Theos-Talk Archives (October 2002 Message tt00024)

I find the text below, posted on my website, to contain convincing 
arguments and although directed as a critique of G.Hanckock's search 
for Atlantis, at the same time makes it clear that the seven 
sunken "continents" from the Secret Doctrine (as home to the "seven" 
races..) simple are fiction. Unless there are some detailed counter 
arguments addressing the details below. Besides it also makes unlikely 
that the Stanza's of Dzyan are from Atlantis from where the "Aryans" 
would have climbed up the Himalayas to establish the Great White 
Brotherhood in Tibet and their library as is claimed by Blavatsky. 

The mystery of Atlantis has gripped the popular imagination at least 
since the late nineteenth century. Today, it continues to spawn a cottage 
industry of books and television programmes promoting the ideas 
of "alternative archaeologists" about lost supercivilizations obsessed with 
sky-ground correlations, ancient astronauts mating with cavewomen, or 
secret brotherhoods of priest-astronomers guiding our ancestors to a 
higher purpose. 

One of the most significant problems for the lost civilization hypothesis is 
the development of agriculture, which is supported by a wealth of 
archaeological and genetic evidence. 

Even if we accept every shred of Hancock's evidence without question, 
he has done nothing more than propose that over the course of the 
5,000 years people spent living through the Ice Age meltdown people 
managed to raise some stone monuments, develop a spiritual system of 
great complexity, and (most controversially) somehow manage to map 
the world. While many conservative archaeologists will disagree with at 
least the last of these things, it is not hard to conceive it possible. Since 
ancient humans arrived in Australia by boat before 50,000 B.C., it is not 
that hard to imagine that Ice Age peoples did explore their coast lines. 

Graham Hancock, like many of us, would like to think of a time in history 
when human society was closer to nature, when we were less obsessed 
by materialism and more in tune with our spirituality. It may well be 
comforting to think of such a golden age and to employ the past to 
idealize our own priorities. 

However if there is not any evidence with which to verify this golden age 
in history then this will only ever serve as an allegorical tale and not a 
genuine portrait of what pre-historical life may have truly been like. 

Hancock recognizes that many archaeologists brand him as "The Lunatic 
Fringe", and while this is disarming, it is not in any way equivalent to 
identifying the evidence which actually contradicts his theories. 

When the sea level rose again, while the ice caps were melting, 
vegetation was killed off by salination and inundated (gradually), while 
animals and people who had been on the continental shelf moved back 
onto the continents and large islands such as Japan, Sri Lanka, 
Tasmania, Britain and Ireland where they joined the people who had 
been living there anyway. 

Flood myths that occur all over the world are the "folk memory" of the 
experience of suffering 10,000 years of (slowly) rising sea level, and the 
continuous loss of hunting and foraging territory. 

The allegation by Graham Hancock that the topic of people living on the 
continental shelf during the Ice Age has not been previously studied is 
incorrect. Archaeologists and geologists have in fact been studying 
exactly this topic since at least 1930. Hundreds of papers and books 
written by different experts working independently, have been published 
in many countries. The failure to recognize the work of these experts is 
derogatory to them, and results in a bias throughout Hancock's recent 
TV series. 

Hancock refers frequently to tidal waves, floods and other catastrophes. 
The average rate of sea level rise as the ice melted was one metre ( 
three feet three inches) every 100 years, and occasionally as much as 
one metre every 50 years. Models which propose "spikes" of rapid rise 
indicate a maximum rate of about seven centimetrees ( three inches) 
per year. This rise would gradually eliminate certain hunting grounds 
during a person's life time, but would not cause any personal risk. The 
chances of being killed or drowned by a storm or a big wave or coastal 
flood was exactly the same as it is today and probably less because the 
population density was lower. The International Geological Correlation 
Programme (IGCP)-Project-61, and successor IGCP projects, showed 
that sea level curves based on submerged peat, shells, mangroves, ice 
cores, erosion geomorphology, sediments, borings in alluvium on land 
and on raised beaches (Pirazzoli, Bloom and Tooley) show a general 
consistency world wide though there are regional differences in the 
curves due to glacial isostasy and hydro-isostasy, the gravitational 
attraction of the ice mass itself, tectonics and sediment loading (Clark, 
Lingle, Peltier, et al). 

Hancock works by stringing together sequences of suppositions, 
speculations, and what ifs? This is illogical and does not work (see my 
analysis of this in my review of the second programme). 

Ice Ages earlier than the last have been ignored. This omits an 
important dimension of continental shelf archaeology. 

There is no sign in the programmes that Hancock measures, records, or 
checks field data himself, other than prodding the rocks with a knife. 
[This is not thorough.] 

Numerous standard texts and well-proven sources of information, 
offshore geological maps, palaeo-vegetation maps, etc., are ignored. 

The sites visited by Hancock in Malta and Bimini did not show any signs 
of submarine archaeological relics and were natural geological features. 
I have dived on both sites myself in the 1960's and 70's. I informed 
Hancock's film company in June, 2000 that these sites were natural and 
that there were better sites to visit. This information was ignored, 
although all the documents and reports on better sites are in the public 
domain (see bibliography, below). 

The sites of Cambay and Poompuhur are almost certainly natural rock. I 
had no prior information on these sites, but expert opinion of marine 
geologists, acoustics experts and sedimentiologists who have worked for 
decades with sonar, side-scan sonar and sub-bottom profiling confirms 
this opinion (see my review of the second programme). Since that time 
professional prehistoric archaeologists who have seen the programme 
have also said the materials were not artefacts. 

The Japanese sites of Yonaguni and Kerama are natural rock, with no 
sign of archaeological significance. Again, I informed Hancock's film 
company in June 2000 that these sites were natural, and that there 
were better sites to visit. This information was ignored, although all the 
documents and reports on better sites are in the public domain (see 
bibliography, below). The Japanese Nippon TV company showed me 
video recordings of the Yonaguni site in about 1992 and I considered it 
to obviously be natural rock, an opinion that was reported on Japanese 
domestic television. 

Folk myths describing floods in the distant past have indeed been 
provoked and caused by the real rise of sea level at the end of the ice 
age, but that does not mean that every embellishment of the stories is 
literally true. Many flood myths contain references to such dramas as 
evil kings, wicked princesses, angry gods, sexual perversions, luxurious 
palaces, complex irrigation systems, broken lock gates, galloping horses, 
church bells and all sorts of other emotive symbols. We do not believe 
these details any more than we believe that Poseidon really existed with 
a three-pointed spear and a big beard and no clothes. Analysts agree 
that the Greek myths of gods and mortals, as well as central European 
fairy stories, can tell us important truths about the human psyche but we 
do not launch expeditions to look for Cinderella's glass slipper. The myth 
of the flood is NOT an accurately dated historical record - such details 
are added at the time that the myth was written down which was some 
time during the last 5,000 years. Such details may make the story more 
marketable - but you don't have to buy it. 

If Graham Hancock wants to make an exciting programme about the 
human occupation of the continental shelves during the Ice Age - which 
is a very important subject - why does he not film the incredible Grotte 
Cosquer where rock paintings 19,000 years old are reached from a cave 
entrance 40 metres below the sea? 

Why does he not film the submerged Neolithic village at Atlit off Israel, 
or the submerged Jomon culture site at a depth of 25 metres off 
Tokonami River, Japan? Why not photograph the caves and terraces off 
British Columbia where Daryl Fedje found stone tools 52 metres below 
the sea? 

These places really exist, and have been mapped, and archaeologists 
have found skeletons, and charcoal from fires, and baskets, and fresh-
water wells, and other structures ten thousand years old and more. 

Why photograph rocks and call them a "Lost Civilization"? No-one else 
working offshore sees anything like that which Hancock claims to see. 
He is living in a different world. 

I have dived at almost every spot mentioned by the programme, and at 
many more with verifiable ancient ruins and occupied stone-age sites. 
This stuff was boring by comparison with reality. 

Ignoring Archaeology 

Hancock is, of course, correct about the timing and end of the last 
glaciation. He correct in saying that humans were living on the 
continental shelf, and that the places where they lived are now covered 
by the sea. 

Beyond that, key mistakes and wrong assumptions shot through 
everything, so that almost every statement that one longed to applaud 
turned out to be seriously misleading. 

Hancock repeatedly asserts that archaeologists have persistently ignored 
the importance of the continental shelf. This assertion is wrong. Yet, 
because it implies that he had been working in a vacuum where no 
other archaeologist had produced any data, it permits him to say 
anything he likes no matter how outrageous it is. The known facts 
dictate other, more exciting, conclusions. 

Hancock ignores the hundreds of prehistoric sites already found offshore 
which totally contradict his own dubious "findings". Godwin (1930s), 
Blanc ( 1930-42), Birdsell (1950's), Shephard (1950's), Bonifay (1960's), 
Flemming (1968-1995), Masters and Flemming (1983), Scuvee and 
Verague (1978), Cockerel, Murphy, Clausen (1970's), Fischer and 
Skaarup ( 1980's), Dunbar and Faught (1980's), Daryl Fedje (1990's), 
John Chappell and Rhys Jones (1980's), Galili (1980's), Kenzo Hayashida 
and Araki ( 1990's), Momber (2001), and Werz and Flemming (2001) 
and many others on every continent of the world (except Antarctica) 
have found hundreds of submerged prehistoric sites. These sites fit 
exactly into the usual sequence of Middle Paleolithic, Upper Paleolithic, 
Mesolithic and Neolithic eras. Stone tools, kill sites, artifacts, skeletons, 
hearths, shell-middens and burials, and all the associated deposits and 
organics, plot exactly as one would expect and show how early tribes 
exploited the seashore. There is no evidence for "Lost Kingdoms". 

Hancock is quoted - in the Guardian in advance of his programme - as 
saying that "If the case is made, then it means that the foundations are 
out of the bottom of archaeology". This attitude assumes rather 
strangely that archaeologists are not influenced by evidence they see 
every day in front of their noses. If the accepted concepts and 
paradigms are false then the thousands of archaeologists digging all 
over the world are blind. 

Archaeology is dynamic and produces new data every hour of every day. 
In spite of this, nobody finds data that supports a "lost civilization" 
hypothesis, and very few archaeologists think that anything could be 
better explained by such a theory. The existing structure works well and 
is continuously adjusted at the margins. While not expecting to 
find "advanced civilizations" of 10,000-20,000 years ago, archaeologists 
would react very quickly indeed if they found one, provided the evidence 
were robust. 

Ignoring Geology 

Frequent references to tidal waves, catastrophes and massive floods, 
along with portrayals of vast towering breakers pouring across the 
screen, are misleading. 

When the ice caps melted sea level rose about 100 metres during a 
period of 10,000 years. That is a rate of one metre per 100 years. 
Certainly there were periods of faster rise and brief halts or recessions 
so that the rate may have been 2 metres per 100 years for some 
periods. Geologists think in terms of hundreds of millions of years. 
Anything that happens within one million years is considered to 
be "fast". Anything faster than this is "rapid". It is possible to find 
scientific papers about the end of the ice age which say that the sea 
level rise was rapid. They mean a rate of one metre rise in 50 years. 

The rising sea levels did cause prehistoric people to abandon their 
hunting grounds and to leave the coast, as at Atlit or Aghios Petros. It 
did cut off Malta and other islands, such as Tasmania and Kangaroo 
Island from Australia, and it did separate Australia from Papua-New 
Guinea, and Britain from France. Close to the melting ice sheets there 
were occasional slumps or collapses of ice dams and releases of lake 
water. These would have caused large, local waves with little change of 
sea level globally. 

But - sorry - nobody was "overwhelmed" by oceans rising one metre in 
50 years! 

Hancock's programme ignored the fact that there have been six or more 
ice ages in the last 800,000 years, and that hominids occupied the 
continental shelf on each occasion. This means that the real objectives 
of submarine prehistory are much more exciting than Hancock 
suggested. It was a pity to ignore this point. 

Malta 

This first segment of Hancock's programme examines Malta, an island in 
the Mediterranean north of the African coast, and Bimini, an island of 
the Bahamas. 

I agree that the scale of structures which exist on Malta is amazing and 
difficult to explain. I agree that more work needs to be done offshore 
there. The flooding of the link between Malta-Sicily-Italy is important. 

There is a famous length of submerged "cart-track" which crosses a bay 
on the coast of Malta near a town called Birzebbugia. These "cart 
tracks" have been known for decades and there was a major article on 
them in the Geographic Journal last year. I snorkelled on them in about 
1985. There are two parallel tracks that can seen sloping down the 
bedrock into the sea. 

Instead of filming these, Hancock chose to film a perfectly normal 
groove in the rock many miles away; a cave which looks a bit square; 
and a submerged rock arch. Several shots in the film showed dozens of 
caves along the coastal cliff, all of which are entirely natural. 

Malta is composed of limestone. Since limestone bedding is often 
horizontal, roofs of limestone caves are often straight and squarish. Why 
was the underwater cave any different? 

Martineau did an extensive survey of submarine caves in Malta in the 
1960's. 

If Hancock wanted to prove that the things he saw were man-made - 
and I mean prove - then he, too, should have made an exhaustive 
survey of the region to determine whether similar features occur 
naturally. He should have shown that the one arch that he thought was 
man-made was so different from all the natural ones that his conclusion 
was inescapable. Yet there were no measurements, and there is no 
evidence. 

Give Hancock a clue about a nearby submerged village - Atlit - or a 
Paleolithic cave with paintings 19,000 years old 40 metres deep in the 
sea - Cosquer - and he goes off in the opposite direction and 
photographs a natural piece of rock and says it is part of some lost 
civilization. 

The discussion about earlier pre-Megalithic occupation of Malta was 
interesting (without need for lost kingdoms). My own guess - and it is 
totally a guess - is that 30,000 to 40,000 years ago people were hunting 
and living in Italy, on Sicily and on the associated Malta promontory. But 
in that Palaeolithic time small numbers of people needed vast areas on 
which to hunt. When Malta was cut off as the sea level rose it could not 
support a separate population as a sustainable breeding group. The 
same happened to Kangaroo Island off south Australia. This resulted in 
a huge span of time passing before the island of Malta could be re-
occupied by people who had developed boats, and who built the 
megalithic temples. The earlier Palaeolithic phase would now be very 
difficult to find, and much of it would be under the sea. That is worth 
researching. 

Bimini 

The Bimini 'road feature' has been filmed dozens of times before, as 
Hancock gallantly said. Gifford and others dived on it in the 1970's and 
drilled and sampled the rock and showed that it was all natural. The 
only new aspect presented by Hancock concerned a story about granite 
blocks. He suggested that granite blocks were precisely aligned on top of 
the "road feature" and were lifted off before 1930. This is pretty rich. 

Since the "road feature" was not discovered until the 1960's, how on 
earth could Hancock's delightful informant know that the granite was on 
top of the "road"? The existence of wrecked cargoes of masonry in the 
area is well known, and Blashford Snell dived on them in the 1980's. 
Granting that the stone was quarried from somewhere within five to ten 
miles of the "road feature" does not prove that there existed a multi-
coursed structure. This is a classic case of the wildest wishful thinking. 
The dodgy logic of this argument is breathtaking. 

There was a actually a complete contradiction between the presentation 
about Malta and that about the Bahamas. In Malta we were asked to 
believe that ancient peoples would naturally build on the highest hills, 
and in the case of the Bahamas we were asked to believe the opposite. 

Many of the computer graphics showing the rising sea, ancient 
shorelines and melting ice caps were well done and illustrated the facts 
extremely well. Good educational stuff. But, the use of "morphing" 
graphics was brilliantly deceptive. 

On several occasions a very irregular rocky feature with weeds and 
flickering colour gradually became smoother, straighter, more uniform, 
and more artificial, like a conjuring trick before your very eyes. I was 
impressed by the process, although it is common enough in commercial 
advertisements and movies like Terminator. The effect was extremely 
forceful in pressing the viewer to see what the producers wanted. There 
is nothing wrong with the use of these techniques, the effects are overt, 
but the cleverness of the technique does not make the assertion true. 
The rocks were natural. 

I cannot imagine that a single person enquiring over the course of a few 
months could produce a credible revision of the entire archaeological 
corpus of data on the sub-continent of India, yet that seemed to be 
Graham Hancock's objective. 

The dating of Dvaraka is published as 3700 years (S. R. Rao). Hancock 
disputes this, and suggests Dvaraka is only 1200 years old. By 
comparison with Bronze Age coastal cities in the Mediterranean, the 
earlier date would be perfectly acceptable. Hancock seeks to advantage 
his Flooded Kingdom theory by questioning the earlier date and thus 
make Dvaraka seem very recent so that subsequent footage of much 
less credible underwater "ruins" would seem to compare favourably with 
Dvaraka. 

I was puzzled that a programme purporting to be about ruins under the 
sea only had a few minutes in total of undersea footage. I had expected 
at least 20-30 minutes of underwater pictures, with extensive 
presentation of acoustic side-scan images. 

It is reasonable in scientific work to develop a series of stages of 
experiment, data, and deduction which can be demonstrably proven as 
true, and then to conclude the presentation with some suggestions as to 
the next stage of work which might be useful. These may be based on 
logical projections of the argument, or on hunches or speculation. This 
is accepted at the end of an argument, because it indicates logical 
possibilities that should be checked out for future research 

For example, when I speculated on the basis of the connection between 
Malta-Sicily and Italy that Palaeolithic tribes had hunted on the 
continental shelf, and that this proposition could be checked, this was a 
reasonable proposition on the basis of the previous established 
evidence. But this line of logic does not work in reverse. 

You cannot make a legitimate chain of arguments which goes "A may 
have happened and it is possible that B happened and what if C 
happened and therefore I conclude definitely that there were Flooded 
Kingdoms in the Ice Age". In the social sciences there are usually dozens 
of plausible alternative possibilities. 

Thus, each time that Hancock says "A" may have happened he must also 
concede that multiple other things are equally likely to be the 
explanation. For instance, after three such steps for which a chain of 
five alternatives has been suggested three times, 125 different possible 
outcomes or explanations are possible. 

Yet only one of these chains might - conservatively - be supported by 
and be consistent with the Flooded Kingdom proposition. 

The normal scientific procedure when confronted with 125 possible 
explanations for events is to first weed out the non-starters, and reduce 
the field before spending time and money on expensive research. A 
quick check on the Flooded Kingdoms proposition would show masses of 
evidence against it from the hundred or more known stone-age sites on 
the continental shelf, and evidence of contemporaneous cultures on land 
and that would be the end of the argument. To waste any more time on 
the Flooded Kingdoms proposal would be a blunder. 

Instead, after listing multiple chains of "possibly, what-if and could-it-be" 
Hancock concludes that his one and only proposal, the Flooded 
Kingdoms hypotheses, is strongly substantiated. 

It is not. 

Another technique used by Hancock is frequent references such as "I 
have now discovered..." or "Now I know that..." as if points presented 
were his original discoveries. In most cases the "discovery" has been 
known to students of archaeology and oceanography for decades, and 
could have been summarized in a few minutes, leaving time for some 
really original footage of underwater ruins, if they exist. 

One general example of this is presentation of computer generated 
maps showing the seas. We returned again and again to different 
versions of this, and sometimes the same version more than once. The 
technique developed by Dr Milne is undoubtedly useful, and could have 
been used once or twice. However, any modern atlas, such as the 
Times Concise Atlas shows approximately the depth of the sea on the 
continental shelf. My atlas at home (not a research document) shows 
the depth contours at 25 metres, 50 metres, and 200 metres with a 
change of blue tint at each contour, for every country with a sea coast. 
Anyone with such a common atlas can see immediately the light blue 
area out to the 200m contour, the limit of the continental shelf. If you 
know that the Ice Age sea level was at -25 metres about 8000 years 
ago, and -50 metres about 10,000 years ago, the two intermediate 
colours tell you where the coastline was at these two dates. That is not 
rocket science. You can do it at home. 

My concern is that much of this presentation seemed designed to baffle 
and impress the viewer, to mystify rather than to explain matters which 
are fundamentally very simple, and fun. There are probably stone-age 
human occupation sites off every coast in the world, and any scuba diver 
could find artifacts with a bit of luck, and with the correct information of 
what to look for. It is not a mystery. 

Mythology 

The thesis that the late-glacial rise of sea level was the cause of 
widespread flood myths was presented in great detail in a book 
published by F.J. North in 1957. (see refs below). I read this a few years 
later, and expanded the logic in Chapter One of my book "Cities in the 
Sea", published in 1970 in the USA, 1971 in UK, and a few years later in 
Japan. This model is widely accepted, and has been developed 
independently by several researchers. 

As is evident from the Old Testament, and other religious texts. Life is, 
and always has been, a rather frustrating and puzzling experience. 
There are good times, but still, most of us also experience some pretty 
nasty things. When this happens we long to know why. Was life always 
so unjust? Did people always suffer? Do the gods really care nothing 
about us? Thus many belief systems produce ideas or concepts relating 
to a period when things were better in the past, or, in some religions, 
when they will be better after death. The change from that idyllic past to 
the reality of the present is portrayed either as simply loss of the perfect 
state - "Golden Age" - or a moral punishment for sin - "Fall of Man". 

The myths as referred to by Hancock are somewhat wrapped round 
each other, and imply that the Indians (and other peoples) believe in a 
wonderful period in the past when people had been richer and happier 
and that they also believe in Flood Myths. Both events are in the past! By 
Hancock's logic, the cultures that existed at the time of the sea level rise 
were the rich and technically developed cultures of the Golden Age. 

The confusion or merging of the myths is very convenient for 
the "Flooded Kingdoms" proposition but it does not work. 

The Fall and the Golden Age have no reference to place and time. They 
are purely spiritual or psychological concepts, even though they are 
sometimes fitted into a theological chronology. 

The Flood is very much time and site specific. 

The Flood Myth becomes embedded in stone age culture during the 
period 20,000 to 5,000 years Before Present ( BP) because of the 
intensive way which pre-literate peoples relate to the land and nature in 
general. 

If you live by hunting and finding wild plants and roots and insects which 
are good to eat, and rely on finding regular supplies of freshwater in the 
ground, you develop an encyclopaedic knowledge of the terrain. 
Aboriginal peoples in Australia, and probably other hunting cultures such 
as African Bushmen, memorize voluminous path or track narratives, 
describing every rock, shelter, shrub, and spring, shade, and danger 
along hundreds, if not thousands, of miles of track. These memorized 
records have to be handed down from generation to generation, along 
with all the additional data about seasons, migration of animals, 
geographical variation in climate, and so on. 

One can see the impact that a continuously rising sea level would have 
on coastal pre-literate hunting or migratory cultures. Even if the vertical 
change within a few decades might seem small, the horizontal incursion 
was observable, and hunting tracks that were functional during one 
generation could be flooded and useless two or three generations later. 
Rising sea level became one of the things a young hunter had to know 
about, along with the danger of storms, dangerous animals, poisonous 
plants, and so on. It was obvious. The late Rhys Jones reported 
Australian tribal track records which had loops that extended offshore 
from the present coastline and tracked back again, because the "mental 
tape record" had not been altered. In some cases it was easier to keep 
the "tape" intact and add footnotes in daily life, rather than to alter 
the "master tape in the mind". 

When I was researching in 1982 on the Aborigine crossing routes from 
Timor to North Australia the Aborigine Council Leaders in Bathurst Island 
were perfectly aware that their ancestors had crossed the sea walking 
on the sea floor when the sea was lower. They had not learnt this from 
modern scientists. They saw us as the novice beginners studying an 
obvious fact, and they encouraged our research using divers. 

By about 10,000 years BP we find Neolithic villages in many parts of 
Europe, Africa, and Asia. (See Mellart, the Neolithic of the Middle East) 
Several such villages have been found under the sea. (See Galili, 
Efstratiou, Flemming, and others). Towns such as Catal Huyuk in Turkey 
were founded in this period. The Neolithic people had settled down, 
started building villages and small towns, and began to practice 
agriculture and, on the coast, more advanced methods of fishing. 

When the sea level rose over a Neolithic village the occupants were 
forced to abandon a significant investment in capital structures. That 
hurt. In practice, a rise of one metre per 100 years would force the 
occupants to abandon houses on the waterfront, and build on the 
landward side of the settlement, until, due to the topography of the site, 
the whole settlement might have to be deserted. This process seems to 
have occurred at Aghios Petros (Efstratiou, Flemming) and at Atlit 
(Galili). 

All this time we are talking about pre-literate cultures. In particular it is 
inconceivable that they could have had a system of counting time which 
was fixed to an absolute reference point over thousands of years. By the 
time the sea level settled down at its present level 5000 years ago, the 
demonized and threatening rise of the sea was something which had 
occurred in the far off past. It had become a legend: "In the time of the 
gods", "Before the great king who founded our city", (eg.Gilgamesh), or 
whatever was the local myth system. 

The cultural specification of the date of the Flood could only be fixed 
when a culture had advanced to the point of possessing a writing system 
and a dating system, and the technology for preservation of records. 
When this was occurred, the regional or local Flood Myth became fixed 
at a defined time, and was not dragged forward by the oral transmission 
of the story from one generation to the next. This fixing of the Flood 
Myth happened at different times in different cultures, with the earliest 
ones we know of in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of Noah, and some 
Indian legends. The story in each case becomes embellished with details 
of the culture at the time it was written down and not when the sea was 
rising. This is also true of the Welsh legends recorded by F. J. North, 
which only trace back one or two thousand years to the date of being 
written down. 

The important point to note is that this sequence leads to Flood Myths 
which were written down and known now as always being written by 
people who have invented writing (obviously) , and who are therefore 
already living in cities. They describe the Flood as if it inundated a 
culture like their own, with buildings and roads. 

Additionally they compressed the timescale, because no one could have 
enumerated a timescale of thousands of years until considerably later 
(as, for example, Plato did). 

All scientists and archaeologists who have studied this problem have 
concluded that the Flood Myth does refer to the cumulative memory of 
the post-glacial sea level rise, but that the reference to great cities and 
catastrophic floods is inadvertently attached from the culture and 
technology of the time when the stories are written down. They should 
be separate. 

The mistake Graham Hancock makes in this programme is to move the 
Flood Myth and the big cities and the writing back together into the 
Paleolithic at 10-20,000 years ago. 

Sonar 

Experts on acoustics, sidescan sonar, and sub-bottom profiling at the 
Southampton Oceanography Centre, UK, have examined the images on 
the official Graham Hancock website. Their opinions are not identical, 
but can be combined and summarized as follows: 

Any resemblance of the images to a rectangular structure on the seabed 
is a coincidence. Sonar images are not black-and-white photographs. 
The non-expert viewer interprets them as a perspective snapshot of an 
area viewed from a particular point. In fact the side-scan image is built 
up line by line below a ship, which is always looking straight down and 
to each side along each line. Thus the apparent shape of "objects" in the 
image depends upon the ship's speed, the lateral range of the sonar 
beam on each side, and the speed of the paper in the printer. Since 
none of those data can be deduced from the images displayed on the 
web site, the shapes shown on the screen of the side-scans are largely 
a coincidental illusion. 

The "diamond" pattern with the proportions shown presents a strong 
illusion of being a rectangle with vertical relief, illuminated from the 
upper left. The human eye is strongly conditioned to make this deduction 
from our experience of photography and perspective drawings. Side-
scan Plate No. 3 is labelled 97m x 24m, in a ratio of 4:1 (approx). But 
the picture is at best 2:1, and so the image should be compressed top-
to-bottom by a factor of two (or, less probably, compressed left-to-right 
by much more). The most probable correction results in a pattern of 
lineation intersecting at 10-15 degrees. It is interesting that Hancock 
himself reports in the book Underworld (p.675) that neither the Indian 
National Institute of Oceanography, nor the Archaeological Survey 
believed that the findings were of human origin, and the NIO experts 
considered that the illusion in the side-scan images was synthesized by 
the acoustic process and had no significance. NIO is a world-class 
institution, and I would trust their judgement. 

Side-scan systems either print strong echo = black, or strong echo= 
white. It is not clear which convention is being used. This again 
emphasizes that the illusion is arbitrary, like those trick games: 6 cubes 
or 7? A duck or an old woman? 

In Plate No. 3 there are regions of the picture at top left and bottom 
right which do not show the linear-intersecting pattern. In both cases 
there is a simple lineation from upper right to lower left, just striations. 
Because of the strong currents in the area these features are probably 
linear dune-like ribbons sculpted in sand or other loose sediments. 
These blend in the centre of the picture into the intersecting pattern. 
This transition is perfectly natural in geomorphological features, but is 
very odd in a human structure. The same transition is apparent in Plate 
4, at the upper left. 

There is no evidence in the sidescan image to confirm precisely the 
origin of the reported outcrops, My first impression , before I had even 
seen the pictures, was that the "underwater city 9 km long" would turn 
out to be natural fossil beach rock. Further scrutiny, combined with the 
so-called artifacts (see below) suggests that the hard ridges are 
outcrops of shale or mudstone. Beach rock is a natural cementation of 
beach sands rich in siliceous sands and carbonates which react with 
sunlight and salt water at the water's edge on tropical beaches. The 
result is a strip of rock a few metres wide that can extend horizontally 
for many miles. If more sand is transported onto the beach successive 
layers of rock accumulate to seawards, absolutely flat and straight along 
the beach, but with a very slight tilt towards the sea, which was the 
original beach gradient. Such features can be many tens of metres 
wide, even a hundred metres or more. 

The sub-bottom profiler images look much more complex than 
necessary. The exaggerated features at the bottom of the picture are 
simply the double echoes which result in a second version of the true 
echo at the top of the picture, but with twice the amplitude. These can 
be ignored. From the web site it is not possible to read the scales, either 
vertical or horizontal, but the features are probably a few metres high, 
and tens of metres across. This is in the range of the dimension one 
would expect from beach rock strips, and reasonable for one limb of an 
eroded anticlynal bedrock structure. 

Since the position of the track of the sub-bottom profiler is not known in 
relation to the sidescan images, it is not possible to correlate them 
accurately. The discussion on the TV programme that the sub-bottom 
profiler showed "deep foundations" was absurd. Acoustic profiling 
images always show deep lines of greyish scattering within soft 
sediments, and a hard echo with pure white paper underneath from 
rocky surfaces. The contrast between the two looks like "deep 
foundations". It always does. 

Sea bottom samples 

Dr Neil Kenyon, a colleague at SOC who has published more than 100 
papers on the use of sidescan sonar and sub-bottom profiling to analyse 
seabed sediments and geological outcrops. He has worked recently in 
the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Hormuz and provides the following 
comments: 

"Although only based on the images seen on the TV programme, the 
materials dredged up from the Cambay site and presented as human 
artifacts all appear to be well-known natural geological features and 
fossils, familiar to any sedimentary geologist who has worked in the 
Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, or Arabian Gulf region. The flat stones 
which looked so smooth are natural fragments of shale or mudstone, 
probably from a natural outcrop known to the Geological Survey of India. 
Most continental shelves have been surveyed acoustically for military 
and offshore petroleum purposes. The outcrop would probably be 
plotted on available marine geological maps. The flat stone fragments 
have been rolled in the strong currents on the seabed, and blasted with 
suspended sand particles, which has made them smooth, like beach 
pebbles. 

"Some of them had been perforated by boring molluscs, seashells which 
eat calcareous rock, and this accounted for the holes in them. The 
nodular and cylindrical objects are natural concretions and fossils. The 
object that looked as if it has been turned on a lathe is just a nodule that 
has been rolled on the sea bed by the current. 

"The flat grey object which GH said had got writing on it is a well known 
fossil from this area, and is popularly known to geologists as 
a "hieroglyph fossil" because of the patterns on its surface. It is probably 
several million years old. This fossil is typical of layers of shale and 
mudstone of this age. Although I had only a glance at them the trace 
fossils could be Palaeodictyon or Helminthoida. 

"Many objects left on the sea floor in these climatic conditions become 
concreted rapidly with calcareous deposits. The so-called human 
jawbone is probably an object that has been coated in natural 
calcareous limestone precipitated on the seabed. Inside the hard white 
coating there could be a bent piece of wood, or a fish-bone. These 
possibilities should be checked. 

"All the materials displayed on the film were the sort of natural objects 
which a sedimentary geologist would expect to find anywhere in the 
tropics on the seabed, dating to millions of years old, but moved, 
altered, and concreted by modern currents, boring organisms, and 
natural chemical processes of seawater." 

In short, there is no evidence that these objects are man-made. Any 
piece of debris or old tree root stuck on the seabed could have, by 
chance, provided the convenient carbon 14 date. 

Yonaguni 

Graham Hancock said "Nobody can tell us who lived on the continental 
shelf 10,000 years ago". This is not true. 

We go on a dive on Yonaguni, a small island belonging now to Japan, 
but actually 1000 kilometres from the mainland of Japan and only 100 
kilometres from Taiwan. Yonaguni was always a remote island, even 
during times of lowest sea level. When the Hancock's film company 
visited me in June 2000 I advised them to visit the thoroughly excavated 
Jomon culture site off the Tokonami River at a depth of 25 metres which 
is proven to be 9000 years old and which has been published by Kenzo 
Hayashida. It is off the coast of Kyushu, part of the main islands of 
Japan, facing the Tsushima Channel. Tokonami has provided extensive 
finds of pottery, bones, flint tools, and organic materials. I also 
recommended consulting Wataru Ishihara who lists about 50 palaeolithic 
coastal sites in Japan. Instead, they chose to film Yonaguni, which is 
widely presumed to be a natural geological feature. 

There are real ambiguities in separating man-made and naturally 
occurring rock features. Neither geologists nor archaeologists have a 
monopoly of wisdom on this. However, the geologists have an 
advantage if they can say "I have seen exactly the same kind of 
formation many times before in all sorts of totally natural conditions". 
The archaeologists then have to prove that in this particular case the 
formation is not natural (like all the others) but is man-made. In the 
absence of pottery, organics, soil, bones, or any other artefacts this is 
very difficult. That is the present status of Yonaguni. Geologists think it is 
natural. 

Proposals that odd rock features must be man-made because they are 
so improbable are seldom valid. People who make this kind of statement 
should look in detail through any good text book on geology or 
geomorphology to see the weird landforms, tors, yardangs, stacks, 
natural arches, standing stones, ledges, pillars, drying lake mud, cooled 
columns of lava, concretions, glacial erratics, geodes, pedogenic 
concretions, igneous intrusions, dikes, scour pools, drip-stones and the 
like that occur in nature. At Pammukkale in Turkey you can see a 
mountainside covered in a cascade of pure white projecting rock basins 
shaped like lotus leaves, each the size of a Hollywood swimming pool, 
dripping crystal clear water. This is not the result of a mad king's 
obsession with cleanliness, it is natural. Nearby at Urgup there is a 
valley full of stone mushrooms tens of metres high. They are natural, 
though people do often hollow them out to live in them. Nature can be 
absolutely weird. 

A major weakness of the archaeological case for a man-made origin of 
the Yonaguni feature is its uselessness. Hancock shifted the case 
backwards and forwards between a ceremonial site for rock worship, a 
pool, various passages and terraces, and finally a harbour. It looked 
totally useless as a harbour to me, and I have surveyed hundreds of 
ancient harbours. Since the "feature" mapped by Hancock and others 
seems to extend down to a depth of only 30 metres (90 feet) the whole 
feature would have been more than 50-100 metres above sea level at 
its base and a considerable distance from the seashore 10,000 years 
ago. The supposed man-made object would have been an irregular 
stepped outcrop on top of a hill set way back from the sea. How could it 
be a harbour? His different alleged uses also all depended upon different 
relations to sea level. Also, there was no mention of other Jomon sites 
on the island of Yonaguni itself, if they exist. Since the island was always 
separated from both Taiwan and the mainland of Japan, even at times 
of lowest sea level, who was trying to live in this isolated spot or sail 
boats to it 10,000 years ago? 

There was much discussion about the missing debris which might have 
fallen from the exposed flat ledges. This argument seemed to ignore the 
fact that the ledges may have been exposed in their present form, more 
or less, for many hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years. The 
sandstone would then have broken up through frost and rain 
weathering, as suggested by Wolf Wichman, and the rock debris or 
scree itself would have had many tens of thousands of years to be 
broken into small pieces which were washed away by the rising sea. 

The programme next devoted some time to discussion of Shinto 
religious beliefs and associated myths and legends. I cannot comment 
on the theories put forward in this section except to say that they 
seemed very speculative. 

Jomon Culture 

Hancock then said that very little is known about people who were 
around at the end of the Ice Age. Were they primitive hunters, or were 
they an advanced civilization? The evidence of other speakers in the 
programme showed that a great deal is known about the Jomon culture 
although, as Charles Kealey said, one is always finding new data and 
some surprises. There followed a somewhat philosophical discussion 
about just what constitutes civilization, and what can be considered to 
be primitive. This seemed to hark back to Hancock's allegation that it is 
difficult to explain what early humans were doing between the evolution 
of Homo Sapiens about 100,000 years ago and the development of cities 
and writing at the conventionally dated periods of around 8000-5000 
years ago. The explanation is not a difficult one. 

These stages of development of human skills and arts are well 
substantiated as conventional archaeological sequences. Sophisticated 
stone tools, the control of fire, aerodynamically designed wooden 
javelins, and other obvious signs of intelligence are found well before 
100,000 years. Home Sapiens developed the ability to cross water 
channels on rafts or boats, make a wide range of fine stone tools, 
paintings and rock art, domesticate some animals, practice religious 
burial and create cultural carvings, woven baskets and musical 
instruments during the period 50,000 to 10,000 years ago. Around 
10,000 years ago the standard sequence suggests the development of 
agriculture with a full suite of domesticated animals, pottery, 
constructed houses, and soon thereafter villages and towns. This seems 
to me to be pretty clever, pretty fast. What more does Graham Hancock 
want? Palaeolithic peoples were not stupid, but rather were apparently 
quite sophisticated and cultured although around 10,000 ago they did 
not yet have big cities or writing. That took a little longer. 

In order to prove the mathematical sophistication of the supposed 
missing kingdom, or the component of it which might be Jomon, 
Hancock then visited a reconstructed monument which included a 
reconstructed framework consisting of six large brand-new vertical 
timbers. We were told that at midsummer's day the end of the shadow 
of one timber fell exactly on the midpoint between two other timbers, 
and this proved that the originators were sophisticated astronomers. 
The flaws in this are obvious. Firstly, how does anyone know exactly 
how long the timbers were originally? They were completely new. If the 
posts had been driven ten centimetres further into the ground or been 
five centimetres longer or shorter the shadows would have fallen 
somewhere else. On almost any day of the year at any time, one 
shadow or another would have fallen exactly onto the base of another 
timber, half way up a timber, two thirds of the way between the 
timbers, onto the mid-point of a square between four timbers, and so 
on. This proves nothing. 

Hancock claimed that a line of important structures were situated exactly 
on the Tropic of Cancer. Yet, quite apart from the fact that the Yonaguni 
feature is not man-made, it is also noticeable that a great many 
important archaeological sites are NOT on the Tropic of Cancer. It is 
pure chance that some are, if they are. How do we know that there are 
more or less archaeological features at 10 degrees North, 20 degrees, 
27 degrees, or 54 degrees? Has Hancock counted them all? 

The discussion of stone circles made out of small stones was quite 
interesting. Similar man-made features are found in Australia. The 
significance and age of these very simple structures could be examined 
further, and I suspect that much work on this has been done in 
Australia. 

Kerama 

Archaeologists working all round the world have already found over 100 
prehistoric sites on the continental shelves, and these fit into the usual 
sequence of 'Palaeolithic to Neolithic'. We want to find many more sites, 
of course, and to find out about the maritime skills of the people who 
lived in them. But it is unbelievable that between these Palaeolithic or 
Neolithic settlements on the continental shelves there was an alternative 
branch of the human race, one that was technically sophisticated and 
living in big cities. These presumed cities would have been trapped 
between the more primitive sites on both sides and, for some reason, 
unable to go above the 150 metre contour to landwards, as they have 
left no traces for us to find on the present dry land. None of the 100 
prehistoric sites recorded by archaeologists has ever been alleged to be 
natural geological features, while all of Hancock's presumed flooded 
kingdom sites are alleged by many critics to be geological. 

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