[1] Emacs-Time-stamp: "2007-08-23 21:47:30" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2007.08.23) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ top __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ [BEGIN] Alexander Kondratov TIU: 099-1.jpg 099-2.jpg TRRBB __TITLE__ The Riddles of Three Oceans __TEXTFILE_BORN__ 2007-08-23T20:22:11-0700 __TRANSMARKUP__ "Y. Sverdlov" 099-3.jpg

Progress Publishers. Moscow

[2]

Translated from the Russian by LEONARD STOKLITSKY

Designed by VICTOR KOROLKOV

Scientific editors and consultants of the Russian edition:
G. S. GANESHIN, D. Sc. (Geology- Mineralogy)
R. F. ITS, D. Sc. (History)
0. K. LEONTYEV, D. Sc.
(Geography)
V. V. SHEVOROSHKIN,
D. Sc. (Philology)
N. F. ZHIROV, D. (Chemistry)
Sc.

__COPYRIGHT__ First printing 1974
© Translation into English. Progress Publishers 1974
Printed in the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics 20901--495 77--74 014(01)-74 [3] CONTENTS KOllEWORIJ-5 PltOLOGUE---7 Part One. THE PACIFIC OCEAN-23 Discovery.---The Mystery of Easter Island.---Remains of the Pacific Continent.---When Did This Happen?---Professor Zubov's Theory.---Pacific Floor Theories.---The Darwin Rise.---Sunken Islands of the Pacific.-Bering Land.---Andes Land and the Secret of Tiahuanaco.---From the Andes to Easter Island.---Kalnga Nulnui, or "Enormous] Land".---A Polynesian Continent?---A Hawaiian Continent?---Guyot Land? Micronesia Land?---The Sinking Coast of the Pacific.---Australia and Tasmania Land.---Melanesia Land, Part Two. TIIK INDIAN OCEAN---I 19 Kiddles of the Equatorial Race.---Gondwanaland and Lemuria.--- The Cradle of Homo Sapiens.---Tamalaham, Nawalam and South Madura.---The Sumerians and the Ubaids.---- MesopotamiaBahrein-India.---The Land Known as Elam.---The "Dravidian Problem".---Ships from the Land of Melukha.---Search for the "Sumerian Paradise".---Egypt: Riddles That Outdate the Sphinx.---Turkmcnistan-Sumer-Lemuria.---Islands in the Indian Ocean.---The Least Studied Ocean.---The Fall of MohenJo-Daro.--- Deities of the Proto-Indians.---The Secrets of Tantra.---From the Buryat Area to Australia.---Pages fiom "Chronicles on Rock".--- Did Antarctica Drift Away? Part Three. THE ATLANTIC OCEAN-----201 Legendary Islands.---The Bed of the Atlantic.---Thule, Dunejar Buss and Mayda.---In the Southern Part of the North Sea.---. The Cassiterides or "Tin Islands".---Gadir and Tartessos.--- Island Groups.---Atlantophiles and Atlantophobes.---The Mediterranean and Tyrrhenia.---Tritonia? Aegean Continent? Bosphoria?---Prom Pontus to the Antilles. EPILOGUE [4] ~ [5] __ALPHA_LVL1__ FOREWORD

One of the most difficult problems faced by the scientific investigator, no matter what his particular field, is that of elucidating the origins of things and the lines along which they have developed to reach their present state. These are usually shrouded in the mists of time. When it comes to a study of man and human society, probably the most complicated subject in the whole Universe, the problems that arise are staggering.

We know that man appeared on earth more than a million years ago, but we still do not know exactly where. The human race multiplied and spread over the continents. As new regions were settled and developed, tribes and peoples took shape, civilisations arose and declined. More often than not, these processes remain a mystery to scholars. Written records throw light only on minute periods of history, while information relating to the preceding periods is indirect, fragmentary and often hazy. Here, even myths and legends can help because many have some foundation in fact. Scholars can sometimes obtain valid information by comparing the languages of different peoples and also by analysing place-names. The historian's most reliable helper is archeology, which deals with traces of material culture, in other words, with highly objective evidence. Until now, most of the contributions to our knowledge of ancient peoples and civilisations have been made by ``land'' archeology. Today, more and more traces of man are being discovered under water as well. Archeologists discover artifacts, sunken ships and even ruins of settlements and cities as much as two kilometres below the surface.

Although finds made at the bottom of lakes or coastal waters are usually supplementary to those made on land nearby, scholars have gradually outlined a range of problems in which underwater archeology can play an independent role, moreover, a decisive role. For instance, in explaining how it is that habitats of the equatorial race (tropical Africa and A ustralia, say) are separated by the expanses of the 6 Indian Ocean. Or the similarity between ancient monumental structures found in places so far apart as Easier Island and Pitcairn Island. The scholar cannot help assuming thai land bridges, in the form of chains of islands or stretches of dry land, once linked these widely scattered places but then sank below the waves.

Here archeology cones into close contact with geology: the former combs the ocean floor for artifacts and dates them; the latter seeks evidence of subsidences of the earth s crust and establishes in which periods of geological time they occurred. When the findings of the two sciences agree, highly reliable conclusions can be drawn. In this book Alexander Kondratov takes a look at some of the blank spaces in mans knowledge that can be filled in by further evidence obtained from underwater archeology. In the Pacific Ocean these include such riddles as the culture of Easter Island, the origin of the American Indians, the original homeland of the Polynesians and the peopling of Australia. In the Indian Ocean one of the mysteries is how the ancient Dravidian civilisation spread. Among the secrets of the Atlantic are the warm and cold legendary islands of St. Brendan, Antilia and Thule, the extinct tribes of the Canary Islands, and A tlantis, a fascinating mystery that has given rise to a voluminous body of literature.

The author sets forth the main hypotheses that have been advanced to solve these riddles and analyses them from the standpoints of ethnography, linguistics, geology and other sciences. But he does not try to impose any of the hypotheses on the reader. The conclusions he draws are extremely cautious, and in cases where there is insufficient data the question is left open.

This highly interesting book is intended for the general reader. Indeed, no educated person can fail to take an interest in problems that have a direct bearing on the human race.

Academician S. Kalesnik

[7] __ALPHA_LVL1__ PROLOGUE

Man's discovery of the world can be divided into three main stages. The first relates to prehistoric times, when primitive tribes were spreading across the globe. The second is the Age of Great Geographical Discoveries, from the 15th to the 18th centuries, when Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and Russian seafarers and travellers mapped new countries, seas, islands, mountain ranges and deserts. The third covers the 19th and 20th centuries, the Age of Great Historical Discoveries.

Until the 19th century the only written records which European historians and philosophers had on early history were the Bible and the works of the historians of antiquity. But after the Egyptian hieroglyphic and Mesopotamian cuneiform scripts were deciphered the stream of source material swelled into a flood. The scholar of today has literally no time to read everything that has come down to us. In the Middle Ages the Bible was accepted without question. The sceptical 18th century regarded biblical accounts as fairy-tales. Today, Orientalists consider the sacred book of Christianity and Judaism a magnificent historical document---although requiring a special approach. Every proper name, geographical name, event and date in the Bible has to be deciphered, as it were, since actual happenings, personages, peoples and cities are refracted through a "prism of myths" enveloped in fantasy or poetry.

The creativity and mythopoetic gifts of Judean preachers, prophets and poets over many centuries, beginning with the 13th century B.C., went into the making of the Bible. The Bible absorbed myths and legends of the more ancient culture of Mesopotamia, reflected actual events of that 8 period in the Middle East, and, as all sacred writings should, presented a universal picture of the world from its inception to its imminent end.

The ``deciphering'' of biblical evidence has helped scholars to establish many historical events. Other sacred literature provides equally valuable source material. (Like the Bible this literature has to be painstakingly ``deciphered''.) Take, for example, the Veda, the sacred books of the Hindus, particularly the Rig-Veda, the oldest, longest and most interesting of the books; the A vesta, the sacred book of the Parsic fire worshippers; the Popol Vuh, or Book of the Peoples of the Quiche; and the many myths, legends, and fairytales of the most diverse peoples. If we make allowances for the "prism of myths" through which actual events were refracted, all this can be a splendid record that helps us to pierce the veil of time.

In the course of their work on ancient writings and sacred books, philologists came into contact with a great many languages. Reading the RigVeda and Avesta, they discovered that ancient Hindu and Persian words were astonishingly similar to words in the Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Lithuanian, Russian and other languages, in short almost all European languages, including Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic. The similarity of words and roots was not accidental. It showed the ancient kinship of the languages that became known as the Indo-European family. The discovery laid the foundation of a new science, historical and comparative linguistics.

Furthermore, this discovery proved just as important to the science of history. It showed that not only texts but language itself, its grammar and, particularly, vocabulary, can be an 9 excellent historical source, moreover, a source that has not been ``edited'' by rulers, priests, officials or scribes.

Language data enable the historian to look far back to periods when written language did not yet exist and which have not left any other material evidence. There are cases when the words of a language can take the place of the archeologist's spade and the annals of ancient chroniclers.

Where was the birthplace of the Indo-- European languages, and therefore of the tribes that spoke a single "parent Indo-European language" (or cognate dialects, as many scholars believe)? What was their cultural level? What were their occupations? Indo-European unity broke up long before writing was invented. Archeology, too, is still powerless to help. None of the cultures found on the vast expanses of Eurasia can be authentically linked to the Indo-Europeans. All that is left are linguistic data. By comparing words of the different Indo-European languages and searching for the oldest stratum of a common vocabulary, philologists have been able to tell historians a great deal.

For instance, "language archeology" has revealed that while the Indo-Europeans knew the rudiments of agriculture the similarity in the names of domestic animals, including differentiated names---separate names for cow, calf, sheep, lamb, horse, colt and so on---shows that their chief occupation was cattle-raising.

The discovery of this fact enabled scholars to narrow considerably the search for the original Indo-European homeland. It could not be the forests of Lithuania or the island of Ireland, as some scholars had supposed. The plains bordering on the Black Sea or the plains in Central 10 Asia appeared to be a more natural place. The latest findings in linguistics tell us that the most likely area is Asia Minor. For it has been found that some Caucasian languages and the Semitic languages have words in common that could not have been borrowed, since they belong to the basic vocabulary. This shows an underlying kinship of the above languages, and also that the most suitable territory for their ``coexistence'' was Asia Minor.

Since languages change it is obvious that the earlier the stage at which the historian finds a language the more valuable the information he can obtain from it. Discovery of the secret of ancient scripts has enabled scholars to study more than thirty centuries of the Greek language. (It was inscribed on clay tablets one thousand years before Homer!) The history of the Egyptian and the Akkadian languages covers an equally long span. Whole branches of Indo-European languages that have vanished from the face of the earth have been brought to light, as have new families of languages like the Hurri Urartic language that was spoken in Mitanni and Urartu, great kingdoms of the ancient East.

The historian widely uses ancient texts and the data provided by the vocabularies of cognate languages. But if he has neither texts nor vocabularies he can turn to toponymy, a science that combines history with linguistics and geography, for help. The names of cities, settlements, mountains and, particularly, rivers endure after countries, peoples and languages have vanished. No wonder they are sometimes called "history on the surface of the map''. The names of the rivers Don, Dnieper, Danube, Dniester and Donets tell us that Scythians once lived on the territory of Southern 11 Europe and along the Black Sea, for the Scythian word ``don'' means ``water'' or ``river''.

Toponymy is helping modern scholars to make new discoveries in such thoroughly studied fields as the history of the ancient world. They have found, for example, that Greece and the islands of the Aegean Sea were once inhabited by peoples (or one people) who spoke a language which has nothing in common with the Indo-European languages and has been tentatively named ``Aegean''. Then the Hittites and other kindred peoples penetrated into the Aegean area from the east. Next, or perhaps at the same time, from the north came the Pelasgians, whose language was cognate with the now vanished Thracian language,the native tongue of the famous Spartacus. The first Greeks appeared in the Aegean area around 2000 B.C. An analysis of geographical names has enabled scholars to distinguish four strata belonging to four different cultures and peoples: the Aegean, Hittite, Pelasgian and Greek.

These strata emerge not only from an analysis of place-names, of course. But toponymy helps historians to determine to which ethnos inhabitants of the Aegean area belonged. The excavations carried on in Greece and the Aegean Islands through the centuries have brought to light thousands of material records left by their early inhabitants.

Excavations there began in antiquity, when collecting became a passionate hobby of wealthy men of the Hellenic kingdoms and the Roman empire. Actually, it was not excavation as we understand the word. It was sooner plunder of ancient Greek temples, tombs and burial vaults. In the Middle Ages all material records of antiquity were considered ``pagan'' and were 12 barbarously destroyed. But the Renaissance brought with it a remarkable revival of interest in classic culture, and excavation started again. Unfortunately, the chief purpose was to find statues, basreliefs and other works of art, or at any rate, coins and inscriptions. Nothing else interested collectors and connoisseurs of antiquity.

Early in the 18th century the ruins of the Roman town of Herculaneum, which had been buried by an eruption of Ml Vesuvius, were uncovered. Pompeii, a cily buried by the same eruption, was discovered in the middle of the same century. By forcing scholars to pay careful attention to every detail, to each seemingly insignificant object, the excavation of these lowns, which wenl on for many years, stimulated the establishment of modern melhods of archeological excavalion. In Ihe second half of the 18th century Eduard Winkelmann, a brilliant authority on the culture of antiquity, was able to link up passages from ancient writings with works of art unearthed by archeologists. He showed that the history of art styles was inseparably connected with the overall cultural development of the lands of classical antiquity. (That is why Winkelmann is sometimes called both "the father of archeology" and "the father of the history of art".)

In the second half of the 19th century archeologists carried out a series of excavations on the lerrilory of ancienl Greece and ``hellenised'' Asia Minor; they restored Olympia, sacred site of the ancient Olympic games, where they discovered 130 marble statues and bas-reliefs, 1,000 inscriptions, 6,000 coins, 13,000 bronze objects, and many thousands of terra-cotta objects. Digging went on at Alhens and Delphi. Pergamum yielded its famous altar. At Halicarnassus they found one 13 of the seven wonders of the world, the monumental tomb of King Mausolns of Garia.

While archeologists wereworkingwithphilologists and historians to reconstruct the world of classical antiquity, Jleinrich Schliemann, enthusiastic archeological amaleur and a dedicated admirer of Homer, discovered an entirely new culture, one that preceded classical antiquity by many centuries.

Monuments of that civilisation are still being found. Each new archeological expedition produces unexpected results, forcing us to view Aegean history from a new angle. Yet this appeared to be the best studied area. So it is natural that historians and archeologists could makeslill moreunexpected discoveries elsewhere.

The Egyptian pyramids were known to writers of anliquily as "the world's first wonder''. After the brilliant French scholar Francois Champollion found the key to the mysterious hieroglyphics of the land of the pyramids (1822), Egyptology was born. This new science resurrected a unique, ancient and majeslic civilisation.

All that scholars of previous centuries knew about Babylon, "mother of cities'', and Assyria, the ``lions'den'', had come from the embellished accounts of Herodotus, the still more fantastic composition of the Babylonian priest Berossus, and stories from the Bible, distinguished by equally far-fetched flights of the imagination. Then archeologists started digging in the Holy Lands, as they are called,and to mankind's astonishment, brought to light the ruins of lall lemples and big palaces, Ihe most famous of them being the Tower of Babylon. Thousands of cuneiform tablets were carefully studied, and when they were finally deciphered a new science, Assyriology, which 14 is the study of the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, came into being. Assyriology led to Sumerology after it was^ found that Babylon and Assyria had been preceded by the civilisation of the Sumerians, who spoke a language of their own and used a written language of drawings that later developed into the Mesopotamian cuneiform.

Early in the 20th century it became clear that a third great civilisation, the Hittite, had existed in the ancient East along with Egypt and Mesopotamia. During World War I the eminent Czech scholar Bedrich Hrozny finally deciphered the mysterious language of the Hittites. It proved to be an Indo-European language, related to Greek, Russian and other tongues. This gave rise to still another science, Hittology.

In the nineteen twenties and thirties British and Indian archeologists discovered a completely unknown culture to which they gave the name ``proto-Indian''. It seems that the bellicose nomad Aryan tribes, mentioned in the Rig-Veda, that invaded the Indian subcontinent did not enter a wild country. On the contrary, they found the proto-Indian civilisation, from which they borrowed the basic elements of the great culture that flourished in ancient India.

In the 19th century the American traveller John Stephens intrigued the world with his accounts of amazing sculptures and temples lost in the jungles of Central America. Since the last century archeologists have found dozens of ancient cities there. They have dug up hundreds of statues, temples and steles with calendric and hieroglyphic inscriptions. Spanish chroniclers recorded how Aztec cities in the valley of Mexico and cities of the Mayan tribes on the peninsula of Yucatan were plundered and wrecked. Now we know that 15 the Aztecs and the Yucatan Mayas were the heirs of earlier and still higher civilisations that existed in Central America. And not only in Central America. Numerous works of art, written records, temples and statues which the Indians created hundreds of years before Europeans reached the New World have been found in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. All these cultures come within the province of the science of Americanology.

Another new science, Africanology, is resurrecting the ancient and medieval cultures of Africa. The magnificent frescoes of Tassili and the less well known cave paintings at Fezzan and in Tanganyika and South Africa; the amazing complex of buildings at Zimbabwe, where King Solomon's mines were once sought, and the equally magnificent Inyangeni mountain complex whose construction involved as much labour as the Egyptian pyramids; the bronze masterpieces of Benin; the mysterious ruins on the shores of East Africa and the no less mysterious drawings of South Africa; the great Axumite kingdom in Ethiopia and the still greater and more ancient Meriotic kingdom---all these are merely separate pages in the long history of the Black Continent.

Until the middle of this century Australia and Oceania remained terrae incognitae to archeologists; chance finds by geologists, gold prospectors and farmers do not count. Today these remote corners of the globe are beginning to attract the attention of archeologists. Excavations in Australia show that the continent was settled many thousands of years earlier than had been believed. Digs on the Fiji Islands and in Micronesia, on the Hawaiian and Marquesas islands, on Easter Island and in New Zealand are only the initial steps in another young science studying Oceania.

16

Ruins of vanished cities and traces of dead civilisations are very often found in places that are now either deserts or jungles. The Mayan culture, one of the highest pre-Columbian civilisations in the New World, was discovered by John Stephens after a long and arduous search in the nearly impassable jungles of Central America. The "dead city" or Kara Hoto, capital of the once powerful Tangut kingdom, was found by the Russian traveller Ivan Kozlov after exhausting treks across the barren sands of the Gobi Desert.

Today, aerial photography pinpoints sites of ancient buildings and towns. The ruins of ancient Khwarizm, almost completely buried in the sand, were photographed from the air before digging started..The photographs helped Soviet archeologists to make careful and thorough excavation plans that led to the discovery of the unique ancient civilisation of Khwarizm.

The sciences of criminology, nuclear physics, cybernetics, genetics and chemistry are helping archeology more and more. Egyptian scholars are now trying to make gigantic X-ray pictures of the great pyramids of Khefren and Cheops in the hope of finding secret bricked-up chambers and premises that might be hidden behind the thick slabs of stone.

A full account of the present-day methods used in archeology, a science which with the help of other disciplines is becoming an exact science, would take hundreds of pages. In this book I shall dwell on only one aspect of modern archeology, the connection between the discovery of " submarine outer space" and the Great Historical Discovery of our globe, in which archeologists, linguists, ethnographers and anthropologists are taking part. At the junction of these two great 17 discoveries a new science, underwater archeology, has come into being.

With the invention of the aqualung archeologists were able to start exploration and excavation of the sea bottom. The first steps in underwater archeology were made, however, long before the aqualung was invented. Like ``land'' archeology, underwater archeology originated in Greece, or rather, off the coast of Greece.

This was in the year 1802, when Greek divers salvaged cases filled with priceless friezes of the Parthenon from the Mentor, a ship which was wrecked near the island of Antikythera. Nearly a century later, at the end of 1900, sponge-divers noticed the hand of a statue sticking out of the silt not far from the Mentor shipwreck. They went down again and again, discovering a whole cemetery of works of ancient art. Next, the Greek government outfitted an expedition to work there at a depth of 60 metres between November 1900 and September 1901. This was the world's first underwater archeological expedition.

Archeologists conducted their next big underwater exploration near the Tunisian port of Mahdia in 1907. Here, by chance, they found the wreck of an ancient ship carrying a cargo of marble columns, bronze and marble statues, clay vessels and slabs of marble. Salvaging proceeded for five seasons until 1913. Magnificent sculptures and a large quantity of handicraft wares were raised from the bottom of the sea.

Underwater archeological exploration was also conducted in the period between the two world wars, in the twenties and thirties. But large-scale work did not begin until after the aqualung was invented in 1943. Skin divers have found dozens of ships in the Mediterranean and have salvaged __PRINTERS_P_17_COMMENT__ 2---0200 18 a vast number of ancient amphoras, statues, household articles and marble slabs and columns.

This branch of archeology does not limit itself to finding and studying wrecked ships. Archeologists have also excavated sunken settlements, and not only settlements. American archeologist Edward Herbert Thompson conducted one of the first underwater explorations in 1904 when he set out to find Mayan treasure lying at the bottom of a sacred well in the ancient city of GhichenItza. His work was continued in 1961 by a large and excellently-equipped expedition including archeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico, skin divers from a Mexican water sports club, and diving experts from the United States.

Using an ordinary dredging shovel, Thompson salvaged thousands of the most diverse objects, from priceless gold discs depicting battles and ritual scenes to the bones of unfortunate sacrificial victims thrown into the sacred well. In 1961 a suction pipe 25 centimetres in diameter was used to suck up water from the well, and silt and small objects together with it. The first day's finds included potsherds and chunks of fragrant yellow resin which the ancient Mayas used in their rituals.

There was work for skin divers too. They explored depths which the dredge pump could not reach. Their efforts were generously rewarded with a clay bowl and the figure of an idol made of pure rubber. In four months of intensive, painstaking work Mexican archeologists found a tremendous number of all kinds of articles made not only by the Mayas but also by Indians who inhabited Central Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama and the other regions of Central America.

19

This indicates that the Mayas traded extensively with other Indian tribes and peoples. Finds salvaged from the bottom of the sacred well have helped to throw light on the history of the city of Chichen-Itza. Sacrifices to ancient gods continued to be made there even after the city was abandoned. The richest archeological yields date back to the time when the city was ruled by the belligerent Toltec-Aztec conquerors from Central Mexico, between the 10th and 13th centuries A.D.

Mexican underwater archeologists believe that neither Thompson nor their own multipurpose expedition have exhausted the treasures of the sacred-well. But scholars are interested in more than the treasures lying at the bottom of the well. They feel that it is far more important to establish the sequence of the strata. The objects found in the well, brought there from all over Central America,! will help archeologists to determine the age of the Central American cultures. Such stratigraphy will have to be left for future study, after at least part of the well has been drained and more precise and reliable tools than a dredging pump are used.

Besides comparing the strata in a single well, archeologists may in future be able to conduct strata comparison on a broader scale. The results of the underwater excavations of sacred wells in Central America have already made a valuable contribution to the young science of Americanology.

In Guatemala, statues of Mayan gods and colourfully decorated pottery have been found at the bottom of Lake Amatitlan.

Interesting discoveries await underwater archeologists in Lake Guatavita, Colombia, which lies __PRINTERS_P_19_COMMENT__ 2* 20 in the crater of an extinct volcano. Legend has it that subjects of the fabulous El Dorado, the "king of gold'', flung precious gifts into this lake. The future will show whether there is any truth in the legend. Meanwhile, skin divers are reconnoitering lakes in the Old World, including the Soviet Union, as well as the New World.

Not long ago the science department of the Moscow newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta organised an expedition to search for Kitezh, a city supposed to have sunk to the bottom of Lake Svetoyar. Nothing has been found there so far. But at other lakes in the Soviet Union archeologists have discovered many interesting things, including the ruins of a settlement of the second century A.D. at the bottom of Lake Paleostomi, near Poti, in the Georgian Bepublic.

Ruins of ancient settlements have been discovered in Lake Issyk Kul high in the mountains of the Kirghiz Republic. Chichu Gen, the capital of the Usuni, contemporaries and rivals of the warlike Huns, and cities mentioned by Marco Polo may lie at the bottom of this lake. The waters of Lake Sevan, in the Armenian Republic, concealed the ruins of one of the oldest cities on the territory of the Soviet Union. It was built by Urartu rulers in the third millennium B.C. Underwater archeological research at the bottom of Lake Chudskoye (Lake Peipus) has helped historians to reconstruct important details of the famous Battle on the Ice there in the Middle Ages.

Many discoveries have been made at the bottom of other lakes in Europe and Asia. Hungarian archeologists have found the walls of a building dating back to the Roman Empire and a smithy of the fourth century A.D. on the floor of Lake Balaton. On the bed of Lake Pulaki Polish 21 archeologists have found a military settlement of the Prussian tribes, ancient inhabitants of the Masurian forest, that goes back 2,500 years. Some 50 Stone Age sites and 12 Bronze Age sites have been found in Boden See, Switzerland. All of the sites were built on piles.

In the German Democratic Republic villages on piles have been located by skin divers in lakes in the environs of Berlin and in the state of Mecklenburg. West German archeologists have discovered, in the bed of the Rhine, the remains of an ancient fortress, of a military camp of a Roman legion, and of a town that grew up beside the camp in the reign of Emperor Trajan. Interesting finds have been made at the bottom of Rupkund, a small mountain lake in the Himalayas.

An even larger number of underwater finds will undoubtedly be made at the bottom of seas and oceans. Investigation into dwellings of primitive man is in progress on the floors of the Baltic and North seas. Searches are being made for sunken cities at the bottom of the Mediterranean, Black, Caribbean, Aegean, Adriatic and other seas. And this is only the beginning.

Geology and oceanography tell us that the earth's crust rises and falls, that seas and oceans alternately advance on the land and retreat. These movements went on millions of years ago and also during the time when Homo sapiens was developing, when he started his triumphant march across the globe, and when the early civilisations arose. These movements continue to take place literally before our eyes.

At the bottom of the seas and oceans archeologists are seeking, and finding, monuments of antiquity that have been safely protected against destruction by a thick layer of water. Each year 22 they are discovering more and more traces'of " sunken cities and villages, evidence that primitive man once lived in places now covered by water.

The future obviously promises many new geological, oceanographic, archeological, historical and ethnographic discoveries.

The first part of this book deals with the Pacific Ocean, the world's greatest ocean in size, importance, depth and volume. Can the underwater archeologist expect to come upon traces of Homo sapiens at the bottom of this ocean, or its adjoining seas,'' either in the shape of ruins of sunken cities or as crude stone tools fashioned by Paleolithic man?

[23] __NUMERIC_LVL1__ Part One __ALPHA_LVL1__ THE
PACIFIC
OCEAN __ALPHA_LVL2__ Discovery 099-4.jpg [24] ~ [25] __NOTE__ LVL2 moved back two pages to page 23.

At the end of November 1520 the three surviving ships of Magellan's fleet emerged from a narrow, tortuous strait into unknown waters. The Spice Islands (Moluccas), the goal of the expedition, lay somewhere to the south-west. The immeasurable expanse across which Magellan sailed was so calm that he named it ``Pacific''.

On January 24, 1521, after two months in these waters, the three ships finally caught their first glimpse of land, a tiny desert island. Ten days later they came to another barren island. Only on March 6, after three months and twenty days, did the seafarers, tormented by hunger and thirst, reach inhabited land, the island of Guam. That was how Europeans discovered the strange, unique, astonishing world of Oceania.

In the following decades and centuries Spanish, Dutch, English, French and Russian frigates plied the waters of the Pacific Ocean and the explorers entered more and more discovered lands on the map. In the wake of the geographical discoveries a study of the vast ocean and its islands was begun by oceanographers, botanists, zoologists, meteorologists, geologists, linguists, folklorists and anthropologists. Although these investigations have a history of more than 400 years, they have developed on a large scale only in the present century.

From the very beginning the question that agitated the minds of the navigators and early explorers of the islands and archipelagoes of Oceania was how man had first reached them, for some are separated by thousands of kilometres of ocean.

In the 16th century the Portuguese navigator Pedro de Quiros advanced the theory that the islands were the remains of a large, now submerged, continent, and their inhabitants were 26 descendants of its population. Many other wellknown navigators supported this view. Its most ardent champions were two students of Oceania, the distinguished French naval commander and explorer Dumont d'Urville and his fellowcountryman Moerenhout, collector of folklore.

To support the idea that America and Asia were once joined by a large land mass Dumont d'Urville thought that Oceania's volcanic islands, such as the Hawaiian Islands, were the peaks of mountain chains which stretched across the now sunken continent. The continent, he said, had been inhabited by a large and civilised population whose descendants, now greatly degraded, remained on the Pacific islands and islets.Moerenhout, in his turn, used folklore as evidence that a continent had existed until a colossal cataclysm led to its submersion and the death of a great number of people.

Dumont d'Urville and Moerenhout published their hypotheses in the first half of the 19th century, when oceanographers, anthropologists, geologists, folklorists and ethnographers had only just begun to study Oceania. As new data came to light, new theories concerning a hypothetical Pacific continent appeared.

In a monograph published in 1865 the English naturalist Alfred Wallace, associate of the great Darwin, cited evidence to prove that the contemporary aborigines of Australia, the Papuans of New Guinea, the dark-skinned Melanesians and the light-skinned Polynesians were all descendants of a single "Oceanic race" that had inhabited a vast Pacific continent, now sunken. Thomas Huxley, another outstanding evolutionist of the 19th century, shared Wallace's view.

27

The hypotheses of biologists and anthropologists were supported by some geological theories, except that geologists put the disappearance of the Pacific continent at a far earlier date, before man had evolved. The French geologist, Haug, thought that a vast land mass, situated in the central part of the Pacific, began to submerge in the Mesozoic era, that is, between 100 and 200 million years ago. The German geologist H. Hallier agreed with him. In 1911 the Russian geologist Lukashevich compiled a series of maps of the hypothetical Pacific continent showing all the changes it underwent, up to and including its final submergence.

In 1923 and 1924 two books about the hypothetical continent appeared, written by men living in different countries and working in quite different fields of science; they probably did not even suspect each other's existence. They were Mikhail Menzbir, Russian pioneer in zoogeography, and J. Macmillan Brown, English ethnographer, who spent a lifetime studying the numerous tribes and peoples of the Pacific. The titles of their books were similar: Brown's The Riddle of the Pacific and Menzbir's Secrets of the Great Ocean.

Menzbir presented a number of arguments relating to geology, ethnography and oceanography that testified, although indirectly, to the existence of a land mass in the Pacific Ocean at one time. His most persuasive and astounding arguments came from zoogeography, a science dealing with the geographical distribution of animals and their migration routes.

Take the case of the fish called Galaxias, which was first discovered in the rivers of New Zealand in 1764. This genus is confined to fresh water 28 on the continents and islands of the Southern Hemisphere, in 30° to 60°S. The Galaxias is found only in fresh water; it cannot live in salt water. How, then, did it reach New^Zealand, which lies many hundreds of kilometres away from the continents? How did this fish get into the waters of several other Pacific islands? Since the Galaxias could not have migrated through the salty waters of the ocean, the only way was along the fresh-water rivers that once flowed in the now sunken Pacific continent.

Or take the iguana, a large lizard that once inhabited continents and is now found on the Galapagos and Fiji Islands. Iguanas are poor swimmers, so it is unlikely they crossed the ocean. Doesn't this signify that the islands were once connected with a land area? There are many other inhabitants of the Pacific islands, from beetles, mollusks, amphibia and ants to butterflies and crayfish, which could not have travelled hundreds, in some cases thousands, of kilometres through the ocean to reach their present habitat. The snakes that live on many Pacific islands can hardly swim at all.

On the islands of Oceania we find specimens'of specifically North American, East American, South American, Australian, Indonesian, and even Antarctic flora growing side by side.

Botanical and zoological data offered convincing evidence of the existence of a continent or of large land bridges in the Pacific. In Menzbir's opinion, the humanities, the branch of learning concerned with human thought and relations, showed that the'land mass sank in human'times. Not in the time of primitive man but much later, after man had attained a certain degree of civilisation. Professor Brown devoted almost the 29 whole of his voluminous monograph to proving this. lie concentrated on the enigmatic culture of tiny Easter Island, a culture that vanished before scholars had time to describe and study it.

__ALPHA_LVL2__ The Mystery of Easter Island

The first Europeans to visit Easter Island, in the early 18th century, were amazed to find enormous carved stone images of long-eared human beings surmounted by hats or crowns.

They also found wooden tablets covered with writing in a unique and undecipherable script.

The statues stood on stone platforms (the local inhabitants called them ahus), some of them so large---all of 60 metres long and three metres high---that no less labour must have gone into their construction than into the statues themselves. An ahu usually supported several images. But literally before the eyes of the seafarers who visited Easter Island between late 18th and early 19th centuries the statues were pulled down from their platforms one by one. By about the middle of the 19th century not a single statue remained on the platforms. True, some images still remained upright, not on the coast but in the quarry, in the crater of a volcano, from where they began their journey to the shore.

Altogether, some 600 stone images have been found in various parts of the island. The size of some of them staggers the imagination when we remember that they were fashioned with primitive stone implements. The largest statue, not only on Easter Island but in the whole of Oceania, is 20 metres 90 centimetres high. The 30 head of this giant is 11 metres high, with a nose measuring four metres!

There is something else that is still more astonishing. Not only did the makers of the images sculpture them out of hard, unyielding stone, move them to the coast, and erect them on platforms, the building of which also called for titanic effort. They crowned the images with tall cylindrical hats of red tuff, which the islanders call pukaos. The pukaos were carved in a different quarry, located in the crater of a small volcano in the middle of the island. This is the only place having deposits of red tuff. The hats evidently had to be made of red stone.

They fit the statues well. One statue had a hat just under two and three-quarter metres in diameter and two metres high. In the quarry itself lies a pukao that is more than three metres in diameter; it is two and a half metres high and weighs 30 tons!

It is hard to imagine how the islanders managed, without hoisting devices, draught animals or implements of iron or bronze, to transport and erect the statues which discoverers of Easter Island were fortunate enough to see still upright. Yet the stone giants standing on the platforms, crowned by hats weighing many tons, are not the only notable sight---and mystery---although they are the main one, on this islet in the Pacific Ocean.

The urge to record speech and keep accounts arises only in civilised societies; primitive tribes get along with pictographs, a language of drawings. Easter Island had a unique script, unlike any other in the world. All attempts to find convincing traces of similarity between any other writing and the writing of Easter Island, 31 known as kohau rongo-rongo (``the talking wood'') have failed. Yet scholars have compared the tiny kohau ron#o-ro/z£0~characters, engraved on wooden tablets with a shark's tooth, with scripts ranging from Egyptian hieroglyphs and the writing found in caves on Ceylon to scripts discovered in Mesopotamia, Central America, Southern China, South America, India and Mexico.

Many of the characters in the kohau rongo-rongo script closely resemble the stylised figures that cover Easter Island rocks and cave walls. The cave paintings depict insects, fish, mollusks, birds and, most important, the mysterious figure of a bird-headed man with outstretched paws with claws on them.

According to legend, the Easter Islanders, before they were converted to Christianity, held an annual ceremony in which they chose their tangata-manu, or bird-man. The ceremony combined the elements of a religious cult with those of a competition. The winner of the competition became the ruler of the island---for one year exactly---and was honoured as a deity. The bird-man is represented in magnificent sculptures made of the hard wood which the islanders carved so skilfully, along with representations of fantastic beings, as well as fish, birds and humans.

Stone giants weighing many tons; huge stone platforms; unique writing that is unlike the hieroglyphs of other ancient scripts; rocks covered with carvings; a surprising competitive religious ceremonial not encountered anywhere else; magnificent wooden sculptures---surely all this is too much for one tiny island lost in the vastness of the Pacific! Could other lands have lain 32 close by to Easter Island long ago? Or could Easter Island itself be only a small remnant of what once was a large and well-populated land mass?

The famous mariner and explorer James Cook believed that a cataclysm must have struck Easter Island. Dumont d'Urville and Moerenhout were certain that the population and culture of Easter Island, like those of many other Pacific islands, are only the remains of the civilisation of a Pacific continent. Many scholars agreed with this hypothesis. Macmillan Brown gathered together all the evidence pointing to the existence of a Pacific continent that was tragically destroyed within human memory. Among other things, he cites enigmatic facts from the history of the discovery of Easter Island by European seafarers.

First, there is the record of what Juan Fernandez saw. In 1572 this Spanish navigator discovered what we now know as the Juan Fernandez Islands, one of them Robinson Crusoe's island off the coast of Chile. When, six years later, he again sailed the waters of the southeastern Pacific a storm drove his ship far to the south, towards an unknown land. Although Fernandez did not dare to drop anchor there he later declared that he saw the mouths of very large rivers and "people so white and so well-clad and in everything so different from those of Chile and Peru''. He took this to be the great Southern Continent, then believed to exist, which navigators before him had unsuccessfully tried to find.

The delighted captain hurried back to Chile to make thorough preparations for his next expedition. He kept both his unexpected discovery of a continent (or large island) and his 33 preparations lor a big expedition there a secret. But death prevented him from carrying out his plans. The project died together with him. Only many years later did historians learn of Juan Fernandez's surprising discovery.

In 1687 the ship of the English buccaneer Captain Davis sailed direcly southward from the Galapagos Islands on the equator and, after covering about 2,000 miles, sighted a low, sandy shore at 27°20'S, 500 miles off the Chilean coast. Several dozen miles to the west was a long tract of high land.

On April 6, 1722, the Dutch admiral Roggeveen discovered a small rocky island in that same area and named it Easter Island. There was no land anywhere near the island except for three tiny islets at the southwestern end and another islet near its eastern coast.

To recapitulate Professor Brown's chain of evidence: at the end of the 16th century Juan Fernandez sighted a large land, fruitful and wellpopulated; in 1687 Captain Davis saw "a low, sandy coast" and "a long tract of high land" west of it; but in 1722 Admiral Roggeveen found only a single patch of land, Easter Island (the islets do not, of course, count). Does this not imply that the disaster which struck Easter Island or, rather, the Pacific continent, occurred within that period? What Fernandez said may sound fantastic, but Captain Davis---and his entire crew, for that matter---really did see "a long tract of high land''.

Traces of a cataclysm can be seen on Easter Island itself. Huge unfinished statues still lie in the quarry inside the crater of the volcano called Rano ^Raraku (ratio means volcano and raraku, or raku-raku, means "to scrape''). Beside __PRINTERS_P_33_COMMENT__ 3---0200 34 them lie the primitive stone chisel* and scrapers used to carve the images. It is a small island, yet in Professor Brown's opinion it required many thousands of workers to make such a large number of stone colossi, at least as many workers as built the Egyptian pyramids. These thousands of people had to be fed while they worked. Where could the builders and the people who fed them have lived except on a large area of land? Also, such grandiose construction could have been undertaken only by a country with a strong centralised government.

According to a legend about the peopling of Easter Island, the first settlers, sent by a chief named Hotu Matua, found some inhabitants there when they arrived. One of them told the new arrivals that Easter Island had once been a big country and was destroyed by a giant named Uoke. Since then the island has been called Te Pito o te Henua, the Navel of the Universe.

No one knows what the writing engraved on the kohau rongo-rongo wooden tablets says. In the 19th century, however, enthnographers recorded several legends which were said by islanders to be translations of the tablets.

According to one legend, when the island was first created it had many roads criss-crossing it. They were built by Heke (which means ``octopus''), who sat in a place of honour in the middle of the island. From there the roads radiated in all directions like a grey-and-black spider's web. No one could determine where the roads began and where they ended.

Today there are traces of paved ways on Easter Island that run down to the edge of the sea and break off, roads that lead nowhere. Or do they 35 lead farther, to a land mass that vanished under the water?

Professor Brown believed Easter Island to be a vast mausoleum where giant likenesses of the kings and chiefs of a now submerged country were erected. The statues give us an idea of the appearance of the vanished inhabitants of the hypothetical Pacific continent. They had imperiously jutting chins, compressed, arrogant mouths, deep-sunken eyes arid elongated ear lobes.

A missionary, Eugenio Eyraud, said that the islanders used the tablets by custom, "without enquiring into the sense of them''. Doesn't this indicate that the kohau rongo-rongo writing, like the stone giants, is a remnant of the culture of a submerged continent?

The mysterious rock drawings represent, as we have said, bird-men and the unusual royal election rites that took place annually on Easter Island until the ancient culture perished and the inhabitants were converted to Christianity. Gould this bird-cult, not found on other Oceanic islands or anywhere else in the world, be a survival of the beliefs of the people of the hypothetical Pacific continent? Is the old culture of Easter Island the last trace of a vanished civilisation?

__ALPHA_LVL2__ Remains of the Pacific Continent

Perhaps it is, but it is not the only one. Professor Brown searched for the submerged culture of the hypothetical continent on other islands in Oceania, and he found stone statues similar in style to the Easter Island giants, __PRINTERS_P_35_COMMENT__ 3* 36 although smaller, OH the Hawaiian Islands, on tiny Pitcairn Island, and on the Marquesas Islands.

Lost in the vast waste of waters of the Pacific, near the equator, there are several small islands on which the first European visitors, at the end of the 18th century, found nothing but scanty vegetation. No one appeared to have ever lived on those miserable patches of land.

Yet coconut palms grew there, and they could have reached the islands only with the help of man. Since then other, more obvious, traces of man have been found. Christmas Island has rectangular platforms made of slabs of coral. Maiden, another island in this equatorial group, also has platforms, as well as the ruins of a temple. The shape of the temple, judging from a sketch, resembles that of the ancient pyramids of South America.

With the ocean stretching on all sides for hundreds of miles, who could have built the platforms and the temple? How could the unknown builders have erected these structures if the islands do not even have a fresh water supply? Could the ruins be the remains of a mysterious culture that sank into the Pacific along with the fertile lands that fed the thousands of building workers? Was Maiden Island, like Easter Island, only a place connected with theceremonials and festivals of the people of a great country that now lies beneath the waves of the Pacific?

The centre of this vanished empire lay, according to Professor Brown, far to the west, near small Ponape Island, where cyclopean ruins werejound in the 19th century. The basalt walls of some of these great structures were six metres 37 thick. Immense blocks of stone weighing up to 25 tons had been raised to a height of almost 20 metres! Such colossal work could have been performed only by the organised labour of many thousands of workers. A country capable of erecting such gigantic structures must have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. Yet within a radius of 1,500 miles there live no more than 50,000 people, on islands and islets separated from one another by hundreds of miles. What is more, you would not find 2,000 among them capable of doing the hard work of a builder.

There are likewise the remains of monumental structures---two parallel rows of stone pillars four metres high---on Tinian Island, which is also in the western part of Oceania. Were these pillars ornamentation, or did they support the floors of houses? And who built those enormous houses? The modern inhabitants of the Tinian Island live in small reed or wooden huts.

Professor Brown cited other archeological, ethnographic and anthropological evidence pointing indirectly to the existence in the Pacific of large land masses or separate islands and archipelagoes that are now submerged. He was fully aware, of course, of the fact that all this was only indirect evidence and would remain such until bolstered by the findings of natural sciences like geology, zoogeography and oceanography. He did refer to some evidence furnished by those sciences, among them the fact that both the western and eastern parts of the Pacific, and the coasts of Asia and America which they wash, are subject to severe earthquakes. In other words, the earth's crust there is unstable.

At the time of Brown and Menzbir little was known about the structure of the Pacific bed. 38 In the mid-twenties of our century scientists had only indirect data to go by. On the basis of their sciences ethnographer Macmillan Brown and zoogeographer Mikhail Menzbir came to the same general conclusion---that a land mass had existed in the Pacific and it had vanished within man's memory.

Marine geology was now the only science that could prove the hypotheses and indirect evidence. Oceanographic research conducted in the region of Easter Island and north-east of the island early in the thirties led to the discovery of the large underwater Albatross Plateau. From the rocks brought up from the bottom the American geologist L. J. Chubb, who was in charge of the expedition, concluded that land connecting South America with Australia and perhaps even Asia had once existed there. But he also drew a conclusion that was of no comfort to the supporters of an "inhabited Pacific continent''. Submergence of the land mass here, he declared, took place very long ago; in the past few thousand years Easter Island 'has not subsided by a single yard. Despite Brown's contention, at the time when the monuments were erected the shoreline was as stable as it is today.

Although scientists now know a great deal more about the marine geology of the Pacific than in the 19th century or at the beginning of this century, the debate about hypothetical Pacific continent goes on. Many oceanographers and geologists believe that the vast depression in the Pacific has existed there ever since the formation of the earth's crust. But some support the Pacific continent theory. Among the latter are the Soviet geographer Panov, the Bulgarian geologist Mikhailovich, the Soviet zoogeographer 39 Lindberg and a number of other Soviet and foreign scientists. Contemporary researchers on Easter Island have found rhyolite, rock that is of continental origin. What is even more important is the fact that they have found continental crust on Easter Island, although not a deep layer. "This supports the assumption that a continent once existed in the eastern part of the Pacific'', says Panov.

Millions of years ago, say advocates of the Pacific continent theory, this land mass covered a vast area, forming an unbroken bridge between Australia and America. Then sections of it began to subside and break up into island continents: Australia, a Melanese continent, including the islands of Melanesia, a West Pacific continent, combining what are now the thousands of small islands and islets of Micronesia, the Hawaiian continent, stretching from Japan to California and of which only the Hawaiian Islands remain today, and, finally, the East Pacific continent, of which Easter Island is one of the remains.

__ALPHA_LVL2__ When Did This Happen?

The land bridge between America and Australia started to break up a very long time ago. The sinking of the land continued for millions of years. Even today the coast of South-East Asia is subsiding into the Pacific centimetre by centimetre. The East Pacific continent split off from the rest of the land mass long before man appeared on earth. But when did it start to sink into the ocean, leaving Raster Island all by itself?

40

Professor Brown believed that the subsidence of the last remnants of land took place quite recently, between the voyages of Davis and Roggeveen. From the viewpoint of geologists this is absurd. Academician Vladimir Obruchev, the eminent Soviet geologist, suggested a more plausible point of time. He placed the sinking of the land in the region of Easter Island at the time of the glacial epoch, when the melting of the ice led to a rise in the level of the oceans, including the Pacific, and the low-lying sections of land were submerged.

It was quite possible, said Obruchev, that extensive lowlands with thickly populated towns and villages once existed around the mountainous part of Easter Island. These lowlands were gradually submerged when the last Ice Age ended. The population, probably urged on by priests or sorcerers, hurriedly began carving statues with threatening faces out of the local volcanic tuff and setting them up along the coast in the hope they would hold the sea back and thereby save the coastal towns and villages. The melting of the glaciers had not yet ended, however, and the sea level continued to rise. In the end, the island lowlands were submerged. The population either perished or gradually moved to other islands in Polynesia. Only many years later did other inhabitants, who knew nothing about the preceding culture, appear on Easter Island.

In Academician Obruchev's opinion, Easter Island had attained a high level of culture about 10,000 years ago.

It well may be, as Academician Obruchev believed, that the last remnants of the hypothetical Pacific continent were destroyed in human 41 times, when the level of the ocean rose as the glaciers melted. But the end of the last Ice Age evidently has nothing to do with the riddles of Easter Island. The melting of the glaciers took place between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago. Archeological excavations show, however, that the island was settled at the beginning of our era. Construction of the gigantic statues is placed at no earlier than 1100 A.D. That would make a gap of some 10,000 years between the melting of the glaciers and the carving of the images.

What is more, it seems unlikely that the statues were erected to prevent an invasion by the waters. Supporters of that theory vividly describe how "the ocean continued to rise and the stone gods fixed their wrathful, threatening gaze on it in vain''. But the stone giants stood with their backs to the ocean, as evidenced by sketches made by the first explorers to see the statues on their platforms, and also by the findings of archcologists.

Or consider the enormous stone platforms, the ahus. If Easter Island were larger, why did they build the platforms along the entire length of the coastline? It is highly improbable that the ocean could have risen so evenly that it reached the platforms and then stopped. It is much more likely that the platforms were erected along the shore, and that the shore has remained unchanged since the time the platforms were built.

Even if one were to assume that the platforms and statues were erected as protection against the threat of the rising water, and were placed on the shore to prevent that, then they should have vanished under the waves long, long ago.

But could the Easter Island monuments be merely the remains of a once great culture, with 42 the ocean bottom preserving far more traces of this culture than Easter Island itself? Could the ocean floor be strewn with platforms and statues? After all, the paved roads stop abruptly at the edge of the ocean.

__ALPHA_LVL2__ Professor Zubov's Theory

On the other hand, why necessarily search for submerged land along the shores of Easter Island? Even if the picture of a dramatic breakup of a continent and sinking of the island shores, together with their huge statues and platforms, is a figment of the imagination, this does not mean there may not be other lands around Easter Island that are now at the bottom of the ocean.

Professor Brown believed that Easter Island was a vast mausoleum, visited by the people of neighbouring islands that have vanished. In an article written in 1949 Professor Nikolai Zubov, an eminent Soviet oceanographer, put forward a hypothesis that Easter Island was once a kind of Mecca for the inhabitants of Oceania, that people from many islands, both those that exist now and those that have vanished, voyaged there to perform religious rites.

This, said Professor Zubov, is confirmed by the fact that all the statues were made in the same place, of the same material, while all the hats of the statues were also made out of the same kind of stone, but in a different place. Also by the fact that all the statues lining the roads leading to the quarry were set up with their backs to the quarry, in such a way that travellers or processions of people going to the quarry to 43 work saw the faces of the images. Although, said Professor Zubov, the purpose of the statues on the burial platforms and along the roads leading to the quarries could somehow bo explained, there was no explanation for the statues dug into the ground on the outer slope of the crater, to say nothing of those on the inner slope. It would have been impossible to drag the statues out of the crater. Nor was it intended that they should be dragged out. It cannot be accidental, Professor Zubov said, that all the statues stand with their faces turned towards the centre of the crater.

Professor Zubov considered the fact that all the statues were made according to a single pattern to be even more weighty evidence in support of his theory. There was no question here of any sort of creativity, of any quest for something new. You did not have to be an artist to carve a statue. All you needed was diligence. The relative sizes of the individual features of the images had long been established. Regardless of their si/c, the statues intended for the burial terrace and set up on the horizontal platforms would be stable. So would those intended to be buried in the earth.

But if we view Easter Island as the Mecca of Oceania, Professor Zubov said in conclusion, a question arises which is more involved than the question of the peopling of the island. Pilgrimages mean regular travel, yet this would hardly be possible if thousands of miles separated Easter Island from the other islands of Oceania. Besides, provisions and other supplies would have to be transported.

It is quite possible that a large number of islands and archipelagoes, now submerged, 44 facilitated travel between Easter Island and other Oceanian islands.

A quarter of a century after the books of Brown and Menzbir appeared, Professor Zubov again put forward the theory of sunken land in the region of Easter Island. Now an oceanographer had come to the support of the ethnographer and zoogeographer. A true scholar, Professor Zubov admitted that only a thorough investigation of the Pacific bed, an investigation which to this day is incomplete, would bear out or refute the hypothesis.

__ALPHA_LVL2__ Pacific Floor Theories

Continuing our attempt to solve the riddles of Easter Island, we must now take a look at the floor of the Pacific, where scientists have discovered a vast submarine land, with mountains and abysses. And to explain the origin of this submarine land we shall have to look into another abyss, not oceanic but geological---the abyss of time that has passed since our planet was formed.

Geophysics has shown that there are two types of crust, the oceanic type and the continental type. Was there always this division? Or did the whole earth originally have an oceanic type? Or did it have a continental type? Which came first?

The answers to these questions will resolve the' problem of the origin of the Pacific basin, a basin that covers almost half the globe. Below, we reproduce the table of hypotheses of the origin of oceanic basins drawn up by the prominent American oceanographer Professor H. W. Menard. 45 The tabio clearly sols forth all Hie possible variants of a solulion lo the problem, so thai we have only to find the ``correcl'' section of the table.

Hypotheses of the Origin of Ocean Basins Modification Meteorite Original crust impact 1 OCEANIC Meteorites arc continents Ejection 3 Differentiation 5 Mantle yields continents and water 6 Continents ``basaltified'' to oceanic basins CONTI- 2 NENTAL 4 Scar is Pacific Basin ocean basins

According to the hypothesis in the section numbered 1, the oceanic crust came first, after which continents grew as meteorite matter accumulated on the surface of the earth. The hypothesis in section 2, on the contrary, assumes that the continental crust came first, after which basins were blasted in the crust by impact of meteorites. Neither hypothesis is popular today.

The section numbered 3 is empty. No one will assume that the gigantic Pacific basin could have been formed because land became separated from the surface of the earth and was ejected into outer space. But hypothesis 4 is intriguing and has won many supporters. They believe that the Pacific basin is the space left by the Moon after it became detached from the Earth!

46

The hypothesis, however, is rejected by most scientists today because it, explains too little, and too many facts contradict it. Efforts are still being made to resurrect it, although not very successfully. Analyses of moon rock show that our satellite is composed of non-terrestrial matter.

Today the overwhelming majority of oceanographers and geologists share the last two hypotheses. According to one (section 5 of the table), the oceanic crust came first, and the continents and water were formed from the mantle. (Professor Menard supports this assumption.) Soviet geologist A. P. Vinogradov is the scientist who has most thoroughly substantiated it.

The opposite hypothesis (sec section G) assumes that the oceanic basins, including the largest, the Pacific, were formed as a result of gradual fragmentation of the continents. Blocks of continental crust were ``dissolved'' in the basalt rising out of the bowels of the earth, and this crust turned into oceanic crust. However, as F. Shephard, one of the founders of marine geology, has correctly noted, our present knowledge of the structure of the earth's crust is only sufficient to reject some of the older and more obviously erroneous assumptions but insufficient to construct promising new hypotheses.

Geophysicists have proposed an impressive project of deep sea drilling through the thick layer of sediment that has accumulated on the floor for millions of years, and then farther down through the oceanic crust to the mantle itself. Evidently, only this can tell us which is primary, the oceanic crust or the continental crust.

But even before scientists drill through the crust we may confidently state that the Pacific Ocean 47 was once different from what it is today although, says Professor Menard, "almost all of the geology of the Pacific Basin may well have originated during the last 200 million years''.

__ALPHA_LVL2__ The Darwin Rise

Two hundred million years is, of course, a very approximate hgure. It was arrived at by estimating the present rate of sedimentation of the Pacific floor and then comparing it with the present thickness of the layer of sediment on the Pacific floor. But we do not yet know whether the rate of marine sedimentation was constant at all periods in the history of our planet. Over the ages the sedimentary layer may have become packed down, consolidated, and we have no reliable data with which to calculate the ratio between consolidation and one or another period of geological time.

Hence, other methods are used to determine the age of the Pacific, such as, for example, the time it would take to acquire its present degree of salinity. Estimates have shown this to be between 100 million and 300 million years, that is, the average agrees with Menard's figure. However, we do not know if the oceans grew saline at a constant rate.

Shephard notes the following interesting circumstance: no matter how many different fossils the dredges bring up from the ocean floor and from seamounts, none are ever older than the Cretaceous period. He believes this shows that the oceans may not be very old. The Cretaceous period began 140 million years ago and lasted 70 million years. This would make the Pacific a good 48 50 million yours younger than Mouunl thinks, that is, about 150 million years old.

Some scientists put the origin of the Pacific at an even later period. Academician Shcherbakov, for instance, believes the oldest layers of the ocean floor were formed about 100 million years ago. Finally, the Soviet geologist G. Afanasyev offers a new estimate of the sedimentation rate and puts the origin of the Pacific, and of the World Ocean too, in the Tertiary period, which would make the Pacific no more than 70 million years old. In fact, Afanasyev maintains that the Pacific is no more than 50 million years old.

Other scientists, using the same data on the sedimentary cover, believe that sediment was deposited much more slowly in the past and therefore place the origin of the Pacific at a much more remote period. Professor Leontyev, a Soviet oceanographer, thinks the Pacific is at least 1,000 million (!) years old. He and other scientists in the Soviet Union and abroad consider the oceans to be the same age as the planet, that is, thousands of millions of years old.

Despite their differences as to the dating, most scientists agree that the Pacific Ocean as we know it today developed as a result of long and intensive processes in the earth's crust, that it has its own geological history, although its prehistory is shrouded in the mists of time.

In setting forth this brief history we shall follow, in the main, Menard's excellent monograph Marine Geology of the Pacific. Here he brings together and summarises the vast amount of factual material that oceanographers and geophysicists have accumulated over recent years. Moreover, he examines all geological, 49 geophysical and biological processes and facts in their interconnection.

Two hundred million years ago, says Menard, the Pacific basin cannot have been much different from the basin as it is now: it was surrounded by an almost continuous ring of island arcs and submarine ridges. The water depth averaged about the same as now but the distribution of depths was different from the present. Sometime during the Meso/oic era there began, in the eastern and middle Pacific, a great process that led to the rise of a vast underwater land, the highest parts forming islands and archipelagoes, some of which still exist while others have disappeared. Menard calls this the Darwin Rise in honour of the great English naturalist, who first advanced the hypothesis that islands and banks, now submerged, once existed in that part of the Pacific basin.

This mid-Pacific underwater continent was 10,000 kilometres long and 4,000 kilometres wide, stretching from the Tuamotu Archipelago to the Marshall Islands. The paroxysm of volcanism that produced the Darwin Rise also led to the birth of volcanic islands and islets. Colossal crustal blocks were moved away; on the northwest flank of the Rise, island arcs developed and deep troughs were formed. By the Middle Cretaceous time, about 100 million years ago, large volcanoes had built up from the central part of the Pacific. When closely-spaced volcanoes had grown large enough to overlap along the flanks of the Darwin Rise they built great volcanic ridges such as the Mid-Pacific Mountains and the Tuamotu Ridge. Although other, more widely spaced volcanoes did not overlap, they did break through the water and form separate __PRINTERS_P_49_COMMENT__ 4---0200 50 islands. Among them, in Menard's opinion, are the Marshall Islands with their numerous volcanic peaks.

Today, the central part of the Pacific is an area of enormous waves and considerable depths. Millions of years ago there were groups of islands and extensive shallow banks here. The peaks of underwater ridges, formed when volcanoes merged into a single chain, crowned many of them. This was when the imperceptible but truly titanic work of the corals began. The remains of these tiny marine organisms, which flourish only at moderate depths, built up today's coral islands and reefs, atolls, submarine plateaus and banks.

If coral islands are built by shallow-water organisms, how is it that they are found at depths of several miles? Scientists pondered this question for almost 150 years. The great Darwin advanced the theory that a lagoon island is a monument erected by myriads of tiny architects to mark the place where land was buried in the ocean depths.

Darwin's hypothesis had its ardent champions and no less fervent detractors. It was debated for more than 100 years, until scientists of our day proved that Darwin was fundamentally right.

Coral reefs are found in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. However, the small reefs of the West Indian and Bermuda islands in the Atlantic, and even the numerous coral islands and islets in the Indian Ocean (the Maldive Islands and the Gocos or Keeling islands) are insignificant compared with the innumerable coral reefs scattered through the tropical part of the Pacific in a gigantic band running 51 northwest to south-east, almost 10,000 kilometres long and some 2,500 kilometres wide!

The large coral islands and archipelagoes---the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands, the Tuamotu Archipelago, the Gilbert Islands and the Ellice Islands---were inhabited long before the beginning of our era. Europeans did not find people on other coral islands in the mid-Pacific, but they came upon many signs that those islands had once been inhabited. Finally, there are hundreds upon hundreds of coral reefs that were never places of human habitation.

The Great Barrier Reef of northeastern Australia, discovered at the end of the 18th century by the famous Captain James Cook, stretches for almost 2,000 kilometres, the northern part about 100 kilometres from the coast, the middle section coming to within about 15 kilometres, and the southern part being more than 150 kilometres from the coast. Between it and the coast there are a large number of smaller coral reefs.

The assumption that the Great Barrier Reef and the other, smaller reefs along the coasts of continents and islands are ``tombstones'' on top of submerged land does not arouse any doubt. We know that the ocean is rising most rapidly in that part of the Pacific, while the South-East Asian coast and the adjacent islands are slowly sinking. But are the numerous coral islands and atolls in the middle of the Pacific also `` tombstones''over sunken land? Darwin and his supporters thought this was so. But their hypothesis was proven only a short time ^ago, by deep drilling on coral islands.

Coral reefs grow at a rate of about 17 to 37 metres per 1,000 years. The thicker the reef, the __PRINTERS_P_51_COMMENT__ 4* 52 older it is. Every 100 metres in ttie depth of a reef corresponds to roughly 50 metres of subsidence of land or shallow-water bank.

The first boring in a reef, made in 1897--98 on the atoll of Funafuti in the Ellice group, found nothing but coral rock to depths of more than 300 metres. The reef thickness may have been much greater; the drill was able to bore only to that depth. The next boring, on Borodino Island (Smith Island), south of Japan, reached a depth of 432 metres, but here too the researchers were unable to penetrate all the way through the reef.

Drillers on Bikini Atoll reached a depth of more than 780 metres in the summer of 1947. Geophysical studies showed the thickness at Bikini to be actually 1,300 metres. Later, geophysical investigation of the Eniwetok Atoll revealed its coral thickness to be about 1,500 metres. This means that land in this region has sunk about 1,500 metres, an impressive figure even for the Pacific.

When did the Uarwin Rise begin to subside? Volcanism reached its height in the Pacific between 60 and 100 million years ago, after which the Uarwin Rise started to sink. Many volcanoes became extinct. Their peaks were levelled by the waves, and they turned into shallow-water banks. According to Menard, sinking took place throughout almost the entire area except in the region of the Tokelau group and, possibly, two shallow-water sections in the northwestern ocean. The collapse amounted to almost two kilometres. Despite the subsidence of numerous islands many of them still served as stepping-stones for biological migration because growing coral colonies kept the peaks of the 53 islands at sea level. Volcanoes that disappeared beneath the waves were replaced from time to time by new groups of volcanoes.

__ALPHA_LVL2__ Sunken Islands of the Pacific

The sinking of the Darwin Rise is connected, some scientists say, with the Early Cenozoic era, when great changes ushered in the present period of geological history.

Volcanism continued in the Pacific in the Early Cenozoic era. But the Mid-Pacific Mountains and other underwater ridges now lying at a depth of many kilometres gradually began to sink. Coral islands and atolls started to grow in place of the submerged Tuamotu Ridge; other oceanic volcanoes and mountains also acquired their coral ``tombstones''. Some, however, were unable to leave traces of their existence on the surface of the ocean. Coral colonies did not settle on their peaks, the peaks were planed almost flat by wave erosion, and today a tremendous number of submarine volcanoes---called guyots---with broad, almost flat, tops is to be found in the Pacific.

While the Darwin Rise was sinking, the East Pacific Rise, stretching all the way from the Gulf of Alaska to the Galapagos Islands, was born. The East Pacific Rise is one of the largest sections of the chain of abyssal ridges that encircle the globe.

The Hawaiian Islands rose, and so did many other volcanic islands of the deep basin. Some of the present atolls were elevated and forested for a time and then again subsided. New islands arose and then sank in the eastern part of the Pacific.

54

The Gulf of Alaska and the west coast of the United States had islands that cannot be found on maps today. Numerous islands and banks were present in what is known as the Baja California Seamount Province and on the ridge that runs near the Pacific coast of South America.

Simultaneously the so-called Melanesian Rise may have developed in the Southwestern Pacific, although ocoanographers are still debating its existence. According to Menard, "Melanesia is structurally complex and little known, and not much can be said about it that is not conjectural''. The Chatham Rise east of New Zealand was likewise at sea level, forming a very extensive bank.

There was a time when scientists, influenced by the Bible, believed in the idea of a great flood. When viewed not as God's punishment for man's sins but as an actual event, a flood explained many facts that science could not yet explain, such as the discovery of fossils of fishes and seashells on mountains. Early in the 19th century, the famous French naturalist Georges Cuvier advanced a theory of cataclysms, according to which life on earth is periodically destroyed by great ``explosions'', such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and floods, and then, like the Phoenix, is resurrected.

Before very long, however, Cuvier's theory of cataclysms was refuted by the large amount of data collected by new sciences like oceanography, paleontology, geology and climatology. By the beginning of our century, one hundred years after Cuvier, the majority of scientists held a diametrically opposite view, believing that the earth's crust, very old, was 'little affected 55 by the turbulent events taking place inside the earth and reacted to them---in the shape of earthquakes, floods and volcanic eruptions--- only in exceptional cases and on a local scale.

However, each decade of the 20th century has brought new discoveries that enableus to penetrate deep into the bowels of the earth and down to the ocean floor. The data that science has accumulated speak of the opposite. Although the earth is thousands of millions of years old, very substantial changes are still taking place. The earth's crust can be ``rejuvenated''; continents and oceans can change their outlines; plains can turn into mountains or sink below sea level.

Neotectonics, a science concerned with movements and deformations of the earth's crust during the past 25 million years (the name `` neotectonics'' was proposed by Academician Obruchev in 1948), has developed into an independent branch of geology with a promising future.

When measured in human terms, 25 million years is an enormous span of time. But it is only a tiny fraction of time in the history of our planet.

In the past 25 million years the face of the earth has undergone important changes, whether in the relief of the mountains or the contours of the oceans. The greatest mountain ranges---the Himalayas, Pamirs, Alps, Caucasus, Cordilleras and Andes---have developed in this period, as has the present Pacific basin, with all its underwater mountains and ridges, islands and archipelagoes, coral reefs and atolls, inner seas and island arcs.

Still, modern earth science considers 25 million years too long a period. The time scale has to be reduced if we are to understand the 56 processes that have given our planet its present appearance.

The Quaternary, the geological period during which man became Homo sapiens, a period that has lasted about one million years, up to the present time, was previously considered to be the least significant division in geological history. But more and more new scientific findings are changing the attitude to the Quaternary.

The rise of Homo sapiens took place against a background of extremely abrupt climatic shifts and contrasts. Grassy plains turned into barren deserts, which again became covered with vegetation, and then again turned into sands. (Take, for example, the Sahara, the world's largest desert, where man has lived since remote times.) In the north, great glaciers advanced and retreated, causing the ocean level to fall and rise. The relief changed as well as the climate. Mountains rose, volcanoes erupted (Mt Elbrus in the Caucasus was an active volcano several thousand years ago), and the configuration of the ocean floor was altered. Along with the climate and the relief the organic world of our planet also changed.

The appearance or melting of glaciers in the temperate zone led to fluctuations in sea level. An idea of how great these were can be gained from the International Geophysical Year data on the approximate volume of ice that covers Antarctica and parts of the other continents. If this ice were to melt, the level of the World Ocean would rise 66 metres, and many cities and tracts of land would be drowned.

When cold set in on earth the accumulation of glaciers enormously lowered the sea level, exposing land that had been covered in places 57 by as much as hundreds of metres of water. When it grew warmer the glaciers began to melt, the sea level rose, and land was submerged. This process has taken place several times throughout the Quaternary period.

Exactly how many times we do not know. Some scientists believe the ocean rose and fell greatly at least three times. Others set the figure at four, seven and even twelve times. There is also a view that there was only one vast glacial epoch broken by short warm periods. Finally, there are scientists who maintain that our planet had no ice age at all!

These questions of Quaternary period geology and glaciology are indeed highly interesting, but we shall not go into them here. The important thing as far as the present subject is concerned is merely to note that individual parts of the Pacific as they are today---the shape of coastlines, islands, etc.---developed after Homo sapiens had come on the scene and was beginning to explore and settle his planet.

The marginal seas of the Pacific---the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Yellow Sea, the Bering Sea and the inner seas of Indonesia--- acquired their present shape only at the end of the last glacial epoch, about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. The Pacific coasts of Asia, America and Australia preserve traces of the rise and fall of the ocean level. Underwater banks, guyots and shallows were islands and islets not so long ago. In a word, man was a witness to the last great changes in the relief of our planet---and more than merely a passive witness, at that.

During the glacial period the ocean level was much lower than it is today. Chains of land bridges ran from island to island, from 58 archipelago to archipelago. Along these bridges Ihe primitive explorers of the Pacific ventured ever farther out into the ocean, peopling more and more archipelagoes.

What is more, that is how the American and Australian continents were in all likelihood settled in the remote past. Land bridges enabled primitive Columbuses to discover the New World thousands of years before Columbus, and Australia thousands of years before Captain Cook and the Dutch seafarers.

__ALPHA_LVL2__ Bering Land

For a long time scholars, particularly American scholars, attempted to prove that Homo Amerindus was descended from a special offshoot of anthropoid ape or a special species of Neanderthal man. But the facts contradict that. The New World could 7iot have been the cradle of man. Long before Columbus the New World was discovered by men from the Old World, who peopled the American continent and were the ancestors of the Indians. Who were those men? When and how did they come to the New World?

The hypotheses advanced over the past four centuries to explain the origin of the inhabitants of America and the riddle of their high civilisations, which were barbarously destroyed by the* conquistadors, make a fascinating story. Who, indeed, has not been put forward as the forefather of the indigenous population of the New World! The list of ``candidates'' includes the ancient Egyptians and the no less ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia; the Basques on the coast 59 of the Atlantic and the Japanese on the other side of the world; the nomad Huns and the seafaring Phoenicians; the Cretans, Israelites, Scythians, Normans, Persians, Greeks, Celts, Hittites, Romans, Khmers, Indians, Africans, Chinese and, finally, the inhabitants of mythical Atlantis.

Fantastic hypotheses continue to appear. Along with the hypotheses the past four centuries have seen the accumulation of evidencelinguistic, anthropological, archeological and enthnographic---that the culture of the American Indians is an original culture, the outcome of long internal development.

Americanology is a young science in which very much is still debatable and hypothetical. Investigators do not have either a precise chronology or the historical sources possessed by students of the civilisations of the Old World (the hieroglyphic inscriptions left by the American Indians have not yet been deciphered). Nevertheless, the majority of Americanists believe the origin of the American Indians to be basically a settled question. The first explorers came to the New World from Asia. The American Indians are an enormous branch of the Mongoloid race. Anthropology and genetics indicate this, as do the splendid works of art of pre-Columbian America. Ancient sculptural monuments and clay statuettes fashioned several thousand years ago depict people with slanting eyes and other marked Mongoloid features.

How many years were the first settlers of America ahead of Christopher Columbus? When did man first set foot on New World soil? So far, no exact answer can be given to this question. The most modest estimates say 15,000 years ago. 60 Dick Edgar Ibarra Grasso, the Bolivian archeologist and ethnographer, puts it at f>0,000 years. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, which would be that man first appeared in America 30,000 to 40,000 years before Europeans came there.

How did he get to the New World? It was clearly beyond the powers of Paleolithic man to sail across the ocean, for he did not make either boats or rafts that could have negotiated the many hundreds of miles between Asia and America. At either end of the New World, though, the distances are not particularly great. Only small expanses of water separate Alaska from Chukotka and Tierra del Fuego from the North Antarctic.

According to the Portuguese anthropologist Mendez-Correa, America was peopled by way of Antarctica at a time when the Antarctic continent was not yet covered with ice; man first reached Antarctica from Australia, and from there journeyed to Tierra del Fuego. This bold hypothesis is refuted by many facts. In the first place, the Fuegians have no features in common with the Australians; secondly, Antarctica was covered with ice long before Homo sapiens appeared on earth; thirdly, Australia was peopled later than America; and fourthly, the most important point: the peopling of the New World proceeded from the north to the south and not the other way. People appeared in South America between 13,000 and 15,000 years ago, but the shores of the Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego were settled only at the beginning of our era. The oldest traces of human habitation found on the territory of the United States date hack more than 25,000 years!

61

Man could not have reached America by sea. He could not have crossed the ocean 25,000 years ago. That means the first explorers reached the New World not by the southern Tierra del Fuego-Antarctic route, but by the northern route, from Chukotka. Yet no traces of ancient man have been found on either side of the Bering Strait. Probably those traces now lie not on land, where archeologists have been searching for them, but under water.

Bering Land is what some geologists call the land whicli once existed in place of the present Chukotsk Sea and northern part of the Bering Sea. Rocky St. Lawrence Island and the two Diomede islands are remnants of this land mass. This is the bridge whicli primitive man probably used to cross over from Asia into America. Americanists are not yet certain as to what part of the vast Asian continent provided the first settlers of the New World. But each passing year furnishes more evidence that the area was probably the Soviet Union's Far Eastern seaboard and the Kamchatka Peninsula.

In 1964 an archeological expedition of the Siberian Department of the USSB Academy of Sciences under N. N. Dikov found, on the Kamchatka Peninsula, a site that is from 14,000 to 15,000 years old. This dates back to approximately the time when the Bering Sea land bridge was used as a route to the American continent. The most notable thing about the finds is that they show connections between the ancient Kamchatkan culture and the Indian cultures of America. For instance, Soviet archeologists found a large number of beads and pendants that are strikingly reminiscent of the famous Indian wampum. The arrowheads used by the 62 ancient inhabitants of Kamchatka also have much in common with those of the American Indians. Further, both used red ochre in their burial rites.

The location, antiquity and largely Americanoid nature of this first Paleolithic monument discovered in North-East Asia are all new and impressive evidence that early settlers of America (although perhaps not the original settlers), came from Asia via the extreme north-east, in particular, via the Kamchatka Peninsula and the ancient land mass connecting Asia with America in the north.

Bering Land began to sink at the end of the last glacial period, between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago. Traces of the primitive explorers, camp sites, stone and ivory implements and, possibly, burial sites similar to the one which Soviet archeologists have found on the Kamchatka Peninsula, all disappeared beneath the waves. Underwater archeologists will probably come upon these traces some day and add data brought up from the floor of the Chukotsk and Bering seas to the "land data''.

Perhaps the route to the New World did not lie so far to the north. After all, the Komandorskiye and Aleutian islands stretch in a long chain between Kamchatka and Alaska. There is both oceanographical and geological evidence that land subsidence took place there not so long ago. A group of guyots, or underwater volcanoes, whose peaks once rose above the surface, has been discovered in the Gulf of Alaska. (For example, the Dickens Guyot lies at a depth of only 475 metres; it is surrounded by depths of 3,000 to 3,500 metres.) This indicates that underwater archeologists may look forward to interesting 63 discoveries not only in now submerged Bering Land but also much farther south.

The great Alaskan earthquake of March 1964 substantially changed the surrounding topography. It may be assumed that in remote times even more significant movements of the earth's crust took place south of Bering Land, that the ocean swallowed up many kilometres of coast and drowned many islands and islets.

When originally settled, a large part of North America was covered by a vast ice cap. The newcomers could advance only through narrow passages free of ice. Their route lay along a now submerged coastal strip of the Pacific Ocean.

The enormous underwater canyons along the west coast of the United States and Baja California indicate that there was once land where the ocean is now. Many of the submarine canyons come up almost to the shore and are amazingly similar to the canyons on land both in shape and structure.

An astonishing find made by scuba divers in the area of La Jolla Canyon near the Gulf of California shows that people once lived in places now at the bottom of the ocean. From the floor of the Pacific the divers brought up a large number of metates, stones which Indians have used for grinding cereal seeds since the most ancient times.

This is the only discovery of its kind. But it should be remembered that La Jolla is probably the most thoroughly studied area of the submarine Pacific, for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the largest centre in the world studying the ocean, is located there. If the floor along the whole Pacific coast of America is 64 studied with equal thoroughness we may look forward to a great many astonishing finds that will put the Indian metates in the shade.

__ALPHA_LVL2__ Andes Land and the Secret of Tiahuanaco

A search for traces of primitive Columbuses on the floor of the Pacific Ocean is certainly a worthwhile and interesting occupation. Still, scuha divers seem more drawn to the idea of looking for the remains of sunken cities, with their temples, palaces, works of art and nndociphered writings. It may be that the key to the secrets of the origin of the South American civilisations lies at the bottom of the Pacific.

In Central America scholars have established the sequence of cultures and the general features of their development from primitive hunters and gatherers through agriculturists to the creators of great civilisations. There is a relatively precise chronology for Central America since many Central American monuments have hieroglyphic calendar dates.

In South America, however, the investigator encounters a large number of cultures whose age he does not know either absolutely or relatively, that is, he does not know which culture preceded which. Excavations in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Chile have revealed hundreds of archeological cultures. Archeology has worked up the chronological framework of these South American cultures, their dispersal, interconnections and in some cases their sequence, to a far less degree than it has for the peoples of Central America. A single new discovery often upsets the existing pattern and makes it necessary to construct a new one. To this day many points are still 65 099-5.jpg __CAPTION__ Easter Island rock carvings have been ravaged by time 099-6.jpg 099-7.jpg 099-8.jpg __CAPTION__ This Easter Island statue, called the IIoa-HaUa-Nana-Ia, stood in
the British Museum for nearly half a century before symbolic signs
and drawings were discovered on its back~ __CAPTION__ Drawings of a bird-man from the caves of Orongo on Easter Island~ 099-9.jpg 099-10.jpg 099-11.jpg __CAPTION__ Some of the decorative motifs and figures in Easter Island art resemble
those of ancient Greece~ __CAPTION__ Enormous stone statues have been found on Easter Island and other
islands of Eastern Polynesia. Tlieir origin and purpose are still a
mystery~

This fantastic lizard-like man, called the Tangata-Moko, is found on Easter Island rock carvings, among the characters of the Itohau rcm? ormgo script and is represented in figurines

099-12.jpg 099-13.jpg __CAPTION__ Is the striking resemblance between the wooden idols of the North
American Indians and those of the Polynesians Just a coincidence?
No, it indicates ancient contacts, say Thor Heyerdahl and supporters
of his theory. If they are right, could not these contacts have been
facilitated by now sunken islands and islets lying between America
and Polynesia? 099-14.jpg 099-15.jpg __CAPTION__ When La P(5rouse visited Easter Island in 1786 he found the giant
statues still standing on their platforms. The statues were crowned by
tall cylindrical hats~ __CAPTION__ The Sun Gate in Tiahuanaco~ __CAPTION__ The ``Triliton'', a huge stone gateway on the Tonga Islands in Western
Polynesia~ 099-16.jpg 099-17.jpg __CAPTION__ This drawing on a proto-Inclian seal with a hieroglyphic inscription
is believed hy iTiost scholars to he a prototype of the great, trod Siva,
the mythical creator of the teaching of Tantra. The-`proto-Siva'' is
sitting in a yoga posture~ __CAPTION__ West of Mesopotamia, in a land called Klam, a civilisation that had
affinities with the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia and the Indian
subcontinent flourished between 4,000 and 5,000 years airo. Might
not these three ancient cultures have a common origin? This bronze
statuette in a Berlin museum hears an inscription by Kutur Mapuk,
who ruled Elam in the 18th century B.C. 099-18.jpg 099-19.jpg 099-20.jpg BRAZIL---COLOMBIA BORDER COLOMBIA POLYNESIA __CAPTION__ The Mesopotamian script developed from drawings to combinations
of wedges. The oldest symbols (far left) of what is known as the ``
protoSumerian'' writing resemble in many ways the signs used in writing
in Elam and India, lands that were the neighbours of Mesopotamia~ __CAPTION__ Figs a, k and e are Peruvian spirit emblems. Figs c and </ aie
petroglyphs of a type common in the Marquesas and Society islands. This
peculiar type of Polynesian petroglypli represents, like so many of
the Peruvian spirit emblems, an anthropomorphic figure drawn in two
parallel lines in such a way that the hody is not joined at the hips.
Pig. / is a petroglyph from Kauai, Hawaii. The petioglyph of this
type agrees remarkably with spirit emblems in early Peru.
Fig. » is a petroglyph from the Brazil-Colombia border, and Fig. h
is one from Rio Cuduiary in Colombia, introduced merely by way
of its strong resemblance to the Moriori figure, Fig. i, which was carved
on a trunk of a Chatham Island Kopi tree~ __CAPTION__ The ancient Egyptians did not sail along the Nile in ships with a high
stern, like the one depicted on a clay vessel found in Egypt. In the
Red Sea area, however, drawings of these ``foreign'' ships are found
fairly often. A number of scholars think that men from the Persian
Gulf visited Egypt in them; others believe that the voyagers came
from the Indian subcontinent. Could these ships have come from the
enigmatic land of Melukha or the equally mysterious land of Dilmun? 099-21.jpg 099-22.jpg __CAPTION__ This is Idi-Narum, a Sumerian official. The appearance and
anthropological type of the oldest inhabitants of the valley of the Tigris
and the Euphrates are remarkably like those of the men who created
the proto-Indian civilisation~ __CAPTION__ Alahastcr head of a Sumerian woman of the city of Uruk. The
eyebrows and eyes were once inlaid with semi-precious stones. The bust
is now in a museum in Baghdad, capital of Iraq~ EASTKHN ASIA ANCIKNT AMKHICA 099-23.jpg 099-24.jpg TI 099-25.jpg 099-26.jpg 099-27.jpg IV 099-28.jpg 099-29.jpg __CAPTION__ I. Feline divinities were worshiped by China's Shang Dynasty (left)
and by both the Olrnecs of Mexico and the Chavin civilisation of Peru
(right). II Lion-headed thrones are shown in representations of
deities in India (left) and of Maya dignitaries (right). 111. Lotus friey.es
adorn both Maya and Indian temples. Remarkable similarities
occurbetween these two designs, which portray men reclining {between
winding lotus stems which they grasp in both bands. I\. Wheeled
animals made in India may have inspired similar figures found in
Mexican tombs~ debatable and South America's ancient history remains vague.

The best known and yet most enigmatic site in South America is called Tiahuanaco. It is located in Bolivia, near Lake Titicaca, the highest of all inland basins. The site consists of the ruins of a series of monumental stone buildings. The chief structure, called the Sun Gate, is a portal built of enormous stone slabs decorated with bas-reliefs depicting imaginary or highly stylised creatures.

In the 1930s two scholars, Arthur Posnansky and Edmund Kiss, attempted to decipher the bas-reliefs on the Sun Gate by treating them as signs of a calendar. Before they had been proven right or wrong, the enthusiasts discovered an amazing resemblance between the "Tiahuanaco calendar" and the calculations made by Hanns Horbiger, author of an original cosmogonic hypothesis to the effect that the moon is not an "eternal satellite" but a fairly late acquisition, dating back only a few tens of thousands of years.

A science-fiction writer, Hans Schindler, who used the pen-name Bellamy, hastened to combine the doubtful Posnansky-Kiss translation of the characters on the bas-reliefs with the still more doubtful theory of Horbiger and created a neat, elegant hypothesis that took care of all the unsolved problems in oceanography, archeology, geology, ethnography, folklore and so on, at one stroke.

According to Bellamy, the Moon's original orbit passed between Mars and the Earth. But one fine day the moon was drawn into the earth's field of gravitation and became a satellite of our planet. The new satellite proved to be a __PRINTERS_P_65_COMMENT__ 5---0200 66 dangerous acquisition. It immediately had a disastrous effect on the earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere. Hurricanes of unprecedented force swept across the globe, floods wreaked havoc in many low-lying places, intensive volcanic activity set in, and mountain ridges lifted up out of the bowels of the earth. The catastrophes destroyed the prehistoric civilisation, of which the Tiahuanaco monument, the calendar on the Sun Gate, is one of the relics. It was an island culture, not a continental culture, says Bellamy, because the Andes in the region of Tiahuanaco was once a vast island in the Pacific, Andes Land.

Bellamy's hypothesis is farfetched, to put it mildly. Although actually based only on a calendar that has not been authentically deciphered, it runs counter to fundamental findings of oceanography, geology, astronomy, archeology and many other sciences. The reason why we have mentioned it here is to show that even the most fantastic assumption sometimes contains a grain of truth. For in recent years two discoveries have been made in the Andes area that will undoubtedly open up a new chapter in the history of underwater research.

First, investigations at the bottom of Lake Titicaca by archeologists, with the collaboration of the Argentinian Diving Federation, revealed, a couple of hundred metres from the shore, a group of structures more than one kilometre long. The structures include a paved area of several hundred square metres and about 30 walls placed geometrically, in parallel rows.

Is this a drowned city? Or the remains of a temple that stood on the shore of the lake? Or is it the necropolis of Tiahnanaco, for not 67 a single burial site has been Found in that vast complex? We do not know as yet.

Nor do we know why the structures are now below the surface. (Lake Titicaca lies at a higher elevation than Mt Fuji and only 1,000 metres below Mont Blanc.) Despite their height and grandeur, the Andes are young mountains. They developed towards the end of the Tertiary period. Before that Lake Titicaca was not the highest lake in the world but an ordinary sea gulf, as evidenced by the skeletons of marine animals found there. In the Tertiary period the Andes began to rise, and the lake was cut off from the ocean.

The water level of the lake alternately rose and fell, which is perhaps why the builders of the Sun Gate and the other vast structures abandoned Tiahuanaco. By the time the first Europeans reached the site, the local inhabitants could tell them only legends about the people who had erected those structures. One of the occasions when the level of the lake rose (perhaps, owing to a heavy snowmelt in the mountains) might have caused a ``flood'' at an elevation of four kilometres.

The discovery of ancient ruins at the bottom of a lake is extremely interesting but not particularly sensational. The discovery of a sunken city in the ocean, at a depth of almost two kilometres, is truly an extraordinary happening. If this discovery is shown to be authentic it will open up immeasurably broader vistas before underwater archeology, which may possibly begin to investigate the abyssal depths as well as the continental shelf. Archeologists will, of course, require more sophisticated equipment; scuba divers could not cope with the job.

__PRINTERS_P_67_COMMENT__ 5* 68

The purpose of the oceanograpliic expedition under Robert Menzis that was sent to the coast of Peru in the mid-sixties by the marine laboratory of Duke University, in the United States, was to study the fauna in Peruvian waters, which are rightly called the "richest waters in the world''. For six weeks the expedition investigated the Milne-Edwards Basin not far from the port of Callao. Here, for a good 1,000 kilometres, the ocean floor lies at a depth of almost six kilometres. But suddenly the oceanographers found, to their amazement, that the underwater cameras they raised from a depth of about two kilometres (6,000 feet, to be exact), had recorded the ruins of an ancient city! Stone columns, many of them covered with carvings that were either ornamentation or hieroglyphic inscriptions, were clearly visible in the photographs.

Shaken by the discovery, Robert Menzis and his companions started a search closer to Callao, which is a very old port. Using a depth recorder, they found stone columns on the sea floor. Does not this indicate that a continuation of Callao should be sought out in the Pacific?

The Andes area is one of the most unstable regions of the globe. Earthquakes are frequent there for the Andes are still continuing to rise. The biggest and strongest disturbance of the earth's crust ever recorded by modern instruments occurred in that region on May 22, 1960. Starting in the ocean, not far from Valdivia, Chile, the earthquake reduced a large number of towns and cities along the Pacific coast of South America to ruins. Enormous tidal waves crossed the entire Pacific. Subterranean shocks, landslides and volcanic eruptions devastated a territory larger than Great Britain. In such a seismic 69 zone it is quite possible for entire cities to sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Oceanographers and geologists say that part of the coast in the region of Callao sank beneath the waves comparatively recently, deepening the Milne-Edwards Basin by 200 metres. When did this take place? Archeologists, rather than geologists, may be able to answer this question after they investigate the underwater ruins near Callao.

As to the mysterious city spotted at a depth of 6,000 feet, Robert Menzis dreams of studying it with the help of a small submarine, since it cannot be reached by divers. If there really is a city there and not just a chance accumulation of rocks and stones this will be, says Menzis, one of the most thrilling discoveries of the 20th century.

__ALPHA_LVL2__ From the Andes to Easter Island

It well may be that only underwater exploration, whether at the bottom of Lake Titicaca or in the Pacific deeps, will solve the riddle of the ancient civilisations of South America. When conquered by the Spaniards in the 16th century, the Incas ruled a territory of some 2,000,000 square kilometres, stretching for more than 4,000 kilometres along the Pacific coast.

The unique civilisation of the Incas, which the conquistadors barbarously destroyed, was based on still older cultures. Some scholars are inclined to think that the roots of the latter go back^to the civilisation of Ancient Egypt which, they hold, lies at the foundation of all the great cultures of antiquity. Some believe that the roots go back still farther, to Mesopotamia. And some think 70 the civilisations of South America owe 1heir origin to the most ancient culture of the New World, remains of which are hidden in the "green hell" of the Amazonian jungle.

Professor Posnansky concluded that not only the Sun Gate at Tiahuanaco hut (he entire complex of monumental structures represents "a gigantic stone calendar reflecting astronomical phenomena" that took place about 20,000 years ago. Indian legends say that the first human settlement on earth arose at, Tiahuanaco and that human culture was born there. In his book Tiahuanaco, the Cradle of American Man, Professor Posnansky maintains that the archeological findings and his "deciphering of the complex" prove that the Indian legends are true.

The earliest Old World sites date back no more than 8,000 to 9,000 years. If Posnansky is to be believed, they are half as old as Tiahuanaco. Bellamy increased the age of the Tiahuanaco complex to 250,000 years, while the French writer Denis Saurat estimated it to be as much as 300,000 years. Finally, Alexander Kazantsev, Soviet science-fiction author, announced that the famous Sun Gate calendar was not made here on earth at all but had been left as a memento by visitors from Venus.

As the reader can see, it is not such a long way from shaky hypotheses to the realm of pure fantasy. But let us leave the realm of fantasy to the science-fiction writers.

Americanists now believe that the Sun Gate and other Tiahuanaco monuments were built between the 6th and 10th centuries A.D., and by the local inhabitants, the Indians, instead of by Egyptians, Mesopotamians or visiting Venusians,

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Indeed, why look for outsiders who might have built Tiahuanaco? Might it not have been the other way round, that the builders of that great architectural complex, people possessing a high culture, influenced other cultures? Archeologists have found undisputed evidence that the Tiahuanaco civilisation strongly influenced the later cultures of ancient Peru and Bolivia. At the edges of the area over which the Tiahuanaco culture spread, in Colombia, individual centres of this civilisation lasted right up until the Spanish invasion. Could it have spread even farther, not only through South America but also westwards, into the ocean, until it reached the islands of Polynesia?

This question was posed by the famous Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. There is no need to retell his fascinating book The Kon-Tiki Expedition, for all his arguments in support of that hypothesis are set forth in it with sufficient clarity. The next step was taken during excavations on the Galapagos Islands.

These islands in the eastern part of the Pacific occupy a splendid strategic position. But that is not why they interest scientists. Oceanographers closely study the interaction of two powerful currents, the warm South Equatorial Current and the cold Peru Current, which meet at the Galapagos. The flora and fauna provide naturalists with rich material for comparisons and generalisations. It is not surprising that the remarkable world of the Galapagos, where flora and fauna of the tropics and the arctic regions live side by side, helped Darwin to arrive at his theory of evolution. (Darwin stopped at the islands during his voyage on the Beagle.)

Tropical lianas and arctic mosses, 72 bright-coloured jungle birds and antarctic seagulls, parrots and penguins, cold-loving seals and heatloving giant tortoises are some of the striking contrasts found on the Galapagos Islands. But perhaps the best known of the Galapagos fauna are the iguanas, large lizards that look like mythological dragons.

It was long thought that the Galapagos Islands were a unique preserve unknown to man until the arrival of Europeans. Only recently, however, it was discovered that not only oceanographers and naturalists but archeologists as well can find much of interest there.

Botanists were the first to point this out. Among the flora of the archipelago they found a number of species that were cultivated by the coastal Indians of Northern Peru. From this they concluded that people had once lived on the islands.

The hypothesis was confirmed during archeological excavations organised and headed by Thor Heyerdahl of Kon-Tiki fame. It seems that men visited the Galapagos Islands many centuries before the islands were discovered by Europeans.

The Heyerdahl expedition found about 2,000 objects on the islands, including stoneware, potsherds, vases and vessels covered with decorative patterns. The objects were made in different styles of workmanship and belong to various periods and to the various cultures that existed along the Peruvian coast before the Spanish conquest. The Galapagos Islands must have been well known to the Indians who sailed the ocean on their balsa rafts.

Why did they abandon the islands? The layers of lava covering the remains of some of the ancient sites suggest the reason. Volcanic 73 eruptions some centuries ago evidently forced the Indians to leave the islands and return home. Or perhaps lava flows wiped out the inhabitants. The Galapagos flora and fauna suggest that the archipelago was once connected with the mainland. True, the fact that relict flora and fauna are preserved there indicates that the land bridge must have sunk very long ago. It may be, though, that some bridges, in the shape of islands and islets, remained on the surface for a long time, and it was by way of these that Indian seafarers made their way to the Galapagos archipelago.

Europeans were unable, for a very long time, to find the Galapagos Islands and for that reason called them the Enchanted Isles. Yet they had compasses and well-equipped ships. How, then, could Indians with their vastly inferior navigational techniques have made regular voyages over the course of a long period, as is shown by the pottery found on the islands? It is quite possible that dry tracts, now at the bottom of the Pacific, served them as reference landmarks and even stopping places.

A long underwater ridge named after Cocos Island, the only patch of land remaining above the water, stretches from the shores of South America to the Galapagos archipelago. Cocos Island is famous for treasure which, say old maps and documents, is hidden in its caves or buried along its shores. But underwater research may bring treasure of another kind---- archeological treasure---to light on this "treasure island''. It may be that Cocos Island and the Galapagos group served, along with other islands and islets in this part of the Pacific, as way stations for Indian navigators.

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Two chapters of Thor lleyerdahl's recent book, Das Abenteuer einer Theorie (The Adventures of a Theory), convincingly support thai idea. Traces of visits by Indians have been found on the Galapagos. Another piece of evidence are the plantations of coconut palms that must have been laid out on Cocos Island long before Europeans first came there. In Heyerdahl's opinion, Gocos Island, which lies on the route from Ecuador to Guatemala, was an ideal intermediate harbour in the open sea between the two great cultural areas of pre-Columbian America, the Andean and the Central American. Today scholars are finding more and more evidence of the contacts that existed between those two cultural areas many centuries ago. It is quite possible that contacts were maintained not via land--- through the almost impenetrable forests of Colombia and Panama---but via the sea. Other islets, which are now submerged, as well as Cocos Island, may have helped to make the water route easier.

The Andes is the name applied to the great mountain system which extends along the full length of the Pacific coast of South America. The eminent Soviet geologist V. Belousov believes that this range is only the eastern part of a vast zone, the western part being under water. Of the submarine mountains and the Albatross Plateau that were once above water, says Belousov, only the Galapagos Islands and tiny Cocos Island, summit of the Cocos Ridge, remain. Investigation has shown that the ridge sank comparatively recently.

Indian mariners could have used other islets that were part of the Cocos Ridge as ``landmarks'' when they sailed their rafts over the Pacific. 75 They could have sailed in two directions: northward from the coast of Peru and Ecuador to the coast of Central America, where the Mayan and Zapotecan cultures existed, or westward, to the islands of Oceania inhabited by Polynesians.

Only underwater archeology can confirm this. The volcanic eruptions and cataclysmic earthquakes that took place in this area both on land and on the ocean floor show that the earth's crust here is still unquiet.

Describing excavations on Easter Island and on Rapa and other islands in the eastern Pacific, Ileyerdahl expounds in his book Aku-Aku the theory that the first inhabitants of eastern Polynesia were seafarers from ancient Peru. Islands now sunken may have helped them to get across the ocean. An underwater ridge runs south-west from the coast of Peru from 15° to 28°S. Here a large group of guyots, flattopped seamounts, was discovered not long ago, some of them at a depth of only 200 to 500 metros, which means they were mountains above water, or perhaps islands, in the recent past.

Not far from where this underwater ridge ends another begins. It runs almost parallel to 25°S for a good 2,000 kilometres. Only the sullen cliffs of Sala-y-G6mez, an island after which the ridge is named, appear above the water. Other peaks may have been visible not so very long ago. To sum up, a long chain of underwater ridges stretches from the coast of Peru straight to Easter Island, which is not far from Salay-G6mez Island. Islands arid islets now under water may have been used by the Indians as stepping-stones and landmarks when they sailed the Peru-Easter Island route. Underwater 76 archeology may give us the answer to this question, a question that interests both historians and oceanographers.

__ALPHA_LVL2__ Kainga Nuinui, or ``Enormous Land"

What about Easter Island itself? Even if its coastline "has not dropped by a yard" since man first appeared in Oceania, as the oceanographer Chubb maintains, the islands, some of them inhabited, that Captain Davis saw could have existed in the area. Or, as most scientists, including Thor Heyerdahl, today believe, what Davis saw were other Polynesian islands, such as Mangareva and Timoe, whose appearance corresponds to his description.

Oceanographers note that the floor of the vast southeastern part of the Pacific where Easter Island is situated is remarkable in many respects. There the earth's crust is not between three and five kilometres thick, as is typical for oceanic crust, but between 20 and 30 kilometres thick, approaching the thickness of the continental crust. This area is the centre of severe earthquakes. Finally, on Easter Island geologists have found samples of rock, such as rhyolites, that are extremely rare in the Pacific and are sooner typical of the volcanoes of island arcs than of open parts of the ocean. Easter Island is part of the gigantic East Pacific Rise, a young geological formation that is still active. (The Rise, a vast underwater land on the bottom of the ocean, reaches a height of two or three kilometres. It is from 2,000 to 4,000 kilometres wide and about 15,000 kilometres long, the size of an entire continent!)

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The topography and s true lure of Ihe eastern part of the Pacific and the structure of the neighbouring continental shelf evidently started developing in the Early Tertiary and continue to be technically active, says Professor Menard. The majority of experts agree that dry land once existed in the Easter Island area. It may have been a large land mass or most probably a group of islands that later sank. But when did they sink? The same experts say this happened very long ago, before human times or, at the very latest, at the end of the last Ice Age, between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago. The culture of Easter Island cannot possibly be that old. The earliest traces of man on that mysterious island date back only to the 4th century A.D.

Of course, archeologists may find earlier traces, but it is clear that man arrived on Easter Island somewhere at the turn of our era, perhaps even a few centuries before, but certainly not several millennia ago. The great changes that took place 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, when the last Ice Age ended, may have something to do with the island's geological history but they cannot provide a key to the riddle of its astonishing culture. Still, there are findings that prompt us to recall the hypotheses of Menzbir, Brown and Zubov.

The only European who could have seen large numbers of kohau rongo-rongo wooden tablets, instead of the score or so that remain and are now in museums, was the missionary Eugenio Eyraud. Brother Eyraud reported: "In all the huts are found tables of wood or sticks covered with hieroglyphs; these are figures of animals unknown in the island.'' Soon after, thousands of these priceless monuments of Easter Island writing were destroyed. When the few remaining 78 tablets fell inlo the hands of Bishop Topaiio Jaussen, the lirsl man Lo study the kohau rongorongo hieroglyphs, he did not find a