Ancient World Review

The Yonaguni Monument: Japan's "Lost Atlantis" Or Natural Formation?

Video from 2017. Note the mention of artwork discovered on the formations.

"The Yonaguni-jima Kaitei Chikei, literally translated as 'Yonaguni Island Submarine Topography,' is an underwater mystery off the coast of the Ryukyu Islands, Japan. The massive underwater rock formation is speculated to have existed for more than 10,000 years, but whether the formation is completely man-made, entirely natural, or has been altered by human hands is still up for debate." Source: Atlas Obscura.

Many sources matter-of-factly describe the formations of the Yonaguni Monument as the ruins of an advanced prehistoric city which sank beneath the waves thousands of years ago. For instance, see the book Underworld by Graham Hancock, author of the classic work of alternate history "Fingerprints Of The Gods." This theory was first put forward by the Japanese professor and marine geologist Masaaki Kimura who began studying the monument in 1992 (the formation was first discovered by local divers in the 1980s).

Video from 2015.

After exploring the monument for around twenty years, Kimura "remains convinced that the site was carved thousands of years ago, when the land mass was above water. According to Kimura the Yonaguni’s numerous right angles, strategically placed holes and aesthetic triangles are signs of human alteration. He also claims that carvings exist on the monuments, resembling Kaida script. He believes that a pyramid, castles, roads, monuments and a stadium can be identified within the structure – which for him is evidence that the monument is what remains of the Lost Continent of Mu, the Japanese equivalent to Atlantis." (Atlas Obscura)

Note: Mu was also the home of the dreaded Ghatanothoa, an elder god so hideous that anyone who saw him (or an image of him, no matter how small) was instantly petrified, their skin turned to leather and bone while their brains remained alive and conscious forever. For more information on Ghatanothoa, see Out of the Aeons by H.P. Lovecraft.

The Yonaguni Monument could be part of a prehistoric city, I guess. It doesn't look natural to me -- there are two many straight lines and right angles and structures that definitely resemble loose blocks, stairs and what could be terraces or plazas -- but Kimura loses me when he claims that the monument originally stood on the Lost Continent of Mu. I'd like to believe in Mu and I suppose it's possible that lost continents once existed, but it would be nice to have some evidence other than ambiguous formations on the bottom of the sea.

Even if the monument is artificial, there are no signs (as far as I know) that it was ever inhabited. The top video mentions that artwork was discovered in the submerged "ruins," and Kimura claims in the next video that "tools and engraved stones" were discovered there, but I haven't been able to verify that these tools and engravings actually exist. The engravings may just be scratches in the rocks. To the best of my knowledge, no artifacts of any kind have ever been discovered in the Yonaguni Monument. In contrast, divers exploring the very real sunken town of Baiae off the coast of Italy have found all sorts of Roman statuary, mosaics, etc., lying around on the bottom of the Gulf of Naples.  There doesn't seem to be anything like that in this enigmatic site off the coast of Japan.

Mainstream archaeologists and other experts call Kimura's "sunken city" pseudoarchaeology, and they're probably right. If you believe the geologists, anyway,  this bizarre formation may not be all that bizarre after all:

"Some of those who have studied the formation, such as geologist Robert Schoch of Boston University, state that it is most likely natural. Schoch observed the sandstones that make up the Yonaguni formation to 'contain numerous well-defined, parallel bedding planes along which the layers easily separate. The rocks of this group are also criss-crossed by numerous sets of parallel, vertically oriented joints in the rock. These joints are natural, parallel fractures by which the rectangular formations seen in the area likely formed. Yonaguni lies in an earthquake-prone region; such earthquakes tend to fracture the rocks in a regular manner.' He also observes that there are similar formations on the northeast coast of Yonaguni. John Anthony West also reaches the same conclusion. Schoch also believes that the 'drawings' identified by Kimura are natural scratches on the rocks, and suggests that the 'walls' are simply natural horizontal platforms which fell into a vertical position when rock below them eroded, and the alleged roads are simply channels in the rock." (Wikipedia)

Submerged 7000-Yr-Old Aboriginal Site Discovered Off Coast Of Australia

"Australia has a deep human history stretching back 65,000 years, but many of its oldest archaeological sites are now underwater. In an encouraging sign that Aboriginal artifacts and landscapes may actually be preserved offshore, archaeologists have discovered a 7,000-year-old site submerged along Australia's continental shelf, the first of its kind. Their discovery is outlined today in the journal PLoS One." Source: Smithsonian Magazine.

Note: "At the end of the Ice Age, sea level was much lower than today, and the Australian coastline was 160 kilometers farther offshore. When the ice receded and sea level rose to its current level, approximately two million square kilometers of Australian land became submerged where Aboriginal peoples had previously lived. Thus, it is likely that many ancient Aboriginal sites are currently underwater." (Science Daily)

Closed-captions helpful.

The Face Of A Stone Age Man Whose Skull Was Found On A Spike

"We may never know why the skull of a Stone Age man ended up on a stake in a mysterious underwater grave 8,000 years ago, but thanks to a new facial reconstruction, we can see what he probably looked like before he died." Source: Live Science.

"Archaeologists discovered the man's skull, as well as the remains of at least 10 other Stone Age adults and an infant, in 2012 at the bottom of what used to be a small lake in what is now Motala, a municipality in eastern-central Sweden. However, only one of the adults had a jaw; the rest were jawless, and two of the skulls had been placed on stakes sticking out from the lake's surface.

"Now, a 3D facial reconstruction reveals the likeness of one of those jawless skulls. Oscar Nilsson, a forensic artist based in Sweden, used this skull as well as genetic and anatomical information gleaned from it to create a bust of the man — a blue-eyed, brown-haired and pale-skinned individual in his 50s."

How To Fake The Shroud Of Turin

The Shroud of Turin is probably a medieval forgery. Radiocarbon 14 tests performed back in 1988 dated the shroud to AD 1260–1390, but as usual these results have been called into question. For example, in 2013 USA Today announced that "new scientific tests on the Shroud of Turin, which went on display Saturday in a special TV appearance introduced by the Pope, dates the cloth to ancient times, challenging earlier experiments dating it only to the Middle Ages."

Video from 2009. Closed-captions helpful.

When it comes to the dating of the shroud, all I can say is good luck trying to sort all this stuff out. If you aren't an expert on radiocarbon dating, you don't have a prayer of figuring out which tests, if any, were accurate, and the fact that the experts themselves can't agree would seem to call into question the value of radiocarbon dating in this particular case.

There are other ways to test the shroud's authenticity. For instance, if it could be shown that the "body of Jesus" had been painted on the fabric, that would prove that the shroud is a forgery. Some experts have argued that this could be the case, but to my knowledge no traces of pigment have been discovered so far. As pointed out in the top video, the fabric itself has been darkened through some unknown process.

The people who believe that the shroud is authentic think that the image was created by exposure to Jesus's body and/or blood. These believers can be divided into two general camps:

"A 'strong-authenticity' view holds that the body image was produced by supernatural means involving Jesus' body, while a 'weak-authenticity' view holds that the body image was produced by Jesus' body via unusual natural processes. In both the strong- and weak-authenticity views, the 'blood' images arose via contact of the cloth with a bloody Jesus."  Source: The Shroud of Turin's "Blood" Images: Blood or Paint? A History of Science Inquiry," David Ford, University of Maryland (PDF)

As far as I know, the Catholic Church hasn't actually come out and said that the shroud is authentic. But they haven't said that it's inauthentic, either. If you ask me, they're trying to cover themselves with their true believers while distancing themselves enough so that they won't lose credibility if somebody does manage to prove that the shroud is a fake.

The news anchor in the next video (2009) claims that the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin has been called into question because the shroud material doesn't match the material used in another shroud discovered in a Jerusalem tomb. This is an obviously spurious argument. After all, there's no reason why different fabrics couldn't have been used for burial shrouds back then.

Fortunately for those of us who want to get to the truth of the matter, it doesn't make any difference when or how the image on the shroud was created. Even if it's "authentic," i.e., even if the shroud dates back to the first century AD and the image was left on the fabric by contact with a human body, there's absolutely no way that anyone could ever prove that it was Jesus's body. After all, we don't know what he looked like. There are no written descriptions and nobody had cameras back then. The truth is that the image on the shroud, if it's for real, could have been left there by almost anyone.

It's a fake though. You can take that to the bank.

Related: How Did The Turin Shroud Get Its Image?

Did Viking Shieldmaidens Actually Exist?

Vikings is a great show (until recently, anyway), but like all historical dramas it has to play fast and loose with its own timeline, not to mention the actual history of the events it depicts. It's also inaccurate in various details such as its depiction of the armor that the Vikings wore in battle, but all of this is to be expected due to time and budget constraints as well as the fact that the series mixes mythology and real history for dramatic effect.

One of the show's most popular characters, Lagertha, a female warrior or shieldmaiden, is also a source of controversy since it's unclear whether shieldmaidens ever existed. Strictly speaking, of course, the question is irrelevant because Vikings is a fictional drama, not a documentary, but it would be interesting to know if characters like Lagertha actually fought alongside the men in real life.

Like her husband, Ragnar Lodbrok, the character of Lagertha is taken from Viking mythology. "Her tale, as recorded by the chronicler Saxo in the 12th century, may be a reflection of tales about Thorgerd .., a Norse deity," according to Wikipedia. Shieldmaidens in general appear in the Sagas and the female Valkyries may have been based on them.

"Few, if any, scholars nowadays believe that women warriors led war bands in Viking-age Scandinavia; they have either been relegated to the world of amazon myths or explained away in other ways," according to Medievalists.net (2015). On the other hand, there is some archaeological and documentary evidence that Viking women fought in battle, at least in certain situations:

"There are few historic attestations that Viking Age women took part in warfare, but the Byzantine historian John Skylitzes records that women fought in battle when Sviatoslav I of Kiev attacked the Byzantines in Bulgaria in 971. When the Varangians (not to be confused with the Byzantine Varangian Guard) had suffered a devastating defeat in the Siege of Dorostolon, the victors were stunned at discovering armed women among the fallen warriors." (Wikipedia)

Taken by itself, this Byzantine account doesn't prove that female warriors were a standard feature of Viking society. After all, the women killed in this battle could have been wives or daughters forced to fight by a desperate situation. If the story's accurate, however, it does show that Viking women -- some of them, at any rate -- were capable of taking part in battles. How often this happened is another matter.

Ultimately, the question boils down to the interpretation of burials. Recent findings suggest that women accompanied the Viking men (in England, at any rate) in greater numbers than previously assumed, but whether these women--or the men, for that matter--were raiders is another question. Some of the sources I've seen claim that "almost half" of the Viking burials discovered in England belonged to women, but calling them warriors may be a misinterpretation of the original study (see Related links below). As it turns out, these Vikings were probably colonists rather than raiders as such, so it would have been natural for them to take their families along with them. Some of the women were buried with weapons, though, and the question is why?

Here are two examples from the stories about the burial study:

"Viking women accompanied their male partners to Britain in far greater numbers than had been previously thought," according to the Daily Mail (2011). "Almost half of all bodies in burial grounds researchers examined were those of women - with some carrying swords and shields." (Emphasis added)

The women buried in these graves may have been under-counted in earlier studies. "A study has revealed that previous research examining the gender ratio of Vikings in Medieval England may have underestimated the number of Viking women because they assumed that graves showing individuals buried with a sword and shield were men.  According to USA Today (2011), the newer study, which determined sex by analyzing the skeletal remains, showed that nearly half the examined remains were female, including one of the ‘warrior’ skeletons buried with a sword and shield." Source: Ancient Origins. (Emphasis added)

Even if half of the bodies discovered were women, it sounds like only a few of them were buried with swords and shields. Whatever the case, these grave findings suggest that female warriors did exist. After all, if a male skeleton is found buried with weapons, it would be natural to assume that he was a warrior of some kind, so the same thing could be assumed about a female skeleton. I'm not sure why a woman would be buried with weapons otherwise (unless they had some kind of symbolic value). Even if there were female Viking warriors, however, this still wouldn't prove that shieldmaidens as such actually existed as a distinct warrior caste in Viking society.

Shieldmaidens are a classic example of what I would call hidden history. Maybe they were real. Maybe not. The question, as far as I can tell, is still up in the air and will probably never be resolved conclusively until more archaeological or documentary evidence is uncovered. If shieldmaidens did exist, I have my doubts that they were as gorgeous as Katheryn Winnick, the actress and martial artist who plays Lagertha in Vikings. Most likely, they were hard-bitten characters with nasty tempers when they were crossed. One way or another, it doesn't help that the whole issue has become so mixed up in contemporary identity politics.

Related: The Role Of Women In Viking Society

Study Didn't Show That Half Of Viking Warriors Were Women

The Mysterious "Black Goo" Of The Ancient Egyptians

"Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh lived and died almost 3,000 years ago in ancient Egypt. We don’t know a lot about Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh’s life, but we do know he was a priest in the temple of Amun at Karnak. Here he had two main roles – one was ‘Opener of the Doors of Heaven’, which meant he was one of the priests who was entitled to open the doors of the shrine in the temple sanctuary, containing the cult image of the god." Source: The British Museum.

"After Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh died, he was mummified, wrapped in fine linen and sewn into his plaster and linen mummy case. This case was beautifully painted in bright colours and gilded with gold leaf over the face. At the time of his funeral, he was lowered into his coffin, and carried to his tomb. Then several litres of warm black ‘goo’ were poured all over the mummy case, covering it completely, effectively cementing the case into the coffin. The lid was then placed on the coffin, and he was left to journey forth to the underworld."

The Drought Theory Of The Collapse Of Classic Maya Civilization (UPDATED)

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Video from 2015. Ancient Apocalypse was a 2001 BBC documentary series.

Note: "Dick Gill [featured in the documentary] was a most unusual person to put forward a bold new theory explaining the collapse of Mayan civilisation. When he started his hunt for clues, he was actually a banker." Source: BBC (2011). Gill spend a considerable amount of time investigating his theory that a major drought led to the collapse and believed that he had found conclusive evidence that this is what had happened:

"The drought theory holds that rapid climate change in the form of severe drought brought about the Classic Maya collapse. According to the particular version put forward by Gill in The Great Maya Droughts ... '[Studies of] Yucatecan lake sediment cores ... provide unambiguous evidence for a severe 200-year drought from AD 800 to 1000 ... the most severe in the last 7,000 years ... precisely at the time of the Maya Collapse." (Wikipedia)

The drought theory seems to be widely accepted now. LIDAR scans support the theory, according to Wikipedia, and Gill's evidence is apparently pretty solid -- I haven't found any sources questioning the evidence itself. Still, it's possible that drought may not be enough to explain what actually happened.

"David Webster, a critic of [Gill's] megadrought theory, says that much of the evidence provided by Gill comes from the northern Yucatán and not the southern part of the peninsula, where Classic Maya civilization flourished. He also states that if water sources were to have dried up, then several city-states would have moved to other water sources. That Gill suggests that all water in the region would have dried up and destroyed Maya civilization is a stretch, according to Webster, although Webster does not have a precise competing theory explaining the Classic Maya Collapse." (Wikipedia)

Earthquakes may have played a big part in the collapse as well:

"A study published in Scientific Reports in 2016 showed that between 750 and 900 a cluster of four earthquakes affected the wet tropical mountains south of the Yucatán lowlands, which are not vulnerable to drought, and include such important cities as Quirigua and Copán. These earthquakes left detectable destruction in several Maya cities and led to the abandonment of Quirigua. The study hypothesizes that repeated destruction combined with declining trade with the Maya kingdoms of the Yucatán lowlands to propagate the collapse to the southern part of the Maya realm." (Wikipedia)

Note: Megadroughts aren't uncommon and they can last for a long time. For instance, there was a 200-year megadrought in the Sierra Nevada in the 9th - 12th centuries. Parts of the western United States could be heading into one of these destructive dry spells right now.

Report from May, 2020.

Related: Scientists Measure Severity Of Drought During The Maya Collapse

The Drowned World Of Doggerland

"Doggerland was an area of land, now submerged beneath the southern North Sea, that connected Great Britain to continental Europe. It was flooded by rising sea levels around 6,500–6,200 BC. Geological surveys have suggested that it stretched from Britain's east coast to the Netherlands and the western coasts of Germany and the peninsula of Jutland. It was probably a rich habitat with human habitation in the Mesolithic period, although rising sea levels gradually reduced it to low-lying islands before its final submergence, possibly following a tsunami caused by the Storegga Slide." (Wikipedia)

"Evidence of Doggerlanders’ nomadic presence can be found embedded in the seafloor, where modern fishermen often find ancient bones and tools that date to about 9,000 years ago. These artifacts brought Doggerland’s submerged history to the attention of British and Dutch archaeologists and paleontologists." Source: National Geographic.

"Using sophisticated seismic survey data acquired mainly by oil companies drilling in the North Sea, the scientists have been able to reconstruct a digital model of nearly 46,620 square kilometers (18,000 square miles) of what Doggerland looked like before it was flooded."

"The prehistoric existence of what is now known as Doggerland was established in the late 19th century. H. G. Wells referred to the concept in his short story A Story of the Stone Age of 1897, set in 'a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea...Fifty thousand years ago it was, fifty thousand years if the reckoning of geologists is correct', though most of the action seems to occur in what is now Surrey and Kent, but stretching out to Doggerland." (Wikipedia)

Ancient Origins reported in 2015 that "[t]he study of Doggerland has received a €2.5 million ($2.8 million) Advanced Research Grant from the European Research Council, with hopes that the results of the study provide better insight into the life of prehistoric inhabitants who are thought to have resided in the area for about 6000 years."

According to Science Magazine, "The dark, cold waters that now hide the region add to its allure because they preserve organic material for DNA analysis and radiocarbon dating better than on land. And the techniques now being tested to explore the area could aid research on submerged landscapes elsewhere, such as Beringia, the vanished land between Asia and North America inhabited by the first Americans. 'It really is a pioneer field and will make a huge difference to our understanding of prehistory,' retired University of York archaeologist Geoff Bailey says."

Related: "Britain's Atlantis" Found At Bottom Of North Sea (2012).

British Atlantis: Archaeologists Begin Exploring Lost World Of Doggerland (2015).

10,000-Year-Old Prehistoric Forest Discovered Submerged Off UK Coast

Gobekli Tepe Built Along A "Grand Geometric Plan?"

"Hunter-gatherers might have built the world's oldest known temple on a precise geometric plan, according to new findings." Source: Live Science.

"The Neolithic site, known as Göbekli Tepe, is perched atop a limestone mountain ridge in southeastern Turkey. The site's T-shaped pillars, which are carved with mystic drawings of animals, abstract symbols and human hands [next video], are arranged in giant circles and ovals  — each structure is made up of two large central pillars surrounded by smaller inward-facing pillars."

In this study, researchers used a computer to analyze the layout of the site:

"They found that the two centermost pillars aligned exactly with the midpoint of the circular structures. What's more, when they drew an imaginary line connecting the centerpoints of three of the structures, they found that it made a nearly perfect equilateral triangle, or one with three equal-length sides.

"This suggests that these three structures were planned together in advance and built according to a 'geometric design,' [one researcher] said. Archaeologists believe that the hunter-gatherers must have excavated and moved the limestone rocks from a stone quarry nearby."

Video from 2011.

Comment: Gobekli Tepe is a very strange place. It dates back to the early Neolithic, before the rise of agriculture, the domestication of animals and presumably the first settled communities -- that seems to be well established -- but beyond that "all statements about the site must be considered preliminary, as less than 5% of the site has been excavated..." (Wikipedia) One way or another, the megalith isn't the kind of place you'd expect to find from that time period and it's still a mystery how it was constructed:

"The construction of Göbekli Tepe implies organization of an advanced order not hitherto associated with Paleolithic, PPNA, or PPNB societies ... Archaeologists estimate that up to 500 persons were required to extract the heavy pillars from local quarries and move them 100–500 meters (330–1,640 ft) to the site. The pillars weigh 10–20 metric tons ... with one still in the quarry weighing 50 tons."

It's very hard to believe that primitive hunter-gatherers could have built a massive megalithic temple like this. If that's what happened, it implies that the hunter-gatherer bands in the area were either much larger than commonly believed [1] or that several of them joined together for this particular project, something that would be pretty remarkable considering their generally nomadic lifestyle.

[1] "Hunter-gatherer groups tended to range in size from an extended family to a larger band of no more than about 100 people." (National Geographic)

Small nomadic groups following a subsistence lifestyle would presumably have been spread out over a large area. You'd think they wouldn't have had that much contact with each other, but if they came together to construct Gobekli Tepe that means that they must have had enough contact to visualize and join together in a common purpose requiring a huge amount of time and labor. On the other hand, if one particular group of hunter-gatherers was large enough to build the temple (if it is a temple) on their own, does it make sense to call them "hunter-gatherers" anymore? Whatever the case, it's hard to understand how they could have acquired the knowledge of stonework and heavy transportation techniques that would have been required to quarry, move, raise and carve these gigantic stones, not to mention the knowledge required to design the site in the first place.

The improbability of all this has naturally led to speculation that Gobekli Tepe was by some lost civilization.

Normally I don't believe in the existence of lost, highly advanced (for the time) ancient civilizations, but Gobekli Tepe is so strange that it makes me wonder if something like what Graham Hancock is talking about in the above video might have actually happened.

Whatever the case, the existence of Gobekli Tepe proves without a doubt that something is wrong somewhere. Either the dating of the site is incorrect or the people who built it were a lot more advanced than we think, in which case our current picture of the early Neolithic, at least in this part of the world, is inaccurate. This one site could revolutionize our whole understanding of human development:

"Göbekli Tepe is regarded by some as an archaeological discovery of great importance since it could profoundly change the understanding of a crucial stage in the development of human society. Ian Hodder of Stanford University said, 'Göbekli Tepe changes everything'. If indeed the site was built by hunter-gatherers as some researchers believe then it would mean that the ability to erect monumental complexes was within the capacities of these sorts of groups, which would overturn previous assumptions. Some researchers believe that the construction of Göbekli Tepe may have contributed to the later development of urban civilization, or, as excavator Klaus Schmidt put it, 'First came the temple, then the city.'"

Cannabis In Ancient Greece: The Smoke Of The Oracles?

The audio in this video is pretty bad, but this is an interesting documentary. There's a lot of speculation that the fumes inhaled by the oracle at Delphi could have been from burning marijuana or some other kind of psychotropic plant, and the use of psychedelic mushrooms has been suggested to explain the trances that priests were said to enter at various sites, but the whole subject of drug use in ancient religions is extremely obscure.

Marijuana was known and used in the ancient world. According to The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist (footnote, p. 147), the Scythians used a kind of "cannabis steam bath" for ritual purification (Herodotus), and the ancient Hebrews might have done something similar. "The first solid evidence of the Hebrew use of cannabis was established in 1936 ... Cannabis, usually thought to be of Scythian origin, has a much earlier occurrence in Semitic languages and appears several times throughout the Old Testament."

The theory that marijuana was used by the ancient Greek oracles may sound absurd, but the idea isn't really all that outlandish. If the Scythians and Hebrews used the plant, there's no reason why the Greeks couldn't have been aware of its psychotropic properties as well. I don't have any particular evidence to support this, but the use of marijuana and other drugs may go all the way back to the Stone Age shamanic rituals which some scholars believe were the distant ancestors of all our modern religions.