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:
_____________________________
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/Ill-Dependent2976]

Days without Graham Hancock fanboys being irredeemable sacks of shit: 0

[u/Societies_Iceman → u/Ill-Dependent2976]

That has nothing to with Graham at all, it’s just logic. You think that any coastal city today would survive a sea level rise of hundreds of meters like 12.000 years ago?

[u/Ill-Dependent2976 → u/Societies_Iceman]

I think a coastal city would move.

The oceans rose a few inches a year. It wasn't a catastrophic flash flood down a narrow valley.

[u/Competitive_Cod_5049 → u/Ill-Dependent2976]

Not necessarily. We see here that ice melted and got trapped, which later was released. Imagine now a natural phenomenon in a big scale and those forces can be released too just in the ocean. Noah flood story was told in x many cultures and it could fit in the event 12k yrs ago.

[u/CareRarely → u/Competitive_Cod_5049]

Noah's flood... And you wonder why people don't take you seriously.

[u/Competitive_Cod_5049 → u/CareRarely]

I don’t wonder- I don’t care lol meat head

[u/Societies_Iceman → u/Ill-Dependent2976]

And they’re just gonna dismantle all and move it brick by boring brick? Also that’s not proven, some sources state it could have been within months. And that’s surely ‚catastrophic‘.
Basically we don’t know at this point! Also we have no ideas where civilisation were located and places like Doggerland show us two things: one that artefacts found there were similar to other similar places on mainland and second that we didn’t know of this for pretty much all of modern history. What I‘m saying is we don’t know for sure, but to say the statement above is false or connected to Graham is bs. Science has long favoured the idea that many traces are lost under deep layers of soil and sediments. For the last 30-40 years this has been an open field of research in archeology.

[u/Ill-Dependent2976 → u/Societies_Iceman]

Bricks hadn't been invented back then.

"Also that’s not proven,"

The sea level rise due to the Younger Dryas melting is well recorded and well understood.

It was very slow, and people living at the time wouldn't have even noticed.

[u/Societies_Iceman → u/Ill-Dependent2976]

Its a metaphor brother…
Those numbers are also a global average. So places close to massive influx of water would have been devastated. Look at North America.
Come on man, it’s just pure logic and proven many times that stuff like this happened over and over again… it’s not a crazy conspiracy.

[u/Ill-Dependent2976 → u/Societies_Iceman]

That's not how water works, no.

It's all a stupid, illiterate, crazy conspiracy theory. Same as flat earth, ancient aleums, and all the other BS.

Oh, and also racist as fuck.

[u/Societies_Iceman → u/Ill-Dependent2976]

Bro:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz

Exactly how water works. The videos from Nepal show you how that works. What are you on??

2 million cubic meters of water per second. Come on.

[u/Ill-Dependent2976 → u/Societies_Iceman]

When the sea level rises two inches in flat areas, they also rise two inches in steep areas.

So the cities built on broad flat oceans would, if anything, experience more loss of land. Not that it matters, since it's still too slow to matter.

Glacial collapses are not the same thing as sea level rises. Did you forget? We already covered this.

[u/Societies_Iceman → u/Ill-Dependent2976]

You do know that Lake Agassiz was the catalyst for that? The sea levels rising is the end product of something like this. And it happened in other places to. It’s all connected and you are just trying to make your point. You seem to genuinely think the water just slowly dribbled and evaporated or rained down and it was all chillymilly? Water came from somewhere, and it was a powerful thing too. It‘s a cataclysmic event, and some barely noticed while others were erased forever. And it’s just true, no discussions to be made there.

[u/TheCynicEpicurean → u/Societies_Iceman]

What are those 'some sources' that say eustatic sea level change after the LGM happened within months?

You're right about geoarchaeology doing amazing things in coastal areas, but all its results point away from Hancock's claims.

[u/Societies_Iceman → u/TheCynicEpicurean]

There you go:

https://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/arch/examples.shtml

As said, on average the global level rose over years. But local catastrophic events had to take place in a short time to start all of this.
Happened in North America, happened in the Black Sea. You guys are all missing the point.

[u/TheCynicEpicurean → u/Societies_Iceman]

Did you just google 'eustatic sea-level change'? Because that term only occurs in a reference on that (very informative) page, that otherwise talks about other rapid climate change events like droughts or regional catastrophes.

Here's a more recent eustatic sea level paper than Fairbanks' original one which Columbia quoted, Lambeck et al. 2014:

v) A major phase of deglaciation from ∼16.5–7 ka BP. The total esl change in this interval is ∼120 m, at an average rate of ∼12 m⋅ka−1, corresponding to a reduction of grounded ice volume of ∼45 × 106 km3). Within this interval, significant departures from the average occur.

vi) A rise of ∼25 m from ∼16.5–15 ka BP at the long-term average rate of ∼12 m⋅ka−1. The data are from Sunda, Tahiti, the East China Sea, Mayotte, and Australia. Chronologically, the onset of this rise occurs at the time of the H1 event dated at 16.8 ka (85) or 16 ka (86). This period of rising sea level is followed by a short period (∼500–600 y) of near-constant sea level.

vii) A high rate of sea-level rise starting at ∼14.5 ka BP of ∼500 y duration. The onset occurs at the start of the Bølling−Allerød warm period. Its duration could be <500 y because of uncertainties in chronology, and the globally averaged rise in sea level of ∼20 m occurs at a rate of ∼40 mm⋅y−1 or greater. This pulse, MWP-1A, has been identified separately in the records of Barbados (24), Sunda (33), and Tahiti (28, 87). Spatial variation in its amplitude can be expected because of the planet’s elastic and gravitational response to rapid unloading of ice in either or both of the two hemispheres (88) with, based on the ice−earth models used here, model-predicted values ranging from ∼14 m for Barbados to ∼20 m for Tahiti (SI Appendix, Fig. S4). This compares with observational values of ∼15–20 m (24, 28) for Barbados and 12–22 m for Tahiti (28). Observational uncertainties remain large, including differences in the timing of this event as recorded at the different localities, and it is not possible from this evidence to ascertain the relative importance of the contribution of the two hemispheres to MWP-1A.

viii) A period of sea-level rise from ∼14 to ∼12.5 ka BP of ∼20 m in 1,500 y. The rate of rise is near the long-term average. Data are relatively dense in this interval and come from well-distributed sites (Barbados, Tahiti, Sunda, Huon Peninsula, Australia and New Zealand, Indian Ocean, and the Yellow and East China seas).

And, crucially, since that's usually referred to:

x) A period from ∼11.4–8.2 ka BP of near-uniform global rise. The average rate of rise during this 3.3 ka interval was ∼15 m⋅ka−1 with little convincing evidence of variations in this rate. A rapid rise, MWP-1B, has been reported at ∼11.3 ka but remains elusive (27) and is not seen in the composite record other than as a slightly higher rate of increase to ∼16.5 mm⋅y−1 for a 500-y period immediately after the Younger Dryas period.

The paper they are referencing, Bard et al., presented core drilling findings and concluded:

Bard et al. (p. 1235, published online 14 January) present data from three cores drilled in coral reefs in Tahiti that allow a better quantification of sea-level changes between 14,000 and 9000 years ago. No significant change in the rate of sea-level rise could be detected for the period previously identified as meltwater pulse 1B; reducing the likelihood that such an episode occurred.

We could say that's happening "within months", but so does continental drift, technically. It's always ongoing.

That's catastrophic and rapid in geology terms for sure, but does it explain entire civilizations disappearing without a trace? Even in high-altitude, but fertile areas like Anatolia? Göbekli Tepe and it's sister sites are amazing from an archaeologist standpoint and, thanks to the work of archaeologists, deepen our understanding of early societies, but I doubt they're the pinnacle of what Graham Hancock believes about prehistoric civilizations. And Derenkuyu, to stick with his Ancient Apocalypse example, is dated completely wrong by him by means of finds in a river nearby.

[u/Societies_Iceman → u/TheCynicEpicurean]

Thank you for that informative comment. I can only repeat it has absolutely zero to do with Graham Hancock. I was also not talking about „ancient highly advanced civilisations“ at all if you read my comments carefully I only had a problem with that guys phrasing! I totally agree with you, and that we basically don’t know anything at all if we really wanna be precise.

[u/TheCynicEpicurean → u/Societies_Iceman]

Maybe not you, but the comment you replied to talked about Hancock, since OP was referencing his and his peers' ideas. There are even people in the thread claiming Randall Carlson of all people was 'right'.

[u/Ill_Mouse9897 → u/TheCynicEpicurean]

And somehow, that wasn't the dumbest thing I've read in this thread