Between 17,000 and 7,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, something terrible happened to the world our ancestors lived in. The large ice sheets over northern Europe and North America melted, and the huge sea level rose by more than 100 meters. About 25 million square kilometers of originally habitable land were swallowed by waves.
Marine archaeology has been around as a scientific discipline for about 50 years – since the advent of diving. During that time, according to Nick Flemming, the patriarch of British marine archaeology, only 500 underwater sites containing any form of man-made structure or stone tool remains have been discovered worldwide. There are only 100 of these sites – only 100 in the world! – Over 3000 years old.
This is not for lack of potential locations. This is at least in part because a significant portion of the limited funds available for marine archeology is devoted to discovering and excavating shipwrecks. This has resulted in a dearth of diving archaeologists interested in underwater structures, and without the funds to pay extremely expensive – and possibly unsuccessful – searches for very old, eroded, silt-covered remains at depth. Moreover, with the exception of Bob Ballard’s Black Sea survey for the National Geographic Society, marine archeology simply does not address the possibility that post-glacial floods have any relationship to the rise of civilization.
