Lost Cities - Lost Continents
New Discoveries
Lost cities show civilisation began 9,500 years ago
Has a lost civilisation been found under the sea?
LOST CITY COULD REWRITE HISTORY
UNDERWATER INDIAN CITIES FOUND, DATE TO 7,500 B.C.
UNDERWATER JAPANESE PYRAMID MANMADE SAY SCIENTISTS
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-2002031818,00.html
SATURDAY JANUARY 19 2002
Lost cities show civilisation began 9,500 years ago
BY SAM LISTER AND TIM TEEMAN
AN ANCIENT metropolis likened to the lost city of Atlantis has been discovered off the west coast of India, suggesting that civilisation may have started 5,000 years earlier than previously believed.
A grid of geometric structures thought to be the foundations of two cities, each more than five miles wide, has been detected 120ft below sea level in the Gulf of Khambhat.
Fragments of pottery, carved wood, bone and beads have been recovered from the site, 40 miles off the coast of Gujarat, with initial tests dating two of the artefacts to 7500BC.
Until now, the earliest human civilisations -- the Harrapan and Indus Valley communities -- had been dated to about 2500BC. However, experts have speculated that "civilised" communities may have existed much earlier but were lost as sea levels rose at the end of the Ice Age around 8000BC. Other specialists remained sceptical yesterday, dismissing the discovery.
Traces of the cities, located at a site that was once the fork of a river, were detected by a team of Indian oceanographers carrying out pollution checks. Sonar scans of the area revealed one six-mile long conurbation, with a second smaller settlement eight miles to the south.
Dr S. Kathiroli, the director of India's National Institute of Ocean Technology, said that the find had astonished him and his team, who returned three times to check their results.
"The sonar scans we were carrying out picked up these many large regular geometric patterns, the sort of shapes you would never expect in the sea. We then went back many times to explore the site, when we discovered many artefacts," he said.
As well as indicating many large square and rectangular structures, the foundations also suggested more complex shapes, believed to be a staircase and a courtyard.
Other items retrieved from the site included what appeared to be construction material, broken pieces of sculpture and a fossilised jaw bone.
Speaking yesterday from the institute's base in Madras, Dr Kathiroli said that the first carbon dating tests -- on two carved logs sent to separate laboratories -- had shown both samples dated from about 7500BC. A large stone slab covered in impressions was being studied to see if it was one of the earliest discovered forms of writing.
Announcing the first results, the Indian Government said that the discovery could have worldwide implications for theories of civilisation, which would become clearer as further tests were conducted.
Some experts are already heralding the find as confirmation that the history of civilisation needs radical revision.
Graham Hancock, who has spent ten years investigating the earliest civilisations, said the discovery finally confirmed that complex communities existed in the Ice Age.
For three years Mr Hancock has been working on a book, Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age, which is being made into a Channel 4 documentary.
He recently visited the site in India and said the scans had shown foundations that suggested buildings up to three storeys high and walls running for more than 400ft.
"It is all so highly geometric. The scans show large rectangles and squares which number in their hundreds, even thousands."
Mr Hancock said that it was extremely likely that other civilisations had been at the end of the Ice Age, when 15 million square miles of land were submerged by the sea.
He said: "It was a catastrophic period of climate change. The most obvious areas that people would have settled would have been on fertile land near the coasts, and it was these areas that were lost with the rise in sea levels."
Other experts remained sceptical of the discovery. Derek Kennet, a research fellow in archaeology at the University of Durham, said: "It all sounds extremely dubious. If it's true it means an utter re-evaluation of how we view history. Even the earliest cities came 2,000 years later than this supposed discovery. If this is true we're looking at a period of about a thousand years after the end of the Ice Age with cavemen building cities.
"Up until now we knew that from about 9000BC to about 4000BC there was a period of village economies and people farming. The transition to urbanisation was slow. This discovery would change that completely and put the construction of the cities in the Palaeolithic Age, which is frankly unthinkable."
Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard terms and conditions. To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from The Times, visit the Syndication website.
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http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,8-2002030838,00.html
FRIDAY JANUARY 18 2002
Has a lost civilisation been found under the sea?
A "lost" city has been found off the coast of India. Graham Hancock, author of Underworld, has been studying it and believes it could change the way we view civilisation.
What has been found?
In May 2001 the National Institute for Oceanic Technology was conducting pollution surveys in the Gulf of Cambay in the Arabian Sea off the west coast of the India. They noticed the profile of huge geometric structures lying on the seabed. Diving trips were then made to the site, about 120ft (40m) beneath the surface, to bring up about 2,000 manmade artefacts from the site, including jewellery, pottery and human teeth and bones. The divers discovered a city of about 5m (9km) in length and half a mile (2km) wide. Two days ago carbon dating revealed that this city hailed from a civilisation that was 5,000 years older than Indus Valley culture, which existed 4,500 years ago. That would make it the oldest city known to man.
How would this change how we view civilisation?
Until now it was believed that during this period man was only just emerging from the hunter-gatherer stage of evolution and that the largest settlements numbered little more than about 20 or 30 individuals. This discovery shows that this was not the case: there were sophisticated civilisations thousands of years before we had previously thought.
What could have happened to this "lost" city?
Towards the end of the Ice Age the level of the sea rose by some 400ft. This happened at some time between 17,000 and 7,000 years ago. Huge swaths of the earth were submerged; in fact an area the size of Europe and China combined was covered in water during this period.
From the discovery of human bones and teeth found on the site we can deduce that the people who inhabited the city were caught and drowned by the flooding. Plato writes about this period as being one of flooding and earthquakes.
What can we tell about the city?
We learn more from the structure of the city than from the artefacts that were pulled up from the depths. This was a very sophisticated city built upon a grid system. The buildings were square or rectangular and of an enormous scale, hundreds of feet in length. We can even make out the drains that run alongside the streets. The height of some of the buildings is more difficult to determine but it was surrounded by walls about 12ft (3m) high.
If there is a lost city beneath the waves off the coast of Gujarat then there are others that dotted this huge area that was lost to the sea at the end of the Ice Age. This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of discovery. Another city has also been discovered about 9.3m (15km) away. We believe there are similar cities off the coast of Japan, near Malta in the Mediterranean and off the southeast coast of India.
How will the archaeological community take the news?
Well, they are going to dismiss it. Accepting it would represent a complete volte face and an admission that for the last century of modern archaeology they have been getting it wrong. They will probably demand more evidence before accepting it as fact.
A Channel 4 programme about lost cities will be shown on Feburary 11.
Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard terms and conditions. To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from The Times, visit the Syndication website.
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LOST CITY COULD REWRITE HISTORY
http://www.rumormillnews.net/cgi-bin/config.pl?read=17079
Photo on url
Posted By: Ben_Cobegglia
Date: Friday, 25 January 2002, 1:18 a.m.
"There's a huge chronological problem in this discovery. It means that the whole model of the origins of civilisation with which archaeologists have been working will have to be remade from scratch," Graham Hancock.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1768000/1768109.stm
LOST CITY COULD REWRITE HISTORY
Saturday, 19 January, 2002, 06:33 GMT
Lost city 'could rewrite history'
The city is believed to predate the Harappan civilisation
By BBC News Online's Tom Housden
The remains of what has been described as a huge lost city may force historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of ancient human history.
Marine scientists say archaeological remains discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old.
The vast city - which is five miles long and two miles wide - is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years.
The site was discovered by chance last year by oceanographers from India's National Institute of Ocean Technology conducting a survey of pollution.
Using sidescan sonar - which sends a beam of sound waves down to the bottom of the ocean they identified huge geometrical structures at a depth of 120ft.
Debris recovered from the site - including construction material, pottery, sections of walls, beads, sculpture and human bones and teeth has been carbon dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old.
Lost civilisation
The city is believed to be even older than the ancient Harappan civilisation, which dates back around 4,000 years.
Marine archaeologists have used a technique known as sub-bottom profiling to show that the buildings remains stand on enormous foundations.
The whole model of the origins of civilisation will have to be remade from scratch
Graham Hancock
Author and film-maker Graham Hancock - who has written extensively on the uncovering of ancient civilisations - told BBC News Online that the evidence was compelling:
"The [oceanographers] found that they were dealing with two large blocks of apparently man made structures.
"Cities on this scale are not known in the archaeological record until roughly 4,500 years ago when the first big cities begin to appear in Mesopotamia.
"Nothing else on the scale of the underwater cities of Cambay is known. The first cities of the historical period are as far away from these cities as we are today from the pyramids of Egypt," he said.
Chronological problem
This, Mr Hancock told BBC News Online, could have massive repercussions for our view of the ancient world.
Harappan remains have been found in India and Pakistan
"There's a huge chronological problem in this discovery. It means that the whole model of the origins of civilisation with which archaeologists have been working will have to be remade from scratch," he said.
However, archaeologist Justin Morris from the British Museum said more work would need to be undertaken before the site could be categorically said to belong to a 9,000 year old civilisation.
"Culturally speaking, in that part of the world there were no civilisations prior to about 2,500 BC. What's happening before then mainly consisted of small, village settlements," he told BBC News Online.
Dr Morris added that artefacts from the site would need to be very carefully analysed, and pointed out that the C14 carbon dating process is not without its error margins.
It is believed that the area was submerged as ice caps melted at the end of the last ice age 9-10,000 years ago
Although the first signs of a significant find came eight months ago, exploring the area has been extremely difficult because the remains lie in highly treacherous waters, with strong currents and rip tides.
The Indian Minister for Human Resources and ocean development said a group had been formed to oversee further studies in the area.
"We have to find out what happened then ... where and how this civilisation vanished," he said.
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UNDERWATER INDIAN CITIES FOUND, DATE TO 7,500 B.C.
Posted By: Rosalinda Date: Friday, 25 January 2002, 2:43 p.m. In Response To: LOST CITY COULD REWRITE HISTORY (Ben_Cobegglia)
[Source: Sam Lister and Tim Teeman, London Times, Jan. 20, 2002]
INDIAN CITIES, FOUND IN SEA, DATE TO PERHAPS 7,500 B.C.
The remains of two cities, each more than five miles wide, have been discovered, 40 miles off the coast of India's Gujarat state, as a grid of geometric structures, accompanied by pottery fragments, carved wood, bone and beads.
Initial tests date the find to about 9,500 years ago. The cities, now 120 feet down in the Gulf of Khambhat, are at a site that was once the fork of a river before the sea level rose.
Indian oceanographers have detected many large structures, with foundations suggesting other shapes such as a staircase and a courtyard. Archeologist Graham Hancock says the foundations discovered suggest 3-storey buildings and walls more than 400 feet long--
"It is all so highly geometric. The scans show large rectangles and squares which number in their hundreds, even thousands."
The findings of such ancient Gujarati civilization, predating generally accepted early limits for civilized mankind, would tend to confirm the hypothesis of advanced, pre-glacial, coastal civilizations now underwater, and would bear on the view that Sumer was a colony of a more advanced Indian Ocean littoral civilization.
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UNDERWATER JAPANESE PYRAMID MANMADE SAY SCIENTISTS
http://www.rumormillnews.net/cgi-bin/config.pl?read=17080
Posted By: Ben_Cobegglia Date: Friday, 25 January 2002, 2:45 a.m.
In Response To: LOST CITY COULD REWRITE HISTORY (Ben_Cobegglia)
http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=540
Scientists Say Underwater Japanese Pyramid Definitely Manmade
19-May-2001
Japanese Scientists Say Yonaguni Pyramid Manmade
A Complex Structure
Tonight (Saturday, May 19th) on Dreamland, Ancient American Magazine http://www.ancientamerican.com/ editor Frank Joseph reports on a conference he recently attended in Japan at which Japanese geologists and archaeologists argued that the sunken pyramid off the island of Yonaguni near Okinawa has been found to be manmade.
The structure was found by dive tour operator Kihachiro Aratake in 1985 and has been a source of controversy ever since. It appears to be a construction made of wide terraces, ramps and large steps. However, American geologists have contented that the structure is not manmade, but a natural formation.
According to the report, Japanese scientists have documented marks on the stones that indicate that they were hewn. Not only that, the tools used in this process have been found in the area, and carvings have been discovered. A small stairway carved into the rocks appears to render the theory that this is a natural formation implausible.
The problem with all of this for western scientists is that it implies that an unknown eastern culture had developed a high degree of organization thousands of years before the earliest western civilizations. Geologically, the Yonaguni pyramid sank into the ocean at the end of the last ice age, around ten thousand years ago. Some western geologists have theorized that, if it is manmade, it must have risen from the sea in more recent times, and been carved then.
However, the discovery of other, similar structures beneath the sea of Japan was also announced at the conference. If these prove to be similar to the Yonaguni pyramid they may rewrite the history of early man.