Link to Graham Hancock, Underword: Flooded kingdoms of the ice age (episode 1) documentary
Documentary Description
17,000 years ago and 7000 years ago, at the end
of the last Ice Age, terrible things happened to the world our ancestors
lived in. Great ice caps over northern Europe and north America melted
down, huge floods ripped across the earth, sea-level rose by more than
100 metres, and about 25 million square kilometres of formerly habitable
lands were swallowed up by the waves.
Marine archaeology has been possible as a scholarly discipline for about
50 years - since the introduction of scuba. In that time, according to
Nick Flemming, the doyen of British marine archaeology, only 500
submerged sites have been found worldwide containing the remains of any
form of man-made structure or of lithic artefacts. Of these sites only
100 - that's 100 in the whole world! - are more than 3000 years old.
This is not because of a shortage of potential sites. It is at least
partly because a large share of the limited funds available for marine
archaeology goes into the discovery and excavation of shipwrecks. This
leaves a shortage of diving archaeologists interested in underwater
structures and a shortage of money to pay for the extremely expensive
business of searching - possibly fruitlessly - for very ancient, eroded,
silt-covered ruins at great depths under water. Moreover, with the
recent exception of Bob Ballard's survey of the Black Sea for the
National Geographic Society, marine archaeology has simply not concerned
itself with the possibility that the post-glacial floods might in any
way be connected to the problem of the rise of civilisations.
