If the builders of Stonehenge were the lost civilisation of Atlantis, where did they originate from and why did they come to the Salisbury plain to construct their monument?
We have shown (in the previous chapters of the book) that after the last ice age the ‘great melt’ flooded the landscape of Britain for over ten thousand years. This flooding started a ‘chain reaction’ and as a consequence the sea level slowly increased and vast areas of land were lost including a land mass known as ‘Doggerland’.
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| Doggerland sinks long after the Northern ice cap melts |
Throughout the 19th century, oyster dredgers working the shallow waters off the north east coast of England recorded frequent finds of animal bones caught up in their nets. These discoveries became a regular occurrence as the fishing technology increased and the trawlers at a later date and in deeper waters of the North Sea also found traces of civilisation and a lost continent. Sadly, the location were rarely recorded with any degree of accuracy; this material appeared to come from a number of areas within the North Sea.
One area where the greatest number of finds were was discovered is known as the ‘Dogger bank’ which lies just 90km – 110km (60-70 miles) from the coast of the British Isles. This shoal (a shoal, sandbar , sandbank or gravel bar is a somewhat linear landform within or extending into a body of water, typically composed of sand, silt or small pebbles.) rises about 45m (150 ft) above the North Sea bed. To the north it plunges into deeper water and forms a subterranean plateau covering 17,600 sq. km. (6,800 miles) with a maximum dimension being 260km (160 miles) from North to South and 95 km (60 miles) from East to West.
Over time the number of finds reduced as the same area was dredged day after day and any artefacts sitting on the surface would have been scooped up and either returned as a curiosity (or in a majority) most of the time just thrown back in a different location.
Even so, items such as; bear, wolf, hyena, bison, woolly rhino, mammoth, beaver walrus, elk, deer and most importantly horse have been collected. This precious collection of findings gives us a fantastic insight to what Doggerland looked like, the environment that supported these animals and the climate of this unique area of the world.
It would be impossible to talk about Doggerland and its environment without understanding the clear connection to Plato’s written references to the lost world of Atlantis. Over the years Atlantis has grown to be both a legend and the source of much science fiction. This is neither correct nor helpful in tracing the history of mankind, as it moves the debate from scientific observation to fantasy and the degrading of the most important time of our history.
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| Plato |
Plato is a source of credible information for he is not a ‘story teller’ like some other historic writers, he is fundamentally a philosopher whose writings are still studied even now, some 2,000 years after his death at the most famous and prestigious universities throughout the world. This man is not prone to fantasy or exaggeration, his writings therefore must be accepted as true evidence that once in the distant past an ancient great civilisation did in fact exist and that they changed the course of mankind in ways which I believe we do not fully understand to date.
The next book in our trilogy traces the ‘megalithic builders’ from when they came out of Africa to where they landed in their boats on Doggerland following the herds of Animals as the ice caps receded and the food supply for these ancient ancestors moved north travelling to a new continent. They constructed a civilisation that used new stone tools and incorporated megalithic stone constructions into their society.
Consequently, we need to look at the probability that Plato’s ‘Atlantis’ is a genuine reference to this land, as it is the oldest written source and may give us clues of how this civilisation lived and traded. Fortunately for us Plato gave some detail about this civilisation, such as how they lived and what they believed, which will allow us to compare what we know from landscape and archaeological finds and look for other areas of investigation the texts might reveal.
Plato’s most famous line from ‘Timaeus’, a dialogue between Critias and Socrates, where ‘Critias’ tells a story he learned through his family about the Greek statesman ‘Solon’ whilst he was studying with the most scholarly of Egyptian priests during a visit to Sais in Egypt in about 590 BCE. The priests claimed to have access to secret records about a lost civilisation called ‘Atlantis’, which only they were allowed to read, for it was written on the pillars within their most sacred temple. Now Sais was one of the oldest cities in the old kingdom and the city’s patron goddess was ‘Neith’, whose cult is attested as early as the 1st Dynasty, ca. 3100- 3050 BCE.
The Greeks, such as Herodotus, Plato and Diodorus Siculus, identified her with Athena and hence postulated a primordial link to Athens. Diodorus recounts that Athena built Sais ‘before’ the ‘deluge’ that supposedly destroyed Athens and Atlantis. While all Greek cities were destroyed during that cataclysm, the Egyptian cities including Sais survived.
As we can see from this connection, the deluge has incredible importance to ancient civilisations, clearly indicating that any prehistoric civilisation that wanted to ‘stay alive’ would possibly build boats, not for some, but for everyone. Sadly, the city of Sais has been recently destroyed by farmers who used the house and temple mud bricks as free fertiliser for the fields – to this date the temple and its writings have never been found.
The most famous line from Plato’s dialogue is:
“in front of the mouth which you Greeks say ‘the pillars of Hercules’ there lay an island which is much larger than Libya and Asia together” translated by W.R.M. Lamb 1925 or
“in front of the straits which are by you called the pillars of Hercules; the island was bigger than Libya and Asia together” B. Jowett 1871
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| Atlantis - Portrayed as a gigantic Island |
This single sentence has caused no end of debate about the location of Atlantis. Some suggest that ‘the pillars’ can refer to water flows, thus allowing the speculation (which is current) that Atlantis is a Greek Island. Others suggest (including myself) that the ‘pillars of Hercules’ is the mouth of the Mediterranean between Morocco and Spain. Now this is a case of translation and interpretation, the word ‘mouth’ is sometime called ‘strait’, in other quotations Plato refers to the Mediterranean Sea as “within the straits of Hercules”.
According to some Roman sources, while on his way to the island of ‘Erytheia’ Hercules had to cross the mountain that was once Atlas (the Atlas Mountains are in Northern Africa overlooking the Mediterranean). Instead of climbing the great mountain, Hercules used his superhuman strength to smash through it. By doing so, he connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea and formed the Straits of Gibraltar.
But the best evidence is in the name itself ‘Atlantis’ for Herodotus (an ancient Greek historian, 484 BCE – 425 BCE) in a time before Plato’s writings calls the Sea outside the Pillars of Hercules the ‘Atlantis Sea’ (Cyrus, 557-530 BCE: Book 1). Moreover, even today we call it the Atlantic Ocean and in history c’s and s’s are commonly transposed.
So we are left with a clear understanding that Atlantis was in the Atlantic Ocean, but then come the next problem with this description “the island was bigger than Libya and Asia together” this is where most Atlantis claims fall flat. Libya was well known in Plato’s time as a big country as it bordered the Mediterranean, but the reference to Asia cannot be the Asia we know as it was unknown to the old world and the Greeks, therefore the Asia that Plato was referring to is now called Asia Minor.
‘Asia Minor (from Greek: Μικρὰ Ἀσία, Mikrá Asía, small Asia) is a geographical location at the westernmost protrusion of Asia, also called Anatolia, and corresponds to the western two thirds of the Asian part of Turkey. It is a peninsula bounded by the Black Sea to the north, Georgia to the north-east, the Armenian Highland to the east, Mesopotamia to the south-east, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and the Aegean Sea to the west.’
The size of this ‘island’ is consequently a major problem for historians to date, as the only two island possibilities are the Caribbean in America or a continent that was once in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that has disappeared without trace. Well the islands of the Caribbean are far too small and the trek across the middle of the Atlantic Ocean without landmass to guide the ships eleven thousand years ago would be too daunting to be truly feasible with ‘Bronze Age technology’ as Plato suggests.
This is why the search has failed to date and all various ‘silly’ hypotheses based on the Mediterranean make news headlines. If we look again at this passage and the exact wording of Atlantis we find something most researchers have overlooked in the translation and it’s the word ‘island’, the original Greek word is ‘nesos’ which can mean either island or peninsula.
If we are looking for a ‘Peninsula’ (which is a piece of land that is bordered by water on three sides but connected to mainland.) that is outside the Mediterranean, then there are only two possibilities - Africa or Europe. These are both outside the Pillars of Hercules and can be easily navigated by sticking to the shorelines. The African continent has shown no signs of any peninsula on its Atlantic side that has disappeared in the past 10,000 years - but Europe has!
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| Europe 14000 BCE a large peninsula in the Atlantic Ocean (NEP) |
If we look at a map of Europe at the end of the Ice Age, we notice that the water levels were about 160m lower than today, so much lower that extra coastlines are added to both Spain and France. But when we look at the British Isles we notice Britain has completely vanished.
It has been replace a massive new land mass protruding into the Atlantic Ocean, for the English Channel, Irish Sea and the North Sea as we know them today has been replaced by a single land mass. Moreover, the land to the west of Ireland and North West from Scotland would have also been reclaimed from the sea.
This peninsula (which includes to the North East Norway, Sweden and Finland, to the east Denmark and the Baltic Sea) creates a continent about the same size of Libya and Asia Minor, which correlates to Plato’s writings.
We know from our history that the rising of sea waters over the last 10,000 years has caused flooding that created the island nation we know today. But, do the writings contain any other information which will allow us to confirm this peninsula is the land mass Critias was talking about?
Plato adds -
“yonder (beyond the pillars of Hercules) is a real Ocean, and the land surrounding it may most rightly be called, in the fullest and truest sense, a continent”
in this sentence the ‘island’ is turned into a ‘continent’ so this proves that the translation of ‘nesos’ is peninsula not island, and in today’s terms, we are looking at a land mass that incorporates the British Isles, Scandinavia and the Northern European countries of France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Poland, Netherlands, Denmark, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Baltic, North and Irish seas, that were at time land masses, which I call the North European Peninsula (NEP).
Therefore, do the other descriptions of Plato’s Atlantis match this new continent?
Where he does give us an indication of some other identification features for this lost continent is -
“and it is possible for the travellers of that time to cross from it to the other islands and from the islands to the whole of the continent”.
If NEP is correct, this could mean either one of two different continents. For about 2,000 years (between 10,000 BCE and 8,000 BCE) you could travel from the North West end of the NEP to the Faroe islands which were about five times larger than the islands we know today (due to the drop in sea levels) and then a short hop west to Iceland, which again, for the same reasons, was twice as wide as today, then finally over the short distance to Greenland and then America.
The coastal route would then allow you access to the ‘New World’ down the entire east side of America. The most interesting and controversial aspect, is that the Atlanteans would have discovered America 11,000 years before Columbus, which may seem far fetched but it will answer an evolutionary mystery that has confused geneticists and anthropologists for many years. This mystery involves the spread of the A- blood group in Northern American Indians and ancient skeletons that have European features and stone tool kits.
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| Map of the Common 'O' blood group - 'A' was introduced 10,000 years ago in North America |
Other illustrations of Atlantis, in Plato’s writings, can now be compared for further comparison such as the famous plain of Atlantis. For -
“The whole country was said by him to be very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea, but the country immediately about and surrounding the city was a level plain, itself surrounded by mountains which descended towards the sea; it was smooth and even, and of an oblong shape, extending in one direction three thousand stadia, but across the centre inland it was two thousand stadia.”
So a level oblong shaped plain that was surrounded by mountains which were by the sea and the plain which measured about 250 miles by 350 miles. The current North Sea (Doggerland) would comfortably incorporate a flat plain of that size and hence it sinking below the rising sea levels, for it measures 450 miles by 1200 miles. There are mountains in the North in both Scotland and Norway which ‘descended towards the sea’ not even taking into account the mountains of Doggerland in the north which is now the ‘Viking’ and ‘Berger’ sand banks between Shetland and Norway.
Another indication that we are talking about a peninsula or part of a continent is the line ’lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea’ if this was an island would not ALL sides be on the side of the sea? Our newly discovered Atlantis has one side by the sea where the city and plain lays and that is in the north, the area we know now as Scotland, Shetland, Orkney across to Norway, where it always rains.
He continues -
“This part of the peninsula looked towards the south, and was sheltered from the north. The surrounding mountains were celebrated for their number and size and beauty, far beyond any which still exist, having in them also many wealthy villages of country folk, and rivers, and lakes, and meadows supplying food enough for every animal, wild or tame, and much wood of various sorts, abundant for each and every kind of work.”
Modern sonar readings of the North Sea floor has shown this land of ‘rivers and lakes and meadows’ and with the mountains in the north the great plain would naturally face south.
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| Doggerland with its vast plains and hills |
see part II
USOs: Unidentified Submersible Objects
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