The story of a “Great Flood” is a widespread account shared by many religions and cultures around the world, and dates back to our earliest recorded history. From India to ancient Greece, Mesopotamia and even among North American Indian tribes, there is no shortage of such tales that often enough sound very much alike. Some of these stories truly sound so similar that one could wonder whether all cultures around the planet had experienced such an event.

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To challenge this theory, at least until recently, anthropologists insisted that 10,000 years ago humans were way too primitive to have been aware of such an event. So, in essence, as there were no known civilizations around at the time that could have been affected by this natural catastrophe, the Great Flood story was thought to be a myth or a disaster that have taken place later in time, during our recorded history. Of course, as there are no clues of global cataclysms during our recorded history, this once more led to their eventual conclusion that the Great Flood was either a myth or a much smaller regional incident like the flooding of the Black Sea.

For many years, this was the general “logic” that dominated many academic minds and the greatest challenge to the Ice Age Flood theory, when this hypothesis was brought up.

New Evidence

NOAA archaeologist does underwater research using specially a constructed sled mounted with a high-resolution camera. Representational image. (Flickr/ CC BY 2.0 )

All this changed in 1994 with the archaeological discovery of Gobekli Tepe, a 12,000-year-old mega site in southeastern Turkey, as well as in 2002 with the discovery of a 10,000-year-old city found submerged under 130 feet of water off the coast of West India in the Gulf of Cambay. In this case, several generations of fishermen insisted on stories of an underwater city in that area, but their claims went unnoticed until the site was accidentally discovered during pollution survey tests conducted by India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology.

There are similarities between the Hindu flood legend of Manu and the Biblical account of Noah. Here the fish avatara of Vishnu saves Manu during the great deluge. ( Public Domain )

With the use of side-scan sonar, which sends a beam of sound waves to the bottom of the ocean, scientists found huge geometric structures at the bottom of the sea, at a depth of about 40 meters (130 feet). Debris recovered from the site, including construction material, pottery, sections of walls, beads, sculptures, and human bones were carbon dated and found to be approximately 10,000 years old.

Scientists now estimate that this 26-square-kilometer (10-square-mile) city was sunken after the last ice age, when melting ice 10,000 years ago caused the oceans around the globe to rise significantly. This was an incredible find. Not only does this discovery help rewrite some of the early pages of our history, but most importantly, it confirms ancient testimony around the planet in regard to past lost civilizations (including that of Atlantis which, according to Plato, was drowned by the sea during this period).

Artist’s representation of Atlantis. Source: BigStockPhoto

Early Advanced Civilizations

In addition to the ancient city of Jericho, which long ago was established to have some of its structures date back to the 10 th millennium BC, we now have two additional remarkable discoveries that conclusively prove mankind had advanced much earlier in time than the scientific community was previously aware of. In light of these latest findings, is it possible today to assume that a worldwide flood, roughly 10,000 years ago, may have been the one our ancestors labeled as the Great Flood? Certainly we can.

The submerged city off the west coast of India, not only confirms that 10,000 years ago humans were more advanced and thus aware of this particular natural catastrophe, but it further proves that the rising waters, particularly between 8000 BC and 7500 BC, devastated those civilizations and destroyed all evidence of their existence.

Photo of ancient sculpture submerged beneath the Red Sea. (Flickr/ CC BY-SA 2.0 )

In a study published in Current Anthropology (December 2010), titled “New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis,” Jeffrey Rose, an archaeologist and researcher with the United Kingdom’s University of Birmingham, pointed out that sixty highly advanced settlements arose out of nowhere around the shores of the Persian Gulf about 7,500 years ago.

These settlements featured well-built stone houses, long-distance trade networks, elaborate pottery, and signs of domesticated animals. With no known precursor populations in the archaeological record to explain the existence of these advanced settlements, Rose ultimately concluded the dwellers of these new settlements were those of displaced populations who managed to escape the Gulf inundation around 8000 BC.

‘The Deluge’ by Francis Danby, 1840. ( Public Domain )

As more and more evidence points towards such an assumption, is it so difficult to imagine that such a worldwide cataclysm could have been what erased our early history? If not, how else can we justify the rise of several advanced civilizations around the planet which, since the dawn of our recorded history seem to mysteriously appear out of thin air? Overnight, these people turned out to be masters of architecture, astronomy, and somehow possessed incredible technological skills that neither historians nor anthropologists can quite explain. Is it possible that due to the lack of tangible evidence, early scholars failed to make the connection and to recognize that many of these people had advanced thousands of years earlier and prior to the Great Flood?

Is it so difficult to accept that the incredible megalithic structures and technological achievements of our early recorded history were essentially part of an earlier “renaissance" era that began once the rise of the oceans ended?

Christos A. Djonis is author of the book “ Uchronia? Atlantis Revealed ”.

Featured image: The Deluge (1834). ( Public Domain )

By Christos A. Djonis