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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The City of Eridu is the Oldest on Earth, It's Largely Unexplored
Over the past decade, there have been a number of archeological revelations pushing back the timeline of human evolution and our ancient ancestors’ various diasporas. Initially, these discoveries elicit some resistance as archeologists bemoan the daunting prospect of rewriting the history books, though once enough evidence is presented to established institutions, a new chronology becomes accepted.
But this really only pertains to the era of human development that predates civilization — the epochs of our past in which we were merely hunter-gatherers and nomads roaming the savannahs. Try challenging the consensus timeline of human civilization and it’s likely you’ll be met with derision and rigidity.
Conversely, someone of an alternative persuasion may profess stories of ancient civilizations, such as Atlantis or Lemuria, with speculative mythology recounting a lost, golden age in human history that was surely responsible for building the pyramids and other wonders of the world. They point to the writings of Solon and Plato as evidence for these ancestors’ existence, which is exciting but difficult to corroborate without physical proof.
Researcher Matt LaCroix seems to find himself somewhere in the middle of these two perspectives. While he says he’s fascinated by the Athenian clues detailing the destruction of Atlantis, he finds more compelling evidence in ancient Mesopotamia, or what academia already acknowledges as “the cradle of civilization.”
It’s here we find the ruins of the most ancient city on Earth that we have physical proof of — the city of Eridu. This archaic metropolis is well-documented in historical texts covering ancient Sumer and the Babylonian empire, but there’s also a mythological component to Eridu that may imply human civilization is far older than we believe — significant orders of magnitude older.
