Posted on 03/31/2005 8:48:54 PM PST by blam
From the Author
'Eden in the East'overturns conventional ideas of the origins of western civilization in Mesopotamia. In this book I place Southeast Asia for the first time as the key to the first roots of civilisation.
At the same time I provide scientific explanations for numerous, and previously unexplained, cultural links between early Eastern and Western cultures. Notable among these links are the hundreds of myths of a great flood which forced people into boats and left only a few survivors.
I can now identify this flood as the dramatic rise in sea level at the end of the ice age that suddenly inundated vast areas of Eurasia. In other words the Biblical Flood really did occur. It had its most disastrous effects, however, in the continent of Southeast Asia - now a lost and half-sunken Eden.
As the Ice Age ended, there were three catastrophic and rapid rises in sea level. The last of these, which finished shortly before the start of civilization in Mesopotamia, may have been the one that was remembered.
These three floods drowned the coastal cultures and all the flat continental shelves of Southeast Asia. As the sea rolled in, there was a mass emigration from the sinking continent. These flood-driven refugees, carried their domestic animals with them in large ocean-going canoes in all directions.
The networks of sea trade, created by their settlements around the Indian Ocean, fertilized the Neolithic cultures of China, India, Mesopotamia and Egypt.
The Southeast Asian contributions to the building of the first cities in Mesopotamia may not have been solely technological. While they may have brought the new ideas and skills of megalithic construction cereal domestication, sea-faring, astronomy, navigation, trade and commerce, they may also have introduced the tools to harness and control the labour of the farmers and artisans. These included magic, religion, and concepts of state, kingship and social hierarchy.
The evidence:
While most alternative prehistories are based more on speculation than fact, I have found some very solid evidence; and have built on the work of specialists in many fields in addition to my own research, to support a comprehensive new picture.
The most solid facts come from oceanographic research of the last decade. It now appears that the great rise in sea level after the last ice age, known about for many years, was not gradual; three sudden ice-melts, the last of which was only 8000 years ago, had catastrophic effects on tropical coasts with flat continental shelves.
Rapid land loss was compounded by superwaves, set off by cracks in the earth's crust as the weight of ice shifted to the seas.
Archaeology holds the most accurately dated clues to the past. I have devoted two chapters to archaeological evidence found on coasts and in caves throughout the Indo-Pacific region. All of the technological 'firsts' which signalled man's emergence from the long Palaeolithic era towards the end of the Ice Age come from the Pacific Rim islands.
These include evidence of deliberate long-distance sailing and grinding of cereal flour in the Solomon islands from 30,000 years ago. The world's first pots, 12,500 years old, come from Japan. The first evidence that swamps were drained for agriculture comes from the New Guinea Highlands 9,000 years ago.
These snapshots hint at a much older history to the discovery of Neolithic skills in the East. The better archaeological preservation of the later stages of human development in Mesopotamia and Egypt, however, has given rise to the view that civilization started in the West.
I review the evidence of the spoken word in the two linguistic chapters. Experts in the history of language now recognise that Southeast Asia not Europe or West Asia was the centre of language dispersal at the end of the Ice Age.
The ancestral language of the Micronesians and Polynesians did not come out of China, as has been recently assumed, but further south over 8000 years ago out of the drowning islands of Indonesia.
As the Flood engulfed Indo- China and separated Sumatra from Malaysia the ancestral languages of the Khmers, whose descendants built Angkor Wat, moved west into India.
The most dramatic new findings in this book come out of my own research field. I have published more than 25 scientific papers on the genetic prehistory of the Indo-Pacific region over the past 15 years. Building on my initial work, in Eden in the East I have shown that genetic disorders can be used as people-markers revealing a new view of prehistoric migrations in the Indo-Pacific region.
My latest finding, made in collaboration with the Oxford Institute of Molecular Medicine, was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics in October 1998. This paper arose directly out of my research for Eden in the East. It provides compelling evidence that Polynesians and other argonauts of the Indian and Pacific Oceans originated in eastern Indonesia back in the Ice Age rather than in China, as previously thought.
This finding alone forces the realisation that the Polynesians' skills of sailing, navigation, astronomy and agriculture had their origins, back in Indonesia, during the Ice Age.
Another objective tool that I use to explore ancient East-West cultural influence in the last part of the book is comparative mythology. Uniquely shared folklore shows that counterparts and originals for nearly every Middle Eastern and European mythological archetype, including the Flood, can be found in the islands of eastern Indonesia and the southwest Pacific.
Southeast Asia is revealed as the original Garden of Eden and the Flood as the force which drove people from Paradise.
My multidisciplinary approach to prehistoric enquiry has been recognised in the academic fields of linguistics and comparative folklore.
I have been invited to present papers on my work on prehistory at international linguistic meetings. This year I contributed a chapter to a book on Flood myths in the Moluccas published by the Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania, Leiden University (Netherlands). --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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I don't recall that Oppenheimer mentions Atlantis at all in his books. It was Dr Robert Schoch, citing Oppenheimer's work, who does in his book, Voyages Of The Pyramid Builders.
I think there is some truth to all ancient myths. I think there must have been an Atlantis. My ideas of it's possible location have changed numerous times. Sundaland is presently my preferred location.
Great article,thanx.I won't comment on the veracity of the theory,but i've held the opinion for years that civilization is considerably older than estimates would indicate.The fact all civilizations mention an "ancient" society that was lost to flooding and/or seizmic activity is compelling.
All very interesting links.. ty for posting!
Just maybe it's because the foundation of the thread is a nut job who learned a language no one else knows, and read thousands of tablets which "mysteriously" disappeared.
Without leaving a trace.
Cameras had been invented, but it was against his religion to use one. I suppose.
Moonbat city..
Melting of ice within the ice dam would have created a massive lake up to 2 miles deep.
When the dam finally broke in a catastrophic crash, you'd had a tsunami leaving Antarctica headed North with the power to climb thousands of feet in altitude as it hit continental masses.
Guy would have had to be hunting birds of paradise up in the Java/Sumatran mountains to survive that, and he'd still have to be on the North slopes!
Just about the only population that'd been left relatively intact would be living in Northern Asia or Central Africa.
One of them seems to mean "reindeer crossing" or "mule's crossing", and the other seems to mean "reindeer pants" ~ like a coverall you might wear out working with animals in a corral.
These words give me a clue about where some of the ancestors came from several centuries ago (from roughly 1638 to 1812). It's definitely the Sapmai, but is it in Finland or Norway?
So many questions, so few answers, and when the family members left the place, there was no nationstate that'd yet organized any of it.
Still, little as I can figure out about the individuals involved, their ancestors seem to have used a highly developed pictoglyph system as much as 9,000 years ago, and that's very important.
The Chinese now have a collection of 20,000 similar pictoglyphs to study and they think it's very nearly an ideographic system very similar to the one currently in use in China.
These places where this stuff was found were cold as the devil back then and had more than today's 168 "snow days" per year.
I can tell you why they had a lot of time on their hands, but not what their language sounded like, or what they called themselves or others, or if they even knew that others existed.
Research in all things procedes in fits and starts and progress is always questionable.
The Sundaland thesis fits into my own question ~ why is it cinnamon is so incredibly healthy for 5% of the human population to use ~ it helps us use insulin, lowers cholesterol, drives down tri-glycerides, and smells so good. Cinnamon's homeland is Cylon and Sundaland. We must have lived there a long time for an appetite like that to become written in the genes.
Some think the Laurentide ice sheet floated, then broke in half and went crashing into Hudson Bay . Gigantic tsunamis!! Could explain why even the Tibeteans have flood stories of the 'mountain-topping' variety.
Hmmm. My youngest brother has an allergic reaction to cinnamon.
Humans would have flourished in Sundaland during the Ice Age.
"Many scientific communities are sadly all too like religions. In spite of all the evidence against their theory, their doctrine and dogma must be observed and preserved!"
Boy, ain't that the truth. Sort of like what Schoch and co get from the Egyptologists, or anyone who disagrees that immediate radical action is necessary to combat anthropogenic Global Warming.
There are some fascinating black holes in our collectively murky prehistory and quite a bit of still unreconciled (to my satisfaction) evidence. I'm willing to listen and research and value the sensible theories while disregarding those which are less so. Multiple pyramid-building post-Neolithic cultures independently developing on various continents never sat well with me as a theory.
The tablets revealed that man first appeared in Mu millions of years ago, at a time when dinosaurs walked the Earth, and that a sophisticated race of 64 million people had somehow evolved.
That would put the origin of Man about 60 million years in the past -- shades of Alley Oop. I have no doubt that Sundaland existed and I doubt we're even close to answering questions about the origin of mankind and civilization. But a belief based on secret disappearing tablets read and interpreted by one man -- well, I'll pass in favor of real evidence.
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