Doggerland; Sunken Landmass Between UK & Europe May Be Atlantis
A thriving ancient culture that was wiped out by rising waters and a great tsunami—could the real Atlantis have been located between Britain and Europe?
Along the coast of the Netherlands, the ocean has been giving up its secrets. About 10,000 years ago, what is now water, was a landmass filled with flora, fresh game, and from what we can tell, a flourishing civilization. But at the end of the last ice age, glaciers melted, sea levels rose and what remained of this area is believed to have been knocked out by a tsunami.
Dubbed “Doggerland” after a sandbank off the coast of England, archeologists first learned of the potential of the Stone Age civilization there in 1931, when a fishing boat pulled up a barbed antler spearhead. There has been interest in Doggerland since then, but only in the last decade or so has there been intense study using high-tech seafloor mapping equipment, and low-tech citizen archeologists who bring their finds to the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, Holland.
Fishermen have found the remains of mammoths, hyenas, lions, as well as pre-historic tools, weapons, and skull fragments. Could this be the Atlantis that Plato wrote about? Some experts disagree…
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Japan's Yonaguni Ruins May Hold the Key to a Sunken Civilization
The mystery of the lost continent of Atlantis has puzzled researchers for centuries, as growing evidence supports the theory that an advanced civilization may have been destroyed and gone unnoticed by mainstream archeology. This antediluvian civilization is assumed to have been located somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean and is thought to have been the progenitor of ancient civilizations like those in Egypt and India. But could there have been another sunken continent from that era that predates Atlantis? The Yonaguni ruins might provide an answer.
The Yonaguni Monument
In 1985, a Japanese diver named Kihachiro Aratake was exploring the seafloor off the Southern shore of Yonaguni-Jima island, the Western-most island in the Ryukyu archipelago of Japan. Aratake came across what appeared to be the sunken ruins of an ancient, megalithic, stepped pyramid, similar to the ziggurats built in ancient Sumer. Since his discovery, the provenance of the ruins has been debated as to whether they are man-made or naturally occurring, due to the possibility of natural geological terracing.
Dr. Masaaki Kimura from the University of Ryukyu is the biggest proponent for the theory supporting the artificiality of the ruins. Surprisingly, Dr. Robert Schoch is one archeologist who has contended Kimura’s theory, despite his support for the Sphinx water erosion hypothesis. Although, Schoch has conceded that he doesn’t perceive Yonaguni to be a closed case and that he hasn’t spent as much time diving there, compared to Kimura’s 15 years.
