This blog looks at the evidence of 'Post Glacial Flooding' after the last Ice Age and the subsequent 'Megalithic Civilisation' that developed thereafter. This in-depth analysis of Stonehenge, Avebury, Durrington Walls (Woodhenge) and Old Sarum, led Langdon to the discovery the location of the 'lost world' of Atlantis as described by Plato that existed ten thousand years ago and is now under the North Sea.
This is the third of my new debunked series looking at Old Sarum.
The history of Old Sarum traditionally starts by claims that it was an Iron Age site. Sadly, this claim has no evidence to substantiate this idea as the only excavation ever undertook in 1915 was never completed as the archaeologist died not writing up his notes - although on the English Heritage site there is a reference to the notes being looked at in the near future, so its only taken a hundred years!
The video 'debunks' the claim that this was an 'Iron Age fortification' to protect residence during the aggressive pre-Roman era. The only historical evidence for this claim (and this is used for most prehistoric sites in the UK) is the ditch that surrounds theses type of monuments, as it is perceived that these are defensive ditches.
Old Sarum
What we find is that rather than these dry 'ditches' being a defensive feature of the site, they would in time of conflict actually aid the attacker of the site by creating a blind spot so they would not be seen and a point where they could gather and hide from the defenders of the site before the final assault. It is no surprise that both the Romans and the Normans did not use the outer bank as a defence but concentrated on the inner bank which they used as a moat.
Outer bank showing spoil was placed on the outside of the ditch
So the idea that this is a defensive bank is 'debunked' and the video goes on to look at what is outer bank really is for and a similar bank of size and shape is found at Avebury, where again the spoil is placed on the outside of the ditch for a very good reason.
Lastly, the video looks at the new archaeological evidence that has been produced this year showing that there was a canal cut into the outer ditch to join it to the inner ditch. This piece of engineering allowed the boats that landed on the shoreline of this post glacial island to enter the site and moor in the centre of the island.
Similar descriptions of sites that had these types of 'concentric circle' sites with canals that allowed boats to enter harbours have been found in my books that look at the writings of Plato and his 'Lost Ancient Civilisation' he called Atlantis - Old Sarum was not Atlantis but the same civilisation did build this site as it it has the same engineering signatures.
Atlantis with its concentric circles and connecting canals
Old Sarum with two concentric circles and a connecting canal
This is the second video in my new 'debunked series' where I look at current archaeological 'myths' and totally disprove the so called evidence for something more rational and sensible. This post is about Avebury.
Avebury is unique as it has one of the largest man made ditches in Britain (over 10m deep) archaeologists as shown in this video believe that these ditches are built by primitive man using basic 'antler picks' but the video will show that this is impossible and the evidence used - such as the antler picks found in the bottom of the ditch are in fact nothing to do with the ditches a part from their use in 'cleaning out' the moat when in use.
The video shows the following pictures from my archive never seen before on the internet that totally 'debunk' the myth of Avebury.
Cross-section drawing of Avebury
This is a cross-section drawing of Avebury drawn in 1914 by St George Grey (love the name!) showing that our ancestors took great care to make sure the bottom was flat - the question is why?
If it's a ceremonial ditch (as some deluded archaeologists suggest) why flat? why so deep? surely a small easy to cut round ditch would suffice?
Unless its for a water and was in fact a moat?
But what evidence is there that it was once full of water?
Well strangely enough the excavation proved it was once full of water as as they dug towards the bottom - guess who? It started to fill with water as shown on the next picture.
Who would have believed it - we struct water chaps!!
Now this is in May 1914 and they have reached the water table level. We know in winter the water table would be higher and more importantly, we know that the water tables have been falling since the Ice Age Flood ten thousand years ago that's why old wells are now dry.
So they question is even more urgent for those up to their waist in water digging this ditch - why a flat bottom - your not going to see it as its full of water?
It's the same reason reason that we dredge rivers and canals - silting!
The silting will create a round bottom to the moat/canal - if you make the bottom flat, it will take longer to silt up than if it was round, prolonging its use or for the need to remove the silt. Is this what we are finding in the 'fill' of these ditches, the tools used to keep the moat/canal clean and free from weeds - Antler picks and cow shoulder blades??
So this video will show Avebury's phases of use:
Phase I
After the Post Glacial Flooding - waters subsided and Windmill Hill became an Island which was the first Trading Post in this area. As the waters from the flooding subsided the site had to cut ditches for boats into the side of the hill - we now call these early trading sites with round canal cuttings, Causewayed Enclosures.
Phase II
When the waters no longer reached the canal/moats of Windmill Hill they looked south of the site for a new home and chose Avebury. They then dug ditches bigger than ever to take larger boats and ships with a wall to protect them from the weather/storms.
Phase III
When the water fell so far that they could not get the ships to Avebury they created a landing site on the Kennet with a stone walkway to Avebury we call 'The Sanctary' which attracted ships and boats via a gigantic beacon built on a man-made hill known as Silbury Hill.
But yet there is still one great mystery about Avebury seldom considered - the oversized Stones that make the outer ring of the henge - the reason for these gigantic Stone (and the clue is that Avebury is a trading point) will be full discussed in part 2 of Avebury Debunked.
Prof Alice Roberts last week in her TV documentary 'Ice Age Giants' made an indepth reference to the fact that post glacial flooding occurred in the Northern Polar region some 15,000 years ago and showed an example of the massive force water has on the landscape.
Alice Roberts on Post Glacial Flooding
Included in her commentary was new evidence that this flooding did not happen just once over the two thousand years it took for the last ice age to end but over 100 times!!
In America it created a series of Canyons that are vast as the water was naturally dammed for a period releasing this vast amount of water in a sudden burst, causing devastation to the landscape and forming a gigantic canyon. We are fortunate for this to have happened otherwise if the same amount of water was released 'naturally' the only landscape alterations would be the 'Dry River Valleys' we see in Britain today.
British Geologists have had trouble in how exactly these valleys were made, initially (and some geologists still believe in this outdated fact) by ice from the polar cap cutting the valleys. But hard evidence has shown that no ice cap has ever travelled further south than the Thames.
Maximum extent of the Ice Caps
Alice Proves that the volume of water from the ice cap is so great that it could do nothing less than flood the entire landscape which our findings prove stayed partially flooded until doggerland sunk in the 4th Millennium BCE.
Researchers discuss new theories on human migration revealed by sophisticated DNA tests
December 3, 2014 | Editor's PickPopular
By Alvin Powell, Harvard Staff Writer
The answers to the human past are out there, hidden in the DNA of bones in ancient burial mounds and unmarked graves.
Increasingly, those answers are coming to light as geneticists at Harvard and elsewhere employ sophisticated methods to extract that DNA and make it readable despite the ravages of time.
On Tuesday, geneticists from Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT highlighted those evolving techniques and talked about recent findings that revealed that a previously unknown group made a major contribution to the gene pool of modern Europeans and Native Americans. They also discussed the result of preliminary investigations that suggest that an ancient civilization located between the Black and Caspian seas may have created a major group of modern languages, spanning English, German, Russian, Urdu, Punjabi, and Hindi.
Michael McCormick, the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History, said the new techniques are opening “an extraordinary window on the human past” and make a powerful partner to traditional historical and archaeological techniques in understanding humanity’s hidden history.
“You and I have the extraordinary privilege of living in a time of revolutionary discovery … that extends advances of technology in the life sciences that are transforming the world today to … disciplines that are transforming our understanding of the human past, dissolving the timeworn barriers between history and prehistory, between science and the humanities,” McCormick said. “Human genetics are another extraordinary window on a vanished world of migrations and matings that take you back literally to the dawn of human time.”
McCormick introduced a talk at the Harvard-Yenching Library by Harvard Medical School genetics Professor David Reich, an associate at the Broad Institute, and Nick Patterson, the senior computational biologist at the Broad and visiting scientist and a research fellow in genetics at HMS and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The lecture, “What’s New in Genomic Archaeology? The Peopling of Europe from Ancient and Modern DNA,” was sponsored by the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past at Harvard, whose steering committee McCormick chairs.
Reich highlighted recent research indicating that ancient European history was more complex than previously had been thought. Researchers had believed that Middle Eastern farmers pushed into Europe 8,500 years ago, after the advent of agriculture, displacing and blending with hunter-gatherer populations there over several thousand years.
First, Reich said, the genetic data clarifies that people migrated into the region, bringing farming with them, rather than agricultural practices spreading alone as they were learned, adopted, and passed along by different societies coming into contact with the cultures practicing them.
As expected, the genetic data showed that modern Europeans hold a mix of genes from Middle Eastern farmers and the European hunter-gatherers who preceded them into Europe. But it also shows that modern Europeans have genetic contributions from a third group, originating in ancient north Eurasia, that was unknown before research from Reich and collaborators was published in September. It appears that this group eventually spread not just into Europe, but also to North America, since their genes are represented in Native Americans.
That ancient north Eurasian population was apparently replaced in the lands between, however, because there’s no trace of their DNA in modern Siberians.
Patterson discussed early work that investigated the rise of one of the world’s predominant language groups: Indo-European. Hundreds of languages belong to the family today, including some of the most widely spoken, such as English, Spanish, Russian, and Hindi.
Patterson said that linguistic evidence has tracked the ancestral language, called “late proto-Indo-European” to about 3,500 years ago in the Caucasus, among a people who had wheeled vehicles at a time when they were just being put into use.
Genetic evidence ruled out one likely related group in the region, the Yamnaya, because their DNA showed the group had hunter-gatherer ancestry, which is inconsistent with the fact that two Indo-European groups, Armenians and Indians, don’t share it, Patterson said. That made Patterson look south, to the Maikop civilization, which likely had significant contact with the Yamnaya, as a plausible culture where Indo-European languages originated. Samples have been obtained from Maikop burial sites, but the DNA work to test that proposal is pending, Patterson said.
Such testing is dependent on sophisticated techniques, Reich said. When DNA can be extracted from bones found at burial sites, most of it actually is microbial DNA from the organisms that have colonized the bones since its owners’ death. In addition, researchers have to be careful that samples aren’t contaminated by handling after they are unearthed.
Reich’s lab uses a technique that targets 390,000 sites of variation on the human genome, extracts them from background DNA, and allows them to generate genome-wide data.
“A lot of it is microbial. Typically only 1 percent comes from the individual whose bone it was,” Reich said.
My Video to the book 'Dawn of the Lost Civilisation'
This fantastic picture never made the final cut of my last book '13 Ancient Things That Don't Make Sense in History'
Believe it or not its the Sahara Desert - and just take a look at the remains of those 'once upon a time' rivers that used to flow across this desert. Go back 25 years and the archaeologists and historians would have told you that these rivers flowed hundreds of thousands if not millions of years ago (just like Britain's dry river valleys ) - but then we find cave paintings in the desert like this:
To quote Wikipedia:
The cave paintings found at Tassili n'Ajjer, north of Tamanrasset, Algeria, and at other locations depict vibrant and vivid scenes of everyday life in the central North Africabetween about 8000 BCE and 4000 BCE, in the Mesolithic (Middle Stone) age. They were executed by a hunting people in the Capsian period of the Neolithic age (3000 -1900 BC) who lived in a savanna region teeming with giant buffalo, elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus, animals that no longer exist in the now-desert area. The pictures provide the most complete record of a prehistoric African culture.
But this change of the environment did not just affect North Africa it also affected but also Asia Minor. This is what happened to the Black and Caspian Seas:
Finally - did the Ice Age affect America?
SO JUST SIX THOUSAND YEARS AGO THE SAHARA DESERT WAS TEAMING WITH WATER, TREES AND EXOTIC ANIMALS. IN ASIA THE BLACK AND CASPIAN SEAS DOUBLED IN SIZE AND IN AMERICA THE GREAT BASIN WAS A SERIES OF DEEP FRESH-WATER LAKE WHICH ARE NOW ARID VALLEYS - YET IN GOOD OLD 'BLIGHTY', ALTHOUGH THE 2 MILE HIGH ICE SHEET WAS ON OUR DOOR-STEP NOTHING HAPPENED OR CHANGE FROM WHAT WE SEE TODAY? SUCH NAIVE IGNORANCE IS CREATING THE NONSENSE WE SEE IN ARCHAEOLOGY TODAY - Its just another Ancient Thing That Doesn't Make Sense in History, and never will!