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.
Thursday, 2 June 2016
Further proof of a Marine Civilisation 8000 years ago
Further evidence is being recovered under the Solent off the Isle of Wight which supports my hypothesis on Post Glacial Flooding after the last Ice and the emergence of a marine civilisation that sailed these enlarged waterways and the lower oceans ten thousand years ago.
With my new book hitting the shelves of Amazon and Kindle in the next couple of weeks I thought that a blatant bit of advertising would not go amiss as I still have one last book to fund of the Trilogy 'Prehistoric Britain' before finally retiring.
In this article Garry now confirms my original suggestion that these boats were in fact SHIPS that would have been at least 20m+. We should not forget that Einkorn Wheat was also found by these boats (and the archaeological establishment tried to discredit the dates) that were also carbon dated to the same period. Proving beyond doubt that this civilisation were travelling by sea to all parts of the known world.
Why This 8,000 Year-Old Piece Of Wood Is Blowing Archaeologists’ Minds
At Bouldnor Cliff, evidence of an 8,000 year-old partially constructed log boat was found near a submerged ancient forest.
Mesolithic carpenters left stone tools, wood chippings and a
partially constructed boat on a site that’s now 11m below the sea.
What’s more, there’s evidence that they were using woodworking
techniques not otherwise seen in Britain for another 2,500 years.
When someone says something was ahead of its time, you don’t usually assume they mean 2,500 years ahead of its time. But at Bouldnor Cliff, archaeologists are finding evidence that this was very much the case.
Eight thousand years ago, this stretch of now-submerged coastline off
the Isle of Wight, was a rich, verdant landscape and an ideal home for
Mesolithic families. But there was one small problem: rising sea levels.
Today, the site is 11m below the waves, but what’s down there is
changing our understanding of the people who first settled island
Britain, and of one of the most important technologies they had at their
disposal: boats.
Surprisingly, archaeologists know very little about prehistoric
boat-building. We know that people have been doing it for tens of
thousands of years (how else did people get to places like Australia?)
and yet solid evidence of what they looked like, and how they were
constructed, is frustratingly rare.
In Europe, the oldest waterborne vessel ever discovered by
archaeologists is a 10,000 year-old dugout canoe from the Netherlands,
while the oldest plank-built vessels in the region are the Bronze Age
boats found at Dover in Kent and North Ferriby in Yorkshire, which have
been radiocarbon dated to between 3,500 and 4,000 years old.
That picture may be about to get a little bit clearer though. At
Bouldnor Cliff, Garry Momber and his team of underwater archaeologists
from the Maritime Archaeology Trust have found something up to twice
that age, built using a woodworking technique that hasn’t otherwise been
seen in Britain for another 2,500 years.
Garry’s first clue to the discovery came in 2005 when he was
inspecting a ridge at the bottom of a 7m high underwater cliff, when he
spotted something made him do an underwater double-take.
“The current was pushing me along, but what I saw was enough to make
me turn 180 degrees and come to a complete stop. Among the branches of
an old tree was a collection of coloured flints, some of which had been
superheated. They looked so out of place, I just had to know what they
were doing there” Garry said.
What I saw was enough to make me turn 180 degrees and come to a complete stop
It was another two years before the Maritime Archaeology Trust had
enough funds to go back and find out, but what they discovered next was
definitely well worth the wait.
“We went back down to the same area of submerged forest and saw
pieces of worked wood sticking out of the peat among the tangle of tree
roots. They were flat and trimmed, and even though the surfaces were
badly damaged by erosion and marine life you could see they had been
shaped by human hands” Garry told us.
That in itself isn’t enough to prove you’ve got evidence of
woodworking, let alone what kind of technique was in use or what they
were building; for that you need all the surface detail you can get. So
Garry’s team decided to excavate a 2x3m area to find wood that had been
protected below the sea floor.
“We started finding charcoal and the occasional flint tool and, as we
worked away, we uncovered wood chippings, well-crafted functional items
and dozens of pieces of really well-preserved timber” says Garry.
We hadn’t really seen anything like this in the British archaeological record before
Some of the pieces had been shaped and trimmed with Mesolithic stone
tools, while others had been charred. Together with the charcoal and
superheated flints, it’s enough to suggest that people were heating the
wood in order to make it easier to work with stone tools, but what they
were trying to make still wasn’t clear.
“Most of the timbers were oak, and still inter-connected, laid out
like they were still in position from they they had fallen over 8,000
years ago. At first, we didn’t know what it all meant; we hadn’t really
seen anything like this in the British archaeological record before”
Garry told us.
And then they found the piece of wood that gave it all away. It was
just shy of one meter long, about 8,100 years old and had been
tangentially split, lengthways as if to make planks. It might not sound
that remarkable, but when you know that’s a technique which doesn’t
otherwise appear in the British archaeological record for another 2,500
years, it’s enough to make your jaw drop.
“At that point, we were quite stunned. Until now, we’d not seen
tangential splitting of large oaks in the UK until the Neolithic when
archaeologists found it in use for the construction at Haddenham Long
Barrow around 3,600 BC” said Garry.
Found
in line with the tangentially-split oak, this scalloped out end piece
includes two small drilled holes – a common process when checking the
thickness of the bottom of the boat during construction.
It was also a method used to build deeper log boats during the Bronze
Age, by removing the bottom quarter (rather than splitting it in half)
and then hollowing out the remaining three quarters of the tree.
Taking the timber back for analysis, Garry’s team found that when it
was felled, the tree would have been a couple of metres wide and several
tens of metres high; meaning this was just a fraction from a much
larger piece that could have measured up to 10 or 20m long.
What’s more, the team also found a scalloped out end-piece in line
with the tangentially split oak, as well as timbers that would have been
the end of the structure and string that would have been used to secure
the various elements.
“Unfortunately, erosion of the seabed means that only a little bit of
the original structure is left, but collectively the artefacts and
their relationships look like a site that was used for constructing a
log boat. And if that really was the case, then that makes Bouldnor
Cliff the oldest boat-building site discovered so far, not just in
Europe, but in the whole world. The trouble is we still need more
evidence to be 100% certain” says Garry.
With the world’s oldest boat building site, wheat that arrived from the Middle East
over 2,000 years earlier than previously thought and the oldest piece
of string, it’s certainly starting to look like the people of Bouldnor
Cliff had access to technology that could change our understanding of
Mesolithic Britain.
It's possible the seafaring Chumash Indians with their boat building technology, traveled to the Isle of Wight to teach the natives how to build capable boats, and Stonehenge. The early ice age Mammonth hunting Native Americans also could of traveled to Spain and Basque Country, and taught the Ice age Europeans how to make their Solutrean points and the Art they made in caves. It's a known fact that ancient remains found in Europe have at least 20 percent Native American admixture, and they have also found Mtdna X, C , M and some A in North, West, East and South Europe. Native Americans have been in the Americas far long than they are given credit for. They have found Ydna haplogroups of Q and C in Europe also in prehistoric remains.
It's possible the seafaring Chumash Indians with their boat building technology, traveled to the Isle of Wight to teach the natives how to build capable boats, and Stonehenge. The early ice age Mammonth hunting Native Americans also could of traveled to Spain and Basque Country, and taught the Ice age Europeans how to make their Solutrean points and the Art they made in caves. It's a known fact that ancient remains found in Europe have at least 20 percent Native American admixture, and they have also found Mtdna X, C , M and some A in North, West, East and South Europe. Native Americans have been in the Americas far long than they are given credit for. They have found Ydna haplogroups of Q and C in Europe also in prehistoric remains.
ReplyDeleteAlways a possibility! Yet looking at prehistoric culture and ativity - the bulk of the evidence is in Northern Europe and so logically its origin?
DeleteRJL
hmmmmmmmmmm
ReplyDelete