Survivors of the Ancient Cataclysms

The Morien Institute - skywatching through the ages

an image of a meteor flashing through the sky

An image of a revolving globe showing the current sea levels since the last ice age, before which many ancient civilisations like Atlantis flourished all over planet Earth on what are now sunken lands.

Survivors of the Ancient Cataclysms

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There has been much speculation over the past 150 years about the origins of civilisation. Human beings, we have been told, built the first civilisations in the Mesopotamia region just a few thousand years ago, and we have been assured that the ‘arch?ological record’ shows traces only of nomadic hunter-gatherers who ‘appear’ to have started experimenting with agriculture only around 10, 000 years ago. But recent discoveries in many parts of the world challenge this view, and the dates for the emergence of the first civilisations are being pushed right back – to the end of the last Ice Age and beyond.

Of one thing we can be very sure, during the last Ice Age (Pleistocene) there were many millions of square miles more land above sea-level than there is today (Holocene), and by all accounts when the the last Ice Age ended at the boundary of the Pleistocene/Holocene periods there were a series of rapid sea-level rises that inundated the coastal plains all over the globe. Were these coastal plains inhabited during the Ice Age? And, if so, what happened to those who survived the many catastrophic events in antiquity?

 

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