ABSTRACT
One of the most written subjects in the world to date is the legendary lost island of Atlantis. Nothing would have been known about this island if not for the writings of the great Athenian philosopher Plato who wrote Critias and Timaeus in the 4th century B.C. According to the narration, Critias who in turn heard it from Solon, a close friend of his father, Dropides, mentioned Atlantis. Accordingly, the dialogue took place in 425 B.C. and as the story goes, Atlantis vanished in the middle of the 10th millennium B.C.(Lee,1977).In the modern world, some regarded the works of Plato as fiction or a figment of his imagination (Doumas, 2005) because many believed that such advance civilization mentioned in the dialogue did not exist in the Mediterranean.
There have been several parts of the world that was proposed as the location of Atlantis among them Thera in the Mediterranean, the British Isles, the Balkans, Sahara Desert, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Caucasus, Greenland, the Netherlands, Tunisia, Yucatan Peninsula, Bolivia, Tartessos, Morocco and Antarctica to mention but a few. Moreover, the inhabitants of this sunken island have been also identified with the Gauls, the Druids, the Goths, the Scyths, (Ramage, 1978). Even the racist German Nazi movement during the 2nd World War sought support using the myth of Atlantis, identifying its inhabitants as the Teutonic race (Spanuth, 1979) and locating the lost island in the North Sea.
The purpose of this paper is to examine closely certain passages within Plato’s account of Atlantis and determine if they can be proven scientifically. Aside from this, an artifact showing the location of Atlantis that was discovered by the author in 1985 will be presented in comparison with Plato’s description as to the location of Atlantis.
Through examination of the evidence that will be presented, a possible location of the legendary lost island of Atlantis will be given at the conclusion of this paper.
Introduction
Since the time of Plato to the present, many thinkers and historians has been debating as to where the true location of Atlantis – an island that sank to the ocean floor in a “terrible day and night” according to the accounts of Plato in his Critias and Timaeus dialogues. In the eyes of Donelly, Berlitz and other countless historians and thinkers of our time, Plate serve as an authority, a philosopher who wrote a great work that started the most elusive quest of history – the search for the lost island of Atlantis.
While the works of Plato are always quite intriguing, scholars have generally accepted that certainly not all of the written accounts of Plato were true. Though these dialogues contain some similar subject matter about Atlantis, accordingly it was a product of the inventive and speculate mind of Plato (Lee, 1977). Lee proposed a theory that the lost island of Atlantis is the Minoan Crete and he derive his influential theory based from the earlier works of Frost, Carpenter and Luce citing seismological, climatic change and archeological evidences.
Over the past 35 years, renewed interest on Plato’s lost island has caused some scholars to search not only the Atlantic Ocean floor but also the Bahama Banks, the Ampere Seamount, Thera and other parts of the globe looking for evidence that could reveal the exact location of the legendary Atlantis. Interestingly, scholars like Valentine, Collins and other who have taken this task have reached contradictory conclusions (Alonzo & Quines, 2005) ranging from the belief that Canary Islands is the lost island to Bimini as part of Atlantis and recent speculations suggestive Cuba as the lost island with the discovery of underwater structures by Paulina Zelitsky in 2000.
A Legend or a Reality?
Deep under then Atlantic Ocean perhaps lays the remains of a continent. The area of this island that we may call the eight of the world’s continental land divisions can still be defined by the present Atlantic islands that were once the tops of the highest mountains. A civilization developed in these huge islands and spread through conquest and colonization throughout the Atlantic basin. This colonization went farther to some of the islands and coast of the Mediterranean, Europe, Asia and the Americas. Thousands of years before the beginnings of history in Egypt and Mesopotamia, this civilization disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean leaving only isolated colonies on the surrounding continents that grew into civilizations that we consider the beginning of history (Berlitz, 1984).
Notwithstanding its wide acceptance by scholars of other ages and by the oceanic and archaeological discoveries during the last hundred years, Atlantis was still considered a myth or a legend.
According to the Egyptian priest whom Plato credits his story, Atlantis “…was an island situated infront of the Strait which you call the Pillars of Heracles…And was the way to the other island and from this island you can pass thru the whole of the opposite continent which surrounds the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbor with a narrow entrance but the other is the real sea and the surrounding land may be most truly called a continent”( Timaeus 24e). Further, Plato says the “The island was larger than Libya ad Asia put together”.
The most serious argument in favor of the assumption that Atlantis was not invented by Plato is that the time when it vanished 11,600 years ago and the circumstances surrounding its destruction, coincides with the findings of modern science about the end of the last Ice Age and the substantial rise in the levels of the World Oceans that accompanied it (Koudriavtsev, 1997).
The Atlantis story might be rooted in the real events of the meltdown of the last Ice Age. A field work conducted by the Department of Geology of the University of Miami in Florida revealed that they found striking evidence of cataclysmic global flooding between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago (Emiliani, 1979). During this period there was also dramatic warming of the earth’s climate (Schoch, 1999). This sudden warming of climate could have triggered the melting of the ice sheet that was later confined to ice dams. An earthquake with a magnitude of 8 in Richter scale could create cracks and massive freshwater flooding from ice dams that will engulfed islands along its course. This could be the thing that happened in the past as Plato mentioned in Critias and Timaeus dialogues.
In these dialogues, Plato left such a convincing description of Atlantis that one doubt the information he recounted could be simply imagined and was anything other that a description of a land that had once existed. According to Plato, the powerful empire of Atlantis came to a sudden end while engaged in a war, when the central island or islands “in a terrible day and night” sank under the ocean that bears its name. Since that time, 11,600 years ago, it has lain on the bottom of the ocean, drowned, lost, and almost forgotten.
The recollection of a far – of homeland, a final catastrophe, and the flight of the survivors to other parts of the world have been kept alive for thousands of years through variants of the story of Noah’ Ark common with different names for Noah to all ancient people. And just as old as the beliefs have been incorporated into more recent traditions, it has been theorized that Halloween refers to an older worldwide memory; the commemoration of the mass disappearance of a large part of the world’s inhabitants who died when their world perished in an earthquake, fire and tidal waves.
Geologists calculate that nearly 5% of the earth’s surface-an area around 25 million square kilometers or 10 million square miles has been swallowed by the rising sea levels since the end of the last Ice Age. That is roughly equivalent to the combined areas of the United States (9.6 million sq.km.) and the whole of South America (17 million sq. km.). It is an area almost three times as large as Canada and much larger than China and Europe combined (Emiliani, 1995). The 25 million square kilometer that was lost to the rising seas adds up to a great deal more than 5% of the earth’s useful and habitable landscape throughout the world.
Atlantis has been believe and discredited for centuries and some writers have argued about it since the time of Plato – 2,500 years ago. But whatever its essential truth, the legend itself had developed its own reality and has contributed greatly to the discovery of the New World, to the literature of many nations, to the study of prehistory and the exploration of the bottom of the ocean.
In modern times, the search for the vestiges of Atlantis has become more realistic that was ever possible in the past encompassing as it does in the field of geology, seismology, anthropology, linguistics, and most logically oceanography. Worldwide study of sunken coastlines, changing sea levels and new sonar maps and the exploration of the ocean floor now indicate the ocean floor is considerably deeper than it was at time frame given by Plato and other sources for the destruction and drowning of Atlantis.
It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to work out that the 120 meters of sea-level rise spread over 10,000 years amount to an average of not more than a meter per century. Not enough to inspire a global myth of flooding according to some scientists. However, in the past 2.6 million years there is a strong correlation with the obliquity and precession of the earth’s axis and the ranging degree of eccentricity of its orbit around the sun. Some geologists feel that these large-scale astronomical influences are sufficient enough on their own to explain the recurrent glaciations and deglaciations of our planet. And there are also other trigger factors like extreme episodes of volcanism, asteroidal and cometary impact, or alignment of the earth’s crust or its mantle. Irrespective of the cause, the sea level is now 120 meters higher than it was 17,000 years ago.
According to recent findings, there have been three global super floods that took place in the past and have been dated within the time frame approximately 15,000-14,000 years ago, 12,000-11,000 and 8,000-7,000 years ago respectively. Nearly half of the total meltwater release at the end of the last Ice Age was concentrated into these three relatively short periods creating conditions of concentrated damage after long episodes of stability. One such great flood that occurred in the American Northwest took place 13,500 years ago when an ice dam holding back 2,000 cubic km. of ice meltwater (Lake Missoula) collapsed. Huge mass of muddy water and debris rushed across the area into the Columbian River cutting broad channels called couless and forming the so-called Channeled Scabland. Other giant super floods also occured down the Mississipi River valley into the Gulf of Mexico and down the Siberian River valleys into the Arctic Ocean. The Mississipi flood carries pebbles which are now confined to the upper reaches of Missouri-Mississipi system all the way down to the delta. The possibility that enormous amount of the glacial meltwater detained for thousands of years behind ice dams in continental Europe and continental America and then released into the open sea all at once is not a remote possibility.
In a paper published in Science magazine in 1975, Cesare Emiliani and his colleagues presented startling evidence from deep-sea core samples from Northeastern part of the Gulf of Mexico. The report revealed that a 2.4% isotopic anomaly between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago was due to the occurrence of major flooding of ice meltwater into the gulf.
Many elements of the universal myth of the deluge may be explained by flooding pouring down the land and intimately linked to the episodes of sudden and ferocious sea-level rise that took place between 15,000 and 8,000 years ago(Shaw, 1989). There was indeed compelling evidence of series of massive glacial surges at the end of the last Ice Age and these correlates with meltwater pulses and peaks of sea-level rise as recorded for example in drowned reefs of Acropora palmate from the Carribean-Atlantic region near the Islands of Barbados. Acropora palmate is an efficient tracker of rising-sea level because it is a light-loving corals and it will die at depths greater than 10 meters. The Brbados reef were drowned three times at the end of the last Ice Age approximately 14,000, 11,000 and 8,000 years ago (Blanchon and Shaw, 1995). The release of meltwater from ice dams of Laurentide and Fennoscandian ice sheets might have caused many of the oceanic islands and continental coastlines to be engulfed by the sea.
Though archaeologists are open to the spirituality and high artistic culture of the ancients, almost with few exceptions do still assume that the population of the earth was at uniformly hunter-gatherer level of social and economic development 17,000 years ago and very far away from founding the first cities. And because of this, they have no particular reason to be interested in the fact that millions of square kilometers of continental shelf were flooded in the intervening years and changing the face of the habitable earth completely. But there are certain aspects of Aboriginal culture that are frankly puzzling and do not fit in to modern thinking. These include evidence of sophisticated astronomical ideas from a very early date and use of astronomical terminology that is also found in other very distant regions of the world. It is a coincidence that indigenous tribal people as far as North America, Siberia and Australia all called the Pleiades star group as “The Seven Sisters” (Rudgley, 1998). The people of the Stone Age were neither ignorant savages nor low brow cave men as they were depicted by archaeologists. Great majority of archaeologists see no particular connection that links the Paleolithic way of life 17,000 or even 12,000 years ago to the urban way of life that appears in Jericho, Catal Huyuk and handful of other sites between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago.
Within the last several years numbers of missing parts of the Atlantean legend have fallen into place like pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, a puzzle almost as old as the civilized man. But essential and completing pieces of evidence would be finding of man-made structures like buildings, temples, walls, and roads at the bottom of the sea indicating a civilization that had once existed above the sea and last but not the least, finding of an artifact that can directly link us to Atlantis.
The ancient legend appears to be changing into a fact; a fact that could be of crucial importance for the survival of our modern world and its people.
Atlantis is in the Atlantic Ocean
Plato, who wrote the most detailed surviving description of Atlantis that has come down from antiquity, was insistent in location Atlantis not in the Mediterranean but far out in the Atlantic. This way beyond the “Pillars of Hercules” and specified that the “island was larger than Libya and Asia put together” and was the way to other islands… and from this island you can pass through the whole of the opposite continent surrounding a true ocean… The Mediterranean, which is within the Straits of Gibraltar, is only a harbor and has a narrow entrance but the other is the real sea and the surrounding land may be most truly called a continent (Lee, 1977).
Let us examine closely the description of Plato. According to him, the island is located in the Atlantic Ocean and that the Mediterranean is only a harbor having a narrow entrance which gives us an idea that the island that he is mentioning is beyond the Pillars of Hercules or what is called now as the Straits of Gibraltar. From the description alone, Plato was precise in saying that the body of water beyond the Pillars of Hercules is much larger and surrounded by a land that can be truly called a continent. Is North and South America the continent being mentioned here by Plato and the large body of water is the Atlantic Ocean?
In 1985, the author found an artifact along the slopes of Zambales Mountains which after 23 years of study reveals that the stone artifact contains the location of Atlantis as described by Plato. By comparing the Atlantis figure in the stone map with the portolano map of Atlantis drawn by Athanasius Kircher in 1665, it was found out that their figures of Atlantis were the same with very little variation. This collaborating piece of evidence gives credence to the stone map of the author. The stone does not only show the location of Atlantis but it also shows location of some places of geological and topographical importance like the Bay of Bengal, the Ninety East Ridge, the Hawaiian Islands, Ural Mountains, Great African Rift Valley and others to name a few. The embossed lines on the overlying surface of the stone map could also denote the compression and spreading centers of the world as depicted in the Quake Stress map of the U.S. Geological Survey since when this lines were plotted in the Quake Stress map, the lines falls within the compression and spreading centers which means that these lines might represent the gargantuan force that help the earth’s surface. The study that was conducted about the stone was presented during the 1st International Conference on Atlantis Hypothesis: Searching for A Lost Land held in Milos Islands, Greece in July of 2005. Many participants from different disciplines of science came to present their theory about Atlantis which includes Christos Doumas, a prominent archaeologist from Greece and Floyd McCoy, a geologist from United States to name a few. The author presented his findings about the stone map of Atlantis to the participants and was greeted with strong opposition from some scholars. However, the presentation captured the attention of some media people who covered the first day of the event and they published the story of the conference in some newspaper in countries like Sweden, France, Spain and other European countries citing the theory that was presented by the author. This only indicates that the hypothesis drawn from the stone map about the location of Atlantis is worth looking into so that further research work could be done. Finding more collaborating evidence other fields of science will once and for all settle this hotly debated issue within the scientific community.
Many scholars of today working on the story of Atlantis would insist on their chosen location as the final resting place of Atlantis. Some say that it was located in the Bahamas; other would say it is located in Crete, and recently some researchers from Canada speculated that Cuba near the Bahamas was the lost island of Atlantis with the discovery of underwater ruins there in 2001. And there are others that proposed Mahabalipuram in India as a candidate for the location of Atlantis with the discovery of underwater ruins and pieces of alleged pot sherds from the bottom of the sea. The Ryukyus Islands in Japan was also being considered as a possible location of the legendary lost island of Atlantis but I do believed that this sites were not the location of Atlantis as Plato describes them in Critias and Timaeus but rather bastion of some civilizations that existed prior to written accounts of history. Because of the rapid rise in sea-level during the melting of ice sheets of the continental North America and Northern Europe, people will be forced to migrate to higher grounds and leaving behind their former settlements which are now under water because of the inundation that took place after the melting of the ice sheets.
Recent underwater discoveries have proved to be instrumental in pointing as to where to look for the vestige of the lost island of Atlantis. However, there are still some individuals who are looking for hard evidence not in the depths of the ocean but on the surface of the earth where civilizations once thrive. Many of these well–known personalities excavate sites which they think is the location of Atlantis.
Greek archaeologists like Spyridon Marinatos and Christos Doumas spent a long time trying to look for evidence in the island of Crete just to discredit Plato and prove that Atlantis is only a utopia. Marinatos and Doumas went wrong in their assessment linking the destruction of Santorini and associating the story of Atlantis with that of the Minoan civilization. It is hard to believe that respected archaeologist like Marinatos and Duomas who dedicated most of their time establishing their name in archaeological community would jump to conclusion saying that Atlantis is only a utopia of the utopia without examining to the fullest the writings of Plato whom we acknowledges as the Father of Western Civilization.
It is well known that the story of Atlantis was set in writing in the 4th century B.C. by the Greek philosopher Plato in his Critias and Timaeus dialogues. There have been several theories about the location of Atlantis moving it around in time according to individual researcher’s whims and placing it everywhere from the Mid-Atlantic to Indonesia and from Crete to Cuba, However, there are two basic and essential ingredients in Plato’s story to consider:
1) Atlantis flourished and was destroyed 9,000 years before Solon’s time in other words 11,600 years ago.
2) It was located in a large island “opposite of the Pillars of Hercules” presumed to be the present day Straits of Gibraltar.
Most researchers would like to discredit Plato and always insist of a certain place as the location of the legendary lost island of Atlantis without going deeper into studying the description given by Plato in Critias and Timaeus. Many scientists and researchers attacks Plato’s account of Atlantis and would always tell that Plato went wrong in placing Atlantis demise in 9,600 B.C. and instead puts forward the theory associating the volcanic eruption in Thera in 1450 B.C. as the destruction of Atlantis described by Plato in Critias and Timaeus. Truly, as it was stated in Timaeus that Greeks were really young in mind and does not have any belief rooted in tradition and no knowledge hoary with age (Lee, 1975). According to the priest from Sais, the reason for the forgetfulness of the Greeks is that, they only remember one deluge that took place in their country although there are already many such deluge that happened in the past. They can’t even remember the finest and best race that ever existed in Greece and that these citizens of Greece were descendants of the few survivors of those cataclysmic events in the past. They know nothing about it because there were no records left behind to them. But according to the Egyptian priest whom Solon learned of the story, the Egyptian priests kept records of great and splendid achievements or notable events which came to their ears whether it occurred in Greece, in Egypt or in any part of the world. The institution that kept those records is about 8,000 years old and that the citizens he is mentioning lived 9,000 years prior.
The insistence of some Atlantis researchers to discredit Plato is a shame by itself since most of them did not make in-depth studies of the fullness of the text, analyzing them and comparing it with the recent discoveries in bathymetry, oceanography, satellite altimetry, geology, archaeology and other fields of science to understand better the reality behind the greatest and most written myth of our times. It is only thru carefully analyzing his works and interpreting them with the aid of modern scientific information that we will arrive to a sound hypothesis which will give us answers to questions pertaining to this myth.
Geological and Oceanographic Evidence
In the quest to locate the lost island of Atlantis, many researchers have turned to geological and oceanographic evidences to back up their claims because the idea that the remains of this legend might be lying beneath the waves is very strong. The geological aspect of Atlantis is the most important facet of the whole issue of Atlantis. If the geological story of this planet does not support the existence of a large island in the midst of the northwest part of the Atlantic Ocean then to make the long story short, Atlantis is down the drain. Therefore, establishing the feasibility of such a landmass geologically is of paramount importance and other related aspects are also confined to the ocean bottom within the vicinity of the ridge. It is in these areas that the focal points of this study will be made.
Many geologists have endeavored to make Plate Tectonics the enemy of Atlantis (Spencer, 1972) but a lot of researchers also believed that Plate tectonics created and destroyed Atlantis. It is also this process that makes Atlantis an unreliable dwelling place for plants and animals and that the landmass may have gone in and out of existence several times over a period of many millions of years. It was not always the same size or shape and doubtless to say, it has different types of flora and fauna during these different periods of time since in a mere thousand years, all kinds of trees, grass, weeds and bushes will cover any landmass making its appearance in any temperate or tropical zone. Such growth couldn’t care less whether the land was made of continental (sial) or basaltic (sima) material.
In the early 70’s , the Glomar Challeger made drilling in different oceans of the world and found that the oldest sediments in any ocean was laid down 160 million years age (Mathews, 1973) in contrast with the oldest rock found in Greenland which is about 3.8 billion years.
Back in 1940’s when Lamont – Doherty made core drilling in the Atlantic Ocean, they found enough evidence indicating a proto – Atlantic Ocean even before the continents began to spread apart. The nature of the core samples resulted in postulating a “proto – Atlantic Ocean” (Cedric, 1979)and there is enough evidence for the existence Atlantis in the North Atlantic Ocean for the last 60 millions years and definitely has a strong oceanographic data to support this (Ewing, 1948). Some biologist and zoologists have postulated the existence of a large landmass in the North Atlantic during the Miocene times, 12 – 26 million years ago therefore Atlantis may have “resurface” several times during the long geological history of the Mid–Atlantic Ridge. It was believed that the areas surrounding the Fennoscandian ice sheet were tilted dramatically upwards during the built-up of ice during the Last Glacial Maximum by the see-saw effect of the isostatic forces emanating from the continental ice mass. There was also unusually rapid collapse of the forebulge in this area around 11,000 years ago coinciding with the ferocious episode of ice-melting and global flooding-the sudden inundation of Atlantis described by Plato. When subjected to large pressure, the earth’s surface can be deformed. Like a gel-ball, a pressure at one point will result in an indentation in that area and the displacement of the fluid mass within a corresponding rise in a roughly circular area surrounding the indentation. Geologist’s calls this isostacy and it plays an important rule not only during the Ice age but also for thousands of years after all the ice has melted away. The vast weight of the ice cap is sufficient enough to force down the earth’s crust into great basin-like depression beneath them. When the ice melts, that pressure is suddenly removed and the floor of the basins begins to rebound. As time passes, they will rise again to their original levels. During the last Ice age about 17,000 years ago, the ice caps over large parts of North America and Northern Europe were between 2 to 4 kilometers thick and they applied loads of several billions of tons to the continental landmass on which they are formed (Crowley, 1991). Segments of continental crust that continue to rise through isostatic rebound since the removal of the ice sheets include that of the highlands of Scotland (Oppenheimer, 1998), the floors of the Gulf of Bothia in what is now the Baltic Sea (rising at a rate of 1 meter per century) and large parts of the coasts and mainland of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and the North-East coast of Canada (Wilson, 2000).
In 1948, Dr. Maurice Ewing, one of the bitter opponent of Atlantis sailed up and down the Mid – Atlantic Ridge during the Woods Hole Oceanographic Expeditions to the MOR. Numerous samples of tremolite asbestos were bought up which according to Ewing is generally typical of continents and not of ocean basin (Ewing, 1948) Important also was the discovery of “beach-like terraces” beneath two miles of ocean water. According to Ewing, long flat stretches of beach about 2 to 20 miles wide and hundred miles long were detected and these beach–like areas were always covered with thick sediments indicating a long period of deposition although occasionally separated by mountainous “higher grounds” exhibiting no such sediments. He stated further that deep ocean basins never have thick sediments, which are the result of surf action and river deposition. It is actually the shorelines that display thick sediments.
An expedition the following year turned up numerous core samples from these terraces and they contained two different strata of beach sand: the older is estimated to be 225,000–325,000 years old and the younger one is between 20,000-100,000 years old. Dr. Ewing concluded that in the distant past this sand found deep beneath the ocean must have been located on a beach, at, or near the surface of the sea (Ewing. 1949)
During this second Woods Hole Mid–Atlantic Ridge Expedition, he dredged up once again continental rocks and large masses of sial, so it became obvious that granite and sedimentary rocks which are originally part of a continent were abundant. According to a respected scientist, Dr. Bruce Heezen, this type of rock indicates a “possible sunken land mass.” Other geologists have guardedly admitted that the Islands of Azores are composed mainly of continental material and even conceding say that there might be enough continental material (sial) in the Mid–Atlantic to make up a landmass the size of Spain (de Camp, 1970).
Further studies conducted by Dr. R.W. Kolbe of Swedish Museum of Natural History who was commissioned to investigate diatoms found in deep–sea cores obtained during Swedish Deep–Sea Expedition of 1947–1948 found proof of geologically recent subsidence of the Mid–Atlantic Ridge since the cores that were taken from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge yielded multitudinous shells of fresh–water diatoms (small lake animals) and fossilized remains of terrestrial plants (Kolbe, 1957). Dr. Malaise of Riks Musuem in Stockholm also theorized that parts of the Ridge must have existed as large islands up to the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000-12,000 years ago. These landmasses must have had fresh–water lakes in order to account for the existence of fresh – water animals (Malaise, 1956).
The six levels terraces discovered by the Wood Hole Expedition during their expedition suggests that the Atlantic island was constantly changing shape as well as reducing its size before finally disappearing at the end of the Ice Age. Such geological changes would have been catastrophic to any life living on such a landmass. If the Atlantic landmass happened to be inhabited by humans in the past, these violent disturbances could well have the cause of the four Cro–Magnon invasions of Europe, Asia, and Africa (Marschack, 1975).
The “sudden” appearance of Cro–Magnon in Europe from nowhere is still a hotly debated issue in the scientific community. During his migration to Western Europe, he brought along with him his skills in writing, art, music, and perhaps the science of astronomy. He engraved lunar phrasing is bones and stones and his cave paintings is very impressive. He also invented his eye-needle to tailor his clothing and Cro-Mgnon’s intelligence really surpasses that of his cousin, the Neanderthal. These people who migrated to Europe from the Northwestern part of the Atlantic were skilled in everything they make. Their migration to other territories was due to the changing climatic conditions in their homeland brought about by series of catastrophic events that forced them to leave their origin. As they migrate to other places they utilize their skills and knowledge from their homeland and use materials that are readily available in their newly adapted environment to make him more comfortable and at home wherever he goes.
These well documented invasions impacted the western shores of North Africa and Northwestern Europe (including Great Britain and other Atlantic islands) and occurred between 35,000 – 12,000 years ago corresponding closely to the date given by Plato for the demise of Atlantis.
Conclusion
Basing from the evidence presented, the author believed that Atlantis existed in our distant past and perhaps “reappeared and disappeared” beneath the waves due to some natural process that is taking place in our planet. The uplifting and subsidence of this island is the work of plate tectonics, a mechanism of the planet to reshape its surface during the passing of time. Accompanying this process were perhaps series of catastrophic events that might took place in the past like comet impact in the Atlantic rupturing the thin crust of the Mid–Atlantic Ridge triggering earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and other seismic activities causing sudden melting of the glacial ice which brought forth the stories of the worldwide Deluge only recalled in traditions around the world. These series of violent events complicates the earth’s environment and finally destroying most of the planet’s inhabitants leaving only behind few human race and structures that withstand the test of time. The worldwide catastrophe that took place in the past is well documented in myths, legends, and tales around the world. The chain of catastrophic events that took place in the past is now gradually been felt around the planet and we are now witnessing a global event where earth is being reshape by the awesome force of nature.
Against the background of all available evidence, the sum total of the proof I have presented regarding Atlantis points to a glimpse of history in complete variance with established view of some scholars in the field. In the course of time as more and more evidence come to light, our connection to Atlantis is sure to grow brighter and clearer in the passing of time. Already the proof of its existence is approaching the point of being irrefutable and before long we are sure to have an even clearer image of the island that refuses to die. An island that sooner or later must regain its place established in history.
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