Sunken Lands

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CHILDREN OF THE FLOOD

One afternoon, a hunter named Nanabozho returned home from an arduous journey to find that his cousin was missing. He called his name, over and over, but heard no answer. His cousin's hut was empty. A half-eaten meal lay abandoned on the table. It was as if he'd vanished into thin air.

Nanabozho noticed a trail of churned earth and snapped twigs snaking through the forest. Immediately, he knew that his cousin had been kidnapped by his enemy, the Great Serpent.

The hunter followed the trail to a dark lake filled with evil spirits, including the Great Serpent himself. To lure the beast out of the lake, Nanabozho stopped the winds and asked the sun to beat down hard, hoping that the serpent would seek the coolness of the leafy, tree-lined shore. In readiness, Nanabozho transformed himself into a tree stump and waited.

As the lake warmed, the Great Serpent emerged, groggily, his scales flashing in the sunshine, and promptly fell asleep in the shade. Seizing his opportunity, Nanabozho shot an arrow into his heart. With a diabolical cry the wounded beast thrashed in the water, unleashing a great flood upon the land. As a tidal wave crashed through the villages and towns, drowning the terrified people, the dying serpent rode high above on the foaming crest, his fiery eyes glaring.

The flood waters continued to rise until only one mountain peak remained, where Nanabozho and a few other survivors took refuge. They built a raft to escape as the final piece of dry land vanished beneath the waves. Almost everything they knew was gone but for the birds that circled in the sky above them.

They drifted in despair for days and days until the waters began to recede and rugged peaks burst through the waves. Then they descended from the mountains to begin all over again.1

In 1984 an archaeologist was searching for submerged ruins in the Bay of Atlit on Israel's Carmel coast. Ten metres below the surface of the sparkling blue Mediterranean waters, Ehud Galili's team discovered seven megaliths on the seabed, clustered in a half-circle, tilted and eroded, but still standing after millennia under water, buffeted by the currents. Cup marks had been carefully carved into the stones, which surrounded the circular mouth of a freshwater well. Nearby, oval slabs were grooved with anthropomorphic symbols. Scattered across a 10-acre surrounding area were the walls of houses, paved plazas and graves full of bones. It was a lost world beneath the sea, untouched by human hands since it was flooded 9,000 years ago.

Gradually, Galili uncovered the remains of a village that was home to the farmers of a fertile plain, sown with wheat, grazed by domesticated animals. They crafted artefacts of bone, wood and stone. They buried their dead and carried out rituals at their sacred well,2 sharing ancestral stories in the shadow of the megaliths until rising seas submerged their homeland, forcing them to migrate. But archaeologists also found a clue that something more sudden and catastrophic might have occurred: piles of fish, ready for sale or storage, lay abandoned. An Italian research team led by Maria Pareschi of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology suggested that a volcanic eruption of Mount Etna sent a tsunami pounding through the settlement, laying all to waste in a matter of hours. British marine archaeologist Dr Sean Kingsley even claimed that this could be evidence of the event that inspired the biblical tale of Noah's flood.

Atlit Yam is one of many sunken places around the globe that evoke wonder and speculation. Deep in the waters between Tunisia and Sicily, a 12-metre limestone monolith lies split in two, encrusted with barnacles, carved over 9,000 years ago, when that bank of seabed was an island. Off the eastern shore of the Croatian island of Korcula lies a 7,000-year-old road that was built by a lost maritime culture known as the Hvar. In the Arabian Sea stone pillars protrude at a location where the holy Hindu city of Dwarka, home to Lord Krishna, was believed to have sunk. Statues, goblets and sarcophagi are strewn on the sea floor of a bay west of the Nile, where the ancient Egyptian trading port of Thonis-Heracleion was guarded by the gigantic statue of Hapi, god of floods, taken down in a torrent of liquified soil when waters destroyed the city after an earthquake.

These are what remain of settlements from epochs when sea levels were hundreds of metres lower, their roads, walls and temples preserved in silt, along with tools, artworks and storage pits for meat and grains. These were centres of trade and agriculture, homes to gods, spirits and ancestors, abandoned to rising waters or destroyed by earthquakes, eruptions and tsunamis. Quickly, they were covered by sand, colonised by crustaceans and seaweed, stalled in time, while high above, on dry land, civilisations rose and fell. For millennia, the stone faces of forgotten deities peered at passing sharks through fronds of kelp. Lobsters scuttled over pottery fragments. Molluscs burrowed into tree trunks, their bark intact, sap still flowing in their capillaries. Jellyfish drifted over the bones of deer and wild cattle in peat beds imprinted with the feet of Stone Age children.

From time to time, these remnants would emerge at low tide after storms, snag in fishing nets, or rise to the surface. For instance, when the ruins of a Roman holiday resort were spotted in the Bay of Naples after an expanding subterranean magma chamber forced them up into the glittering shallows. Or when a night of savage storms revealed wooden posts in a circle around a Neolithic sky-burial platform on a windswept Norfolk beach. Or when a North Sea trawler dredged up a Mesolithic spear point in a clump of peat, revealing a forgotten land that once connected Britain to Europe before a tsunami flooded it 8,000 years ago.

Some of these places might have vanished from the historical record or sunk in a tumult of fire and flood long before humans had even a concept of history. But it doesn't necessarily mean that they were forgotten. Memories of settlements, hunting grounds and farmlands lost to rising waters, glacial floods and seismic cataclysms linger in folklore and cling to anomalies in the coastal topography. Flood stories form the root of mythologies across many cultures, going back to before ancient Sumerian times, and lie at the heart of all three major Abrahamic religions, hinting at traumatic experiences in our deep past, when the world became radically changed by runaway global warming.

Six hundred generations ago, our distant relatives experienced catastrophic flooding in a punishing series of climate shifts that began as the Ice Age came to an end sometime after 18,000 bce, when the world's ice caps were at their furthest extent, known as the Last Glacial Maximum. First, there was a gradual warming period known as the Oldest Dryas, followed by the Bolling in which there was 300 years of super-accelerated heating, with melting glaciers, floods and sea levels rising by 16 metres. But just as the survivors adapted to the forests of birch and pine that flourished on once frozen tundra, the climate slammed into reverse. The world cooled for 600 years, sheets of ice surging back over the land. Another millennium of warming re-established the forests, but in 10,800 bce Earth was plunged into temperatures as cold as the Last Glacial Maximum.

One theory behind the Younger Dryas freeze is that a North American proglacial lake, containing meltwater from the Laurentide Ice Sheet, was breached. A wall of water coursed through Washington State at 105 kilometres per hour, with aquatic tornadoes that scoured the rock like drills, carving the 100-kilometre-long Grand Coulee canyon. So much freshwater entered the sea that it altered the ocean's salinity and switched off the Gulf Stream, the warm Atlantic Ocean current. Another theory is that a comet hit the Greenland Ice Sheet, sending a cloud of dust into the atmosphere, unleashing the mega-flood and casting the world into 1,300 years of winter. Scientists have unearthed evidence of this impact in a 'black mat' of nanodiamonds, carbon spherules, iridium, charcoal and soot - all signs of a high-heat event - in over ninety sites in North America and Greenland, carbon dated from 10,800 bce. Whatever the cause, the aftermath was devastating for life on Earth. Megafauna such as mammoths, giant ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats became extinct. Without a flow of warm Atlantic water moving northward, the ice sheets advanced and temperatures plummeted, rendering much of northern Europe and North America uninhabitable.

There may be traces of human experiences of this in some North American flood legends that exist today. The Pima from Arizona tell of an eagle that warned of a flood before a wall of water careered down the Gila valley, destroying all in its path. The Choctaw tells of a darkness that fell over the earth, bringing unhappiness to the people. When their shaman spotted a glimmer of light in the north, they were full of joy, until they realised it was a mountain of water rolling towards them. Or there's the Ojibwa's tale of the Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star, which burned all the trees and turned the world cold. The same tribe also have the legend of Nanabozho and the Great Serpent.

In 9600 bce, the Gulf Stream was restored and the planet warmed again. Humans thrived as temperate deciduous forests returned, bringing nuts, fruits and edible plants. They settled on coasts and in river valleys, where there was an abundance of food and water. But with opportunity came...