[WMarshal]

I am absolutely certain that much of our history is under the ocean. I wish that there was a project to sink a shaft down 350’ to 450’ down to the old sea level at various places in the Nile Delta and then to sent horizontal shafts to further explore interesting layers that look promising. Sea levels have been rising for the last 13,000 years with numerous pulses and pauses and I am sure that there are various layers of civilization from 25’ all the way down.

People have always lived near deltas where rivers meet the sea (trying to kill the planet by driving SUVs and overfishing mother ocean /sarc).

[Raymann]

Agreed, something really bad happened during the younger dryas that destroyed early civilizations. Not just the sea level rise from the end of the ice, on a human scale that was slow and would just force a people to move.

[SunkenCiv]

I wholeheartedly agree — the continental shelf was dry land for much of the past two million years, and as the temps are higher, generally, at lower altitudes and lower latitudes, and the landscape was mostly free of those big ice coverings, most of our ancestors and their habits (probably including villages, towns, and cities) lived down there.

A problem with the Nile Delta is, as you’d expect, erosion — finding that layer from the glaciation sealevel would be more difficult than just going offshore in some area not in an estuary. That’s paid off different times, such as that submerged cave entrace just offshore along the Med coast of France. The cave ascends to a point above sealevel, and thee traces of human activity were found, well-presevered.

(Nile canyon)
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