Sept. 13, 2000—Explorers in an undersea discovery craft came upon remnants of human habitation 311-feet below the surface of the Black Sea, approximately 12 miles off the Turkish shoreline, near the port city of Sinop. The well-preserved remnants of a mud and wattle house are thought to be part of a human settlement at the intersection of two great rivers, dating to a time before the flooding of the Black Sea by the waters of the Mediterranean, an event which probably occurred about 7,500 years before present as a result of glacial ice melt.

While no surprise to students of Plato, when taken in conjunction with our other knowledge of archaeo-historical events the discovery implicitly explodes at least the following outdated, British Empire hoaxes being taught in university departments today:

* the Mesopotamian origin of civilization, the so-called hydraulic society, and the datings of civilization’s origin;

* the “neolithic revolution”;

* origins of Indo-European language;

* classifications of early man;

* global warming.

The discovery, made by famed underwater explorer Robert Ballard (of Titanic fame), followed from a hypothesis put forward by Columbia Unviersity geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman in their 1997 book Noah’s Flood. Ryan and Pitman elaborate there on the thesis that the Black Sea was a freshwater lake, before the most recent glacial melt, which began about 12,000 years ago, raised the waters of the Mediterranean to the level at which the natural earth dam at the Bosporus was overcome. The Black Sea was inundated by saline water from the Mediterranean, raising sea levels by 300 feet and more, and wiping out civilization along the coastline. The geologists date this to about 7,600 years before present.

The more dense salt water eventually went to the bottom of the Black Sea, where lack of oxygen prevents the action of burrowing mollusks and bacteria from destroying ancient wood structures, including boats. The boundary layer seems to be about 300 to 500 feet. Last year, the underwater explorers discovered the outlines of an ancient coast 550 feet below the current sea level.

Coverage in the daily press focusses on the narrow question of the correlation to the biblical story of Noah and the flood. However, once one recognizes that the rise of sea levels, by 300 feet and more, was a global phenomena, and that ancient civilization had to have been concentrated along coastlines and at the mouths of great rivers, for lawful reasons of physical economy, it is seen that the end of the last 100,000-year Ice Age had to have been a phenomenon of global catastrophic signficance. The truth of the reports, concerning the great antiquity of civilization and their cyclical decline, as indicated in Plato’s Laws, Critias, and Timaeus dialogues, the writings of Diodorus Siculus, and other classical Greek sources, and attributed to earlier Egyptian sources, may then be grasped.

One might then ask oneself the following questions: Of what significance are reports of a so-called “neolithic revolution,” originating in eastern Anatolia about 6,000 B.C., if a worldwide coastal civilization at least 100,000 years old, had been wiped out shortly before this time? Of what significance are speculations dating the origins of Indo-European language-culture to the same time period? Given the evidence of advanced human settlements dating to at least 800,000 years before present, of what significance then are the physical anthropologists claims of distinct, prior species of early man? Since we are at the fag end of an 11,000 year interglacial cycle, which has long since passed its temperature maximum, just how cooly should we receive forecasts of global warming?