This excerpt deals with the informative Atlantis legend. There was no room to stuff in a chart made up by Arysio that strongly supports a South China sea homeland for modern man Intriging at least, but so is Bronze Age Ireland. I do think it is well worth going to his site.
We will first discuss the famed Atlantis legend, which is best described as a possible antediluvian antique civilization with extensive maritime trading activities operating on a global scale. This is a great tale that was first told by Plato by way of Egyptian provenance that has since launched 10,000 books.
The salient difficulty that we must face with Atlantis is the simple fact that this putative civilization lived so deep in time that artifacts would now be extremely few in number and probably be unrecognizable in general. On top of that these artifacts are underwater in their heartland. This means that for now we can satisfy ourselves only to the extent of showing that it might have been.
What I will do now is introduce a chart generated by Arysio Nunes dos Santos on his website www.atlan.org. He has done a splendid job of reinterpreting and assembling the known information showing the compelling case to be made for the Indonesian Archipelago. I personally had come to similar conclusions regarding the importance of this region for unrelated reasons long before I was aware of the areal extent of the submerged plains. His work takes what is likely the most accurate report (Egypt is about the only place that an accurate report might have been retained) and checks it against the many proposed locations of Atlantis.
In this checklist he compares the requirements of Plato with the characteristics of some of the proposed locations. He shows that only the plains of the South China Seas and its environs meet the requirements imposed by the cultural sources.
I consider that the most compelling evidence in support of the early emergence of an antique civilization is the huge areal extent of the tropical coastal plains now submerged. As in the Yucatan, a huge homogenous population could have slowly emerged and become stable enough to support the type of infrastructure such a civilization needs, as happened independently in Yucatan.
Arysio also makes clear that from the Mediterranean perspective, all the oceans, as we know them today, outside the Pillars of Hercules were one and the same. The holy mountains referenced would be those volcanic peaks in and around northern Java. These are some of the most violent volcanoes on earth. The checklist also emphasizes the depth of information provided by Plato. Whatever we make of the myth itself, the original informant was telling a tale describing the East Indies, rather than some Mediterranean locale.
Thus, if we are prepared to accept the existence of a huge, well developed and a probably still antique civilization with a global maritime reach prior to the Pleistocene nonconformity, we have clearly given it a viable homeland.
This is also a civilization that would have been hugely vulnerable to a large tsunami coming in from the northeast out of the Pacific. And the rise in sea levels from the ice melt would have forcibly driven the populations out onto the far less hospitable Chinese and Indian plains provided they had the time and shipping. With or without tsunamis, the one hundred and fifty-foot lift in sea level at this time forced the bulk of all lowland populations globally to move to higher ground. They were probably rushed. The one hundred and fifty foot lift that occurred about two to three thousand years later with the additional collapse of the Laurantide ice sheet was also just as catastrophic in shifting any large civilized areas out of their homelands. We are probably looking at a ten to one reduction in available land.
It is hardly a coincidence then that these great sub tropical plains of India and China and the Sumerian delta, as well as other locales worldwide suddenly and simultaneously developed agriculture. Refugees with plant growing skills would have moved into previously poorly exploited river valleys that were now becoming open to the seas and would have struggled vigorously to reestablish the agricultural economy and civilization that they were familiar with. Our own historical experiences of the difficulties involved in poorly supported colonization give us a pretty good sense of just how difficult this would have been even if the transition took 3,000 years.
I think every schoolchild should read some of the original accounts of pioneers who wintered over with Native Americans during periods of poor hunting. Even with all the skills available, the conditions become absolutely fearsome. It also becomes utterly clear why agriculture was adopted so enthusiastically where possible.
We can be pretty sure, however, that our putative original civilization on the South China Sea plains was itself never truly global in the first instance and that their knowledge base was never internally distributed throughout their civilization. We do not know how advanced their science was, although some cultural sources suggest that they reached technology levels we would recognize as modern. In any event it went unshared and became utterly lost in the exact way that Mayan science and engineering became lost. More likely, they perfected their limiting antique mathematica and applied it brilliantly. Mathematical innovation is the one piece of knowledge that was capable of surviving a holocaust. Try and imagine us losing the use of the zero or the meter stick.
A number of commentators have pointed to cultural evidence in India as support for advanced technology derived from this epoch. In practice, even if it did exist, and we do have suggestive physical anomalies that require explanation, there was a complete failure to preserve the knowledge and pass it down. Our entire knowledge base today is completely regenerated from recognizable antecedents within the past several thousand years, including even our agriculture. If such a civilization existed, it disappeared just as totally as the Mayan civilization in which no successor population could read the old glyphs.
