Atlantis Discovered (Again)

Submitted by Alun on Tuesday, 25 September 2001 Page Views: 2089

Another a lone researcher believes he's found the lost land of Atlantis, fabled home of megalithic scientists, but his time there's a twist, according to a story from New Scientist. He's found it just outside the Straits of Gibraltar.

"Curiously, nobody has really taken seriously the most obvious location," says Jacques Collina-Girard of the University of the Mediterranean in Aix-en-Provence. According to Plato, Atlantis lay just in front of the Pillars of Hercules-what we now call the Strait of Gibraltar - and disappeared around 9000 BC.

Collina-Girard was interested in patterns of human migration from Europe into North Africa at the height of the last ice age, 19,000 years ago. To see if Palaeolithic people could have crossed the strait, he made a map of what the western European coastline looked like at that time, when the sea level was 130 metres lower than it is now. His reconstruction of the area reveals an ancient archipelago, with an island at the spot where Plato described Atlantis.

"There was an island in front of the 'Pillars of Hercules'," says Collina-Girard. Named Spartel, it lay to the west of the Strait of Gibraltar just as Plato described. The Strait was longer and narrower than today, and enclosed a harbour-like inland sea that Plato mentions as the setting for Atlantis.

Just over 11,000 years ago, the slow rise of post-glacial sea levels accelerated briefly to more than 2 metres per century, according to records from coral reefs. This would have swamped the island, Collina-Girard suggests. "The archipelago was engulfed 9000 years before Plato," he says.

There are a few facts that don't match Plato's story, however. Plato describes Atlantis as larger than Libya and Asia put together, whereas Collina-Girard's island is 14 kilometres long by 5 kilometres wide. He argues that a mistake was made in converting Egyptian units of length into Greek units as the story was passed down.

Plato also reports that volcanic activity sank Atlantis, but this may have been a case of embellishment, says Collina-Girard. "The Greeks were familiar with volcanic eruptions," he notes. To them, such a fate might have been more dramatic and plausible than a change in sea level. As for an advanced Atlantean civilisation, Collina-Girard points to Plato's own admission that he grafted these details onto the tale to present his ideas about a Utopian society.

The lower sea levels of 11,000 years ago would have exposed many islands, says Bill Ryan of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. Ryan has examined evidence for the Noah and Gilgamesh flood stories around the Black Sea (New Scientist, 4 October 1997, p 24). But he cautions that the story of Atlantis would have needed to survive down the generations for 9000 years in Egypt before being recorded by the Greeks. "The difficulty here is correct translation of nouns and adjectives passed down by the oral tradition as languages change and evolve," he says.

In the earth and planetary sciences issue of the French journal Comptes Rendus de l'Academie des Sciences (vol 333, p 233), Collina-Girard suggests that the archipelago could have provided stepping stones for primitive sailors to cross between Europe and North Africa. "The coasts of Spain and Morocco were inhabited at the time, so certainly these islands were too," he says. A prehistoric culture spread rapidly in Morocco around 20,000 years ago. "Traditionally this came from the east, but why not from the north?" he asks.

However this theory has to take on two other credible theories that have been put forward by archaeologists and historians.

By Jon Copley, Press Release from New Scientist.

Contributor Bio for Alun: I'm currently working on a PhD thesis.

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