Evidence of ancient city found in depths off Cuba (best article yet)

A team of Canadian and Cuban researchers have discovered the remains of what may be a 6,000-year-old city submerged in deep ocean waters off the western coast of Cuba.

Using sophisticated sonar and videotape equipment, offshore engineer Paulina Zelitsky, her husband, Paul Weinzweig, and her son, Ernesto Tapanes, have found megaliths "of a kind you'd find at Stonehenge or Easter Island," Mr. Weinzweig said in an interview yesterday.

"Some structures within the complex may be as long as 400 metres wide and as high as 40 metres," he said. "Some are sitting on top of each other. They show very distinct shapes and symmetrical designs of a non-natural kind. We've shown them to scientists in Cuba, the U.S. and elsewhere, and nobody has suggested they are natural."

Moreover, an anthropologist affiliated with the Cuban Academy of Sciences has said that still photos taken from the videotape clearly show "symbols and inscriptions," Mr. Weinzweig said. It is not yet known in what language the inscriptions are written.

The sonar images, he added, bear a remarkable resemblance to the pyramidal design of Mayan and Aztec temples in Mexico.

Mr. Weinzweig said it is too early to draw firm conclusions from the evidence collected so far. The research team plans another foray to the site -- off the Guanahacabibes Peninsula on Cuba's western tip -- next month. Next summer, it hopes to return again, this time with the first deep-water mobile excavator, equipped with functions needed for on-site archeological evaluation, including the ability to blow sand off stone.

Geologists have recently hypothesized that a land bridge once connected Cuba to Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. And portions of the Cuban island are believed to have been submerged in the sea on three separate occasions in the distant past.

The structures are on a plateau that forms the bottom of what is thought to be a mud volcano, 650 to 700 metres beneath the surface of the ocean and along what is clearly a geological fault line. "It's well known that ancient civilizations liked to build at the base of volcanoes, because the land is fertile. So that's suggestive," Mr. Weinzweig said.

One tantalizing possibility, entirely speculative for now, is that if the legendary sunken continent of Atlantis is ever proven to have existed, these structures may have been submerged during the same cataclysm.

Mr. Weinzweig simply says that more information is needed. "We'd prefer to stay away from that subject. This is something of great potential scientific interest, but it must involve serious authorities on ancient civilizations."

The precise age of the underwater site is also unknown, although Cuban archeologists in 1966 excavated a land-based megalithic structure on the western coast, close to the new underwater discovery, said to date from 4000 BC. "Based on that and other geological information, we're speculating that these are 6,000 years old," he explained. "It's not exact, but they're very ancient."

If that dating estimate proves accurate, it would mean that an ancient civilization had designed and erected these vast stone structures in the Americas only 500 years after human settlements first became organized in cities and states.

They would also have been built long before the wheel was invented in Sumeria (3500 BC), or the sundial in Egypt (3000 BC). The three pyramids on Egypt's Giza plateau are thought to have been constructed between 2900 and 2200 BC.

The couple's Havana-based company, Advanced Digital Communications, discovered the site in July of 2000, using side-scan sonar equipment to view what resembled an underwater city, complete with roads, buildings and pyramids.

The team returned this past summer with a 1.3-tonne, unmanned Remotely Operated Vehicle, controlled from the mother ship via fibre-optic cable. Its cameras confirmed the earlier findings, showing vast granite-like blocks, between two and five metres in length, that were cut in perpendicular and circular designs.

But because of technical problems, Mr. Weinzweig said, "we were only able to survey the perimeter of the site. Based on initial explorations, we think it's much larger than even our sonar projections show. It may extend for several kilometres."

In addition to the archeological site, ADC has been exploring what Mr. Weinzweig calls "the richest underwater cemetery in the world" for sunken Spanish galleons. Hundreds of treasure-bearing ships are said to lie around the island, several hundred to several thousand metres deep.

Last year, off Havana Bay, it found the remains of USS Maine, the battleship that blew up in 1898. That incident, never entirely explained, killed 260 sailors and precipitated the Spanish-American War.

Posner had a follow-up article the next day that highlighted some of the skeptical views of this discovery.

Sunken city made by nature, critics say

Relevant excerpt from the article:

"But Martin Dean, director of the University of Britain's St. Andrews marine archeological unit, said yesterday that "the world's seas and oceans are full of underwater limestone formations. Some of them cover many square miles, which are mistakenly interpreted as sunken cities with monotonous regularity."

Another critic, Alistair Crame, head of the Geological Sciences division of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, claimed the site is too deep to have any structures fashioned by humans.

"It's very unlikely that the seabed would drop 650 metres in 6,000 years," he said.

The 650-metre depth, he added, is 550 metres below the lowest global sea levels experienced over the past million years.

I don't want to spoil anyone's fun, but the likelihood of this discovery being an archaeological find is low.

Thanks, I saw that somewhere else recently. What I thought was interesting was the critics who have never seen the find or the data just say it's unlikely due to the conventional wisdom. Of course it seems unlikely, that's why it's news! More relevant is this from the article:

...Ms. Zelitsky, a Soviet-trained offshore engineer, rebuffed the criticism. "I'm here in Cuba and what we've found is here. It's local, not in the United Kingdom. And it's not a matter of opinion -- it's objective reality."

She said the project team, which includes Mr. Weinzweig, her son Ernesto Tapanes and representatives of Cuba's Academy of Sciences, was initially "very suspicious of the site's manmade nature," and thought the megaliths might be limestone.

Cuban geologists have recently said the stones are "too smooth and too hard to be a natural limestone formation. Geologists think they are granite."

The structures are on a plateau that forms the bottom of what is thought to be a mud volcano, 650 to 700 metres beneath the surface of the ocean and along what is clearly a geological fault line.

Interesting. I've been looking for an underwater mud volcano because of this:

From Plato's Critias:

Let me begin by observing first of all, that nine thousand was the sum of years which had elapsed since the war which was said to have taken place between those who dwelt outside the Pillars of Heracles and all who dwelt within them; this war I am going to describe. Of the combatants on the one side, the city of Athens was reported to have been the leader and to have fought out the war; the combatants on the other side were commanded by the kings of Atlantis, which, as was saying, was an island greater in extent than Libya and Asia, and when afterwards sunk by an earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean.

From Plato's Timaeus:

Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent.

Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars.

But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

There's no shoal of mud in the Atlantic Ocean, but there is low swamp land in the East Indies. Maybe after 9000 years the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean were confused. The Indian Ocean would appear to be a large harbor because it's completely surrounded by land, except far to the south. The only entrance being the straits of the East Indies. No doubt if the Atlanteans invaded the Mediterranean Basin, they would invade via the pillars of Heracles, they being a maritime power and the Mediterranean may have not even existed 11,600 years ago as evidenced by the Black Sea flood account. Interesting that the acount describes an invasion of Asia too.

Find an area of the ocean that was unnavigable because of muddy shoals circa Plato's time and that should be a good candidate. Sounds like the East Indies if anything. The fact that there is a mud volcano near Cuba due to a possible subsidence of the land make them possible elsewhere there was a subsidence of land.

"No doubt if the Atlanteans invaded the Mediterranean Basin, they would invade via the pillars of Heracles, they being a maritime power and the Mediterranean may have not even existed 11,600 years ago as evidenced by the Black Sea flood account. Interesting that the acount describes an invasion of Asia too."

I have done a little research in this area. The Med has been completely dry at least 40 times. The last time it was completely dry was five million years ago. There are scouring marks on the sea floor at the Gilbraltar entrance where the water gushed in at one time. I've not seen any dating of this scouring but some evidence suggests more recent times.(10-20k years ago) The Med could have stabilized at a much lower level than today (blocked at Gilbraltar) without completely drying. Also, I have proposed that something similar could have happened to the Gulf Of Mexico. The Gulf of Mexico could have been blocked from the worlds oceans during the last ice age across Florida, Cuba and the Yucatan or some of the associated islands. Consequently the Gulf of Mexico water level could have stabilized at a lower level and these structures could have been built along this coast and when the 'barrier' was broken these cities would have been submerged a half mile under water. This scenerio eliminates the need to explain all the subsidence that would have had to occur to place them this far under water. I have a url for a good underwater topography map that could lend some support for this idea. I will look for it and post it next.

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