Tag: history

Ancient Maps of Antarctica Debunked. Maybe. Also, We Are All Idiots

On By Jennifer Mugrage4 Comments

Playin’ the Hits

This is a repost. These past weeks have been busy, what with wrapping up the school year, many family events, and illness. (I have a fever right now, and it’s making my online comments amazing.) So I give you this, one of my most-often-viewed posts of all time.

Disclaimer

Like most sane people, I hate Internet debates. Love/hate, that is.  Even in real life, I’ve always found it hard to let a debate go. I’ve sometimes stubbornly backed positions that later turned out to be false, and on the other end of the spectrum I’ve gotten scared by ad hominems and conceded stuff I didn’t need to concede.   Almost no matter how the debate goes, I end up feeling like an idiot.

I don’t want this site to become a debating site. But a few weeks ago, I posted a wild historical theory and invited you guys to critique it.  Benjamin did, in the comments, here.  So, for the integrity of this site, I’ve got to respond to the critique found in the link.  If you don’t like Internet debates, please please skip this post.

The link that Benjamin posted to is to a site called Bad Archaeology.  The site has two guys’ names on it, but at appears to be mostly written by one guy. (At least, he is the one who responds to comments.)  Let’s call him KFM.  I am not posting his full name here nor am I linking to his web site, because I don’t want to attract his attention because I hate Internet debates!  However, you can easily find his site by Googling it.

The site exists to debunk “Bad Archaeology” (caps in the original), which mostly means various wild theories like the ones we’ve been discussing about lost civilizations, aliens, etc.  It calls proponents of these theories Bad Archaeologists and it fights them with facts, with mischaracterization of their positions, and sometimes with mockery. And by capitalizing its references to them. Always fun.

Summary of the Refutation

KFM’s main arguments against Hancock’s idea that the Piri Reis, Orontius Finaeus, and Buache maps come from an older source are as follows:

-Piri Reis SAID he got his data for the New World part of his map from Columbus.  This is confirmed because he faithfully reproduces some of Columbus’s errors, such as showing Cuba as part of the mainland.

-Most Bad Archaeologists consistently spell Orontius Finaeus’s name wrong.  (Oronteus.)  This shows they don’t know what they’re talking about. 

-There are major errors in Reis’s and Finaeus’s depictions of Antarctica.  So we cannot claim that a supposed older source map was accurate.  (More on this in a second.)

-Only one version of Buache’s famous map exists that shows Antarctica.  It is in the Library of Congress.  Other versions of the same map just show a big blank space there.

-Buache was an accomplished geographer who had a theory that there must be a landmass at the bottom of the world.  He also theorized that within it, there must be a large inland sea that was the source of icebergs.  So, if the map he supposedly drew is not a hoax and was in fact drawn by him, then he just made it up out of pure speculation.  In fact, he wrote “supposed” and “conjectured” all over it.

-He also shows ice and icebergs all over it.  This renders ridiculous the idea that it is a map of Antarctica before the continent was covered in ice. 

-Buache’s and Finaeus’s maps don’t match Reis’s or each other, so clearly they cannot have come from a single source map, let alone an accurate one.

The Strong

KFM’s arguments look, at first glance, super convincing. Some of them are dead on.

The strongest part of KFM’s argument is this:

“[Charles] Hapgood, [Hancock’s source for this theory], assumed that the original source maps, which he believed derived from an ancient survey of Antarctica at a time when it was free from ice, were extremely accurate. Because of this, he also assumed that any difference between the Piri Re‘is map and modern maps were the result of copying errors made by Piri. Starting from this position, it mattered little to Hapgood if he adjusted the scales between stretches of coastline, redrew ‘missing’ sections of coastline and altered the orientation of landmasses to ‘correct errors’ on Piri’s map to match the hypothesised source maps …. Hapgood found it necessary to redraw the map using four separate grids, two of which are parallel, but offset by a few degrees and drawn on different scales; a third has to be turned clockwise nearly 79 degrees from these two, while the fourth is turned counterclockwise almost 40 degrees and drawn on about half the scale of the main grid. Using this method, Hapgood identified five separate equators.”

This is pretty damning to the theory.  It’s not necessarily fatal to the idea that Reis used an obscure ancient source among the 20 that went into his map.  After all, copying errors do happen, especially when we are trying to compile a bunch of maps from different eras of places we have never surveyed ourselves.  But that’s an unfalsifiable claim, so let’s leave it.  Regardless, Hapgood’s shenanigans certainly are fatal to the idea that this ancient map, if it existed, was astonishingly accurate in latitude and longitude.

The Not So Strong

But alongside this excellent argument, KFM also includes a bunch of inconsistent ones:

“All in all, the Piri Re‘is map of 1513 is easily explained. It shows no unknown lands, least of all Antarctica, and contained errors (such as Columbus’s belief that Cuba was an Asian peninsula) that ought not to have been present if it derived from extremely accurate ancient originals. It also conforms to the prevalent geographical theories of the early sixteenth century, including ideas about the necessity of balancing landmasses in the north with others in the south to prevent the earth from tipping over.”

So, the map does not show Antarctica, but one sentence later it does show Antarctica, but Antarctica was only put there because contemporary geographical theory demanded it.  Also, note the assumption that the ‘extremely accurate originals’ are supposed to have included all of the Americas as well as Antarctica.  That’s not my understanding of Hancock’s claim.

It’s also not clear whether KFM is claiming that all the data for Reis’s map came from Columbus.  If he is, this inconsistent with both Hancock’s claim (and KFM’s own showing) that Reis said the map was compiled from 20 others, including among them a map whose source was Columbus. 

Similarly, KFM shows errors on Orontius Finaeus’s map, although he admits that “There are fairly obvious similarities between the general depiction of the southern continent by Orontius Finaeus and modern maps of Antarctica.” 

The Buache Map Shows an Archipelago

For the Buache map, KFM contends that Buache essentially made up the entire map to satisfy a geographical theory he had, namely that there must be a land mass at the bottom of the world to balance the land at the top (this was a popular theory at the time), and that it probably had a large inland lake in it with two major outlets leading to the sea (this was Buache’s own brilliant guess, and he thought this lake must be the source of the icebergs that navigators encountered in the southern sea). 

I take KFM’s word that Buache had this theory, and that his map shows ice and icebergs on Antarctica, which KFM says “makes the claims that Buache’s map shows an ice-free Antarctica all the more bizarre.”

Well, sort of.  But actually, Hancock’s claim is that the source map Buache used shows Antarctica early in the process of icing over.  Also, given Buache’s theory, it would not be surprising if he had added ice and icebergs to any other data that he may have had. 

“Over several parts of the southern continent, Buache writes conjecturée (conjectured) and soupçonnée (suspected).”   KFM thinks this is conclusive proof that Buache basically invented the interior of Antarctica on his map, based purely on his own theory.  That could be.  But I have to say, if it is, he did a great job!  He does not just draw a round mass, attach the few islands and promontories that he knows about (New Zealand, which he took for a peninsula, and the Cape of the Circumcision), and then draw a lake in the middle.  Instead, he has a waterway offset between two unequal land masses.  It corresponds surprisingly well to the shapes of the ranges of mountains and low areas that we now know Antarctica has.

The “Well, I’ll Bet You Didn’t Know About … This!” Argument

Besides these arguments, KFM includes a lot of interesting history about the biographies of these cartographers.  Almost half his page about Finaeus is taken up with the cartographer’s biography, even though it has little to do with claims about his map (beyond boosting his credentials, which I would think Hancock would also want to do).  Similarly, with Buache we are given: “The claims of Bad Archaeologists about Buache’s map ignore a crucial fact: he was the foremost theoretical geographer of his generation, whose published works include hypotheses about the Antarctic continent.”  I’m not sure why Buache’s eminence is supposed to be a devastating blow to any claims about his map, but again we are treated to a long and interesting biography before KFM finally gets to Buache’s theories about a southern continent. 

This style of argument reminds me of people who think they have shown the Bible is not divinely inspired merely because they can show that it happened in a particular historical context and is expressed in a particular historical idiom.  They will trot out some tidbit of historical context that they assume is complete news to some Bible scholar who has been studying ANE history his whole life.  Their line of argument is based on a misunderstanding of what divine inspiration is claimed to be.  They assume that if something is claimed to be the Word of God, it must have come to humanity in an abstract, context-free, propositional and not literary or historical form.  (They also assume that it must cover all knowledge in the world, e.g. so that the discovery of North America was supposed to somehow shake our faith in the Bible.)

KFM’s argument about these maps is exactly the same kind of argument.  He gives a bunch of historical context about these cartographers and thinks that refutes Hancock’s claims.  It’s as if Hancock had been arguing that Piri Reis, Finaeus, and Buache were born of virgins, went through life without interacting with anyone, and then one day, without any context whatsoever, this complete, easy-to-interpret map from an ancient civilization dropped out of the sky into their hands.  Well, that certainly isn’t the argument that Hancock makes in his book. His argument is (or was; he has apparently retracted it) that there were several source maps, made over centuries or millienia, which traced the progressive growth of the Antarctic ice cap.  He does not claim that these were complete, accurate world maps or even that they showed the Americas.  “Someone who knew what they were doing once mapped Antarctica.”  That’s the basic claim.

When We Think We Don’t Have Preconceptions

It turns out that there is a more than coincidental similarity between the way KFM caricatures Hancock’s claims and the way that some people caricature claims about the Bible.  KFM, in fact, classes Biblical Archaeology as a subset of Bad Archaeology.  The following quotes should give you a sense of his general attitude:

“Some Bad Archaeology is just so outrageously Bad that it can only be examined charitably by assuming that its proponents are slightly confused. How else can you explain the complete lack of critical judgment, the belief in ancient fairy stories, the utter absence of logical thought they display? Either that, or they have a particular agenda, usually driven by a religious viewpoint.

 Biblical Archaeology, which has been described as excavation with a trowel in one hand and a Bible in the other, is a specialised branch of archaeology that often seems to ignore the rules and standards required of real archaeology. Conducted for the most part, by people with an explicitly religious agenda (usually Christian or Jewish), it is a battleground between fundamentalist zeal and evidence-based scholarship …  If we can’t find evidence for Solomon’s glorious empire, it must be that we’re not interpreting the archaeological data correctly and that a big discovery is just around the corner (the ‘Jehoash inscription’ leaps to mind in this context). If contemporary Roman documents don’t mention Jesus of Nazareth, why here’s an ossuary that belongs to James, his brother… It’s all very much centred around contentious objects, poorly-dated sites and great interpretative leaps that the non-religious may find astounding.”

Got that?  If you believe in a historical Solomon or even a historical Jesus, you’ve just been dubbed a Bad Archaeologist.  Welcome to the club, friends.

I mention this attitude not because it’s off-putting, but because it tells us something about KFM’s mindset and about what it would take to convince him that something is “good” archaeology.  I’m guessing that any evidence of advanced civilizations older than about 4,000 BC is going to be dismissed out of hand.  As will any evidence showing that humanity might have declined, rather than slowly progressed, over our history.

Conclusion: Inconclusive

Going back to the maps, what has been shown here?  I would say it’s inconclusive.  The maps are less accurate than Hancock claims and far less accurate than I made them sound in my original post, because I was going over Hancock’s theory at treetop level and didn’t bother to get off into the weeds when he discusses the details of the maps.  (As I still haven’t done in this post. I would like to, but my time is limited.)

On the other hand, I think the Finaeus and Buache maps especially are more accurate than we would expect of maps that had been drawn out of pure conjecture, without any source at all.  It looks like more was known about Antarctica in the 16th century than we previously assumed, whatever the source of that knowledge.

So it’s not a case of “Lost civilization proven!” but neither is it “Nothing to see here.”  The most we can say is that something strange is going on, but we don’t know what.  To paraphrase Andrew Klavan, KFM isn’t wrong to think Hancock and Hapgood are wrong; but he is wrong to think that he himself is right.

About the theory of earth crust slippage, I feel the same way.  On the one hand, it’s a pretty hard theory to swallow on geological grounds.  (For example: if a big section of the earth’s crust pivoted around the North American plains – even granted that this could happen – shouldn’t there be some kind of seam where the edge was?)  On the other hand, clearly something weird happened, or we wouldn’t have Siberia being ice-free when Canada was ice-covered.  Nor would we have flash-frozen tropical plants and baby mammoths.  

So, in conclusion, nobody knows anything, boys and girls.  Let us eat, drink and be merry.

Hundreds of Thousands of Ancient Stone Structures in Saudi Arabia

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

On Oct. 17, Live Science published an article describing a highly unusual type of site – called gates in the Harret Khaybar area, that my colleagues and I had systematically catalogued and mapped and were to publish in the scientific literature in November. That sparked immediate and extensive international media coverage, including features in The New York Times, Newsweek and the National Geographic Education Blog. Four days after the article was published on Live Science, I got an invitation from publication from the Royal Commission for Al-Ula, in northwest Saudi Arabia, to visit that town. The Al-Ula oasis is famous for hosting the remains of a succession of early cultures and more recent civilizations, all strewn thickly among its 2 million-plus date palms. As a Roman archaeologist, I had known this oasis for over 40 years as the location of Madain Salih, Al-Hijr — ancient Hegra, a world-class Nabataean site adopted by UNESCO.

Four days after the invitation from the Royal Commission, my colleague Don Boyer, a geologist who now works in archaeology, and I were on our way to Riyadh. Almost immediately, on Oct. 27 to Oct. 29, we began three days of flying in the helicopter of the Royal Commission. In total, we flew for 15 hours and took almost 6,000 photographs of about 200 sites of all kinds — but mainly the stone structures in the two harrat.

Though we didn’t have much notice, Boyer and I spent three days before our visit looking over the sites we had “pinned” and catalogued using Google Earth over several years. We then, relatively easily, planned where we wanted to fly in order to capture several thousand structures in these two lava fields. Our helicopter survey was probably the first systematic aerial reconnaissance for archaeology ever carried out in Saudi Arabia. It was possible only because of the publication of the Live Science feature article describing my research on the gate structures, and the resulting international media coverage, which caught the attention of the Royal Commission.

-Prof. David Kennedy, in this LiveScience article, November 2017

I am just so excited about this, people. Just so excited.

I had heard that there were large stone structures, called “gates,” in Saudi Arabia. I’d even blogged about it before. But I had no idea that there were hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Saudi Arabia must be simply covered in these things.

It gets better. Guesses are that they date back 7,000 years (pre-Flood? Immediately post-Flood?). We know because many of them have been covered by lava flows in the interim. The Bedouins say they are “the works of the old men.”

It gets better. Why was the extent of these structures previously unknown? Must be racism, right? Evil European archaeologists didn’t expect the ancient inhabitants of Saudi Arabia to have built stuff like this?

Why, no. These structures are waaay out in the desert, known only to the locals. Almost impossible to find on foot. They are best surveyed from the air. Well, shortly after the last two World Wars (when small planes first came into general use), the Arab states started to achieve their independence from Britain and France. And they became closed states. They didn’t want anybody flying over their land. So, these amazing structures have been unknown and underappreciated, because those archaeologists who were interested, weren’t allowed to observe them.

So, let’s review. This story simply has everything guaranteed to make Out of Babel squirm with joy. Old, mysterious structures, really old, pre-dating even the amazing Nabatean civilization (the folks who built Petra), HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of them, purpose unknown, not generally known to exist because of remote location and closed country. Not only would this make a great movie, but it is the kind of thing that is continually popping up all over the world. Apparently, there is literally tons of evidence of smart humans building advanced civilizations, in just about every country on earth, yet we moderns have been unaware of this for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons weren’t our fault (how were we supposed to know?), some were (we were blinded by the evolutionary narrative that says prehistoric people weren’t “advanced”).

When I say “advanced civilizations,” I mean a variety of different things by that. I mean cities with sophisticated water systems like Teohihuacan, observatory/computers like Stonehenge, observatory/cities like Poverty Point, temples using advanced geometry like Gobekli Tepe, pyramids like the ones in Bosnia, giant geoglyphs like the Nazca Lines and Serpent Mound and, apparently, these Saudi Arabian gate things. I also mean stones that appear to have been drilled, or precisely molded like the ones at Puma Punku.

If you have time, please follow the link and look up the LiveScience article. It’s worth reading the whole thing, and includes a video with views of the structures from an airplane.

More about the Plymouth Colony

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

Trigger warning: graphic description of smallpox

This spring also [1634], those Indians that lived about their [the Plymouth settlement’s] trading house there, fell sick of the small pox and died most miserably; for a sorer disease cannot befall them, they fear it more than the plague. For usually they that have this disease have them in abundance, and for want of bedding and linen and other helps they fall into a lamentable condition as they lie on their hard mats, and pox breaking and mattering and running one into another, their skin cleaving by reason thereof to the mats they lie on. When they turn them, a whole side will flay off at once as it were, and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful to behold. And then being very sore, what with cold and other distempers, they die like rotten sheep. The condition of this people was so lamentable and they fell down so generally of this disease as they were in the end not able to help one another, no not to make a fire nor to fetch a little water to drink, nor any to bury the dead. But would strive as long as they could, and when they could procure no other means to make a fire, they could burn the wooden trays and dishes they ate their meat in, and their very bows and arrows. And some would crawl on all fours to get a little water, and sometimes die by the way and not be able to get in again. But of those of the English house, though at first they were afraid of the infection, yet seeing their woeful and sad condition and hearing their pitiful cries and lamentations, they had compassion of them, and daily fetched them wood and water and made them fires, got them victuals whilst they lived; and buried them when they died. For very few of them escaped, notwithstanding they did what they could for them to hazard of themselves. The chief sachem himself now died and almost all his friends and kindred. But by the marvelous goodness and providence of God, not one of the English was so much as sick or in the least measure tainted with this disease, though they daily did these offices for them for many weeks together. And this mercy which they showed them was kindly taken and thankfully acknowledged of all the Indians that knew or heard of the same.

William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, pp. 302 – 303

Stone Age Surgery

On By Jennifer Mugrage3 Comments
Photo by Renato Danyi on Pexels.com

Trigger warning: Stone Age surgery!

This post is the first in a series I have planned about prehistory. Each post will draw on one or more chapters from the book The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, by Richard Rudgley, Touchstone, 2000. From the front flap:

Our long-held myths are exploding. Recent discoveries of astonishing accomplishments from the Neolithic Age – in art, technology, writing, math, science, religion, and medicine, and exploration – demand a fundamental rethinking of human history before the dawn of civilization.

Lost Civilizations, inside flap

So, Rudgley’s thesis is basically that there was, in fact, civilization long before there was civilization. That is, of course, also a theme of this blog. “Ancient people were smarter than we think,” or that art, literature, science and civilization are the natural state of human beings and have been present (ebbing and flowing of course) as long as there has been humanity.

A near-universal theme in the mythologies of the world is that the present state of the world, and more specifically the social world, is in decline — a fall from the Garden of Eden or from a Golden Age. Modern civilization has turned these traditional mythological assumptions on their head and written a new script, one based on the idea of social progress and evolution. In this new mythology the notion of civilization (as it is generally understood) replaces Eden and this novel paradise exists not at the beginning of time but, if not right now, then just around the corner. Civilization is … presented as the final flowering of human achievement born out of a long and interminable struggle against the powers of darkness and ignorance that are represented by the Stone Age.

Lost Civilizations, Introduction, page 1

I have come to believe in the ancientness of civilization because I take ancient documents seriously as historical records: Genesis, primarily, but also the other legends and myths from around the world which Rudgley mentions in his intro. This suspicion that ancient people were much smarter than we give them credit for was further strengthened as I learned about some of their building projects. Now Rudgley is presenting archaeological evidence that they knew far more than we suspect about art, mathematics, the natural sciences, and medicine.

Disclaimer about Dates

By the way, I don’t have a coherent way to sort out which archaeological dates to accept and which ones to doubt. As far as I can tell from my reading, all methods of dating archaeological sites are based on some form of dead reckoning.

Carbon dating depends on certain assumptions about rates of molecular decay, which can’t be proven in the first place and can also be thrown off universally or locally by events such as a comet strike. Carbon dating also seems to be less reliable the farther we go back in time.

Dating by archaeological layers also depends on assumptions about different historical periods and what might be diagnostic of each, except in cases where a site can be reliably linked to a known historical event (which is obviously only the case for relatively recent sites). Other than that, it’s all dead reckoning.

Dating events in human history by the use of genetics depends upon assuming that all genetic differences evolved and assuming certain rates of change. Historical linguistics has the same problem.

Finally, historical records such as the genealogies found in Genesis and in the oral traditions of other peoples worldwide hit only the highlights of a family line and don’t give us any idea how many generations were skipped.

Each of these methods can be pretty convincing in specific cases. It is even more convincing when one or more methods converge, yielding the same date range. But even when that happens, it’s still just one method of dead reckoning appearing to validate another. And most often, different dating methods contradict each other. If a plurality of them converged on one timeline for human history, maybe we could accept that. But they don’t. It’s complete chaos.

I would love to present a clever, coherent, data-grounded rubric for sorting all this stuff out. But I’m not a professional in any of these fields. Even if I were, the pros don’t all agree with one another. It’s starting to look like, in order to have a sorting method that makes sense, I would have to do full-time research for several years. Maybe for a lifetime. So I got nothin’.

My working theory is that humanity, and hence human civilization, is tens of thousands but not hundreds of thousands and certainly not millions of years old. I can’t prove this. No one can.

So, in these posts about Rudgley’s book, I’ll just present the dates as he gives them. I won’t try to integrate them with the picture of ancient human history that I have been piecing together in my books and in other posts on this site, all of which could be invalidated at any time by a new historical or archaeological discovery. Sometimes Rudgley gives dates that are hundreds of thousands or even millions of years old (though not in this chapter). I might be skeptical that they are really that old, but can still accept that these people were living long before mainstream archaeology tells us that there was “civilization.”

On to the Icky Stuff!

So. Stone Age Surgery.

Undoubtedly the widest-known major surgical operation in tribal cultures is trepanation … which, as will become clear, was also known in the Stone Age. This operation involves the removing of one or more parts of the skull without damaging the blood vessels, the three membranes that envelop the brain … or the actual brain.

Lost Civilizations, p 126

That’s right, removing parts of the skull. There are three methods by which this can be done: scraping, “a mixture of boring and sawing,” and “the push-plough method,” which involves creating an oval groove in the skull (basically another method of scraping).

Thomas Wilson Parry, MD (1866 – 1945), became fascinated by trepanation and practiced various methods of it on human skulls (not on live patients), “using implements made of obsidian, flint, slate, glass, shell and shark teeth.” “Parry records that the average time it took him to perform a trepanation by the scraping method on a fresh adult skull was half an hour. He found both flint and obsidian excellent materials to work with surgically, and also expressed the opinion that shells — which were used in Oceania to perform such operations — were highly effective too.” (page 128)

Trepanation appears to be less painful than it sounds. It has been used at various times and places to treat epilepsy, mental illness, head injuries, severe headaches, vertigo and deafness (129). It is “still regularly practised among the Gusii of Kenya, a Bantu people with a population of about one million, and theirs is perhaps the last surviving traditional practice of its kind.” (130) Trepanation was also practiced by the Incas and the pre-Inca peoples; in Neolithic Europe; in 6th-century BC Palestine; and now, trepanned skulls a few thousand years old have also been found in Australia.

Rudgley points out that “as it is usually only the bones of Stone Age people that survive to be discovered … any operation that was performed on the soft parts of the body cannot be detected.” (136) If Neolithic people were willing and able occasionally to practice trepanation, it seems likely that they were able to perform less risky kinds of surgery too. There is some evidence from Neolithic Europe of various kinds of dentistry, including toothpick grooves, birch bark chewing gum, and even a skull with a tooth that has been drilled. (136)

Rudgley’s chapter on trepanation (“Stone Age Surgery”) comes after a chapter called “Under the Knife” (pp 116 – 125), which discusses medical procedures in “tribal” cultures that are known from history and ethnography. This includes everything from circumcision in the Ancient Near East, to amputation among the Australian aborigines, to very detailed anatomical knowledge among the Aleutian islanders. The chapter concludes with two horrifying yet impressive accounts of successful surgeries in a tribal context. There is a c-section performed in Uganda in 1879, and various tumor removals performed in the Ellice [sic] Islands in the 1920s. The message is clear: modern, “civilized” people don’t have a corner on medical knowledge.

Antiseptics and Painkillers

We don’t know whether Stone Age people had germ theory. Nor, if they had it, do we know how they referred to germs. In one of Ursula le Guin’s novels, a wound getting infected is called “the evil of the blade.” That’s hardly less scientific than calling it an “infection,” as long as you know how to prevent or treat it.

Studies of both the trepanned skulls of the Incas and some of those found in Neolithic Europe indicate that healing seems to have been the norm in both cases. It is hard to explain the Stone Age success rate without concluding that some kind of effective antiseptic agent must have been used. Furthermore, the surgeons of the time must have understood the need for it.

Lost Civilizations, p 131

If germ theory was ever explicitly known, it was obviously forgotten at some point in human history, only to be re-discovered much later. But even if people were operating on a different theory, it would be possible for them to know the importance of cleanliness and to know how to treat a patient using any of a large number of natural substances that have antiseptic properties. The words “Stone Age” naturally evoke the image of a cave man, and the idea of a cave man naturally includes an individual who never takes a bath. But it ain’t necessarily so.

It is also possible that people’s immune systems were much stronger many years ago, if we are willing to entertain the idea that the human race has declined over time rather than evolving upwards.

Now, I am sure you want to know about painkillers. Here, gleaned from Rudgley’s Stone Age Surgery chapter, is a short list of substances that have been used as painkillers at different times and places:

  • cocaine (in coca leaves — South America)
  • wine mixed with extract of mandrake (first-century Greece)
  • mandrake beer (ancient Egypt)
  • possibly just beer
  • the opium poppy (starting in the Mediterranean around 6000 BC and spreading west from there)
  • cannabis (native to Central Asia, but quickly spread to Old Europe and China)
  • betel nut (Southeast Asia)
  • tobacco (in the Americas)
  • pituri (a nicotine-bearing plant used by the Australian Aborigines)

Clearly, although we might prefer modern anesthesia, ancient peoples were not completely without recourse when it came to pain. Most of the substances on this list are attested not only in history but also in ancient burials.

This has been a repost from January 2020, which by now is … ancient history.

A Roundup of Atlantis Theories

On By Jennifer Mugrage4 Comments
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Too many Atlantises. An embarrassment of Atlantises. One Atlantis, two Atlantis, red Atlantis, blue Atlantis …

Atlantis is Now Off the Coast of Cuba

This article describes an intact granite city, with pyramids, discovered off the West coast of Cuba, about 2,000 feet down, in December of 2001. As our old friend KFM, of Bad Archaeology, points out, the city would be unlikely to survive intact like this if it actually dropped dramatically from what is now sea level, as Plato seems to describe. The article points out that there is another city, the Yonaguni Monument, off the coast of Japan, and Graham Hancock in his book, Underworld, points out that there are submerged megalithic cities in many places around the world, including off the coast of India. (Hancock has cycled through seriously advancing a number of different Atlantis theories, so he will be sort of the workhorse of this post.)

It seems to me that the city off the coast of Cuba is part of a worldwide phenomenon where sea levels were once much lower. We can include in this phenomenon Doggerland (which will make another appearance later in this post), and the land bridges known to have once connected Asia to the Americas and the Indonesian islands to the mainland.

If you are an old-earth believer and have to juggle millions of years, multiple cooling and warming periods, slow but somehow effective continental drift, and some confusing archeological indications that humans were perhaps around well before they should have been … good luck. As someone who believes that the history of the earth is measured in thousands or tens of thousands, but not millions or billions of years, my guess is that this period of low sea levels plus advanced civilization came right after the Great Flood.

You would have a much colder, rainier climate as the earth adjusted to the recent cataclysm (about this more in a minute). You would have had frequent snow and rain storms, with all this precipitation getting frozen in the rapidly forming ice sheets, causing Earth’s water supply to be greatly reduced. Meanwhile, you would have Noah’s children and grandchildren branching out as quickly as possible, building megalithic cities wherever they went, still remembering the techniques and technology (and possibly still assisted by the giants and gods) that they had seen pre-Flood. This period of low sea levels would have had to last long enough for people to disperse and to build, but it need not have been very long. It could have a been a matter of a few hundred to a thousand years. As the climate stabilized, you would have had floods covering settlements and civilizations in different parts of the world. This, I believe, is the reason we have an embarrassment of Atlantises.

There have also been assertions that the reason for the Bermuda Triangle phenomenon is that Atlantis lies underneath it. (Note that the west coast of Cuba is outside of the Bermuda Triangle.) This theory certainly appeals to those who are interested in the potential paranormal effects of the lost city, but I do not know of any actual submerged city found in the Bermuda Triangle area. (If you do, please enlighten me in the comments. I’m always looking for another Atlantis to add to my collection.) This article discusses how ocean-floor mapping technology can create lines that look like city streets.

Atlantis as Antarctica

Graham Hancock makes the case for this in his book Fingerprints of the Gods. He posits that the evidence points to an ancient, advanced civilization which was destroyed by a cataclysm, and asserts that the refugees from it seeded their scientific knowledge, in code form, by creating new religious cults all around the world that featured certain sacred numbers.

If you’ve been reading Out of Babel for a while, you know my assessment of all of this is that it’s right, but not in the way that Hancock thinks it is. Among other things, his scientific materialism and evolutionary beliefs make it impossible for him to imagine that people groups like the Maya, for example, would have come up with advanced mathematics on their own, so he needs to posit a more “advanced” civilization bringing these things from without.

Anyway. For his advanced ancient civilization, Hancock realizes he needs a continent-sized homeland (because, again, his evolutionary beliefs about man require that such a civilization develop gradually, over millennia, from hunter-gatherers to farmers and so on). Antarctica is a good candidate because it’s an entire continent; there is some evidence that it was mapped before it was quite so covered in ice; its general pre-ice outline corresponds roughly to Plato’s description of Atlantis; and there is a theory available for how it could have gone from being in a temperate part of the Atlantic, to being at the South Pole, in a relatively short amount of time. Hancock calls this “earth crust slippage” and posits that it happened about 20,000 B.C.

Now for the version I find more plausible: Creation scientist Dr. Kurt Wise presents his team’s model for “continental sprint” in this video. I find Dr. Wise’s model persuasive as a model of the Great Flood, and as we will discuss, it could explain the Atlantis legend wherever in the world Atlantis proves to have been. However, even if you buy into “continental sprint,” it does not follow that Plato was describing Antarctica when he wrote about Atlantis. If all the land on the earth were breaking up, the ultimate fate of that portion that later became Antarctica would seem like a minor detail.

Atlantis as North America

This one was put forward by Graham Hancock, after he abandoned his Antarctica theory, in his book America Before, a review of which I react to here. Although weak, the theory relies on the fact that there are large structures, either megalithic or earthworks, which align to different astronomical features and/or function as observatories, all around the world, including in North America. For example, the pyramid complex at Teotihuacan appears to be a model of the solar system; the Giza Plateau appears to be a model of Orion, and Serpent Mound in Ohio, which sites towards the sunrise at solstices, may be according to Hancock a model of the constellation Draco.

All that to say, anywhere you can find a large astronomical structure, you can make a case for Atlantis, and Hancock has made that case for North America.

Atlantis as the Cyclades Plateau in the Aegean

This article, which I posted last summer, asserts that Plato’s descriptions of Atlantis are admirably matched by the Cyclades Plateau (now the Cyclades islands), which would have existed when sea levels were 400 feet lower than they are now. The Cyclades Plateau is a rather large formation right in the middle of the Aegean. (If we consider that lower sea levels would have also expanded the coastlines of the rest of Greece, then it would have been even closer to the mainland.) This is an attractive theory in terms of its being what Plato was actually talking about (since he makes Atlantis contemporary with Athens), but it does depend upon this:

Recently, a four year study that included a thorough analysis of Plato’s work established that serious errors by early translators allowed for the mixed messages in the translated document.

Atlantis as Part of Doggerland

Yet another underwater location that used to be inhabited when sea levels were lower, Doggerland was a vast region that stretched between England, France, Holland, and Scandanavia, and is now the relatively shallow southern part of the North Sea. Archaeological discoveries have handily established that this area was once inhabited, here and here among others. As with other now-submerged human habitations, the reader’s preconceptions will determine how long ago you believe it was inhabited, and for how long.

This article describes an entire book which puts forth a detailed theory Plato was describing Doggerland. Apparently, Atlantis had a large, roughly rectangular plain surrounded by “ditches,” which the author thinks could also be translated “dikes.” He imagines the inhabitants of AtlantiDoggerland using these dikes to keep the sea back from a certain region of Doggerland for a period of time. Without some very expensive underwater archeological expeditions (in a notoriously dangerous sea), there is no way to confirm whether the ruins of a large city lie where this theory would predict. The maps are well worth looking at.

Atlantis as the Richat Structure

The Richat Structure, of the “Eye of the Sahara,” is a large (c. 40 km) formation of concentric rings of stone located in present-day Mauritania. Because of its size and remote location, it is hard to spot except from orbit.

Depending upon how you calculate, the structure matches the recorded dimensions of Atlantis quite well. There are also, of course, explanations about how this structure could have formed geologically. I’m not enough of an expert to assess these, but I am more skeptical of geological explanations than I used to be, now that I’ve seen “mountains” that turned out to be pyramids with insides, and geologists’ attempts to explain how a single fossilized tree could cross-cut millions of years’ worth of sedimentary rock layers. In other words, could go either way.

For the Richat structure to be Atlantis, we have to imagine that it was once nearer to coast and was inundated by a tsunami or something of that nature. This theory actually works fairly well with the geological model that Dr. Kurt Wise presents above. “Continental sprint” would have included many earthquakes and resultant tsunamis. Africa, in the model, does not move as much as the other pieces of Pangea, but it would still have undergone earthquakes and, possibly, some uplift.

On this theory, with his tale of Atlantis Plato somehow retained a memory of a pre-Flood incident (and read Athens back into it?). Below is a video of Pastor Joel Webbon discussing the theory with Brian Suave and Ben Garrett of Haunted Cosmos. They get into local lore around the Richat structure, how this dovetails with Greek legends about Atlantis, and how this all could have been plausible in a pre-Flood world haunted by gods and nephilim.

Conclusion

When I first started composing this post, I thought I was going to come out in support of the Richat Structure. Now, I just don’t know. The Haunted Cosmos guys make it sound very plausible, but a few of the other candidates are also plausible (some less so). There does not seem to be any way to “find” Atlantis without sacrificing at least some of what Plato has to say about it. (For example, Athens existed before the Flood? Before there was a Europe?) This makes it really difficult to favor any one theory (although we can probably discard others). What is clear, is that the prehistoric world had many sophisticated cities, lots of things built with megaliths, pyramids on almost every continent, and that there was a period when many human settlements were submerged as sea levels rose. The details are a matter of speculation, of the kind suitable for someone writing a novel.