Yeah, I’m not sure where that date came from, but it was the thing in the article I felt most compelled to argue with. 9600 BC would put it at the same time humans are thought to have first domesticated wheat. Construction on Göbekli_Tepe is believed to have started around then, and is considered to predate not only metallurgy, but writing, pottery, and the wheel.
I wonder if the author has spent any time with Szukalski, for he has a pretty good idea of where the water for the deluge comes from … “Behold!! The Protong!” is a brilliant bit of exploration of the subject, and I would encourage its addition to the stack of literature on the subject…
I’m a bit surprised there’s no discussion in either article or thread of one of the more plausible possibilities, i.e. that Atlantis was not an island sunken in a geological catastrophe, but was rather a coastal civilization inundated when the ice age ended and the sea level rose by about 100 m. The timing is just about perfect: Plato says about 9600 BCE, which is more or less when the present interglacial period began. Such a narrative does not require either geological impossibility, or invoke magical crystalline space pyramid technology. It also makes sense insofar as we are a primarily costal species at any technological level. Ultimately, it amounts to nothing more shocking than the hypothesis that there may have been a (relatively) advanced civilization during the ice age, which was wiped out when the ice age ended, its cities were submerged, rainfall patterns changed, thus rearranging the distribution of arable land, thus forcing a reset that delayed the progress of civilization by a few thousand years. Clearly such a series of events would have left a deep impression on the people affected, such that it would have been preserved in oral histories for very long periods of time (oral histories having been shown to be remarkably stable at the level of basic narrative, if not exact detail), thus explaining the worldwide flood myths. To my mind, it makes for more sense to explore this possibility, than it does to go on a wild goose chase for a lost island.
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But if so:
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Historical memory isn’t reliable enough. Sometimes details can last for several centuries, but sometimes core aspects can get lost in a few centuries.
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So you wouldn’t want to look in Plato’s stories, or in any other stories, closer to the present than to the end of the last ice age.
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But you would want to look into domestication, and especially domestication of plants.
Totally old-hat: Atlantis has already been found!
Anybody wondering why the author didn’t read source X or why the author didn’t address theory Y . . .
This is not an article. It’s an excerpt from a book. There’s more to the author’s examination than just what is here.
Astrofrog’s got it…
…and I’m surprised nobody mentioned Graham Hancock’s ideas about an advanced maritime civilization as the basis for the Atlantean myths…
good stuff ! Looking forward to reading the book…
-csf
Risto Isomäki’s book The Sands of Sarasvati is an eco-speculative novel with strong scientific grounding about the possibility that such a post-Ice Age civilization could have existed off the coast of India, and about the present possibility of a sudden, rapid sea level rise caused by large sheets of ice sliding into the sea. http://www.intokustannus.fi/kirja/the_sands_of_sarasvati/
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