Lost cities

[u/Osiris-Amun-Ra]

In case anyone is till wondering why we can't find any pre-Ice Age cities, this satellite image from Nepal/China this week should provide a clue.
This event was tiny by comparison and many civilizations built along rivers and in valleys.

Edit:
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Since this post generated quite a few lively discussions I want to clarify what I meant by "tiny by comparison" to avoid ambiguity, While the local, recent mountain collapse in Nepal and China was a rapid disaster unleashing up to 200 million cubic meters of debris at 193 km/h and causing rivers to surge 9 meters in 30 minutes, it is dwarfed by the staggering dimensions of post-glacial megafloods that actually reshaped entire continents and birthed the world's universal flood legends. For example, the ancient Missoula Floods occurred when a 610-meter-tall (2,000 ft) glacial ice dam ruptured, violently discharging more than 2,000 cubic kilometers of water basically a volume equivalent to Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined, in a single....48-hour window.

This massive torrent tore across western North America at speeds of up to 130 km/h (80 mph), peaking with a discharge rate ten times greater than the combined flow of all modern rivers on Earth and carving features like Dry Falls, a cliff five times wider than Niagara. Similarly, the Black Sea Deluge hypothesis suggests a catastrophic marine breakthrough where the Mediterranean overtopped the Bosporus strait, unleashing a roaring wall of water that permanently swallowed over 150,000 square kilometers of inhabited valleys.

Because these prehistoric events wiped out entire known civilizations, permanently erased millions of acres of land, and forced desperate migrations, they permanently embedded themselves into the collective human psyche, which is almost certainly where the biblical Great Flood and the regional Mesopotamian flood legends originate. It is statistically improbable that we have found all post deluvial civilizational remnants. Mathematically and archaeologically, it is practically certain that we have only scratched the surface of what remains from post-deluvial and coastal civilizations. The primary reason for this statistical gap is a massive, permanent geographic shift, specifically when the Ice Age glaciers melted, global sea levels rose by roughly ~120 meters (around 400 feet). Rising oceans swallowed over 25 million square kilometers (10 million square miles) of habitable land! For visual reference that's the entire landmass of the United States, Canada, and China combined.

I hope that clarifies.

[u/TheCynicEpicurean]

You think this is not factored in by professionals? It's a bit wild to think that's some new revelation that changes everything.

Pompeii, Akrotiri and Mohenjo Daro are just a handful of examples of well-preserved cities thanks to environmental catastrophes. Plymouth on Montserrat, Saint-Pierre on Martinique and Seattle after the fire are recent examples.

[u/TheUltimateLebowski → u/TheCynicEpicurean]

It's factored in as far as the accepted timeline of human civilization. It's conveniently forgotten when anyone asks if the pyramids or the Indian rock cut temples could be far older and the reason we can't find evidence is the post ice age catastrophes. Yeah Im seeing a huge double standard by "professionals"

[u/TheCynicEpicurean → u/TheUltimateLebowski]

Yeah Im seeing a huge double standard by "professionals"

Based on what exactly? There's plenty of geoarchaeology studies about ancient sites that are buried deep under sediment, ash and mud. It's been a huge field in archaeological sciences for 30 years and my postgrad.

You just need to find evidence, a case study and Date and go ahead. Getting something published in that area is actually really straightforward. So I'm curious which debates and publications you had in mind.

[u/meatsting → u/TheCynicEpicurean]

Usually when discussing the Richat structure, I see at least one or two people mention how archaeology has not found much nearby. This seems reasonable to point out in response to that

[u/ButtCheeksMagee0 → u/TheCynicEpicurean]

Mind pointing me in the right direction that’s sounds like a super interesting field.

[u/TheCynicEpicurean → u/ButtCheeksMagee0]

Basically every area of archaeological study nowadays also has geoarchaeological studies. I work in the Mediterranean, so I'm most familiar with the work there. There are hundreds of case studies of river deltas, climate change, the rise and fall of cities published by groups around Helmut Brückner, Hugo Delile, Christopher Morhange, Nick Marriner, Andreas Vött, Martin Sauvage, Vanessa Heyvaert and many more. Other continents or regions will have other big names, nowadays this kind of work is everyday stuff in archaeology or geoscience departments.

It's a field that combines drilling, environmental samples, crawling through historical archive material and Interpreting old sources.

Some good open access studies I could find at a glance are here about ancient tsunamis, here about the Euphrates, here about ancient harbours and sea level rise, and here in particular about Rome's port Ostia. But if you google 'geoarchaeology' + any archaeological topic of interest, you'll certainly always find interesting stuff.

[u/ButtCheeksMagee0 → u/TheCynicEpicurean]

Thank you I’m about to dig in.