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My personal twist on the Atlantis Mythos...

Considering all that we know about the Ice Ages, what if a key detail was wrong? Maybe during the last Ice Age there was a short term shift where the Northern Hemisphere was inundated with glaciers, but the Southern Hemisphere was slightly warmer. This contradicts everything we know about the Earth, but just listen... Everybody is aware of the maps where much of Eurasia and North America is covered in glaciers. Paleontologists and archaeologists have done a disproportionate amount of investigative work with Ice Age artifacts on the Northern half of the planet.

But suppose sometime between 130,000 YBP and 55,000 YBP, there was a warmer region in the far southern latitudes. Perhaps in that time period, a bridge of islands linked the Cape of Africa to Antarctica. Early homo sapiens left Southern Africa for Antarctica and settled there. From about 60,000 YBP to 10,000 YBP, the region began to cool down, but not until the end of the period did all of Antarctica become hostile to human life. Near the end of the Ice Ages, humans were confined to the northernmost reaches of Antarctica, along the coasts and the Northern Peninsula, where they developed a rudimentary proto-civilization. Eventually humans abandoned the frozen Antarctic wastelands and migrated in waves.

One group migrated across the Indian Ocean and landed in the Persian Gulf. Another group migrated aloung the Pacific Coast of South America where they landed in what is now Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico. Another group ended around the Bengal Sea. These groups seeded the Near Eastern (Levantine - Anatolian - Mesopotamian) & Egyptian cultures, the Andean & Meso-American cultures, and the Indus & Southeast Asian cultures. If you examine a map of South America, you will see that a peninsula juts toward South America, and a disk of land along the Indian Ocean projects northward.

Legends of this lost country were preserved in the myths of Atlantis and Mu (Lemuria). This could also explain the mysteries of the Indus Valley Civilization, or the Piri Reis map.

Think about it. I know none of the above is very probable given the gelogical, climatological, archaeological, and genetic evidence. We know that the Ice Age was not a polar shift of warmer climates southward and colder climates northward (which would make my scenario work), but a tremendous global cooling trend (making frigid Antarctica even less hospitable. Also, no archaelogical evidence exists of prehistoric humans on Antarctica. Finally, the genetic evidence indicates that humans migrated out of Africa towards Eurasia and Australia. There is no evidence of an Atlantean race which originated out of Southern Africa and then became absorbed into Middle Eastern, Pakistani, Bengali, or Native American populations.

But if my theory were true, that would make an awesome fuckin' movie!
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