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Atlantis: Discovered at Last?
Henry G. writes "The BBC is reporting that recent satellite pictures may show the location of the fabled city of Atlantis, as described by Plato. It is in Southern Spain, though, and not on an island as is commonly believed. Here's an image of the concentric rings over the alleged area." This story has gotten a lot of submissions; it's worth noting that it's also shown up off Cyprus, or near Cuba, or is Crete, or... It is worth noting that that Ubar was found this way.
...who can't see any rings in that photo?
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Of course, it certainly would be cool if it was the real deal!
It's probably just pareidolia. They know what they are looking for, so they see it in highly ambiguous data. Sure it might be Atlantis, but I remain skeptical until they can produce much more unequivocal evidence.
Or is anyone else having Heraldo and the vaults of Capone flashbacks?
(we found it! we found it! Oh, crap...)
-Goran
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It might be important to note that the sory of Atlantis could and is most likly just that a story. Plato like Homer was a great story teller, he was also had an great impact on many Academic Disciplines.
While Homers story of The Illiad was based on the real war that happened in Troy, we have no conclusive prof that an island of Atlantis existed. This discovery may provide evidence of the fabled city, but I won't hold my breath just yet.
-Ghost
how do they confirm it is atlantis?
will they find a stone fragment with the words "downtown atlantis, exit 43" in ancient greek?
no seriously: how does a mythical city of unknown location be "proven" to be this old city versus that old city?
why can't their find of this ancient city stand on its own as exciting and important? why link it to a dubious unprovable myth?
it seems to me that there is no way to say either this city or that one is atlantis itself, or am i missing something
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It strikes me that there will be many cities lost to flooding throughout history. Just because they've found one sunken city doesn't mean that it's the same city Plato was talking about, surely?
IIRC, the Greeks attributed their stories of Atlantis to a travelling Egyptian. So even the Greeks got the information second hand, and probably wouldn't have been able to uniquely identify Atlantis.
"This is the only place that seems to fit [Plato's] description," he told BBC News Online.
Except for its not being an island and all the other bits we ignored to make the data fit the model.
KFG
If you're looking for something spesific, it's easy to find it.. our mind is good at recognisong patterns, even when they arn't there. Off course, this is what leads people to see cities om Mars, Lenin in their shower curtain and, in this cause, traces of Atlantis. It's called pareidolia, and it's more common than you might think.
PS: I urge everyone to visit the link and explore the site - it's a good read and quite interesting as well as funny.
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It was believed to be a mythical place, thanks in great part to the Illiad, but it was eventually found.
The same could be said of some of the biblic places.
And who knows? We may find one day a place that inequivoably is identified as Atlantis.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.
I for one am a believer that Atlantis was really South America. There was a massive thriving culture in South America 3000 years ago and plenty of evidence to suggest that trade was occuring between South America and Egypt around that time. Google has several sites which endorse this theory.
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The Mediterranean Sea is still a connected sea - the Straits of Gibraltar aren't THAT narrow - so it can hardly fill from the surrounding water sources (sealevel rises aside).
Q.
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The neatest thing about this, IMHO... would be if we discovered a very old, very advanced civilization that threw historians a curveball
Actually, that's EXACTLY what Atlantis was: a VERY old, VERY advanced civilization. They supposedly weren't as advanced as we are today, but they were FAR more advanced than the rest of the world was back in the day... and they existed 9000 years before Plato's time.
what if some ancient civilization was just as advanced as us but nuked themselves out of existence?
I've pondered this many times and I keep coming to the same conclusion: If this was true, we would have found SOME evidence of their existence by now. I highly doubt that any really technologically advanced civilization that could create an atomic bomb wouldn't expand their culture beyond a handful of cities. We should have found towers on mountains by now, no? I don't think it very likely that when they wiped themselves out, they destroyed every miniscule building they had ever created.
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I see your point, but seeing as they had to sail their ships between the pillars to get to any ocean other than the Mediterranean, it could still be construed as any ocean beyond the pillars of Hercules.
What's interesting to note though is that this pretty much means that Atlantis isn't in the Med.
(I'm not criticizing you here...)
So how long would you last in your field if you made a huge claim with only the weakest, unsubstantiated data? This Atlantis claim is based solely on one poorly defined image and absolutely NO physical evidence from the ground. The whole story of Atlantis is based on the assumed infallibility of Plato, as if Plato were incapable of being mistaken or believing a bogus folktale.
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We're not going to ask you. Nobody assumes we're becoming more intelligent. We're more advanced because we learn. And once writing was figured out we were able to progress much more quickly.
I tend to agree with you on this, there sure are some shady areas of our past we just can't explain and what scares me is they are so recent geologically and yet evidence is so hard to find.
Look at our ancient cities, we're finding them but they're like 6,000 years old or so, well considering the planet is 4.5billion years old there is surely a lot of stuff we just haven't discovered or has been completely eradicated by the natural recycling forces that happen on our planet.
We can't keep our own stories straight either, biblical texts are really just stories for the most part but they've been strewn out as "the word of God" and millions of little lemmings follow the texts to the word which has them living a dillusional existence at best.
Look at Elvis, he's been officially dead for 25 years or so but we already have all kinds of fables running around about him, including him alive still (resurrection!) and there are several versions of his infamous chicken recipe. And this from a society with advanced technology and writing skills.
One thing I've been thinking about recently is what if there was an intelligent dinosaur? If said intelligent dino only built structures from wood I highly doubt any evidence would exist 65million years after they died out.
Today we have more metal products around that will survive longer, but even then it is estimated that 1billion years after we're gone there will be no evidence left on the planet that we existed in the first place.
Not necessarily. Some tribe that figured out how to work copper would be "very advanced" over the others that were still using stone and antler tools. IANAA, but I can see the discovery of using copper wasn't a single point, where one fellow watched metal come from these rocks next to the fire, and published a story about it in the "Prehistoric Times."
It was most likely a continuum, where people took quite some time to figure out cause and effect, and which rocks worked and which didn't, and how to consistently get the same results, etc. etc. Not to mention convincing the doubters, persuading the shamans not to kill the discoverers, not getting accidently killed by disasters or fights with other tribes before figuring out good weapons to make.
So, yeah, a "very advanced civilization" could have existed in many locations during the time that copper technology was being developed.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
No it isn't. Many aspects of archaeology are non-repeatable. Excavation is the obvious example.
Excavation is not about digging dirt, the main part, and the one that matters is to not destroy anything that matters and rigorusly documenting every aspect of it.
That way you can "repeat the study" later by other archeologs, and based on new theories and/or information, possibly reach a totally different conclusion.
Secondly, although archaeology uses many scientific techniques, it is fundamentally subjective. Once you've excavated a site, got dates from objects and contexts one is still left with the subjective opinions of the primary excavator.
Exacty, and archeology is *exactly* like other sciences in that matter. Physics, for example is not *truth*, but merely a collection of our best efforts to describe the universe we live in.
A new *truth* can be found tomorrow and change the way we think about reality. Take the size and shape of the universe as an example, there are more than one theory about that one.
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Your point about not destroying anything that matters is interesting. How do we know what matters to future generations of archaeologists? I'm sure those who 'excavated' the archaic/classical greek sites were doing their best, but they did destroy stuff that mattered to us now. It's naive to think that we're not doing the same today.
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Good point, I just have two issues with the that.
;)
Plato wasn't there, why should he be anymore of an authority than anyone else?
IMO, and that of quite a few other people, Plato wasn't particularly interested in the truth of it anyway, but more interested in expouding certain of his ideas.
Given the effects of the Santorini eruption on an island like Minos, is it not likely that the flood caused by the eruption on Santorini, that probably had some fairly devastating consequences to the Minoan Civilisation, got conflated with the eruption? It was a long time before Plato, in the Greek Dark Ages, and came to him from a decidedly secondhand source.
I could be wrong, "Atantis" could be somewhere else, inside or outside the Mediterranean Basin, but I'd like to see some pretty good evidence, as the Santorini Hypothesis (that is all it is until we find a "Welcome to Atlantis" sign there or somewhere else).
I just get pretty tired sometimes of all these sensational "We've found Atlantis, no really, we have, we just haven't actually looked for any evidence yet, and what there is is circumstantial at best, but it is there, really it is" type stuff.
Why do pretty smart people seem to turn off their critical faculties whenever some new loon comes along with a new Atlantis, or a Chariots of the Gods type book? I did, admittedly, study this at uni, but its not that hard to the flaws in the ideas of Hancock and Von Daniken, you just have to look at it crtically, if it was some new bollocks about cold fusion or superconductance that wasn't backed up by amything more than a notion and some circumstantial evidence most of you would be circling around it like Frat boys around a drunk cheerleader, waiting to see who could get the first bite in
From http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/Appendi xE/AppendixE.html the definition of the Scientific Method is:
Archaeology can do #1, and #2. Arguably it can do #3. However, #4 is right out as you don't have the ability to create alternate realities.
Also the resevoir effect can throw dates off. Of course, many of the error situations are obvious, and thus won't throw you off. For example, you simply don't carbon date deep sea creatures (recycled carbon from oceanic conveyors), or plants that lived on the rim of an active volcano (carbon from deep in the earth), without expecting your results to be way off. There are lots of ways you can "catch" unexpected causes of carbon being off when they were expected to be correct, but in general, the results of carbon are dating quite accurate because the cases that can really throw carbon dating off are clearly exceptions, not the rule.
Calibration amounts are generally relatively small, so it's not a big deal. Creationists like to pretend that they're huge (they're not), or that all dating mechanisms are calibrated (most aren't; carbon dating is unusual). The most reliable dating methods, BTW, are methods like isochron and concordia/discordia methods, which have built-in error checking.
Probably the best indicator of the reliability of carbon dating in the general case is its correspondance to other dating methods, particularly (as was mentioned) dendrochronology. Different fossilized tree records, while showing somewhat varying levels of the different carbon isotopes in the atmosphere, show, to a good degree of accuracy, the *same* varying levels.
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