 |
||
|
||
|
||
Deep beneath the ocean, this extraordinary picture reveals a city that was submerged 11,000 years ago... Could this be the birth place of a modern civilisation?
The ruin was shaped like a huge horseshoe with a circumference of 260 ft. Its walls stood 10 ft high above the seabed and its entrance was a gateway 15ft wide. I could clearly see courses of masonry along the wall - confirming that we were dealing with a man-made structure. I also knew something else. The last time this mysterious structure had stood above water was more than 11,000 years ago - making it as old as Plato's fabled lost island of Atlantis.
As I swam beside the stonework on the seabed at Poompuhar, off the south-east coast of India, I became more convinced than ever that! civilisation existed thousands of years earlier than we thought.
Received wisdom is that civilisation began with the Sumerians, whose city-states sprang up in the 'fertile crescent of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) little more than 5,000 years ago. It is thought the Sumerians descended from the farmers who invented agriculture, established settlements and started building on a large scale in stone - paving the way for true 'civilisations'.
But I believe there is a missing link. Certainly, the end of the last Ice Age (between 17,000 and 7,000 years ago), brought such enormous floods that large cities - and therefore the earliest examples of civilisation - were submerged beneath the waves. Now we have the evidence confirming this missing link.
I've spent a decade combing the world for clues to the origins of civilisation. During hundreds of dives, I have explored - and filmed for a television series - mysterious underwater ruins in the Mediterranean, the India! n Ocean and the Pacific which cannot be explained by the established theory of prehistory.
All these sites are too large and complex to have been made by any known culture of the Ice Age. One of the most spectacular underwater sites I have seen recently was a ruined city - close to the Japanese island of Yonaguni - that included a vast monolithic structure. The monolith appears to have been carved into steps and platforms. It was strikingly similar to others I have studied on dry land. Huge stairways climb its south and north faces.
Scientists now believe that anatomically modern humans like us, have been around for 1,20,000 years. Yet our 'history' begins 5,000 years ago with the first cities. And mankind's transition from hunter-gathering to farming has only been traced back to around 11,000 years ago. So what were we doing for the other 1,10,000 years?
Maybe it's time to listen to the more than 600 ancient flood myths from around the world. Whether th! ey tell of Manu in India or Noah in the Bible, the myths say civilisation was created by the survivors of a former urban civilisation destroyed by great floods.
But new scientific discoveries have rewritten our understanding of the past. We now know the world's sea level rose by 400 ft as the continental icecaps melted. Science raises the possibility that the flood myths were right and civilisations could have been drowned at the end of the Ice Age and now lie on the seabed.
I'm using my limited resources to dive on the lost lands to search for evidence. Using 'inundation maps' - showing the world's coastlines as they would have been during the meltdown of the Ice Age - I have seen that the 10 million square miles of land swallowed up by the rising seas included vast areas adjacent to known early centres of civilisation.
For instance, Malta, home to 'the oldest freestanding temples in the world', is a tiny Mediterranean island. But until the end of the ! Ice Age, it was joined to Sicily by a 60-mile land bridge. Beside the fertile crescent, the Persian Gulf was dry land until around 12,000 years ago. Nearly a million square miles of land disappeared around what is now India. And a 1,000-mile-wide strip of land was lost off what is now China's east coast.
What helped to narrow my search further were the flood myths, local fishermen's tales of submerged ruins and ancient copies of even older maps showing lands before the floods.
Recently, the underwater ruins of cities off the coast of north-west India have been in the news. Each city covers about 10 square miles and is 120 ft below the surface of the Gulf of Cambay, a place that, until 7,700 years ago, was dry land. Then came the last of the three meltwater pulses, and the gulf was flooded. So it already seems probable that these submerged cities are about 8,000 years old. Radiocarbon dating of some of the 2,000 man-made artefacts from the sites suggest they cou! ld be 9,500 years old - 4,000 years older than any city-building culture recognised by archaeologists.
If they are what they seem, the Gulf of Cambay cities add up to the Holy Grail I've been seeking - a lost civilisation of the Ice Age destroyed by a great flood.
Graham Hancock's book, Underworld,
will be published by Michael Joseph next month - The Mail on Sunday
|
||
|
||
|
||