Still on the same or a similar theme. At https://www.livescience.com/10340-lost-civilization-existed-beneath-persian-gulf.html … the key word here is beneath – as in beneath the waters of the Persian Gulf. I was aware the Gulf was restricted in early Holocene, up to the 6200BC event. At that point the water gushed in and filled the Gulf virtually to its modern extent. The same happened in the North Sea, between Britain and the Low Countries – and various other locations, such as Indonesia. The theory here is that the bottom of the Gulf, or the bit at the head of the Gulf, was a fertile location favoured by humans. The study is in Current Anthropology [December 2023]. It is generally thought the Out of Africa people expanded across Arabia, therefore making the bottom of the Gulf a suitable place to tarry on their journey of migration into every corner of the world. But when did that happen? An unknown that seems to bother a lot of people who like things boxed up and put away in a compartment, as sorted [and forgotten]. Done and dusted, as they say. Unfortunately, the theory that humans migrated around the world only during the last 100,000 years, or less, is just that. A theory. On the other hand, we know that Homo erectus actually did migrate around the globe – but they had millions of years to achieve that goal.
After the 6200BC event a string of settlements popped up along the new shoreline of the Gulf – with stone houses, domesticated animals, and farming activity. These, according to the link above, date from 7500 years ago – shortly after the 6200BC event. The big question then is where did these people come from? Were they migrants from the drowning of the Gulf – or did they come from further afield. However, the thrust of the article is about the Out of Africa migrants and Jeffry Rose appears to suggest evidence of them may be on the seabed. He also makes a case for flood myths in Babylonia, assuming the Noah story was added to the Bible after the Exile, going back to the incoming waters of the 6200BC event.
Gary also sent in a link to https://greekreporter.com/2023/12/22/ancient-landmass-emerged-disappeared-70000-years-ago/ …. which concerns a lost land mass off the top of Australia, from east to west. It was published in the Quaternary Science Review and not only was Australia connected to New Guinea but a considerable amount of dry land existed off the top of NW Australia – and many now submerged islands. It included huge ravines, rivers, lakes, and so on. They are still peserved on the sea floor. In other words, migration into Australia was possible with minimal use of boats. They used bathymetry data to establish when it was dry land. Not the best method we might imagine as it assumed the geoid of the Earth has not changed. However, they have managed to isolate a period when they think this occurred and the suggestion is that Aboriginal groups were able to take advantage of the gateway – dated between 70,000 and 61,000 years ago.
The full article is at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379123004663 … where they spend a lot of time outlining the Late Pleistocene geology and the way they made use of sea level data to isolate rises and falls at specific points in time – even though they used sea level curve data. Curves in graphs are human introductions – assumptions, if you like. They have in practise a tendency to smooth phases of rapid sea level change. Reading the article it becomes obvious sea level did actually change at specific points in time and was stable for most of the time. The curve is of course an artifact of the idea that sea level changes are related to the Ice Ages – and how much water was locked up as ice at any given time. In that respect, one can push aside the curtain and see that in spite of the last 100,000 years being portrayed as an Ice Age, with an interglacial at either end, the seas still rose and fell on a few occasions. One might even think the idea of 100,000 year Ice Ages was invented to provide uniformitarian geology with lots of time to play around with rocks and sediments and animals. Changes in the geoid and redistribution of oceanic waters is not part of mainstream thinking. It may well explain what they found. There are of course the big two sea level pulses associated with the Oldest Dryas period and the Youngewr Dryas period, but this is even more intriguing, During Marine Isotope Stage 5 [130 ka to 71 ka yars ago] higher sea levels suggest the land mass was submerged. The transition to Marine Isotope 4 produced a rapid drop in global sea levels, we are told. This led to the emergence of the full land mass – but what happened around 70,000 years ago we may wonder. Well, there was a supervolcano eruption a few thousand years earlier – but obviously something big must have been going on.
Towards the end of Marine Isotope Stage 4 there was a rise in global sea levels we are told – which continued into early Stage 3. Quite clearly the evidence is saying that the boundaries of these marine isotope stages is associated with the changes, lower or high sea levels. Yet, we are still in the Ice Age. After this the next boundary, between stages 3 and 2, led to a drop in sea level – after 29 ka years ago [roughly contemporary the beginning of the Late Glacial Maximum], coming to an end around 14 ka years ago, or roughly the end of the Oldest Dryas event. However, the low stand of Stage 2 was not as low as that between 70,000 and 61,000 years ago – although most maps have New Guinea connected to Australia. Therefore, the evidence appears to show that Aborigines crossed from Indonesia, around 70,000 years ago. A bit earlier than mainstream currently allow but early enough to allow differences in culture between Aborigines and other groups, such as the Solomon Islanders.
Now, if changes in the dipole leading to a change in the geoid are responsible for these ups and downs in global sea level data, where does that leave us. There is the last Interglacial for example, with higher sea levels associated with it, followed by a drop around 70,000 years ago [when we were already in a bracing Ice Age]. How much colder did it get? This was followed by a sea level rise around 60,000 years ago – but where was the ice melting. Then we have a sea level drop contemporary the Late Glacial Maximum – lasting until the end of the Oldest Dryas period. Here we are told the LGM was the deepest part of the last Ice Age – with the ice cap extending down into the northern states of the US and a similar ice advance in NW Europe. So, once again it was cold – but colder than it was previously cold. However, if these boundaries have a connection with changes in the geoid and then we have the peculiarity that the dipole of the earth moved on 5 or 6 occasions during the last Ice Age. How can that happen?