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| Author | Topic: Antedeluvian World |
| Lost city of Atlantis is uncovered, researcher asserts |
posted 11/15/04 8:36 AM
Lost city of Atlantis is uncovered, researcher asserts By MICHELE KAMBAS Reuters News Agency Monday, November 15, 2004 - Page A11 LIMASSOL, CYPRUS -- A U.S. researcher reported yesterday that he has found the lost civilization of Atlantis in the watery deep off Cyprus, adding another theory to a mystery that has baffled explorers for centuries. "We have definitely found it," said Robert Sarmast, an explorer who led a team to a site 80 kilometres off the southeast coast of Cyprus earlier this month. Mr. Sarmast said that a Mediterranean basin was flooded in a deluge about 9000 BC, submerging a rectangular land mass he believes was Atlantis. The site now lies 1½ kilometres beneath sea level between Cyprus and Syria. Deep-water sonar scanning has indicated man-made structures on a submerged hill, including a three-kilometre-long wall, a walled hill summit and deep trenches, he said. At a news conference in the port city of Limassol, Mr. Sarmast provided only animated simulations of the hill, and acknowledged that further work needs to be done. "We cannot yet provide tangible proof in the form of bricks and mortar as the artifacts are still buried under several metres of sediment. But the circumstantial and other evidence is irrefutable," he asserted. The mystery over the story of Atlantis has captured imaginations for centuries. According to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, it was an island country where an advanced civilization developed 11,500 years ago. Theories abound as to why such a city would have disappeared. Some hold that it could have vanished in a cataclysmic natural disaster; Greek mythology describes the civilization as being so corrupted by greed and power that it was destroyed by God. Skeptics believe it was a figment of Plato's imagination. Mr. Sarmast said he was led to Cyprus by clues in Plato's dialogues. The philosopher's reference to Atlantis lying opposite the Pillars of Hercules -- believed to be the Strait of Gibraltar -- have often led explorers to focus on locations such as the Atlantic Ocean, Ireland and the Azores, off Portugal. "People who dismiss this have not really done their homework. Skeptics don't really understand. To understand the enigma of Atlantis, you have to have good knowledge of ancient history, Biblical references, the Sumerian culture and their tablets and so on," he said. |
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Indian archaeologists divers discover ancient port city in south India (Moderator) |
posted 3/1/05 5:54 AM
Science - AFP Indian archaeologists divers discover ancient port city in south India Sun Feb 27, 6:04 PM ET Science - AFP MAHABALIPURAM, India (AFP) - Indian archaeologists have found what they believe are undersea "stone structures" that could be the remains of an ancient port city off India's southern coast, officials say. The archaeologists learnt of the structures after locals reported spotting a temple and several sculptures when the sea pulled back briefly just before deadly tsunamis smashed into the coastline December 26. Divers discovered the stone remains close to India's famous beachfront Mahabalipuram temple in Tamil Nadu state, Alok Tripathi, an official from the state-run Archeological Survey of India (ASI), said Saturday. "We've found some stone structures which are clearly man-made. They're perfect rectangular blocks, arranged in a clear pattern," he said aboard the Indian naval vessel "Ghorpad". Tripathi headed a diving expedition after the tsunamis uncovered the remains of a stone house, a half-completed rock elephant and two exquisite giant granite lions, one seated and another poised to charge in Mahabalipuram, 70 kilometers (45 miles) south of Madras. The objects were found when the towering waves withdrew from the beach, carrying huge amounts of sand with them. Experts say the tsunami "gifts" discovered in Mahabalipuram belong to the Hindu Pallava dynasty that dominated much of South India from as early as the first century BC to the eighth century AD. Mahabalipuram is recognized as the site of some of India's greatest architectural and sculptural achievements. Since February 11, Tripathi's team of a dozen divers have been scouring the seabed, diving three to eight meters (yards), to examine rocks with "geometrical patterns." "European mariners and travelers, who visited Mahabalipuram in the 18th century, wrote about the existence of seven pagodas (temples) here," he said. "Some believed it was a myth, others thought six of the pagodas sank under the sea while one remained as a rock temple on the shore. "In fact, some scholars believe the entire city, barring a few rock structures and carvings, were submerged under the sea." The divers have brought up pottery pieces and small stone blocks from the seabed. "We'll study everything to gain an insight into early settlement in this area," said Tripathi. Indian Navy commodore Brian Thomas said "extensive diving" had taken place east of Mahabalipuram's shore temple with underwater cameras used to record findings. "The sea was often rough due to the wind and underwater visibility was very poor," Thomas told AFP. "But we found that the area was strewn with a number of blocks of various shapes and sizes." The findings were expected to be presented at an international seminar on maritime archeology in New Delhi between March 17-19, archaeology officials said. Tripathi said experts would study how old the rocks were to fix the date of the ancient civilisation at Mahabalipuram. Cartographers say the waves which left nearly 16,400 dead or missing in southern India and the country's far-flung Andaman and Nicobar islands have redrawn the entire Mahabalipuram coastline. One of a clutch of temples is partially submerged. But the magnificent eighth century Shore Temple, a UN World Heritage Site famed for its carvings representing characters from Hindu scriptures, survived the sea's fury. This was thanks to a move by India's then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, who ordered that huge rocks be piled around the building to protect it from sea erosion after visiting the site in the late 1970s, officials say. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1540&ncid=1540&e=13&u=/afp/20050227/sc_afp/indiatsunamiarchaeology_050227230425 |
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Next Stop: Atlantis, Cuba (Moderator) |
posted 1/12/06 4:29 AM
Next Stop: Atlantis, Cuba Please Exit to the Rear of the Sub? by Judi McLeod, Canadafreepress.com Tuesday, March 15, 2005 Long-ago Greek philosopher Plato may have unwittingly unleashed a modern day political Battle Royale on an unsuspecting world with his haunting tales of the lost city, Atlantis. Untold legions took to heart the philosopher’s lament that `earthquakes and floods ‘in `one terrible day and night’ destroyed his Atlantic island empire. Drama in writing style was not lost on this student of Socrates, who recorded his thoughts post-8570 BC in the TIMAEUS and circa 9421 BC in the CRITIAS. Now a `lost city’, that could be the fabled city of Atlantis, has been discovered by a Canadian scientific research team, off the western coast of Cuba. Why is it that latter day, long-lost sunken treasures always seem to come with a Canadian connection? At about the same time as Soviet-born ocean engineer Paulina Zelitsky, the president of the Canadian-based company Advanced Digital Communications (ADC), had detected what could be Atlantis in deep waters off Cuba, an unnamed "respected Canadian architect" discovered a sunken boat with which he claimed the Chinese really discovered Canada and the western hemisphere. The boat-finding architect is headed for the United Nations to have the site officially declared as a World Heritage site. Davey Jones’ Locker is giving up many recent discoveries around the world. On May 28 2002, National Geographic News reported on the recent discovery of megalithic ruins some 2,200 ft. below sea level off the coast of Cuba. Interviewed for the story was geologist, Manuel Iturralde, Director of Research at Cuba’s Natural History Museum and consulting geologist for Canadian exploration company ADC, based in Havana, Cuba. According to a 2001 Special Report by Gateway to Atlantis author Andrew Collins, "The discoveries were made last summer during deep-sea surveys made by Paulina and a trained scientific research team aboard the Cuban research vessel, Ulysses. "Sonar images revealed `an extensive series of structures’ over a several-mile area in darker and lighter shades. The site is close to the edge of the underwater geological feature known as the Cuban shelf, which falls off sharply in a series of shelves which drop down to several thousand metres, and it is on one of these shelves, in around 600-700 metres of water, that the structures are to be found." "`Whenever you find a volcano, there is often a settlement associated with it,’ Paul Weinzweig, Paulina’s husband and a director of ADC, observed. `I don’t know the exact relationship, but it is in the same vicinity as the volcano, the fault line and the river. They’re quite close to one another.’ "On the matter of whether the sonar imagery really does show `pyramids, roads and buildings`, Paul stated: `We had been looking at the images for some months, and keep a picture on the wall showing pyramids in the Yucatan, and let’s just say they kept reminding us of these structures. They really do look like an urban development.’" Finding sunken cities, much less the fabled Atlantis, was not the main mission of ADC in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Their original scientific operation was to survey the deep waters off the Cuban coastline as part of a joint venture set up between the Canadian company and the Cuban government, in particular its state partner Geomar. One of their chief aims is to pinpoint the location of the billions of dollars of bullion and lost treasure from sunken ships dating back to the Conquest. "Cuba has the richest galleon cemetery in the world," says Weinzweig. Cuba treasure seekers include Visa Gold, a Toronto-based, low-tech company operating out of Havana’s Marina Hemingway, which claims to have retrieved some 7,000 items from sunken vessels. In the cache from a brigantine called Palemon, lost off Cuba’s northern coast in 1839, the booty included jewellery, diamonds and pistols. ADC’s husband and wife team are not the first to have laid claim to the discovery of sunken cities off the coast of Cuba. There are unconfirmed reports that Soviet submarines discovered an underwater "building complex" during the 1960s. Leicester Hemingway, brother of writer Ernest Hemingway claimed to have spotted, during a flight into the country, beyond its northern coast, "an expanse of stone ruins, several acres in area and apparently white, as if they were marble." The exact location of this underwater marble city remains unclear. The Soviet submarine underwater "building complex" remains unconfirmed and there are no actual pictures of undersea objects in the ADC find. But the ADC claim, if ever proven, like the Canadian architect’s claim of having found the Chinese boat that proves that the Chinese reached North America first, would change the course of world history. "If Paulina Zelitsky and her oceanographic colleagues are right in their belief that `pyramids, roads and buildings’, do lie off Cuba’s western coastline, then it is clear that the prehistory of the Caribbean, and its influence on the rise of Mesoamerican civilization, will have to be revised dramatically," says Collins. "Moreover, it could well be that at long last the mystery of Atlantis, mankind’s greatest historical enigma, is about to unfold in a most spectacular fashion." Perhaps it would do us well to remember that while Cuba may be eons away from the democratic world in the political realm, in geographic terms, it’s only 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Canada Free Press founding editor Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the media. A former Toronto Sun and Kingston Whig Standard columnist, she has also appeared on Newsmax.com, the Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, and World Net Daily. Judi can be reached at: letters@canadafreepress.com. http://www.s8int.com/water23.html |
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Cave colours reveal mental leap (Moderator) |
posted 6/24/06 9:39 AM
Cave colours reveal mental leap Red-stained bones dug up in a cave in Israel are prompting researchers to speculate that symbolic thought emerged much earlier than they had believed. Symbolic thought - the ability to let one thing represent another - was a giant leap in human evolution. It was a mental ability that allowed sophisticated language and maths. New excavations show that a red colour made from ochre was used in burials 100,000 years ago, much earlier than other examples of colour association. Study in scarlet Qafzeh Cave in Israel is a remarkable site that contains many skeletons of humans who lived there about 100,000 years ago. Archaeologists have recently discovered fragments of red ochre - a form of iron oxide that yields a pigment when heated - alongside bones in the cave. The ochre is only found alongside the bones. "We found 71 pieces of ochre and established a clear link between the red ochre and the burial process, it seems to have been used as part of a ritual," Dr Erella Hovers of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem told BBC News Online. The association of red ochre with skeletons found in Qafzeh cave in Israel suggests that symbolic burial rituals were being performed almost 100,000 years ago. This is much older than the 50,000 years that some other scientists believe is the date for the emergence of symbolic reasoning. Lost practice The association of ochre with burial indicates that the inhabitants had made the mental leap of associating the coloured pigment with death. Such symbolic thought spurred human progress, allowing the development of sophisticated language and mathematics. "The red ochre meant something to them, exactly what we do not know, but it is not inconceivable that they painted their dead with red ochre," says Erella Hovers. "It is an example of symbolic thought, the ochre symbolised death. The humans at this time behaved in a way that was not just functional but symbolic as well," she added. The researchers believe that the red ochre at Qafzeh was brought to the cave from nearby sources. In layers in the cave archaeologists have found ochre-stained tools indicating that the red pigment was probably produced in the cave, possibly as part of the burial ritual. Somehow the ability was then lost. After the initial evidence of symbolic behaviour in Qafzeh about 100,000 years ago it disappears, only to emerge again about 13,000 years ago. The research is published in the journal Current Anthropology. |
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