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Published online 9 July 2008 | Nature 454, 151-153 (2008) | doi:10.1038/454151a
News Feature
Archaeology: The lost world
Armed with a map depicting a 10,000-year-old landscape submerged beneath the North Sea and fresh evidence from nearby sites, archaeologists are realizing that early humans were more territorial than was previously thought. Laura Spinney reports.
Pilgrim Lockwood, the skipper of a British fishing trawler named Colinda, wasn’t quite sure what to make of the thing his nets had scraped up from the bottom of the North Sea. Just over 21 centimetres long, it was made of antler with a set of barbs running along one side.
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OK, someone has to say it. Atlantis?
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Archeologists were aware that Britain was attached to mainland Europe for some time, but the idea that the "land bridge" extended out into the sea so far is quite new and extraordinary! This will provide many new areas to look for ancient tools and, perhaps, human remains. Atlantis, of course, if it ever really existed, would have been much farther south for the ancient Greeks to have known about it. There is a modern theory that the island of Akrothiri (Thera) was the source of that legend and the eruption of the volcano in about 1500 B.C.E. destroyed it and the Minoan civilization on Crete. That was long after the Mesolithic!
In considering what Paleolithic/Mesolithic cultural remains have been found on what is now dry land, it fascinates me to imagine what might still be extant in Doggerland. For example, it would be likely that the region would have had caves, right? Would cave art have survived the inundation? Certainly cave sculpting would have if it were far enough in the passage that wave action wouldn't have eroded it...
Interesting article. "Atlantis" according to Plato's account lay beyond the "Pillars of Hercules", (Wikipedia), which were the straights of Gibraltar, and which would place it somewhere in the Atlantic, possibly near or around the Azores. Also it allegedly sank (suddenly) 9,000 years before the "time of Solon", or approximately 9500 BC, which would place it smack bang in the Mesolithic.
Atlantis?? No, no, no...Cimmeria, perhaps (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian). So any large mound found down there could be a funeral barrow - for one Conan of Cimmeria, possibly? And this is only *one* site, of many that were drowned: hot-spots for future unerwater exploration would be the Black Sea region, the shallows near the Red Sea...and on, and on. Many thousands of km2.