Antediluvian civilizations: myth or reality?
For official archaeology, Homo Sapiens, who would have evolved in Africa 130 millennia ago, spread throughout Eurasia around 100 thousand years ago.
40 millennia ago it reached Australia, while only 14 millennia ago it reached the New World, crossing the prairie called Beringia (current Bering Strait). According to this theory, just 10 thousand years ago man became sedentary, developing agriculture and beginning the founding of the first inhabited centers (Jericho, 8000 BC).
However, there are numerous critics of this hypothesis, which support not only the inaccuracy of these data, but also the possibility that man may have developed organized civilizations before 9500 BC.
Actually Homo Sapiens could have, over the course of 130 millennia since it appeared on Earth, developed several wild or maritime civilizations, perhaps on different planes than the current one, more spiritual or less attached to materialism, for example.
In recent years, some archaeologists have found remains of ancient colonizers in America, which call into question official theories and lead us to reconsider the history of man, not only with what has to do with America, but with the entire world.
Brazilian archaeologist Niede Guidon (supported by several internationally famous scholars) has found remains of archaic Homines Sapiens in Piauí (northern Brazil, approximately 700 kilometers from the Atlantic coast) dating back 12,000 years. However carbon 14 dating method has proven that some stoves were used in the area under study 60 millennia ago. This evidence challenges the official theory of the population of the Americas according to which the first inhabitants of the New World belonged to the Clovis culture (New Mexico desert) 13 millennia ago.
In the New World, finds were found that prove the archaic presence of man, for example in Monte Verde, Chile, dating back 33,000 years.
This is how the recognized theory of the population of the Americas falls and must be completed by other hypotheses that consider the colonization of the New World directly from Africa, but also from Melanesia and Polynesia.
All this puts the period during which Homo Sapiens colonized the Earth, from 100 millennia ago until now, in a new light.
Now, if we consider that during this long period, the Wisconsin-Wurm glaciation (which lasted from 110 to 11.5 millennia ago) was at its greatest point, it can be said that the sea level was lower, almost 120 meters compared to the current one. This would allow man to move more easily through the oceans precisely because many lands, now submerged, emerged above the surface of the seas.
Is it possible that some groups of humans, belonging to ethnicities still unknown today, have founded coastal cities, which were subsequently wiped out by terrible floods?
Many cultures have left literary works in which they speak of a flood, or a period of exceptional climatic disorders: Atrahasis (Sumerian myth), the epic of Gilgamesh (Babylonian legend), the Bible (history of the Hebrews), Shujing (classic of Chinese history), Matsya Purana and Shatapatha Brahmana (sacred texts of the Hindus dating from the first millennium BC), Timaeus and Crizia of Plato (Greece), the Popul Vuh of the Mayan civilization, citing just a few. According to many frontier researchers, but lately also several geologists and climatologists, the universal flood was precisely the end of the ice age, and it happened approximately 11.5 millennia ago.
Some 20th century researchers have hypothesized that the survivors of some of these antediluvian civilizations have taken refuge in other internal places on the continents, particularly in South America, where they would have founded some cities and laid the foundations for new colonizations.
The first researcher to support this thesis was the greatest adventurer of the 20th century, the English colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett. As the basis of his convictions he found the manuscript (n. 512) preserved in the National Library of Rio de Janeiro, which described the discovery by the bandeirante Francisco Raposo, in 1743, of an unreachable stone city, hidden in the Mato Grosso jungle, not far from the Xingu River.
Fawcett set out several times after 1920, exploring the jungle between the Xingu River and the Araguaia River, at the height of the Serra do Roncador.
His disappearance precisely in the forest area of the Serra do Roncador, at the end of May 1925, did nothing more than revive the legend of a mysterious antediluvian city, which swallowed the explorer, his son Jack and a friend who participated in the expedition.
Another who supports the thesis that the survivors of the flood took refuge in South America was the Austrian Arthur Posnasky, who, in his book Tiwanaku, the cradle of the American man, indicates that the archaeological site near Lake Titicaca would have a founding date that would amount to 10,000 BC.
The pyramids of Pantiacolla (or Paratoari), strange symmetrical formations covered with vegetation that stand not far from the Alto Madre de Dios River (Peru) are also pointed out by some as centers of energy used by antediluvian peoples who took refuge in the Amazon jungle many millennia ago.
The hypothesis of antediluvian civilizations was recently supported by some exceptional finds, made below sea level up to 900 meters deep.
The first fascinating discovery occurred in September 1968, when Doctor Valentine, while swimming along the island of Bimini in the Bahamas, observed a street paved with enormous rectangular and polygonal stone blocks. According to some, these cyclopic stones, perfectly sculpted and with lengths of up to 5 meters, closely resemble the stones of Sacsayhuamán, the imposing structure located a few kilometers from Cusco, at 3,300 meters above sea level.
Some skeptics maintain that the famous Bimini walls are nothing more than a natural phenomenon called a "cobblestone street" which originates when the Earth's ridge is subjected to tension and then fractures into regular blocks. For others, however, such as Valentine himself, but also for the linguist and writer Charles Berlitz, and the underwater archaeologist Robert Marx, the origin of Bimini Street is artificial and comes from the Ice Age.
The second interesting encounter took place in 1969. The crew of the American submarine Aluminaut accidentally discovered, at the bottom of Florida, 900 meters deep, another 20-kilometer street composed of aluminum, silica and magnesium oxide. Even today it is not known whether the mysterious underwater route is the work of a developed civilization or simply a joke of nature.
In 1987, strange megalithic formations were found along Yonaguni Island, the southernmost of the Ryukyu Islands in Japan, from 40 meters deep.
The scientist Maaki Kimura visited the underwater structures and after careful studies came to the conclusion that the author of that cyclopean work could have been only man. The so-called Yonaguni monument, also known as the turtle, is a large rectangular rock structure measuring 150 x 40 meters at the base and 27 meters high. The top of the monument is five meters below water level. According to underwater archaeologist Sean Kingsley, however, these strange underwater monuments may have been modified by man in a time before the flood, when glaciers covered much of the northern hemisphere and sea levels were lower than today.
In 2000, the National Institute of Marine Technology of India announced the discovery, on the seabed near the coast of the state of Gujarat, 40 meters deep, megalithic structures similar to a city. Some Hindu archaeologists refuted this news, saying that it had been spread without strictly following the archaeological canons but above all for political reasons, to grant India the pride of having given the ancestors of the world's first civilization.
However, in 2001 the Minister for Science and Technology Murli Manohar Joshi officially announced the discovery: the submerged structures found in the Gulf of Khambat (Cambay) are the remains of an ancient city that was destroyed by unforeseen floods. It was also stated that the ruins show a remarkable similarity with the remains of the Indus Valley civilizations, which developed in Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro around 2700 BC. At the end of 2001, fragments of charred firewood were found near the submerged city, which were dated, with the carbon 14 method, 9500 years before Christ. In 2003 and 2004, India's National Institute of Marine Technology carried out other underwater explorations, during which pieces of pottery were found, evidence of artistic and craft activities of an ancient people. The findings were sent to some Indian and European laboratories, and through the thermoluminescence method, they were dated to 31 millennia ago. The Hindu geologist Batrinarayan confirmed the authenticity of the finds, maintaining that the relics were subjected to an analysis with the X-ray diffraction technique. Based on these findings, the submerged city of Khambhat would have been the oldest in the world, existing for 31 millennia of years.
In May 2001, Canadian oceanographer Paulina Zelitsky, head of the Advance Digital Communications Company, described the results of a marine exploration in the Caribbean Sea called Exploramar. Using a sophisticated robot, equipped with a sonar, magnetometer and video camera, which was transported to the deep sea and guided remotely with a fiber optic cable, it was possible to map the immersed bottom area, and the results were incredible.
Megalithic structures were found located more than 600 meters deep along Cape San Antonio, or Guanahacabibes Peninsula, at the western end of the island of Cuba. The strange submerged formations, cubes, parallelepipeds and pyramids, extend over more than 20 square kilometers. Due to their size and complexity, they were called Mega.
For many it is simply an impossible city, which cannot be explained with current scientific techniques. For others, however, the enormous sculpted stones are the remains of ancient gigantic walls, since after careful analysis it is concluded that at some point these walls were exposed to atmospheric agents, since they are rusty. Furthermore, based on the photographs and videos released, it is noted that there are repetitive structures as if they were walls used for rooms. Geologist Manuel Iturralde, who participated in the research, maintains that it is possible that the submerged ruins are attributable to an antediluvian civilization, which would date back to the tenth millennium BC.
After all these discoveries, we can conclude that the possibilities of other antediluvian ethnic groups having existed are numerous. In fact, the study of the long period of time during which Homo Sapiens has dominated the planet (130 millennia) is only at the beginning: it seems quite limited to think that civilization was born only after 8000 BC.
Our vision that defines civilization as a society of people who practice agriculture and live in villages, giving each other common rules of behavior, could be incomplete. Probably some groups of humans, even if they did not achieve advanced technological levels, developed a maritime communication network and practiced trade based on barter. They had not anticipated that nature can sometimes be brutal, and many of them died during the climatic upheavals of the end of the ice age. It is plausible to think that the survivors did enter the interior of the continents, where they later mixed with their peers, who had lived in the interior for many millennia.
The definitive proof of these hypotheses has not yet been demonstrated. Probably South America, which with its jungles that are still impenetrable today, contains the mystery of an antediluvian civilization that prospered during the long ice age. We are at the beginning of this exciting challenge. Our distant past could give us precious information not only about our origins, but also about how to face the future, often dense with threatening clouds.
YURI LEVERATTO
