CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Vita-Finzi remarks that we cannot tell whether, over the past century or even now, the shorelines are sinking or rising [1] . Furthermore, there is much greater complexity and much less data when making such determinations for the longer past. The Earth has demonstrated a capability for moving up and down here and there leaving scarcely a clue as to the causes. The wisest path may be to pursue a general theory, such as the Ice Ages or, I think, a great lunar eruption, and build hypotheses and information upon it.
The legendary voices are worth an audience.
Alexander Kondratov, a Soviet linguist and compiler of legendary and geological evidence of the sinking of lands, writes [2] :
China's oldest myths tell of a war between the god of fire and the god of water 'at the beginning of the world. ' The mountains erupted fire, the earth quaked and the sea attacked the land. When the fire god was defeated he decided to commit suicide and struck his head against the highest mountain in the west. The frightful blow drove the land into the sea in the east like the prow of a boat, while in the west it flew into the air like a boat's stern. Since then all the rivers in China have flowed eastwards.
Kondratov inquired of geologist Yuri Reshetov concerning this myth and received the following in reply:
Geological, geophysical, paleontological, archaeological and anthropological studies have shown that up until at least the middle of the last Ice Age the Japanese Islands and Indonesia were Asian peninsulas. During the second half of the Ice Age (from 40,000 to 20,000 years ago), vast areas of land subsided into the sea and were replaced by what are the Sea of Japan and the south China Sea. The sinking was accompanied by powerful volcanism and by earthquakes. At about the same time, that is, towards the end of the Ice Age, the ranges of Indo-China and the mountains of Central Asia rose another 2,000 meters. Many generations of Chinese must have witnessed the gigantic geological changes in south-east Asia. It is these events that the myths about the struggle between the gods of fire and water evidently reflect.
This is macro-geography, indeed. It speaks of a quarter of the world. Part of the world rose and part of it sank. The events described are probably much more recent, the 20,000 year figure reading 10,000 years in other sources.
Many Europeans still speak, as they have from the dawn of history, of a civilized continent of Atlantis that sank in a day.
The legend of the Lost Continent of Atlantis is a hardy tale; billions of words have been written about the few words of the legend. It is quite incorrect of F. M. Cornford, for example, to write that "serious scholars now agree that Atlantis probably owed its existence entirely to Plato's imagination."
If Plato lied in his tale of Atlantis, there would be little truth in him generally; for Plato repeatedly insisted that his story be considered seriously and literally: the Atlantean culture did exist across a water barrier to the west; it had relations with the ancestors of the Athenians and Greeks; it did sink abruptly in an earthquake. Plato's date would place the event at about 11,500 years ago. I attribute this date to a confusion with the lunar catastrophe and assign it instead to the time of the Noachian Deluge, that is, about 6000 B. P. as described in Chaos and Creation.
An ancient document, the Oera Linda manuscript, which was written in Frisian with runic characters and whose age and authenticity is much disputed, claims a general Atlantis-type sinking of a prosperous civilization of the Fryas between the North Sea and the Baltic, where frost was rare and fruit trees blossomed. There came a summer of darkness, great earthquakes, a spitting of fire from newly bursting mountains, a general holocaust, an obliteration of rivers, and huge floods that advanced to cover most of the land. Whole islands were newly formed by the bones of dead cows and sand (one is reminded of the Siberian islands formed of mammoth bones). The survivors were subjected by invading Finnish bands (just as the Hyksos invaded Egypt after the Exodus) [3] .
The Caribbean peoples talk of an "Antilla," now sunk beneath the ocean. The Pacific Ocean and American peoples of the Southern Hemisphere say that once a continent existed where now stand a few islands amidst a great deep sea. The perplexing books of Churchwarden concern this continent of "Mu." Legends of the Greeks speak of a drowned Aegean Sea, and the ancients believed the Mediterranean Sea was recently arisen.
In the Pacific Ocean of the North, there is supposed to have been a Beringia where now stands the Arctic Ocean on one side and on the other side the northern half of the "arc of fire" bordering the great Ocean.
The East Indian peoples and Indian Ocean people offer legends of the sunken continent of "Lemuria," whence came world civilization. T. Huxley and F. Engels were famous supporters of the theory over a century ago. And the islands of the South Seas, where Indonesia stretches out, are reputed to have been of a single piece before the waters rose or the land sank. The Dutch geologist Bartstva claims that a landbridge connected the Celebes and Philippines until Holocene times. In August 1982, Alan Thorne announced the discovery of Chinese human remains in North Australia with an estimated age of at least 10,000 years [4] . A map in Chaos and Creation outlines in the most general way all of these mythical lands that are said to have existed in human times.
If one is to believe legend, every large expanse of ocean once had its land mass. A form of quantavolutionary reasoning could proceed as follows: the ocean basins are new, created in the time of man; before the time of man, there was Pangea, a globe covered by continental crust that carried shallow freshwater seas, especially in the then equatorial area, which area, now greatly tortured, is still recognizable in the fabled Tethyan Sea remnants of the Mediterranean area and the "belt of fire" that girdles the world longitudinally.
The awesome depths to which the land has sunk or from which the crust has been removed should not halt the argument. If the Andes, the Alps, and the Himalayas can rise miles high, Lemuria and Atlantis can slump miles deep. If the sial debris of sunken lands cannot be scooped up by dredges or pierced by the few meters of core drills, that too is not surprising; the ocean basins were opened up and repaved recently with basalt; where the land was not exploded away, it was covered over by lava working furiously and fast under the catalysis of falling and flooding waters.
Where the continental fragments do not remain to be fitted obviously together, then the intervening land was blasted away or sunk. Continental sial has been extracted on occasion from the deep bottoms in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean; this is surprising given the major discovery of recent oceanography that the ocean bottoms are covered everywhere with lava. Metamorphic rocks typical of the nearby islands and Italy were found 3000 meters below sea level in the central Tyrrhenian Sea, as reported by Heezen [5] .
Fragments of black carbonaceous sandstone were found on the Rocksall Plateau and Orphan Knoll, between Greenland and North America [6] .
Some legends have been confirmed by geology; many might be confirmed; most are not, because they are vague or misleading. It would be well to examine closely the myths that have proved quite accurate to see in what mythical form they found expression and then to proceed systematically to the translation of similar myths around the world.
The aboriginal Australians who live around MacDonnell Bay say that an angry witch once stirred up the waters and flooded the beautiful land to make the Bay. Geologists confirm that the land was high in the ice ages and recently sank to form the Bay. The image of the witch should not be discounted; Velikovsky has described how European and Chinese alike have an image of a witch riding a broomstick, which he traces to cometary images of 3500 years ago. Indians of the area of Crater Lake recalled in their oral history what geologists later confirmed - that a great volcanic explosion fashioned the beautiful basin in the mountains that has since collected rainwaters.
These were not the only risings and sinkings, but they were by far the major ones. Kondratov, for example, mentions that Bulgarian researchers have compiled a detailed map of underwater archaeological finds, dating from the eighth to the fifth centuries B. C., discovered along a large section of their country's Black Sea. Irish Celts were in America in this period, according to several recent studies of history, archaeology and linguistics; they were perhaps driven to explore and immigrate by a further sinking of their homeland coasts.
The age of the comet-god Athena-Venus preceded these episodes of the age of the god Mars by under a thousand years. The Gulf of Mexico may have been sunk at this time, for the peoples of the Mexican Gulf Coast were not long afterwards lamenting the destruction of their previous civilization by the jaguar-god (a Venus symbol) and storm-god Hurracan, and telling of how they were taught their arts by a few people who came from the east. Kelly and Dachille wrote that the Gulf of Mexico has the superficial appearance of a meteoritic impact crater. In Cook's reconstruction of the area prior to continental movements, the Spanish peninsula is fit like a socket into the Gulf but a gap, possibly a crater gap, remains.
These several speculations treat of events of 11,500 years ago, or at the latest 7000 years ago, not of 3500 years ago -unless, of course, everyone is right: that is, the breakup of the area occurred and "western Europe" rifted outwards; the flood of Saturn deluged the shallow gulf areas; a fragment of the Venus tail spilled petroleum in the area and impacted.
The Caribbean area generally is rife with myths of disaster and immigration. The timetable is chaotic. Archaeologist Cyrus Gordon has described convincingly Mediterranean materials that originated between Phoenecian and Roman times and that were uncovered in spots so far apart as the Brazilian Coast and Tennesse (U. S. A.) [7] . Sanders and Price in 1968 set up a convincing case for direct Asiatic influences upon the New World. East Indian contacts with the Americas can be traced as well.
At maximum age, none of the materials would go back to before 1500 B. C. That leaves a great prior gap of culture, untilled save by indistinct legend. Brasseur de Bourbourg was one of many early European scholars who felt that, in these myths of white-skinned, technically competent people coming from the East, there were visitors from or survivors of a great continent of Atlantis.
Interest in East-West contacts has increased recently among scholars. That ancient "Japanese" had cultural contacts with at least "Ecuador" is a distinct possibility. That unusual blood types appear among villagers in settlements of the Andes is demonstrable. Also, the ancient Meso-Americans, as judged by sculptures and drawings, seem to be a population in which African-Negroid and Tethyan-Caucasoid (Semitic) types were mingled with Mongolian-Sinyan-Amerindian populations.
John L.Sorenson, citing Kroeber and others, examines 200 basic, defined cultural features of the "Old World Oikoumene." [8] What would be called the "common heritage" of the peoples of the Near East. Of these features one in eight is found in Meso-America definitely. He believes that another tenth would be added to the New World list when checked out through the whole body of information; thus about 18 percent of the Old World basic culture traits are shared with the New World. The statistical probability that this percentage of correspondence would occur by accident is low. It suggests land bridges of past ages.
Perhaps it was around 1500 B. C. as well when Thule vanished into the Faroe Rise. Thule is famous in Northern European myth and is referred to in many books and accounts with tantalizing brevity. Russian geographer N. Zhirov argues this theory, citing evidence that Thule was near Iceland, that many islands were mentioned thereabouts, that it was in a warm oceanic current, and its people grew grain and other crops, (We are reminded of the Oera Linda manuscript.)
Indeed the birth of the North Sea may have come so late as 1500 B. C. The famous amber of the North and Baltic Seas is conventionally dated at seventy million years; it comes from submerged pine forests that are assigned that date. Recently geologists have begun to stress the youngness of the area, prodded by archaeologists. Drowned settlements have been found at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, and off the British Isles. These are not to be confused with the sunken settlements of later time - Slavic Vineta in the Baltic by a tidal wave of 1100 A. D., many places off the mouth of the Rhine in 864 A. D. and so on.
We are writing of the whole of these seas.
"Europe was inhabited when the North Sea did not exist, when England and Ireland were not islands and Jutland and Scandinavia were not peninsulas but were all parts of a single land mass."
Thus writes Roy MacKinnon, who gives us a fix on these great submergences [9] .
Aristotle wrote in his book Of the Earth, "Inroads and withdrawals of the sea have often converted dry land into sea and sea into dry land." And Strabo, the most reliable geographer of the classical age, declared that "extensive submergence of the land, as well as minor submergence, has been known."
Reviewing these and other ancient writers, Professor Ellen Churchill Semple wrote in 1931 that they,
"attributed the straits and sounds of the Mediterranean and the formation of many islands to convulsions of nature. They found evidences of previous land connections in the similarity of relief and rock structure on both sides of the intervening channels, as do modern geographers, but they erred as to the time element in the problem"
That is, she would accept what they said of sinkings and risings, the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Red Sea connection, the Sicilian-Italian-Tunisian bridge, and so forth, but simply dismissed any short-time reckoning for the events. She is not alone in thinking that the ancient sense of time was palpably and prima facie stunted.
The same authority speaks airily of the Mediterranean Sea being of Quaternary origin or less (perhaps a million years); whereas now the Scientific American publishes maps of the Mediterranean as it was supposed to be half a billion years ago, a discrepancy of some 50,000 percent. Not to be outdone, Heezen and Ewing, two of the best contemporary oceanographers, found continental land far beneath the Tyrrhenian waves, even while the "oldest" parts of the seven seas are credited with a mere 200 million years. (Many say less.) That is, 200 million years ago would represent the time a continent was lofted by its convection cell currents over the oldest spot of the oceanic abyss, erasing its sediments and boiling it.
If so, the Mediterranean could hardly resist for such vast lengths of time the passage of land masses over it, while land rocks betook themselves into its depths. One is attracted once more to the ancient idea of the Tethyan Sea, a shallow home for innumerable species until the new oceans were created to house them.
Geographers have long known of this mythical Sea of Tethys of which the ancients spoke. They appropriated the term for a Tethys Geosyncline or trough which they traced around the Old Worlds -from Gibraltar to Indo-China. The Mediterranean Sea is regarded as descended from it. I use the term for an equatorial belt and shallow seas circumscribing the original Pangean globe.
With the new theory of continental drift and splitting of the Old World from the New by the Atlantic Ocean, Carey changed the concept of the Tethyan geosyncline.
"The Mediterranean shear system links up en echelon with the Caribbean system to form part of a global sinistral shear system which I have called the Tethyan Shear System." [10]
The lands (and shallow seas) were wrenched apart between North America/ South America and Europe/ Africa. and Asia/ South Asia. Then Africa rotated sinistrally and Asia dextrally. The Asian continent encountered land masses moving sinistrally from the South, Arabia and India primarily.
So incomplete is the understanding of great movements of land that, where one encyclopedia, the Britannica, is merely out of date, another, the Americana, assigns to the Mediterranean a Tethys origin that runs far to the north -taking the Black Sea route to the Caspian Sea, the Sea of Aral, and into Mongolia. In myth this is incorrect Actually this is a third and temporary great ocean of Tethys that may be called the Gobi Sea.
It replaced the Tethys geosyncline and the remnant of old Mediterranean which are more plausible successors to the ancient mythical Sea of Tethys. It gathered waters in the great basin that is now the Gobi desert or "the Sea of Sand," as the Chinese call it. Like the extinct Sahara Sea, the Gobi Sea lasted long enough to attract many human settlements to its shores. Then it was emptied in a great flood and its cultures disappeared, as described earlier.
Thus there were perhaps three Seas of Tethys, the latest being the Mediterranean Sea of recorded history. The first would be the Pangean shallow sea that carried the vast majority of marine species and supported a thriving population of plants and terrestrial animals, including australopithecines. This area, like the rest of the world, was severely buffeted in Uranian times but became known to the first modern humans. They were called pro-Selenians because the Moon was absent from the sky, and were the prototypical Tethyans of generalized Mediterranean race.
A second sea would be produced from the Lunarian catastrophes and be deepened by transverse cleavages of the world-girdling fracture system; it is discoverable today as the Balearic, Ionian and Eastern Mediterranean basins. It may have been a major locale of recovery for humans and their cultures. But the recovery was far from peaceful. Africa slammed into Europe at several points, raising the Alpine ridges and the mountains of Anatolia, then withdrew after a short interval.
The third Sea of Tethys was formed by the flood waters of the evacuated Gobi Sea basin, four thousand miles away. It was at first huge in expanse, then in a short while diminished to the earliest Mediterranean Sea known to history. The Sea of Azov and the Black Sea basins would have been filled and connected with the Caspian Sea. The Tyrrhenian area was flooded beyond its present level and survivors occupied the high islands of the Western Mediterranean.
Ancient history saw many more risings and sinkings of land and towns than have occurred over the past two thousand years. Extensive research would probably be able to distinguish the sinkings of what we have been calling sometimes the Solarian, Martian, Venusian, and Saturnian ages. They are all part of legend, of some remaining historical fragments and, unfortunately, of an age that knew writing and had a complex culture, but whose achievements are inadequately identified because of the great destruction and the unwillingness of scholars to entertain even a hypothesis of the events. The names of the places supposedly sunk or serving as havens for survivors read like a roster of geography and mythology. Attica; many places of the Aegean Sea; numerous places around the Sea of Azov, a ring of towns around the Black Sea; the whole Adriatic basin (this was probably the location of the predecessor of the Po River, the mythical deep river of Eridanus, that used as its channel an arm of the global cleavage that forked from the Red Sea clear up through the Rhine), the Gulf of Taranto.
The Straits of Messina and the Sicilian-African straits, the lands around Corsica and Sardinia, the coast of ancient Etruria, the Cyrenaican coast of Libya, Jerba in Tunisia, towns of Crete, the Gulf of St. Gervais off of Marseilles, the straits of Gibraltar, the Isthmus of Suez. One can only guess that the Sahara Sea (Sea of Triton of myth and ancient reports) was created during the Saturnian deluges. If so, it probably was emptied into the Atlantic Ocean and its cultures destroyed during the cometary intrusion of about 3500 years ago.
Scholars of every science have pondered the many tantalizing indications of shared history in the southern regions of the globe. Kondratov exclaims at one point:
The most surprising part of it is that a study of the world's earliest civilizations reveals a whole series of riddles that can be solved only by using the hypothesis of Lemuria, a large land mass in the Indian Ocean that was inhabited not just by lemurs and not even by Pithecanthropi, but by human beings who had reached a high level of civilization. (p. 131)
And later he says:
Lemuria... is connected with sciences that range from marine geology to the deciphering of ancient scripts, and geographically, from the Indian Ocean to the Himalayan mountains and the Buryat steppes. It may be that Australia and Australian studies are also linked up with Lemuria.
One can conceive of the original extent of Austroafrica or Lemuria by noting that Africa, South America, Australia, India, and Antarctica were once intimately connected. Moreover, in the South Pacific a huge amount of shelf area exists beneath the waters and a great amount of continental crust is missing.
The Americas were heavily reconstituted by natural disaster. It is reasonable to presume that humans occupied these continents prior to the great catastrophes. Conventional anthropology and archaeology would do well to drop the theory that all Americans are descended from some few who made the passage across Bering Strait a few thousand years ago -some say 20,000, some only 12,000. They assume that the continents were in their present positions; only a bridge of land sank and rose. Even among believers in the possibility of contact from the Pacific islands by sea, a recent occupation is credited. A few think it more likely that the people of Tierra del Fuego and other southern stretches came from "down under," that is, Tasmania or other islands of the South Pacific. I think that it will not be long before some human remains of Uranian or pre-catastrophic times are discovered or rediscovered.
The same will be true of Antarctica. This huge continent, nearly twice the size of Australia, gives many indications of recent tropical climate, and produces many types of fossil animals and plants including those associated farther north with human occupations. Kondratov writes that "we do not know when the antarctic region became covered with ice. Some glaciologists think that it cannot have been more than nine or ten thousand years ago."
Two maps have appeared in recent years after four centuries of gathering dust. One is the Piri Reis map that depicts the true un-iced coasts of Antarctica with considerable accuracy, another, the Orontius Fineus map, that carries interior topography with considerable accuracy. By conventional theory, mapping of a land mass of Antarctica could not have occurred until the middle of our present Twentieth Century because of the ice cover as well as the great difficulties in moving about without planes and snow vehicles.
It seems likely, then, in accord with the general theory of this book as well as such evidence, that African peoples occupied Antarctica during Pangea and Urania, and were decimated by the Lunarian disasters, especially by electrical and atmospheric ravaging; that they recovered somewhat during the Saturnian period, and then died out in the icy climate that descended in the age of Jupiter. Somewhere in the interior their remains will be found
Moving north from the frozen continent to the micro-continent of New-Zealand, largely buried under water, and to Australia, the situation is not too different. There few people were living before the European immigration. These few are supposed according to conventional wisdom to have come from the northern and western islands of the Indian Ocean some 20,000 years ago. Another theory says that this was impossible because there was open water that could not be crossed and that there would have to be land bridges. Presently, the geologists of the area have gotten together with the anthropologists, to the extent of saying that the land bridges existed for the movements of people. (Admittedly, the people of New Zealand, standing across a deep sea, would be difficult to account for by a shallow sea land bridge.)
So the theory goes back and forth in a way to satisfy now theorists of the bridges and then again theorists of the clever navigators. The theory which we employ is that the land masses of New Zealand and Australia were sliced away from Antarctica by the now quite evident earth cleavage and sent rafting along with other lands towards the excavated crustal areas, north and east. On the rafts were Austroafrican survivors.
Australia rafted mostly to the east; India moved mostly northwards and to the east; the Asian continent moved east and south nosing under the waters in places, and ultimately (after the Saturnian deluge) with a large section of its underside underwater as ocean shelf and slope. It is probable that the Indian Ocean was an excavated basin forming part of the great Pacific basin and then was closed in upon by Asia veering southwards and Australia going north.
India itself, it is agreed, became detached from Africa and Madagascar and rafted north to lodge itself into Asia. Half the crust of the earth was gone and the earth was expanding somewhat so that there was plenty of room for maneuver and titanic forces to propel the rafts. Now to examine the human record in the southern regions. It is becoming ever more plain that the oldest surviving large-scale culture in the world is African, exemplified in the Tamil culture of India. For thousands of years we have heard claims that this south Indian culture was a survival of a great sunken culture. Ancient writers even asserted that India had been connected with Africa.
Probably the first modern man to consider the evidence of the common roots of the Dravidians of Tamil Culture of Southern India with the natives of Australia. and then to connect this idea with the notion of continental drift, and hence continental drift in recent times, was the Soviet ethnographer, A. Zolotaryov. He was deeply influenced by Wegener's book and presented his synthesis in 1931.
Before Zolotaryov, the Tamil (Dravidian) legends and the many ancient commentators had impressed others. Thomas Huxley, the apostle of Darwinism, wrote that mankind had originated on the now sunken continent, Lemuria. Frederick Engels, the intimate cohort of Karl Marx, and a believer in Darwin's theory of evolution, wrote that a "particularly highly developed race of anthropoid apes lived somewhere in the tropical zone -probably on a great continent that has now sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean." Ernst Haeckel, German biologist, named the proto-human "pithecanthropus," and assigned its origins to Lemuria; he said it migrated from there to India, Africa and South-East Asia; indeed, in all three places pithecanthropus was shortly found.
The Dravidians, who are among the darkest in skin of the Indians and who had generalized features which could be called Negroid but by the same token primordial human features, are located principally in Southern India today. Their culture is called the Tamil and is now reputed among scholars to be the oldest in India, predating by far the Indo-European culture of the Aryan immigrants of the mid-second millennium B. C., not to mention the medieval culture brought in by Muslim invaders.
The Tamil scholars look back not only to a sunken Lemuria, but to a sunken larger continent called Gondwana. And it is this "Gondwanaland" that has given geologists the name for their conception of a united land mass of the southern hemisphere that split apart in the breaking up of the continents an alleged hundred million years or so ago, long before the age assigned to the primates. (I may note here the interchangeability in the context of this discussion of the words "sinking" and "drifting apart." One must be prepared mentally to think of sinking whenever rifting occurs, both because a cleavage is seen by terrified observers to be a sinking of the opposite lands and because flooding and sinking actually occurs in most areas of rifting.)
However, the number of species whose remains have been found in separate areas where there was once Gondwanaland (that is, around the world in the southern and tropical regions), increases from year to year. Some are alive. Earthworms of the same species are found in Australia, India and Ceylon. Pouched mammals or marsupials are found in the Americas and Australia and nowhere else. (In 1982 fossil marsupials were uncovered in Antarctica.) Old world and new world monkeys exist. So also, identical as well as related fossil species, of horse, elephant, tiger, camel and rhinoceros. So, too, both living and fossil plants.
From Kondratov's summaries, it appears that Soviet scientists have been most active in tracing the ethnic movements of pre-history from the Lemurian homeland. Surprising developments have occurred one after another, building up the case espoused by the old Tamil scholars. In the first place, and using "Dravidian" as the term for the basic generalized Negroid (Australoid) race, the Dravidian language has been compared with and found to be related at some remote period to the language of Madagascar, thus supporting floral and faunal resemblances and geophysical similarities previously uncovered by other scientists from several nations.
Further, the Dravidian roots have been traced up through the Indian sub-continent to the proto-Indian high civilizations of the Indus valley and indeed up and across the whole north of India. Computer analysis of proto-Indian and a number of other writings indicated the Dravidian affinity.
Moreover, Soviet scholars contend that the proto-Indian, hence Dravidian influences, move up the Persian Gulf and into the very foundations of what were to become the Sumerian and other Mesopotamian civilizations. These have long been thought to be the rock-bottom, independently developed civilizations of the old world. This earliest pre-Sumerian culture has been termed the Ubaid. Kondratov makes clear that it is not alone a matter of trade and other intercultural relations; for the pre-Sumerians or Ubaids were part of the proto-Indian, hence, Dravidian complex. Place-names, language roots, religious images, god-names, and forms of building construction are similar if not the same.
Far to the East now is the present Khuzistan, Iran, once called Elam.
The Soviet linguist I. Dyakonov has said that "the only hypothesis supported by a few indicative facts," in a comparison of Elamite with other writings, "is that of an Elamo-Dravidian relationship." Further, "tribes related by language to the Elamites and the Dravidians were scattered throughout Iran, or at any rate, throughout southern Iran, in the fourth and third millennia B. C. and perhaps later as well." Traces of the Dravidian race have been noted since then in various places in southern Iran.
Far to the north, recent Soviet archaeology has been uncovering a South Turkmenian civilization of the third and second millennia B. C. Again, statuettes, symbols and skeletal and cranial analysis point to close relationships to the Elamites, then the Ubaids, then the proto-Indian, that is, the Dravidian, and ultimately to the sunken or rafted continent of Lemuria-Gondwanaland.
Kondratov does not leave his discussion of the Lemurian cradle-land without elaborating two further items of significance. The origins of Egyptian high culture, following the Neolithic, have puzzled many scientists. Suddenly, upon the Neolithic, a high culture seems to have been imposed. I believe that it came from the Tethyan movement eastwards from the Atlantis-Mediterranean centers. Kondratov suggests that a Dravidian north-west thrust may have brought it in.
The earliest Egyptian writings are estimated at five thousand years of age. They are not primitive; they are classical, that is, developed and complex. Perhaps Dravidian India was the source. Indian archaeologist S. R. Rao has analyzed rock drawings of early Egypt found along the Red Sea coast and sees in their high-prowed, high-sterned boats portrayed there the vessels of Dravidian India. I find no contradiction, but actually two early post-diluvian civilizations encountering each other in Egypt.
The Dravidians, or perhaps more properly, the Austroafricans or the fundamental negroid race, did not cease their travels to the East until they reached the farthest islands. African blacks, Dravidians, and the Melanesians that reach across the southern islands of the Pacific to New Zealand relate to a basic African race that was not greatly different from the Tethyan and Sinyan groups during the Uranian age. (Racial differences develop rapidly in isolation and under conditions of inbreeding.) Now it appears that the languages of the Dravidian and Australian peoples -both of which, incidentally, throw the boomerang -are cognate. The Australian scholars J. C. Pritchard and William Bleek argued the case a century ago. In 1963 Swedish linguist, N. M. Holmer, systematized the grammatical and phonetic coincidences of the two languages.
Kondratov continues:
In the last century philologists discovered a remarkable similarity among the languages spoken over the vast area that extends from Madagascar, near the shores of Africa, to Easter Island in the eastern part of the Pacific. It has now been demonstrated that the similarity is not accidental. The languages spoken on Madagascar and on Easter Island which, along with those of the Hawaiians, Maoris and other inhabitants of Polynesia, belong to the Polynesian group, the languages of the Micronesians, living on islands in the North-West Pacific, those of the Melanesians, inhabiting islands in the South-West Pacific, the languages of the Indonesian Archipelago, and those of the indigenous population of Taiwan all come from a single root and constitute the Austraonesian (" southern islands") family of languages.
In view of all of the foregoing, which has relied heavily upon Kondratov, it might be reasoned that the whole southern hemisphere of the world and perhaps a very large belt moving north above India belonged once to a great African grouping and was catastrophized and separated during the lunar fission. Any Antarctic survivors were removed by the new ice age. It may be that the same is true of South America, but with flood, not ice, as the destroyer.
The scientific roots of catastrophism are more extensive than ordinarily believed. Alfred Wallace, co-inventor of evolutionary theory with Charles Darwin, believed that a single oceanic race had inhabited a great island in the Pacific Ocean which had then been sunk. So did Darwin's disciple, Thomas Huxley, and Darwin probably agreed with him. No injustice is done to Darwin by regarding his work as a great model of natural history, or "simply a theory" as some critics like to say. He had many doubts and made many "anomalous" observations about vast sudden catastrophes of species, of mountain building, and, when he experienced a now-forgotten earthquake off the coast of Peru, he was appalled by the high energy displayed, noting in his Journals that the surface of the stricken island was changed more in a day than in a century of uniformitarian processes.
Lesser known scientists developed more elaborate theories of the sinking of Pacific lands: a century ago, Dumont d'Urville, naval officer and explorer, Moerenhout, folklorist, both French; then earlier in this century, J. M. Brown, ethnographer, and M. Menzbir, Russian zoo-geographer. Others might be also named. All brought forward evidence of a great continent joining the Americas to Asia and of human cultures flourishing upon it.
What kinds of evidence of this theory might be advanced? Again, as with the Indian Ocean, the material is geographic, ethnographic, zoological, and mythological. Again the chronological problems are perplexing.
Kondratov, whose work was passed by a high-level interdisciplinary committee of Soviet scientists, can therefore only hint at the possible resolutions:
It used to be thought that the earth sciences possessed indisputable data. However, oceanography and geology are both developing so rapidly today that many seemingly settled questions are being revised. Substantial changes may soon take place in one of the cardinal questions of geology and oceanography -the dating of events that have changed the face of our planet.
Relating to the geographic is our general conception of the Pacific area as an exploded basin, filled promptly with water. The famous "ring of fire" is an effect like a fractured earth that is cauterizing the wounded edges of the continents. Repeated catastrophes irritated and reopened the wounds. The famous arcs of islands and their associated trenches were left in an advanced position when the Asian continent was forced back by the Indian collision and an elastic withdrawal after the continent had been pushed to its maximum.
Japan is rising out of the water. Eastern Siberia is also, as evidenced in a progression of shell mounds of shellfish-eaters marching inland from the coast where the food was taken and eaten. Is Eastern Asia still pulling back from its farthest advance? But southeastern Asia is still subsiding. Is the continent still moving southwards? Experts may be found to date these events anytime from the Tertiary Age to the end of the last Ice Age. As with the ice caps and climate, the rising and sinking of continents is difficult to measure, much more difficult to interpret in terms of localized theory, and always hard to time.
If only people had kept off of the hundreds of Pacific Islands, geologists of long-term persuasion might rest easily. But some surprising human developments have been going on throughout the vast region. Related to the great Sinyan race of the Asian continent are the Malaysians to the southwest and the Polynesians to the south and east. Farther south and mingled with these groupings in some places are the Negroid or Australoid types to which reference has been made earlier. Nor should one neglect the Negritos and pygmies who are found in the middle of Negroid regions but are reputed to have dwelt practically everywhere. "The little people" are a universal subject of folklore. Wherever found they are designated as a very old, perhaps aboriginal, type of mankind; they are said usually to be more clever and have a richer mythology than the peoples around them, despite their smaller braincases.
Not only are there peoples on the Pacific Islands, but also the peoples have cultural complexities and have exercised technologies beyond their recent capacities. Picture writing is found on a number of islands, the kohau rongo-rongo tablets of Easter Island and the Woleai Island script, for instance.
Monumental sculpture, comparable to "Old Bronze Age" achievements of the Middle East, existed on Easter Island, Ponape, and the islands of the Caroline Archipelago. Brown found Easter Island sculptural forms in many islands: Hawaii; Pitcairn; the Marquesas; Christmas; Malden; Tinian; and Ponape. There are no two sculptures alike; hence the contacts were not recent and even originally the peoples must have been of diverse sub-cultures.
And everywhere, including the tiniest atolls, the peoples have myths of large populations, greater lands, of sinking lands, and of past ages of glory.
An Easter Island legend is typical. It is translated by Kondratov from Easter Island writings brought back by Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian archaeologist-explorer:
The Youth Teea Waka said:
'Our country was once a big land, a very big land. '
Kuukuu asked him:
'Why did the country grow small? '
Teea Waka answered:
'Uwoke lowered his staff on it.
He lowered his staff at Ohiro.
The waves rose, and the land became small.
People began to call it Te Pito o te Henua. [Navel of the Universe]
Uwoke's staff broke against Mount Puku Puhipuhi."
A later arrival on the island, Chief Hotu Matua is told the story.
It is added that "When Uwoke's staff was big, the land fell into an abyss.
The chief corrects the report:
"That was not the staff of Uwoke, my friend," said chief Hotu Matua.
"That was the lightning of the god Makemake."
The parallels here to the Phaeton and Typhon myths of Greece and the Near East seem to be beyond mythical fantasy. The comet (staff) of the god (cf. Uwoke, Yahweh, Ea, Yahou, Hermes), the marine tidal upheaval, the near approach of the huge comet, the sinking of the land into the abyss, the stroke of cosmic lightning that broke off the comet's tail, and the resulting "navel of the world," a sacred place like Delos Island in the Aegean Sea, which was called by the same term.
But now we are given pause. The Phaeton incident was of 3500 years ago, not 11,500 years. How explain the discrepancy in time between the Lunarian fragmentation of continents and the Venusian cometary catastrophe?
The question is actually an opportunity to advance the theory. Perhaps the most perplexing of the problems enmeshed in the multifarious evidence of grandiose Pacific happenings is this: the debris of the Pangean continental breakup is scattered around the Pacific as its fundamental morphology; yet reports of more recent disasters occur. Many a geologist has dismissed offhand all evidence of recent happenings because he knows how removed in time were the major events; meanwhile the ethnologists are fixated upon the evidence of a human history unfolding in the midst of disaster. If the Pacific continents sank once, how could they be there to sink again even in the past three thousand years, even, indeed, in the nineteenth century, when reputable navigators swore to the presence of islands near Easter Island and elsewhere that are no longer there.
Some indications fit different periods. One may conjecture that, in the Lunarian episode, small pieces of land survived the chaos, or disengaged from the nearest continent and floated into the vortex. But, as for Europe, Africa, and Asia, so for Oceania. There was no end to catastrophe. Considerable populations and cultures could still be built up, only to be drastically reduced by subsequent lesser catastrophes. The Earth has not yet achieved equilibrium, particularly in the regions that were most heavily damaged. Igneous islands, such as the Hawaiian chain, must be considered as the tallest of seamounts. Coral islands and atolls may be considered as debris of Pangean sea bottoms and as new growth, accelerated by heat and by being adaptable to a quick rate of bottom sinking.
Rare igneous bits of rock, such as rhyolite, are of continental origin and found on Easter Island. The Soviet geologist, V. Belousov, maintains that a large zone off of Western south America had once been continental sial. Moreover, the sea-bottom of this southeastern sector of the Pacific rests upon a crust 20 to 30 kilometers thick; this is characteristic of continental crust, not of oceanic crust, which is only three to five kilometers thick.
It is possible that the area is continental sial, and even was once populated land, but that the stripping of crust by the moon eruption brought on lateral avalanching to the north and west and a sinking generally in this sector. Then as the world cleaved, the rift here overran the land that was to sink. The setting contrasts with western North America where the rift was over-thrust by the continent. One may expect to find oceanic basalt or sima beneath Easter Island, which extruded from the rift to pave over the land. Just as in the northwestern United States, the rift extruded lava on top of the land in wave upon wave.
Regrettably, judgment cannot yet be passed on the origins of Tiahuanaco, in the Bolivian highlands, or upon its related areas of culture in Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador. It may well be connected with Polynesian settlements in mid-ocean. The Galapagos Islands, once thought to be an isolated laboratory of plant and animal evolution, now gives up 2000 pieces of pottery and implements of human manufacture, as well as continental species of flora and fauna.
If Tiahuanaco last rose high when the Sierra Nevadas of California did, and when the area around Easter Island sank, then this event and a new phase of existence maybe placed in the second millennium B. C., rejecting its present dating of around 400 A. D. and moving backwards part of the way to Bellamy's 11,500 dating.
Soviet opinion on the American Indians, like that of most Europeans, assigns earlier dates to their arrival in the Americas. Kondratov works on the baseline of 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, and of 25,000 years for the Indians of the U. S. A. In Kamchatka Peninsula, sites are dated at 14,000 to 15,000 years. Red ochre, arrowheads, and beads and pendants like American Indian wampum were unearthed there. (Perhaps the question should be not "How so early?" but rather "Why so early?") Some 14,000 years of dealing in the same monetary exchange appears extraordinary in view of the fleeting career of historical monies.
There are drawings in the American southwest of man and dinosaur; also footprints of man and dinosaur are linked; it is hopeless to calm the heated objections to these finds here; they are not impossible; then either the dinosaur survived until very late, or Americans are extremely old. Evidence is difficult to come by, but quantavolutionary theory may find profit in considering a humankind in America who was primordial with humans everywhere, who was almost annihilated in the subsequent catastrophe, who was Tethyan (Mediterranean-Atlantean), Melanesian (African) and Sinyan (Mongolian) - all three - and who was later reinforced by way of the Aleutians and the Bering Strait region; there is no gainsaying the supposition.
Perhaps by this time the reader has already noticed the magical phrase which conventional science uses to deal with recent catastrophes of all kinds: "the end of the ice ages." It is a useful way of saying what is uncertain, without admitting that it is uncertain, or that scientists are even in agreement on when the ice ages ended. It could be anywhere between 5000 and 25,000 years ago, with most scientists centering upon the date that I have assigned to the Earth cleavage and Moon eruption, about 11,500 B. P.
Thus, Vladimir Obruschev places "the sinking of the land in the region of Easter Island at the time of the glacial epoch" when the ice melted and waters rose. Or "Bering Land began to sink at the end of the last glacial period, between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago." Probably in any sample of books and articles on quaternary geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, and archaeology, most authors will be found to use the "end of the ice age" as a general synonym for catastrophe. From pole to pole and all around the world "the Pleistocene ended in disaster." The reader might examine the two contrasting hypothetical calendars that follow after the text of this book.
To claim a known sinking for a known time invites error. The help that one can get from geologists and prehistorians is mainly inadvertent. The calendar of events and dates could be readily improved were a quota of careful scientific attention granted to quantavolutionary hypotheses. Even conventional geologists of the holocene period have complained that their colleagues turn their backs on any phenomena that are recent.
Geology has traditionally opposed or ignored the interjection of legendary history and anthropology into its concerns, especially insofar as revisions of time scales are stated or implied. How then has geology coped with the rise and fall of land masses? After shaking off the idea that Noah's flood had covered the world (and the Deluge became a bogeyman to them, obliterating ancient human voices and behavior), geologists were possessed by the need to explain why marine fossils are found in lofty and protected enclaves of the continents. It seemed natural to resort to risings; then just as naturally, the land beneath the sea had taken part in sinkings.
Blessed with the gift of time, they could assign to every parcel of land its turn above and below the sea. The mechanism for the many freight elevators was unfortunately almost as mysterious as the "Hand of the Almighty," and is to this day. Furthermore, the mystery has in the past generation been enhanced by the discovery that most land beneath the wave is a stranger to the subaerial land. 'Sial is sial, and sima is sima, and never the twain shall meet. '
J. Tuzo Wilson pioneered the theory of the destruction and remaking of present ocean floors every couple of hundred million years: so much for sunken lands; they are stuffed down and run over by drifting tectonic plates. The rises are another matter.
The uplift of the continents is by the rise of flat domes of a variety of sizes, which have been called shields, cratons, batholiths and smaller domes... There have been intermittent uplifts involving the rise of land areas of the size of shields, or even of whole continents. Uplifts are followed by erosion and flooding of continents by the sea, each cycle requiring something like a hundred million years... Next smaller in size are cratonic uplifts of which Southern Rhodesia affords a fine example... Much of the shield of Southern Africa is underlain by a series of about a dozen cratons, each roughly circular and a few hundred miles across.
These cratons are uplifted more actively than the shield as a whole... Smaller again are batholithic intrusives... Each craton was formed of a hundred or more batholithic uplifts... Those formed during a period of a few million years in Jurassic-Cretaceous time in the western Cordillera exceed in area by a factor of 1,000 all those formed during the rest of the half billion years since the close of the Precambrian eras. Once considered to have been intruded while molten, batholiths are now widely considered to have more likely resulted from plastic deformation with recrystallization and partial melting of piles of pre-existing sediments. They are often approximately circular and those showing the strongest evidence of recrystallization and igneous activity grade into uplifts of similar size that were clearly intruded while cold and in a solid state." [11] Even smaller uplifts are very many in number.
Wilson's statements are descriptive: the mechanism is here presumed. Too, the language itself is non-operational and Aristotelian in undue proportion. Noteworthy in our view is the assignment of uplift to practically all land above the sea. It is thus that the marine sediments occur in all regions. The uplifts are circular, but not meteoritic; they seem like aborted volcanoes, whether great or small.
The total impression is of immense uplifts from pre-existing sea beds, accompanied by smaller uplifts, then smaller, and finally quite small rises, a bloated skin with many thousands of protuberant patches. There appears also to be a heavy concentration of these rises in an age that concluded with worldwide biosphere extinctions, the Cretaceous. Further, the subterranean force involved a heat whose temperatures might begin by melting rocks and end in slight metamorphic deformation of rocks whose top levels were in fact pushed up in a cold state.
Might this whole worldwide process have occurred mostly in a single quantavolution?
Some regions, even large parts of continents, would have been lifted hundreds or thousands of meters higher than others. Shallow marine sediments would be raised. Many sediments would be reworked in the heat, pressure, and churning of the uneven general uplifts. Erosion would be heavy in such an event, from mechanical disruption, uneven heating, electrical and gaseous outbursts, precipitated vapors, and winds. A great many inter-lift depressions and fractures, laying the groundwork for gullies, streams, and valleys, would develop.
The superpositioning of fossilized sediments according to age would be preserved, even as these were raised. High in the plateaus of Africa, Tibet, and Bolivia, fossils from shallow seas and swamps would be stretched out in their original beds. The Earth would have a largely new surface, uneven, less neat, and confusing to the eye of the beholder. Too, with all this swelling, could not one speak of a general expansion of the Earth? Again, we go in search of a mechanism.
Let us turn to another admirable geologist, whose work unwittingly has helped us to generate the theory of quantavolution. Shelion explains the modern theory of crustal movements of the Earth - diastrophism, in a word [12] .
Most geologists look inside the earth for the ultimate driving force of diastrophism; no known exterior forces are sufficiently versatile to account for the variety of deformation we see... Plastic creep, perhaps in the upper part of the mantle, is the active element, and the brittle crust on which we live is passively tiding on this very slow flow. Of course, discernible forces arise from the rotation of the earth, from the tides, and from gravity acting differentially on irregularities in the crust and its surface topography, but these influences probably can do no more than modify and locally complicate what is probably the essential mechanism of crustal deformation - very slow plastic movements at about the level of the upper mantle.
One notices an absolute indifference to exoterrestrial forces and to their high energy expressions of an electrical, atmospheric, aquatic, and lithic kind. Shelton proceeds:
This concept is attractive for many reasons. By postulating different directions of flow in the upper mantle, it is possible to imagine many different kinds of stress being imparted to the lower side of the comparatively passive crust. If the flow involves circulation in three dimensions it must include rising currents in some areas and sinking currents in neighboring ones hundreds or thousands of miles away, as well as horizontal transfer from the first type to the second.
One notes the speculative terms: "attractive," "postulating," "imagine," "must include." There can be no objection to speculation, especially in so excellent a volume as Shelton's, but neither should geology claim to be a "hard science," fighting off speculators.
Shelton, perhaps embarrassed by the weakness of conduction currents, suggests that the rising heat of the deep mantle is so great as "to require the actual rise of masses of rock from hotter regions deeper in the earth." And he concludes that "some kind of very slow thermal convection -the rise of relatively warm columns and sinking of relatively cool ones -is a favored hypothesis for the ultimate cause of diastrophism." Then in two final paragraphs he reverts to basic questions, asking, too, for the essential information needed to answer the questions. He doubts finally that the information at hand is more than enough to tell one rock from another, and certainly not adequate enough that "a hypothesis of thermal convection currents in the upper mantle can even be formulated, let alone tested..."
Sometimes, when asked why he does not sufficiently quote "creation scientists" -George McCready Price, Donald Patten, Byron C. Nelson, Alfred Rehwinkel, to name a few -the present author answers that he has only a limited perspective, an individuated paradigm, which cannot move too far if it is to remain intact. Moreover, he cannot assimilate theoretically the instrumentation of some secular catastrophists such as Hoerbiger and Beaumont, whereas he feels comfortable in the modes of thought of such as Boulanger, Donnelly, Bellamy, Kelly, Dachille, Velikovsky, and a number of very recent historians and catastrophists.
But finally he must confess that he feels more inspired by the contradictions displayed within the evolutionary and geological literature as it marches in fine array through the catalogues and journals of science. It profits science and pleases him more to tell the latter writers that he agrees with what they are saying but that they do not realize the full meaning of what they are saying.
Notes (Chapter Eighteen: Sinking and Rising Lands)
2. The Riddles of Three Oceans (Moscow: Progress Publ., 1974) 101.
4. Melbourne Sun, Aug 14, 1982.
5. 229 Nature (Jan. 29, 1971), 327-9.
6. By the "Glomar Challenger," cf. 227 Nature (Aug. 22, 1970), 767-8.
7. Before Columbus (NY: Crown, 1971); Riddles in History (NY: Crown, 1974).
9. "Cenomanian Sync., "I S. I. S. Rev. 2 (Spring, 1976).
11. In Beals, et at., Theories of the Origins of Hudson Bay, op. cit., 37-40.
12. The material to follow is contained in Shelton's Geology Illustrated, 423-4.