That "Ancient Apocalypse" show

[Skallagrim]

See, I am not sure that you need the whole large plateau situation for the Azores to be Atlantis.

Just a few more islands and more room to live on, and a trade/sea based culture that was akin to the Phoneticians.

I mean I guess Atlantis could be in Doggerland, but that seems like it is a colder area than the legends about Atlantis depict it as existing in.

Sure, it's not impossible. But it's pretty improbable, and there's no reason to assume that such a thing was ever the case. For starters, even bigger Azores (and even with continents being bigger and thus closer), would still be out there in the ocean. An eminently unlikely place for an advanced civilisation to arise. This sort of thing happens at the cross-roads of natural trade axes, not out in the far unknown where hardly anyone ever explores.

More realistically, Atlantis is just one of many flood myths. Possibly, there's a connection to the post-glacial flooding in the Med. I wouldn't rule that out. But the Azores? That's reaching.

Anyway, my contention wasn't that the Azores weren't bigger than they are now. It was that there was never an Iceland-sized "Azorea" within human time-scales.

The Earth's mantle is plastic. When ice melts it's not just water going into the ocean, it's weight on the crust being redistributed. Some land rises, some land falls. They've dredged parts of the Azores that are kilometers under water and found terrestrial plant matter and coastal formations that are too recent to have been from millions of years ago.

That's not really how isostatic rebound works. Check the map:

Oh, that's millimeters per year, by the way. As you can see, the upward trend in formerly glaciated regions is pronounced. The downward trend is, conversely, very distributed all over the place. It's not like tectonic plates are see-saws, were one end rises, so the other end falls by an equal amount. (And that's in part because they are fairly plastic, as you say.)

Anyway, if we go by this map, then 1300 years ago or so (i.e. before the Younger Dryas cataclysm), the Azores were... oh. Just a few meters higher than they are now. As in, adjusting my estimate to be as generous as conceivably possible, it's four meters.

I don't think that's going to make up the difference.

 

[Rocinante]

Sure, it's not impossible. But it's pretty improbable, and there's no reason to assume that such a thing was ever the case. For starters, even bigger Azores (and even with continents being bigger and thus closer), would still be out there in the ocean. An eminently unlikely place for an advanced civilisation to arise. This sort of thing happens at the cross-roads of natural trade axes, not out in the far unknown where hardly anyone ever explores.

More realistically, Atlantis is just one of many flood myths. Possibly, there's a connection to the post-glacial flooding in the Med. I wouldn't rule that out. But the Azores? That's reaching.

Anyway, my contention wasn't that the Azores weren't bigger than they are now. It was that there was never an Iceland-sized "Azorea" within human time-scales.



That's not really how isostatic rebound works. Check the map:

Oh, that's millimeters per year, by the way. As you can see, the upward trend in formerly glaciated regions is pronounced. The downward trend is, conversely, very distributed all over the place. It's not like tectonic plates are see-saws, were one end rises, so the other end falls by an equal amount. (And that's in part because they are fairly plastic, as you say.)

Anyway, if we go by this map, then 1300 years ago or so (i.e. before the Younger Dryas cataclysm), the Azores were... oh. Just a few meters higher than they are now. As in, adjusting my estimate to be as generous as conceivably possible, it's four meters.

I don't think that's going to make up the difference.

Sure, it's not impossible. But it's pretty improbable, and there's no reason to assume that such a thing was ever the case. For starters, even bigger Azores (and even with continents being bigger and thus closer), would still be out there in the ocean. An eminently unlikely place for an advanced civilisation to arise. This sort of thing happens at the cross-roads of natural trade axes, not out in the far unknown where hardly anyone ever explores.

More realistically, Atlantis is just one of many flood myths. Possibly, there's a connection to the post-glacial flooding in the Med. I wouldn't rule that out. But the Azores? That's reaching.

Anyway, my contention wasn't that the Azores weren't bigger than they are now. It was that there was never an Iceland-sized "Azorea" within human time-scales.



That's not really how isostatic rebound works. Check the map:

Oh, that's millimeters per year, by the way. As you can see, the upward trend in formerly glaciated regions is pronounced. The downward trend is, conversely, very distributed all over the place. It's not like tectonic plates are see-saws, were one end rises, so the other end falls by an equal amount. (And that's in part because they are fairly plastic, as you say.)

Anyway, if we go by this map, then 1300 years ago or so (i.e. before the Younger Dryas cataclysm), the Azores were... oh. Just a few meters higher than they are now. As in, adjusting my estimate to be as generous as conceivably possible, it's four meters.

I don't think that's going to make up the difference.

I don't understand this map at all, but was wondering if you did yoir calculations with 1300, or 13000. Because you typed 1300 here, but 13000 years is the more accurate figure.

 

[Bacle]

Sure, it's not impossible. But it's pretty improbable, and there's no reason to assume that such a thing was ever the case. For starters, even bigger Azores (and even with continents being bigger and thus closer), would still be out there in the ocean. An eminently unlikely place for an advanced civilisation to arise. This sort of thing happens at the cross-roads of natural trade axes, not out in the far unknown where hardly anyone ever explores.

More realistically, Atlantis is just one of many flood myths. Possibly, there's a connection to the post-glacial flooding in the Med. I wouldn't rule that out. But the Azores? That's reaching.

Anyway, my contention wasn't that the Azores weren't bigger than they are now. It was that there was never an Iceland-sized "Azorea" within human time-scales.



That's not really how isostatic rebound works. Check the map:

Oh, that's millimeters per year, by the way. As you can see, the upward trend in formerly glaciated regions is pronounced. The downward trend is, conversely, very distributed all over the place. It's not like tectonic plates are see-saws, were one end rises, so the other end falls by an equal amount. (And that's in part because they are fairly plastic, as you say.)

Anyway, if we go by this map, then 1300 years ago or so (i.e. before the Younger Dryas cataclysm), the Azores were... oh. Just a few meters higher than they are now. As in, adjusting my estimate to be as generous as conceivably possible, it's four meters.

I don't think that's going to make up the difference.

So you think Atlantis is some lost, flooded Med Island?

I mean it's not impossible, far from it, I just expected to be outside the Med since the 'Gate of Heracles' was the old name for the Straight of Gibraltar, so everyone expects Atlantis to be west of that.

 

[Spartan303]

So I've seen this show a few times now and its fascinating watching it. Its a little incoherent at first, but that's just Graham presenting us data points one at a time until a picture starts to emerge.

Was there an advanced civilization that existed during the Ice Age that was more advanced than previously believed? Evidence seems to suggest that, yes there was. Did this Civilization get obliterated during the end of the Ice age by the Younger Drias climate catastrophe 11,600 years ago? Evidence seems to point to something happening along those lines, yes.

Was that civilization Atlantis? I'm not so sure of that exactly.


However, when it comes to Atlantis, I'd advise people to look at Jimmy Corsetti from bright insight about it. I think he might be on to something spectacular here.

 

[Skallagrim]

So you think Atlantis is some lost, flooded Med Island?

I mean it's not impossible, far from it, I just expected to be outside the Med since the 'Gate of Heracles' was the old name for the Straight of Gibraltar, so everyone expects Atlantis to be west of that.

I think Atlantis was just a story, quite probably inspired by older narratives about a great flood or volcanic cataclism. There is reason to assume that this would most likely be a far more recent event (the most notable candidate being the 'Minioan eruption' of Thera, 1600 BC). However, I'll certainly not rule out the possibility of a much older origin, perhaps dating back to the post-glacial flooding. People remember things, stories can be transmitted down the generations for an amazingly long time.

But all in all, I'm pretty sure that Plato's narrative was more of a fantastical version of it, deliberately placing the event in a "land far away", which is punished by the Gods. It's very much a moral lesson. Think Tower of Babel. That sort of thing. It shows up in most mythologies and ancient (quasi-)histories.

Note also that Plato's narrative must be called into question if you want to assume that the story has a really ancient origin, since he explicitly has Athens fighting the Atlanteans. Back in the Younger Dryas, the world had not even begun to dream of the birth of the ancient Proto-Indo-Europeans who would one day spawn (among other peoples!) the distant ancestors of the Mycenaeans who would be the forefathers of the Greeks, among whom we'd know the Athenians. In other words: Plato certainly got stuff wrong, even if he was being as genuine as he could.

(On the other hand, the reference to the lands of Greece being more 'fat' -- i.e. there being more land, and less water between th now-islands of Greece -- is the strongest support we have for a potential Post-Glacial origin of the whole story. But then again... that's one line, which we could be mis-reading...)

Regarding the Gates of Herakles specifically: besides a lot of evidence that Plato was just making up a myth-typical "far-off land", it should be noted that in Greek stories "beyond the Gates of Herakles" is very often the location of mythical lands. That's where you find the mystical Hesperides, where the immortals dwell and the nymphs sing below the stars...

I don't understand this map at all, but was wondering if you did yoir calculations with 1300, or 13000. Because you typed 1300 here, but 13000 years is the more accurate figure.

The point of the map is that isostatic rebound is measured in millimeters per year. And that the Azores are not even in a region where we're on the high end of the scale. The upshot is that we're talking about 'mere' meters of difference, across millennia. It doesn't explain away that the Azores plateau is kilometers below the surface.

I'm certain that the Azores were bigger (if still small) islands when sea levels were 200 meters lower. I'm willing to grant that volcanism and landslides may well have carved off some of their size (while the latter deposited surface vegetation to the bottom of the ocean as well, thus explaining that), meaning the islands were possibly even a bit bigger than mere sea-levels can indicate. And then there's some additional meters of isostatic rebound.

All in all, that changes little. It still gives us "the Azores, but the islands were bigger back then". Which I've never denied. What I wanted to refute was the notion of an Iceland-sized land-mass there, because... that didn't exist. And pretending that it did is pseudoscience. (If someone can show me a convincing meachinism by which such a plateau sinks by four to eight kilometers in the geologically ultra-brief span of a few thousand years, I'm willing to change my mind, to be clear! But to my knowledge, no such mechanism is known to exist.)

However, when it comes to Atlantis, I'd advise people to look at Jimmy Corsetti from bright insight about it. I think he might be on to something spectacular here.

It's a well-made video; I've seen it and enjoyed it. It's certainly a better case than the Azores. It does run into the same issue with isostatic rebound, though. The Richat structure is way too high to have been a port city, so in a reverse of the Azores hypothesis, the 'explanation' now becomes that isostatic rebound caused the region to rise by a a significant amount over the past few thousand years.

And the bottom line is: there's no evidence for that at all. They use arguments like "yeah, but we found skeletons of sea life there in the Sahara". Which is true, but those remains are way older. You can find that stuff in the middle of North America, too. Those are from when the Western Interior Seaway was there. You know... up until about 66 million years ago. That's a credible geological time-frame for this kind of major change. But 12.000 years or so is not.

Granted, if you're going to write an Atlantis narrative, tying it to the last Green Sahara period and to stuff like the giant Tamanrasset River that once emptied into the Atlantic is a great premise. It's more original, and ultimately far more plausible. It's still all speculative, but if someone made a good case for that -- without relying too much on "and then impossible stuff just happened, trust me bro" -- I'd happily read his book.

 

[Spartan303]

It's a well-made video; I've seen it and enjoyed it. It's certainly a better case than the Azores. It does run into the same issue with isostatic rebound, though. The Richat structure is way too high to have been a port city, so in a reverse of the Azores hypothesis, the 'explanation' now becomes that isostatic rebound caused the region to rise by a a significant amount over the past few thousand years.

In a previous video he showed how Western Africa has been steadily rising about an inch a year or something to that effect due to Volcanic activity. that, along with the isostatic rebound could be enough to elevate the Richat structure.

And the bottom line is: there's no evidence for that at all. They use arguments like "yeah, but we found skeletons of sea life there in the Sahara". Which is true, but those remains are way older. You can find that stuff in the middle of North America, too. Those are from when the Western Interior Seaway was there. You know... up until about 66 million years ago. That's a credible geological time-frame for this kind of major change. But 12.000 years or so is not.

Jimmy argues that no one has done any proper dating on the remains there. The Richat structure has only recently come to public attention in the last few years. And Google Earth has shown some evidence of where structures once stood. Whether its true or not I don't know, but I think he's at least on to something and in previous videos he uses geological evidence to back up his theories. But he argues that more extensive study is needed to confirm one way or another. Its a fascinating theory though.

Granted, if you're going to write an Atlantis narrative, tying it to the last Green Sahara period and to stuff like the giant Tamanrasset River that once emptied into the Atlantic is a great premise. It's more original, and ultimately far more plausible. It's still all speculative, but if someone made a good case for that -- without relying too much on "and then impossible stuff just happened, trust me bro" -- I'd happily read his book.

Sadly we wont get that study as the Archeological community is dead set against this theory and wont even look at it. And between Randal, Jimmy and Graham, they just don't have the resources or clout to get it done on their own.

 

[Skallagrim]

Sadly we wont get that study as the Archeological community is dead set against this theory and wont even look at it. And between Randal, Jimmy and Graham, they just don't have the resources or clout to get it done on their own.

Well, we should remember that Troy was once dismissed as a myth, too. Until they found it.

If they found evidence of some "Green Sahara" culture from way back in the past, that would be fascinating. I think it would at most be a particularly refined neolithic culture, rather than some high-tech fantasy or even a bronze age culture several millennia ahead of its time-- but even a fairly refined stone age cultural complex would reveal immense things about the human past that he hadn't previously known.

 

[Captain X]

So you think Atlantis is some lost, flooded Med Island?

I mean it's not impossible, far from it, I just expected to be outside the Med since the 'Gate of Heracles' was the old name for the Straight of Gibraltar, so everyone expects Atlantis to be west of that.

Actually there is a lot about the Azores that fits the description from Plato's story even beyond that. Stuff like what color the rocks there are. And the Eye of Africa might have inspired the description of the city.

 

[Bacle]

In a previous video he showed how Western Africa has been steadily rising about an inch a year or something to that effect due to Volcanic activity. that, along with the isostatic rebound could be enough to elevate the Richat structure.



Jimmy argues that no one has done any proper dating on the remains there. The Richat structure has only recently come to public attention in the last few years. And Google Earth has shown some evidence of where structures once stood. Whether its true or not I don't know, but I think he's at least on to something and in previous videos he uses geological evidence to back up his theories. But he argues that more extensive study is needed to confirm one way or another. Its a fascinating theory though.



Sadly we wont get that study as the Archeological community is dead set against this theory and wont even look at it. And between Randal, Jimmy and Graham, they just don't have the resources or clout to get it done on their own.

The Richat is part of a line of what are likely eroded impact craters in West Africa.

If you look on sat view via Google Earth, there are at least two other impact crater like structures in the region, and they all line up together.

Randal Carlson actually points this out in the same JRE interview where he lays out why he favors the Azores.

Well, we should remember that Troy was once dismissed as a myth, too. Until they found it.

If they found evidence of some "Green Sahara" culture from way back in the past, that would be fascinating. I think it would at most be a particularly refined neolithic culture, rather than some high-tech fantasy or even a bronze age culture several millennia ahead of its time-- but even a fairly refined stone age cultural complex would reveal immense things about the human past that he hadn't previously known.

IIRC they've found cave paintings deep in the Sahara which point towards goat herding going on deep in what is today sand dune seas.

 

[Spartan303]

The Richat is part of a line of what are likely eroded impact craters in West Africa.

If you look on sat view via Google Earth, there are at least two other impact crater like structures in the region, and they all line up together.

Randal Carlson actually points this out in the same JRE interview where he lays out why he favors the Azores.

There is also a theory that it was a super volcano that never actually formed. Again, we have no geological data to confirm one way or another, but both are fascinating. Randal Carlson, Graham Hancock and Jimmy Corsetti are doing fantastic work to bring this all to light. Sadly the experts aren't budging.

 

[Skallagrim]

IIRC they've found cave paintings deep in the Sahara which point towards goat herding going on deep in what is today sand dune seas.

There were certainly people living there, when it was green. If it can be confirmed that they were goat herders, then they were the first known goat herders in history, and have everybody else beat. I wouldn't rule that out, either.

That's the sort of thing worth looking into, and that's what I mean when I say that guys like Hancock have a point about "the mainstream consensus" and its lack of interest in looking beyond what is "known" already. We should be curious! New insights should excite us!

Tying all this to stuff about Atlantis, I do think, distracts from the validity of the point.

Again, I think the most plausible explanation here is that (at least some) humans did whatever they could with whatever they had, as soon as it was possible. As I've argued elsewhere (and previously referenced here): the ice age was marked by extremely rapid regional changes in climate conditions. Within centuries. This made agriculture a dead end: by the time you had it set up, conditions changed and you had to pack up and start over elsewhere. This was, possibly, an era of countless "false starts". But hunter-gatherers are inherently more mobile, so it was their time to shine.

Ice age ends, climate stabilises. I think that quite possibly, early proto-agricultura and animal husbandry started out as soon as it could. That might well be prior to the Younger Dryas. I see no evidence for a Bronze Age type civiliation (on the Azores or elsewhere), but I could buy a culture moving into what we'd call Neolithic and getting underway with this whole "sedentary society" thing.

And then the Younger Dryas hits. I'm partial to the impact hypothesis, but ultimately, the cause is less important (for now) than the undeniable result: the ice comes back. And in this situation, I could that early attempt (or, more probably, those multiple attempts) die out again. The world thrown back into a hunter-gatherer mode of existence.

But possibly, some remnants prevailed. Held on by the skin of their teeth. Made it through the Fimbulwinter. And when the world thawed again, they were ready. They had the knowledge of the ancients. Stone Age knowledge, to be sure, but the very best that the old world before the cataclysm had to offer. And they shared that knowledge. As sea levels rose (quite rapidly, if we look at the meltwater pulses!), their old coastal heartland drowned, but they moved inland, and they taught others what they knew. The unusually advanced sites like Göbekli Tepe could be viewed as a product of that.

In short: they instigated the neolithic revolution. And "they" were then probably not a single global civilisation, but a collection of remnant cultures that had weathered the bad times, and moved inland as the water rose. Poised to be natural leaders in the post-deluge world, where the climate was once again suitable for sedentary life.

Nothing in the above hypothesis relies on unusually advanced tech, or on ancient super-civs, or on shoddy geology. This is all plausible, and there is evidence that hints at this sort of thing. That, certainly, is worth investigating. If this is how it happened, that tells us something about humans. About what we can do, and endure, and adapt to survive.

 

[Bacle]

There were certainly people living there, when it was green. If it can be confirmed that they were goat herders, then they were the first known goat herders in history, and have everybody else beat. I wouldn't rule that out, either.

That's the sort of thing worth looking into, and that's what I mean when I say that guys like Hancock have a point about "the mainstream consensus" and its lack of interest in looking beyond what is "known" already. We should be curious! New insights should excite us!

Tying all this to stuff about Atlantis, I do think, distracts from the validity of the point.

Again, I think the most plausible explanation here is that (at least some) humans did whatever they could with whatever they had, as soon as it was possible. As I've argued elsewhere (and previously referenced here): the ice age was marked by extremely rapid regional changes in climate conditions. Within centuries. This made agriculture a dead end: by the time you had it set up, conditions changed and you had to pack up and start over elsewhere. This was, possibly, an era of countless "false starts". But hunter-gatherers are inherently more mobile, so it was their time to shine.

Ice age ends, climate stabilises. I think that quite possibly, early proto-agricultura and animal husbandry started out as soon as it could. That might well be prior to the Younger Dryas. I see no evidence for a Bronze Age type civiliation (on the Azores or elsewhere), but I could buy a culture moving into what we'd call Neolithic and getting underway with this whole "sedentary society" thing.

And then the Younger Dryas hits. I'm partial to the impact hypothesis, but ultimately, the cause is less important (for now) than the undeniable result: the ice comes back. And in this situation, I could that early attempt (or, more probably, those multiple attempts) die out again. The world thrown back into a hunter-gatherer mode of existence.

But possibly, some remnants prevailed. Held on by the skin of their teeth. Made it through the Fimbulwinter. And when the world thawed again, they were ready. They had the knowledge of the ancients. Stone Age knowledge, to be sure, but the very best that the old world before the cataclysm had to offer. And they shared that knowledge. As sea levels rose (quite rapidly, if we look at the meltwater pulses!), their old coastal heartland drowned, but they moved inland, and they taught others what they knew. The unusually advanced sites like Göbekli Tepe could be viewed as a product of that.

In short: they instigated the neolithic revolution. And "they" were then probably not a single global civilisation, but a collection of remnant cultures that had weathered the bad times, and moved inland as the water rose. Poised to be natural leaders in the post-deluge world, where the climate was once again suitable for sedentary life.

Nothing in the above hypothesis relies on unusually advanced tech, or on ancient super-civs, or on shoddy geology. This is all plausible, and there is evidence that hints at this sort of thing. That, certainly, is worth investigating. If this is how it happened, that tells us something about humans. About what we can do, and endure, and adapt to survive.

I think there is another area where we could look for cultural continuity through the Younger Dryas; the Four Corners Region and the pueblos/cliff dwellings and mountain villages.

One site in particular has seen regular habitation (wasn't a 'city', but was a year long village for decades/centuries/millennia till the European arrived), and has both Clovis and Folsom points present in the same strata.

Mountaineer Archaeological Site | Articles | Colorado Encyclopedia

Discovered in 1994, the Mountaineer Archaeological Site consists of more than sixty clusters of prehistoric artifacts on top of Tenderfoot Mountain near Gunnison.

coloradoencyclopedia.org

The article doesn't go into great detail, but I've been to the site and talked with the people who run it. It's been inhabited nearly constantly, with maybe a few decades/centuries of abandonment intersperced, for about 11,000 years.

The buffalo even used to be able to cross the continental divide in the local region, and the Ute have no migration myth and inhabitied the site for thousands of years in mud/stick wiki-ups, and traded widely to have both Folsom and Clovis points, along with some odd pot sherds that may be Mezo-American. Also had good deposits of obsidian in the nearby area, so could locally source high quality blades/arrowheads

And to top it off, it had a rock ledge that had broken away to create a decent sized kill pit you could run mega-fauna into, and they also found a few rock carrion remnants that imply some rough temporary fencing/obstacles were use to aid in the kill runs.

It's very possible the ancestors of the Ute people weathered the Younger Dryas living on steppeland sagebrush mesa in the Southern Rockies with villages scattered where ever game, water, and resources converged year round. It would be worth checking their oral histories for any possible links to the Younger Dryas impacts and impact winter.

 

[Agent23]

If it makes the leftoids ree then it can not be that bad, also, did the Varna necropolis get mentioned in any way?

"Varna is the oldest cemetery yet found where humans were buried with abundant golden ornaments. … The weight and the number of gold finds in the Varna cemetery exceeds by several times the combined weight and number of all of the gold artifacts found in all excavated sites of the same millenium, 5000-4000 BC, from all over the world, including Mesopotamia and Egypt. … Three graves contained gold objects that together accounted for more than half of the total weight of all gold grave goods yielded by the cemetery. A scepter, symbol of a supreme secular or religious authority, was discovered in each of these three graves." (Slavchev 2010)

I mean, the local cooks constantly go on about how in addition to "we wuz Khanz/Alexander of Macedon/Most important early medieval slav country", and given this and a few archeological finds I would wager that a cry of "We wuz Atlantianz" would also get added.

Oh, and a 8000 year old statue, too.

We found a frog swastika that is just as old as well.

 

[Yinko]

Note also that Plato's narrative must be called into question

Yeah, that's great and all, but not only was Plato using what he called a "poetic truth" AKA what Vivec would call a lie, it doesn't exclude or explain the point about there being land based plant matter from the sea floor Km under the waves right now. You are ignoring facts in order to support your pre-conceived notions just like 8/10ths of the relevant archeological community, the spineless bastards and bitches too chicken shit to read an article that could kill their carreer by association.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

If a lot of this is true, could perhaps the Sumerians have been "survivors" of the Younger Dryas? They had a full blown language isolate and appear to have hailed from lower Arabia when it was greener. They also had their own tales of a terrible flood.

 

[Agent23]

If a lot of this is true, could perhaps the Sumerians have been "survivors" of the Younger Dryas? They had a full blown language isolate and appear to have hailed from lower Arabia when it was greener. They also had their own tales of a terrible flood.

I have heard a bunch of theories claiming that Noah's ark allegedly landed on or around mount Ararat.

That would kinda fit with the evidence for a huge Black Sea flooding.

Between that and all the interesting archeological findings in my area I think that "Atlantis" might have been somewhere on the black sea lake, and then one of the successor cultures was responsible for the Varna treasure:

The oldest gold treasure and jewelry in the world, dating from 4,600 BC to 4,200 BC, was discovered at the site.[1] Several prehistoric Bulgarian finds are considered no less old – the golden treasures of Hotnitsa, Durankulak, artifacts from the Kurgan settlement of Yunatsite near Pazardzhik, the golden treasure Sakar, as well as beads and gold jewelry found in the Kurgan settlement of Provadia – Solnitsata (“salt pit”). However, Varna gold is most often called the oldest since this treasure is the largest and most diverse.

 

[Skallagrim]

Yeah, that's great and all, but not only was Plato using what he called a "poetic truth" AKA what Vivec would call a lie, it doesn't exclude or explain the point about there being land based plant matter from the sea floor Km under the waves right now. You are ignoring facts in order to support your pre-conceived notions just like 8/10ths of the relevant archeological community, the spineless bastards and bitches too chicken shit to read an article that could kill their carreer by association.

If you'd read along, you'd have already known that the very land-slides that calved off some of the Azores' ancient land area (an argument used in favour of their land-mass having been bigger in the past) also explain that chunks of coastal area slid down to the bottom of the ocean... carrying surface materials with them. Indeed, even further out, there are various sea-mounts whose tips may well have been above water in the past, forming additional small islands, but which are entirely below the water now.

This is an evidence-supported explanation of the observations you point to. It doesn't rely on assumptions that fly in the face of evidence. You accuse the archeological community of refusing to see evidence (which may well be valid criticism), but then you veer off to the other end, and start making up hypotheses that aren't supported by the existing evidence. That's just as wrong-headed.

Anyway, considering what I've actually written in this thread, your attempt to smear me as unwilling to look beyond the academic consensus is patently ridiculous.

If a lot of this is true, could perhaps the Sumerians have been "survivors" of the Younger Dryas? They had a full blown language isolate and appear to have hailed from lower Arabia when it was greener. They also had their own tales of a terrible flood.

It's not improbable that they were related to older peoples in the wider region. Regardless, their trade relations along the Indian Ocean (including with the equally archaic Harappan Culture) are certainly deserving of more investigation. Same with the next-door culture, the Elamites.

As one of the maps I posted illustrates very well, the Persian Gulf was in fact entirely dry land during the last Ice Age. So a flood narrative in that region harking back to the (again, relatively rapid) flooding of the region as sea levels rose is not out of the question. This would be roughly concurrent with the drying of Arabia and meltwater from the mountains swelling the rivers that became the heart of Mesopotamia-- so some people end up there, at the new sea-shore, on the banks of newly-enlarged rivers in a region that is now (or has remained) nicely fertile and suitable for agricultural efforts.

Even regardless of what their flood myth was about (those rivers could flood terribly, too, so that may be a more recent inspiration for that specific story), we know for a fact that the above actually happened. More likely than not, the people settling a region in the wake of a relatively short climate-and-coastline-changing period are actually migrants from elsewhere.

 

[Cherico]

I think Atlantis was just a story, quite probably inspired by older narratives about a great flood or volcanic cataclism. There is reason to assume that this would most likely be a far more recent event (the most notable candidate being the 'Minioan eruption' of Thera, 1600 BC). However, I'll certainly not rule out the possibility of a much older origin, perhaps dating back to the post-glacial flooding. People remember things, stories can be transmitted down the generations for an amazingly long time.

But all in all, I'm pretty sure that Plato's narrative was more of a fantastical version of it, deliberately placing the event in a "land far away", which is punished by the Gods. It's very much a moral lesson. Think Tower of Babel. That sort of thing. It shows up in most mythologies and ancient (quasi-)histories.

Note also that Plato's narrative must be called into question if you want to assume that the story has a really ancient origin, since he explicitly has Athens fighting the Atlanteans. Back in the Younger Dryas, the world had not even begun to dream of the birth of the ancient Proto-Indo-Europeans who would one day spawn (among other peoples!) the distant ancestors of the Mycenaeans who would be the forefathers of the Greeks, among whom we'd know the Athenians. In other words: Plato certainly got stuff wrong, even if he was being as genuine as he could.

(On the other hand, the reference to the lands of Greece being more 'fat' -- i.e. there being more land, and less water between th now-islands of Greece -- is the strongest support we have for a potential Post-Glacial origin of the whole story. But then again... that's one line, which we could be mis-reading...)

Regarding the Gates of Herakles specifically: besides a lot of evidence that Plato was just making up a myth-typical "far-off land", it should be noted that in Greek stories "beyond the Gates of Herakles" is very often the location of mythical lands. That's where you find the mystical Hesperides, where the immortals dwell and the nymphs sing below the stars...




The point of the map is that isostatic rebound is measured in millimeters per year. And that the Azores are not even in a region where we're on the high end of the scale. The upshot is that we're talking about 'mere' meters of difference, across millennia. It doesn't explain away that the Azores plateau is kilometers below the surface.

I'm certain that the Azores were bigger (if still small) islands when sea levels were 200 meters lower. I'm willing to grant that volcanism and landslides may well have carved off some of their size (while the latter deposited surface vegetation to the bottom of the ocean as well, thus explaining that), meaning the islands were possibly even a bit bigger than mere sea-levels can indicate. And then there's some additional meters of isostatic rebound.

All in all, that changes little. It still gives us "the Azores, but the islands were bigger back then". Which I've never denied. What I wanted to refute was the notion of an Iceland-sized land-mass there, because... that didn't exist. And pretending that it did is pseudoscience. (If someone can show me a convincing meachinism by which such a plateau sinks by four to eight kilometers in the geologically ultra-brief span of a few thousand years, I'm willing to change my mind, to be clear! But to my knowledge, no such mechanism is known to exist.)



It's a well-made video; I've seen it and enjoyed it. It's certainly a better case than the Azores. It does run into the same issue with isostatic rebound, though. The Richat structure is way too high to have been a port city, so in a reverse of the Azores hypothesis, the 'explanation' now becomes that isostatic rebound caused the region to rise by a a significant amount over the past few thousand years.

And the bottom line is: there's no evidence for that at all. They use arguments like "yeah, but we found skeletons of sea life there in the Sahara". Which is true, but those remains are way older. You can find that stuff in the middle of North America, too. Those are from when the Western Interior Seaway was there. You know... up until about 66 million years ago. That's a credible geological time-frame for this kind of major change. But 12.000 years or so is not.

Granted, if you're going to write an Atlantis narrative, tying it to the last Green Sahara period and to stuff like the giant Tamanrasset River that once emptied into the Atlantic is a great premise. It's more original, and ultimately far more plausible. It's still all speculative, but if someone made a good case for that -- without relying too much on "and then impossible stuff just happened, trust me bro" -- I'd happily read his book.

I think we should keep in mind that the Athenians were drama queens and inserted themselves into litterally fucking everything when they got the chance.

 

[Typhonis]

Proof Sahara Desert was BLASTED by Ocean 12,000Yrs Ago (Should NOT Be Possible) - YouTube

More video evidence that SOMETHING went down in Western Sahara and even Montana after the last ice age.

 

[Captain X]

A lot of things do line up for that 12-13000 years ago timeline. Like those tunnels in Turkey. I've seen some speculation that it might have been a polar shift, which is kind of concerning given the fact that the magnetic poles are moving much faster in the last couple of decades than in the two centuries before that, and that the magnetic field has been weakening at an exponential rate during the same time period. But I guess whatever happened back then might have been bad enough to compel them to build tunnels, but wasn't so bad that they didn't have time to dig them.