The
Huffington Post and other Internet
sources have reported on the phenomenon, with MSNBC’s Morning Meeting showing what could be a city. The unnamed researchers claim to be able to make out structures, including a pyramid, that are older than the pyramids of Egypt.
The earliest Egyptian pyramids were built during the Third and Fourth Dynasties, according to the Penguin Atlas of Ancient History, about 2,500 B.C.
The archaeologists have so far refused to give their names or the location of the reported lost city in the Caribbean. They are trying to raise funds for an expedition to confirm their findings.
While that report seems somewhat questionable, a new archaeological report from the
BBC on submerged human habitations describes how we can learn from how people adapted to rising sea levels in the past.
A UK team has found structures that indicate human habitation in the waters off Scotland’s Orkney Isles. Geomorphologist Sue Dawson, from the University of Dundee, believes modern people can learn to adapt to climate change by observing the undersea structures.
Another team member, archaeologist Caroline Wickham-Jones, from Aberdeen University, said of their research:
We have certainly got a lot of stonework. There are some quite interesting things. You can see voids or entrances. There's this one feature that is like a stone table — you've got a large slab about a metre and a half long and it's sitting up on four pillars or walls so the next thing we need to do is to get plans and more photographs to try and assess and look for patterns. The quality and condition of some of the stonework is remarkable. Nothing like this has ever been found on the seabed around the UK.
Meanwhile, geophysicist Richard Bates of the Scottish Oceans Institute said:
We've got other sites down on the south coast of England where we have got submerged landscapes, meso-neolithic landscapes as we have here but what we haven't got anywhere else is actual structures. I don't say that's unique — that we'll never find that anywhere else, but so far we haven't seen such things before.
Dawson explained one reason to study the past was it is a key to the present and future:
So we can look to times when maybe environmental changes have been much more rapid and much more catastrophic in some instances and people have survived and adapted and it's that adaption to climate change is one of the key things that we need to get to grips with.
Caroline Wickham-Jones added:
The really interesting thing about this bay is the stories relating to things under the sea and sea-level change. Our ancestors were dealing with similar problems to ourselves and we'd like to see how they coped with it.
Was there a real Atlantis? And did it succumb to climate change? Only time will tell.
