Posted on 09/19/2001 9:10:00 PM PDT by blam
Sea level study reveals Atlantis candidate
19:00 19 September 01
Jon Copley
It sounds a familiar enough yarn - a lone researcher claiming to have pinpointed the lost land of Atlantis famously described by Plato. But this time there is no mention of "supercivilisations", UFOs or magic crystals. Instead, he has turned the clock back on ancient rises in sea level to reveal an island that matches Plato's story.
Plato's works Timaeus and Critias contain the first written descriptions of Atlantis and its watery fate, drawn from stories collected in Egypt. "These texts are the origin of a lot of speculation about Atlantis," says Jacques Collina-Girard of the University of the Mediterranean in Aix-en-Provence.
"Curiously, nobody has really taken seriously the most obvious location," Collina-Girard adds. According to Plato, Atlantis lay just in front of the Pillars of Hercules - what we now call the Strait of Gibraltar - and disappeared around 9000 BC.
Collina-Girard was interested in patterns of human migration from Europe into North Africa at the height of the last ice age, 19,000 years ago. To see if Palaeolithic people could have crossed the strait, he made a map of what the western European coastline looked like at that time, when the sea level was 130 metres lower than it is now. His reconstruction of the area reveals an ancient archipelago, with an island at the spot where Plato described Atlantis.
Rising tide
"There was an island in front of the 'Pillars of Hercules'," says Collina-Girard. Named Spartel, it lay to the west of the Strait of Gibraltar just as Plato described. The Strait was longer and narrower than today, and enclosed a harbour-like inland sea that Plato mentions as the setting for Atlantis.
Just over 11,000 years ago, the slow rise of post-glacial sea levels accelerated briefly to more than two metres per century, according to records from coral reefs. This would have swamped the island, Collina-Girard suggests. "The archipelago was engulfed 9000 years before Plato," he says.
There are a few facts that don't match Plato's story, however. Plato describes Atlantis as larger than Libya and Asia put together, whereas Collina-Girard's island is 14 kilometres long by five kilometres wide. He argues that a mistake was made in converting Egyptian units of length into Greek units as the story was passed down.
Plato also reports that volcanic activity sank Atlantis, but this may have been a case of embellishment, says Collina-Girard. "The Greeks were familiar with volcanic eruptions," he notes. To them, such a fate might have been more dramatic and plausible than a change in sea level.
As for an advanced Atlantean civilisation, Collina-Girard points to Plato's own admission that he grafted these details onto the tale to present his ideas about a Utopian society.
Long yarn
The lower sea levels of 11,000 years ago would have exposed many islands, says Bill Ryan of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.(Ryan & Pittman are the guys that discovered the Black Sea Flood, Noah's Flood?)
Ryan has examined evidence for the Noah and Gilgamesh flood stories around the Black Sea. But he cautions that the story of Atlantis would have needed to survive down the generations for 9000 years in Egypt before being recorded by the Greeks. "The difficulty here is correct translation of nouns and adjectives passed down by the oral tradition as languages change and evolve," he says.
Collina-Girard suggests that the archipelago could have provided stepping stones for primitive sailors to cross between Europe and North Africa. "The coasts of Spain and Morocco were inhabited at the time, so certainly these islands were too," he says. A prehistoric culture spread rapidly in Morocco around 20,000 years ago. "Traditionally this came from the east, but why not from the north?" he asks.
You wouldn't be speaking of the Altiplano in Peru would you?
Yup. Do you remember this posting?
Update on Mysterious Deep Water Sonar Images Off Western Cuba http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3b34ba6163f0.htm
We should be hearing something about this Cuba site in a short while. They were going down to have a look this summer.
That's still a good candidate but, I'm leaning toward South America as my first choice these days. The alloy of gold and copper mentioned by Plato occurs naturally in only one place in the world, Peru. Tihuanaco has some unusual metal alloy, nickel/copper, clamps that are used to hold the huge masonary blocks together. We only attained the ability to make that alloy in the 1930's.
Plutarch (Greek) writes of his tour of the ruins of Carthage decades after it was destroyed and mentions seeing descriptions of Atlantic Ocean travel by the Carthagenians.(sp) There are (man) altered waterways in the Amazon basin that some have said would have taken a human population of fifty million to have accomplished, they are ancient and little examined.
Also, I've read one anthropologist say that he thought that Solomon's gold mines may have been at the head waters of the Amazon River.
http://www.geocities.com/webatlantis/
I go with Plato though.
I haven't read them. Can you give a quick overview of his ideas? Thanks.
Well, it's not my place to determine Plato's geographical accuracy. But 9,000 years of verbal memory strains my belief zone.
Look on the net for references to Sitkin and his books.
Plato claimed that this story comes from Solon's discussions with the priests of Eygpt who had written records not just oral ones.
And conclude that if the rest of Free Republic is like this post then there is nothing but a bunch of "flat earth" types in this forum.
Interesting article my friend. Either Plato (and possibly others) invented the story, or else it is based on fact. You knowledge impresses me.
Heinreich Schleimann was ridiculed terribly for using the writing of Homer in his quest to find Troy. The ridicule ceased when he uncovered Troy by following the 'myths' of Homer. I expect something similar will be true of Atlantis.
It'd be even better if nobody read this drivel.
Drivel? Can you be specific...or do you just hate anthropology? You're not making any sense. What about this article/thread is offending you?
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