All cultures have their myths and legends. There are of course many ways to interpret such tales, ranging from works
of playful imagination to vehicles for conveying ethical teachings. However, there is an increasing appreciation that
even if myths do involve such functions, they may also sometimes, perhaps even often, actually be attempts by
pre-literate societies at memorialising, interpreting, and communicating real historical events (Simala, 2015). This
hermeneutic framework gains further credibility when bolstered by observations of a particular narrative recurring
among different cultures. A preeminent example is a great flood, found across many geographically dispersed
traditions, including Sumerian , ancient Israelite , Greek Indian , and Cheyenne .
Similarly, albeit less immediately dramatic, Nunn and Cook
show that many coastal cultures have mythologized stories of land becoming separated from mainlands by submergence.
They point out that science has traditionally underestimated the capacity of oral (pre-literate) cultures to
acquire, encode and sustain their observations of memorable events with a high degree of replication fidelity.
Thus, rather than being merely imaginative creations, such myths may instead have arisen from “eyewitness accounts of
these transformative processes,” so should be engaged with as potential historical testimony. Thus, it is increasingly
thought that flood myths may depict events from around 20,000 to 12,000 years ago, when sea level in the aftermath
of the Last Glaciation (last ice age) was rising and transforming coastal landscapes and their human uses in exactly
the ways these stories describe
(p.29) n1There are thought to have been five main ice ages in the history of our planet, the last being the Quaternery, from around 2.6 million years ago until the present. These are characterised by low global temperatures and
glacial expansion across Earth’s surface, leading to geological changes such as lower sea levels and reshaping of landscapes. Moreover, within these broad epochs are times when the glacial and ice sheet coverages peak, known as glaciations, in which such changes are heightened (Ehlers et al., 2018). The most recent, usually referred simply as “The Ice Age,” was from 29,000 to 18,000 years ago, when eight percent of the planet was covered in ice, and sea levels were approximately 125 metres lower than today. However, around 20,000 years ago, the planet began to warm – possibly caused by a tilt in the Earth’s axis (Bajo et al., 2020) – producing a period of melting that lasted around 8,000 years, involving the gradual but relentless rising of sea levels. Moreover, amidst this general rising were more dramatic eras involving sudden collapses of ice sheets, creating catastrophic “meltwater pulses,” causing sharp and extreme rises. The most significant occurred during the Bølling–Allerød interstadial, an abrupt warm period dated to 14,690 to 12,890 years ago (Rasmussen et al., 2006). This coincided with Meltwater pulse 1A – possibly attributed to melting of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, and indeed which may have caused the Bølling–Allerød interstadial – in which global sea levels rose by about 20 meters in a little as 500 years (Weaver et al., 2003). Moreover, a particularly dramatic flood around 13,000 years ago – possibly caused by an outburst from the North American glacial Lake Agassiz (Murton et al., 2010), although some speculate it could have involved an impact from a comet or asteroid (Sweatman, 2021; Moore et al., 2024) – caused a return to ice age conditions for over 1,000 years, an era known as the Younger Dryas. Moreover, the warming phase at the end, around 11,500 years ago, was also abrupt, with more melting and sharp sea level rises.
Teller et al. for example, analysed the rapid postglacial flooding of the floor of the Persian Gulf
from 12,000 to 6,000 years ago, finding the sea transgressed more than 1000 kilometres, with waters sometimes flooding
this floor by more than a kilometre per year, and so suggest flood myths in the region – from the Babylonian Epic of
Gilgamesh to the biblical Noah – are genuine records of these events.
Even more relevantly here, across world cultures are not only myths of flooding and rising seas, but of land – and
moreover civilizations – being lost to these events, disappearing beneath the waters. Most famous is Atlantis, an
island featured in Plato's works Timaeus and Critias. While some scholars suggest it is merely fictional, created for
allegorical purposes ,
there are ongoing attempts to identify it as an actual location, such as a highly advanced Bronze Age culture in Crete
and its surrounding islands that was devastated by the eruption of the Santorini/Thera volcano, 120 km north of Crete,
around 1,600 BCE . Moreover, efforts to trace
legendary lost civilizations have been encouraged by underwater findings that may – though many claims are disputed –
be extant traces. For example, in 1986 a diver found apparent submerged stone structures in waters off Yonaguni Jima
in Japan, the largest being described as a complicated, monolithic, stepped pyramid” that rises from a depth of 25
meters .
Sceptics dismiss these as merely natural formations, arguing their straight edges result from the “natural
stratigraphy of sandstones
.
Others however, like marine geologist Masaaki Kimura (2004), believe these to be the ruins of a “Japanese Atlantis” –
perhaps a city around 5,000 years old that was sunk by an earthquake around two millennia ago, or even more radically,
one created during the last ice age, when sea levels in the area were 40 meters lower than today. Indeed, the Joe Rogan (2024) podcast recently hosted a lively debate about the claim that it might
represent an ancient undiscovered civilization n2The debate about Yonaguni on the Joe Rogan (2024) podcast was between Graham Hancock (a British writer, researcher, and television presenter) and Dr Flint Dibble (a prominent archaeologist). Hancock is a well-known advocate of the theory that an ancient civilization was wiped out by a cataclysm related to the ending of the Ice Age, as elaborated in his recent Netflix series, “Ancient Apocalypse.” However, he is a rather polarizing and – depending on one’s perspective – controversial figure, whose views have been dismissed by prominent academics as “pseudoarchaeology”; indeed, the very first sentence of his Wikipedia article describes him as a someone who “promotes pseudoscientific theories involving ancient civilizations and hypothetical lost lands.” The significance of the Rogan podcast was that it offered an opportunity for Hancock to discuss these charges, and the topic generally, with a prominent representative of academic archaeology. Part of the episode focused on Yonaguni, with a fascinating discussion on the plausibility of it being human-made architecture. Dibble suggested the straight lines could have been formed naturally, given that “nature sometimes looks bizarre,” while Hancock argued forcefully against the likeliness of that explanation. Rogan took a somewhat middle ground, and without being fully persuaded of Hancock’s position, noted that “Some of the right angles and what looks like passageways … that's a wild one ... Things look weird in nature, [but this] blows me away.” In the end, Dibble did concede “It’s certainly crazy, I’ll give you that.” Overall, though, it was striking the extent to which Dibble seemed to dismiss intriguing underwater structures out of hand; in relation to another potential structure, the “Bimini Road” – a 0.8 km long line of roughly rectangular limestone blocks in the Bahamas – Dibble said, “I'm just looking for some proof here. [Laughing] It's all right, but things look cool I get that, but it's like a question of how do we tell the difference between man-made and natural and that's not easy and I've never really again seen architecture like this.” Rogan then pushed back, somewhat incredulous: “This doesn't intrigue you? You don't look at that and go, ‘wow, that really looks man-made’”. Also of note, the discussion covered the retraction of Natawidjaja et al.’s (2023) article, which – as noted in the main text – had suggested that Gunung Padang features human megalithic constructions dating to between 25,000 and 14,000 BCE. While Dibble argued against the authors’ interpretations of the data and the conclusions in the paper (which is certainly a legitimate move), Hancock accused him and his colleagues of orchestrating a pressure campaign to compel the journal to retract the paper (i.e., instead of publishing a critical response), which Hancock felt was not reasonable. Hancock for example noted Dibble’s apparent sway with prominent media outlets like The Guardian, which before the retraction had published articles, citing Dibble, that were highly critical of the study, and moreover argued that some of the animus directed towards the paper was due to his own link to the research (such as it being the centrepiece of an episode of Ancient Apocalypse). This allegation does seem substantiated by the fact that one piece in The Guardian suggests that “Controversy [about the paper] has been fuelled by the discovery that the paper was proofread by the controversial British writer Graham Hancock” (McKie, 2023b). The fact that the mere act of Hancock proofreading the paper is mentioned as grounds for suspicion does lend support to his claim that Natawidjaja’s work has been unfairly targeted and disparaged for its association with Hancock..
While conventional narratives of history would find that possibility unlikely, discoveries like Göbekli Tepe are
perhaps now making people reconsider.
Easter Island has likewise become a focus of speculation about lost civilizations. Alessio writes, As a result of its remote
island location in the Pacific, and with so many questions about its mysterious stone ruins, myriad caves, and as yet
undeciphered script, it is not surprising that people have fantasized about this isolated and small pocket of land
(p.51), including linking it to a technologically advanced and ancient civilization known as Mu [or Lemuria], a
hypothetical ‘Lost World,’ which purportedly had created a globe-spanning empire” before being swallowed by the
ocean, and whose survivors “formed the nucleus of the world’s first civilizations
n3The notion of Lemuria was first proposed by zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater (1864) based on his observations of the distribution of Lemurs, namely that dozens of species are found on Madagascar alone, but only a handful elsewhere (Bressan, 2013). As a result, he speculated Lemurs had originated in Madagascar and spread to Africa and Asia by a land bridge that once connected these continents, which he named Lemuria. Although it has since been shown that this distribution of Lemurs could have also been achieved by shifting plate tectonics, geologists
have discovered traces of a “Precambrian microcontinent” in the Indian Ocean that disappeared some 84 million years ago, which – Lemurs aside – does allude to the possibility of a lost landmass (Torsvik et al., 2013). In any case, Sclater’s notion of Lemuria captivated attention, and also inspired similar related myths, most notably by British archaeologist Augustus Le Plongeon (1900), who developed the notion of “Mu.” In 1875 he and his wife Alice undertook the first excavation of Chichen Itza, a Mayan city built around 600-900 CE. Based on murals and inscriptions, they came to believe there had been a historical Mayan ruler called Queen Moo. Over time, her legend became intertwined with that of Lemuria, especially by Churchward (1926) in his book Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Man. He vividly depicted Mu as a land in the Pacific that had been home to an advanced civilization, called the Naacal, which flourished between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago and was the progenitor of advanced societies elsewhere (hence the book title). However, he claimed the land was “completely obliterated in almost a single night” after a series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Churchward’s specific claims have of course been widely disputed, and moreover critiqued on various levels, such as upholding 19th Century ideals around imperialism (Deane, 2008). Even so, many people nevertheless suspect our understanding of history is incomplete, and there may have existed civilizations of which evidence has now been lost, as discussed in the main text..
Of course, if global in scope, common artifacts and features would be easily identifiable to terrestrial and
underwater archaeologists. However, such a speculative thesis about a lost, global empire goes far beyond what the CTH
requires vis-à-vis the possibility of a “lost” human civilization being responsible for some UAP, which “only” needs,
(a) a civilization, of whatever size, to have existed at some point, and (b) its members retreating and surviving
underground. To that point, there are many rumoured examples of lost civilizations – and similarly, if not
“civilizations” per se, then areas of land that supported human populations22 – with those noted above just a handful
among many. Moreover, besides apparently strange examples like Easter Island – in which scholars struggle to account
for the level of societal complexity and technical sophistication in such a remote place – there are other potential
sources of evidence for such civilizations.
One intriguing line of enquiry concerns “out of place artifacts” : objects that seem to be incompatible with our knowledge of the era with which they are linked, especially if they evince technological mastery that exceeds assumptions of what people in that era were capable of, which thus challenge conventional historical chronology n4In terms of lost landmasses, Norman et al. (2024) for example suggest there is a “now-drowned region” northwest of the Australian continent that once existed as an “extensive archipelago” capable of supporting between 50,000 and 500,000 people. They argue that two periods of rapid global sea level rise – around 14,000 years ago (Meltwater Pulse 1A) and between 12,000 and 9,000 years ago – resulted in the rapid drowning of ∼50% of the Northwest Shelf, causing a retreat of human populations.. That said, caution is warranted in interpreting artifacts that seem “too advanced for the time,” considering these claims largely stem from a lack of understanding about the capacities of earlier groups. Such assertions can also have racist undertones, implying past people in those places were incapable of such feats, while the achievements of Europeans are rarely if ever similarly questioned . However, such insinuations are not inevitable; a more benign and even celebratory perspective is to suggest these objects challenge conventional chronology by making it more accurate, bringing a deepening appreciation of the expertise of people in earlier ages who had more knowledge and abilities than they are credited with today.
Most relevantly here, while many such objects seem a millennium or more out of place, other findings might be even more historically anomalous. At the Kalambo Falls in Zambia, for example, researchers in 2019 discovered an example of wood craftmanship and technology – involving two pieces of wood fashioned to “interlock” together – that is dated to around 500,000 years ago, well before the emergence of Homo sapiens . Going even further back, workers at a coal mine in Ukraine found what appeared to be a fossilized imprint of a wheel in the sandstone roof of a tunnel they had excavated 900 meters below the surface, which is potentially dated as being 300 million years old . Similarly, a Russian team found what appeared to be a 2cm “screw” embedded within a rock that was estimated to be 300 million years old (though skeptics have argued it could be the fossilized imprint of an ancient sea creature called a crinoid) . Or consider a photo shared by Roemmele (2023) of what appears to be a “petrified book” encased in rock in Western Australia, which some interpreted as possibly being 350 million years old.
Such findings are evidently relevant to a CTH. Indeed, Coulthart (2023a) suggests the
intelligence community has
taken a great interest in such objects, such as Egyptian relics dated to 5,500 years ago that display “mastery of
technology, involving the shaping of stone, that is far beyond the … known technology of that era,” as indicated in
endnote n5Among the most famous “out of place artifacts” is the “Antikythera mechanism,” a Greek hand-powered orrery – a mechanical model of the solar system used to predict astronomical positions – described as the earliest known example of an analogue computer, thought to have been created around 150 BCE (Seiradakis & Edmunds, 2018). Another notable example is the “Baghdad Battery,” a name given to three artifacts – a ceramic pot, tube of copper, and rod of iron – discovered together in 1936 by archaeologist Wilhelm Konig which are believed to date to either the Parthian (150 BCE – 223 CE) or Sasanian (224 – 650 CE) empires, and which Koenig argued constitute an electric battery, a conclusion with which modern scholars still concur (Keyser, 1993). Similarly perplexing is the “Schist Disk,” discovered by Egyptologist Brian Walter Emery in 1936 while excavating the tomb of Prince Sabu (circa 3,000 BCE) (Coffey, 2023). This is striking on many fronts, including composition (derived from clay and mud which have undergone a series of extreme physical-chemical changes) and design (resembling a “concave steering wheel of a car,” with three curved “shovels” that resemble the helix of a boat, together with an opening that would appear to function as the receptacle of an axis of a wheel), as well being seemingly flawless yet with no prototypes or failed attempts ever found. In addition to such objects are not artifacts per se but apparent examples of technologies and techniques that seem to surpass what we thought people at the time possessed. For example, Cairo’s Egyptian museum includes a large granite box, ostensibly dated to 3,000 BCE, that appears to be sliced with millimeter accuracy and precision from top to bottom (Olsen, 2023); crucially, craftspeople at the time were thought to only have copper chisels and hammers, but copper is rated about three on the Mohs Scale of Hardness, yet the rose-granite of the box ranks about an eight (with diamond ranking a 10). Similarly, people have been intrigued by design ideas that seem out of place, such as a 450-page manuscript written between 1529 and 1569 by a military officer for the Imperial court of Vienna, Conrad Haas, which contains elaborate technical details for multistage rocketry, much of which accurately anticipates designs used in 20th century spaceflight programs (Verma, 2022b). Moreover, as noted in the main text, some potential artifacts are far older. A mysterious pyramid in China’s Qinghai Province, for example, features three caves filled with iron pipes which lead to a nearby lake, which were determined by the Beijing Institute of Geology to have been smelted an astonishing 150,000 years ago, many tens of thousands of years before Homo sapiens are thought capable of such techniques (MacIsaac, 2014), although sceptics suggest they might have a more prosaic origin in the fossilization of tree roots (Bauer, 2019).
More generally, he said the CIA has “spent a lot of time investigating ancient civilizations” seeking answers to “who
were the people who crafted these buildings?” As he noted, We still don’t know. There are fundamental mysteries in
human civilization that we haven’t answered.
In that respect, the possibilities discussed here of advanced
pre/historic civilizations lend some support to a CTH. However, this would not merely require such a civilization to
have existed in the past, but to have continued to do so. In that respect, there are also many such myths, and even
potential evidence, as we explore next.