“Lost Island of Atlantis” keeps the secrets of one of the greatest puzzles of anthropology

27,000 years ago, when the planet came down to the last ice age, the polar hubcaps grew and the level of the sea came down, exposing the vast territory of Super Continent Sahul for the first time in 100,000 years – and the lost landscapes where they could have livedhalf a million people.

In the works of Plato, Greek philosopher who lived about 2,400 years ago, was said that the island of Atlantis It had been swallowed by the Atlantic Ocean, after the arrogance of its people irritated the gods.

Although Atlantis was fictionalthe idea that entire civilizations may disappear under the waves have intrigued us during millennia.

Now, innovative technologies are revealing real locations all over the world that our ancestors were forced to abandon before being swallowed by the oceans.

One of these ‘Atlantis’ Lost was found northern Australia during a conducted by investigators at Griffith University and published in January 2024 on Quaternary Science Reviews.

At the height of the last ice age, about 21,000 years ago, the continent of Australia was about 20 % higher than it is today. With more water retained in the cloaks of ice and glaciers, Sea levels were about 120 m lower.

This lower level of sea waters left exposed 2,000,000 km² additional land, which connected Australia to New Guinea in the North and Tasmania in the south, creating one.

Sahul’s northwest platform was a Wide terrestrial mass which covered 400,000 km² (154,000 square miles)-just over 1.5 times the size of the UK-and was linked to the current Kimberley region in northern Western Australia, and the Arnhem Land region in northern Australia.

Many archaeologists have argued that these old landscapes were unproductive environments and were not widely used by the early Aboriginal peoples. But Recent studies are challenging this assumption long maintained.

One of these cases is the 2024 study, which concluded that the vast extension of territory exposed during the ice age for humans.

The now submerged region can also keep the secrets of one of the largest Puzzle of Anthropology.

Situated next to some of the older archaeological sites known in Australia, the northwest platform of Sahul has long been recognized as a likely input point for the first people who arrived on the continent about 65,000 years ago.

Now, a race to discover the hidden treasures of this land similar to Atlantis, Before they are destroyed forever.

Lost landscapes, submerged civilizations

About 27,000 years ago, when the planet went down to the last ice age, the polar hubcaps grew and the level of the sea descended, exposing the low landscapes of the northwest of Sahul platform for the first time in 100,000 years.

“Archaeologists can only speculate about the nature of the landscapes submerged people traveled before the end of the last ice age, and the size of their populations, ”he says Love Normanresearcher at the Max Planck Institute of Geoantropology and the first author of the study, to.

Throughout the study, researchers combined Sonar data with computational modeling to examine the northwest platform with unprecedented detail.

The team overlaps past sea levels estimates in existing high resolution maps from the ocean bottom to visualize how the region would have been There are tens of thousands of years.

The analysis revealed a rich and varied landscape of rivers, lakes, valleys and paradors. “See these submerged landscapes and imagine the people who wandered for them during the last ice age burned my imagination“Says Norman.

The region also had a large inner sea, called Mar Malitawhich covered an area of ​​over 18,000 km² (7,000 square miles).

Norman and colleagues used computational modeling to estimate how productive these landscapes would have been and How many people could have lived in placebetween 71,000 and 15,000 years ago.

Found that at the height of the last ice age, when the entire northwestern platform was dry land, the region had the ability to support a population of More than 500,000 people.

On several remaining islands, scattered along what was once the coast of Sahul, archaeological evidence support the theory that the Northwest platform was regularly used by aboriginal societies.

The team’s population estimates are also in line with one of genetic data from indigenous peoples living on the Tiwi Islands, which are east of the northwest platform of Sahul, published in 2023 in the magazine Nature.

This study found evidence of a large population On the islands 20,000 years ago, followed by a population decline at the end of the last ice age.

How were people’s lives who lived in this now submerged landscape? “This is really the fundamental issue,” he says Sean Ulmresearcher at James Cook University, specializing in coastal and underwater archeology.

“There is extraordinary social diversity, cultural and technological among contemporary and recent aboriginal societies. We have to assume that this was also the case in the past, ”he says.

“What we know is that these societies that lived on the continental platforms emerged from Australia They traveled long distances from and to the coastand were linked to societies far from the interior through commercial networks, ”concludes Ulm.