Ancient Sunken City Discovered Off Shores of Cuba. Maybe

King Africa writes "Explorers using a miniature submarine to probe the sea floor off the coast of Cuba said on Thursday they had confirmed the discovery of stone structures deep below the ocean surface that may have been built by an unknown human civilization thousands of years ago. The explorers said they believed the mysterious structures, discovered at the astounding depth of around 2,100 feet and laid out like an urban area, could have been built at least 6,000 years ago. That would be about 1,500 years earlier than the great Giza pyramids of Egypt. " The BBC has a bit more substantative article on this as well - but I do wonder how they assigned the date "of at least 6000 years ago" to this.

Comments

Some pictures might be nice...

[wessto]

The article arouses my curiosity. In the age of visual arousal, however, pictures would be nice.

'Bona-fide' ancient civilisation scholars to check

[twilight30]

... perhaps. At least, the discoverers want 'genuine' scholars to check this out, presumably to avoid the pseudo-science flamewars currently going on.

Thing is, the pseuds may have a point. We don't really know a lot about ancient civilisations to say. I wonder how they came up with the 'older-than-Giza' thing too...

Only expressing an opinion, not wanting to go trolling around the web at the moment to bring up the refs -- currently doing something else, do look elsewhere for facts :)

uh...

[talks_to_birds]

ahem...

• Lost city found off Cuba coast

  "May 20, 2001 article reports on sonar sightings of what appear to be man-made structures on the seabed near Cuba...."

  http://www.andrewcollins.net/page/articles/lostcit y.htm

  "In a press release dated Havana, 14 May 2001 Reuters of London..."

  Update on Mysterious Deep Water Sonar Images Off Western Cuba

  Underwater City Reported Off Western Cuba

I could go on, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Hint: try a google search for "cuba" and "underwater" and "city"

Ya'd think /. would have picked up on this a while ago, but then, maybe not...

I guess "news" doesn't necessarily mean "new".

t_t_b

Re:uh...

[SloppyElvis]

Those stories covered the initial expedition, as stated in the BBC article. The news is the confirmation of the initial observations, which came on Thursday. I know, I know, so what?, but many of these expeditions are covered this way.

As to whether or not it should be on SlashDot...

...maybe if we could look at some of these images of which they speak.

Re:What geological phenomena could sink 2000 feet

[Mister Black]

It didn't sink. The water level merely rose up. (Think melting polar ice due to ending of last Ice Age)

Archaeologists will talk about Atlantis, too.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Of course, I'm sure this will set off a whole new round of newage (rhymes with "sewage") types talking about Atlantis.

Not to mention actual, reputable, archaeologists.

Legends/oral traditions have preserved quite a bit of actual history over millenia, despite entropy, destruction or loss of records, and religious/ideological suppression. Poems are particularly resistant to change: The rythm, rhyme schemes, alliteration, and other artistic conventions serve as error-correcting codes. These have proven quite useful in directing archaeologists on where to dig.

For a long time they were discounted. But that was before the rich guy with the bee in his bonet funded the dig that discovered the ruins of Troy - the first of several successes using the technique of analyzing legends and seeing what sites in the real world might match.

The Atlantis legend is quite widespread and a number of sites have been considered as possible matches. But none have been really convincing so far.

A 6,000-ish year old city 2,000 feet down just off the coast of Cuba ("Island Beyond the Gates of Hercules") sounds like a very good candidate - especially given that the Americas had about as many years for civilizations to rise and fall as the EurAsian/African landmass did, along with sufficient population and resources to make it happen.

Let's see how this develops.

Re:Archaeologists will talk about Atlantis, too.

[sben]

The Atlantis legend is quite widespread and a number of sites have been considered as possible matches.

The problem is, Plato made the entire legend up, without any precedent. The widespread Atlantis legends all spring from that single invention. (The "great flood" legends are distinct and separate from Atlantis legends.)

[T]he Americas had about as many years for civilizations to rise and fall as the EurAsian/African landmass did, along with sufficient population and resources to make it happen.

Almost, but not quite. The Americas had about as long, true, but there was a huge lack of cultivatable plants and domesticable large animals. See Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel for a good introduction.

Re:Archaeologists will talk about Atlantis, too.

[mttlg]

The Atlantis legend is quite widespread and a number of sites have been considered as possible matches. But none have been really convincing so far.

The most likely reason for this is that there may be no one "Atlantis." Think about it - what is Atlantis? First, you need a volcanic island of some sort. There are plenty of those, so you need to drop some people on this island a few thousand years ago. People have a habit of ending up in strange places, so that isn't too unrealistic either. Now they need to develop some advanced technology and build a nice society. Being on a remote island thousands of years ago was probably a pretty good form of defense, and people can be rather resourceful when they have to rely on themselves and they aren't being killed all the time. Finally, make the volcano go boom and destroy the place, with a few people escaping with little more than their lives and their memories. After this happens a few times, mix the legends together, add in some similar stories in various places for local flavor, have some Greek guy try to make sense of it and write down a single description, and watch people search the entire world for a single place that matches this description...

Re:Archaeologists will talk about Atlantis, too.

[sben]

And after all these years how do you show that Plato did it himself, rather than simply repeating something he had heard and being the first person to be recorded to do so?

A quick Google search turned up a number of pages, including this one (the first half of the page or so, through the first paragraph after the Plato quote, is relevant), summarizing research done by people far more expert in the field than me (and, I'm guessing, most anyone reading /.).

The Egyptians built quite well with just human labor rather than using domestic animals.

Large domesticable animals aren't just useful as a source of labor; at least according to Diamond's thesis (see my post above), they're one of the factors in how easily and advanced a civilization can develop. Among other things, close habitation with large animals leads to plague-style diseases in humans (no goatse.cx posts, please!), and thus to improved resistance to those diseases, which were subsequently carried over to the Americas.

Also: The Americas had quite a range of stuff - including wolly mamoths - until the inhabitants ATE them.

Exactly, and more interestingly, large animals disappeared from the Americas immediately (speaking in archaeological timespans here) after humans arrived -- i.e. there were essentially no large domesticable animals that mattered in the development of civilizations in America.

As for plants - where do you think corn comes from, just for starters? And tomatoes?

Right; I'm aware of that. What many people aren't aware of is that corn became usefully domesticable only shortly before Europeans arrived (again archaeologically speaking here); Americans had to improve it very slowly and painstakingly, as it was essentially useless as a crop (took too much energy to gather relative to the energy it took to harvest). Likewise with the tomato -- not a particularly useful staple crop, unlike the huge varieties of staple crops available in Eurasia/northern Africa.

I'm getting off-topic here, though; I'm not trying to argue that the Americas didn't have civilization, but that they were dealt a crappy hand in terms of a civilization-friendly environment. You're right, one more American civilization would be no surprise, but it's worth being skeptical of the finding, at least until further study is done, and calling it a good candidate for Atlantis is premature to an extreme.

Re:Graham Hancock

[Krieger]

I wouldn't call it total crap. It raises interesting questions and as always if you don't do your own research on a given subject you deserve to be called a fool if what you read was crap and you didn't check it out. There is still a lot of academic confusion on the whole thing and like physics right now, stuff keeps getting found that disproves past theories. Ballard and cities in the Black Sea, this city off the coast of Cuba. Hell they thought that Troy was a myth until it was found. Just because his theories do seem a bit bizarre doesn't mean that they're crap. I will admit that I do take them with a grain of salt, but it does make for a starting point for a lot of other interesting reading.

Oh and ultimately the Horizons piece was edited and reissued see http://www.grahamhancock.com/horizon/bsc-press_rel ease.htm.

Re:Ahh...lets see Volcano...earth quake...ect

[Mister Black]

When the christians burned the library of Alexandria

The Library of Alexandria was burned by the Romans at the time of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. That is pre-Christianity.

Re:Atlantis at last!

[zhensel]

I wouldn't exactly say that it's equally likely - seeing how it was legend before the 'discovery' of the americas.

Re:An LDS view...

[cybercuzco]

"...the city of Moroni did sink into the depths of the sea..." (3 Nephi 8:9 pg. 422).

If thats true, then how come there are so many Morons still around? Wouldn't they have all died when the city sank into the ocean? ( and good riddance i might add)

Re:Look at the geology!

[JohnsonWax]

Good god...

>As an example, in one sunny June afternoon in the late 1600's, the city of Port Royal Jamaica plunged 40 feet below the surface of the sea, killing thousands. That's forty feet in ONE DAY.

No, that's 40 feet in one day and 0 feet in 400 years. Cuba would have had to suffer an equally powerful earthquake on average every 120 years over that period to account for the 2000 feet. Is that trend in the very recent geological record for that area - it should be for your premise to be correct.

Geological processes can be very violent, but they also tend to be regular. You can't argue one aspect without at least factoring in the other. 4" subsidence per year is pretty aggressive - I doubt you'd find many instances of such a rate over that kind of a distance, especially underwater, and especially without a volcano being involved.

Re:Very strange...

[namespan]

A city 6000 years old would have put the city a fair ways before the cataclysmic events of 3 Nephi. Think "Jaredite" civilization (no cataclysms in that record) for the right time period... assuming that:

a) the figure 6000 years wasn't just pulled out of someones butt
b) the city in question was roughly contemporary with the cataclysm that sunk it

both those assumptions are somewhat weak, but there aren't cataclysmic events recorded in the Jaredite portion of the Book of Mormon (well, natural disasters).

I like the Book of Mormon. I think it's worthy of being approached as a valid spiritual text, I think it's interesting spiritually and anthropologically, but I also think that any link between it and this city is largely unclear. Other than the fact they occur in the same hemisphere.