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More than 12,000 years ago, the meltdown of the last ice age produced catastrophic tidal waves flooding vast areas of the earth before what we think of as history began.

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Rich coastal lands warm enough for early peoples to establish civilized societies were transformed into an underworld, drowning our past.

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Now with modern technology, the forgotten chapter in the human story emerges from the deep.

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Off India's west coast, sonar readings reveal two astonishing underwater cities, each covering 10 square miles and flooded no less than 7,000 years ago.

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More than 2,000 artifacts have so far been brought up from the sea bottom.

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It could be the world's oldest civilization yet found.

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4,000 miles away off Japan, divers have discovered a submerged stone circle of gigantic size.

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It may have been carved by the Jomon, a mysterious people who inhabited these islands more than 12,000 years ago.

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Nearby off Taiwan, massive submerged walls have recently been discovered.

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Until the end of the ice age, this structure would have stood above water on land that once connected Taiwan to China.

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Yet no trace remains of the civilization that built it.

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I've spent a decade combing the world for clues about the origins of civilization.

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In doing so, I've occasionally followed highly speculated leads, some of which I now realize have led me wide of the mark.

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This has attracted a lot of criticism, some of it richly deserved, but none of it has convinced me that there couldn't be a big missing chapter in man's early history.

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Science says that humans exactly like us have existed for 100,000 years, but so far archaeology has only been able to find evidence of steps towards civilization around 10,000 years ago with the onset of agriculture.

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What puzzles me is what were we doing with ourselves during the previous 90,000 years?

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The conventional view says that around 5,000 years ago, man started to develop monumental architecture in the first cities independently and coincidentally in Egypt and the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and soon after in India.

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But it's now beginning to be recognized that the origins of civilization stretch thousands of years deeper into the past, as far back as the end of the ice age.

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Yet strangely, archaeologists don't consider the dramatic flooding that took place during the same period, which might have concealed vital evidence.

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I think it's time to challenge this oversight.

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During the ice age, large parts of the earth were covered in ice sheets two miles thick.

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But when the ice melted, billions of gallons of water were released into three distinct pulses between seven and 17,000 years ago.

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Sea level rose by almost 400 feet, flooding low-lying areas and producing the landmass we recognize today.

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An area larger than North America and Australia combined, most of it enjoying a benevolent climate where civilization could flourish, disappeared forever.

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This might explain why stories preserved by hundreds of cultures speak of a great flood that destroyed a former civilization.

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From the loss of Atlantis to Noah leading the animals two by two into the ark.

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People have handed down such stories by word of mouth for thousands of years, but the scholars dismiss them as fantasies.

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With technological advances, underwater archaeology is able to probe those areas of the world submerged at the end of the ice age.

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But most marine archaeologists are looking for shipwrecks, not the submerged traces of a lost civilization that they don't believe ever existed.

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I think there's room for an independent approach.

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I'm not a scientist, but a journalist, and I don't have the funding of a marine institute.

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But already my search has begun to produce evidence which fundamentally challenges the conventional view.

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The beginning of agriculture and the earliest settlements.

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The first arts.

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The origins of religion and the earliest spiritual traditions.

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In short, the very beginnings of civilization.

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My journey begins on Malta, now surrounded by the Mediterranean.

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But during the ice age, part of a huge land mass with a favorable climate, linked to Europe via a land bridge to Sicily.

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Despite its small size today, Malta represents a turning point in the history of civilization and religion.

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Archaeologists believe its temples are the first and oldest anywhere in the world.

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And such temples, built of megaliths or big stones, some of them so huge it's hard to imagine how they were moved.

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This is Gigantia.

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Only a third of its original height now remains, but it still seems, as Maltese folklore has it, like the work of giants.

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It's thought to be about 5,700 years old.

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More than a thousand years older than Stonehenge in England or the pyramids of Egypt.

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It's one of a group of imposing and sophisticated megalithic temples on Malta.

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But the mystery is, there's no background to them.

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The people who worked with these gigantic stones clearly weren't beginners.

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They already knew what they were doing.

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But nowhere on Malta and nowhere in the world have the forerunners to these temples been found.

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Perhaps the archaeologists are wrong to confine their search to sites on land.

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Because the seas have risen so dramatically since the ice age, there's a real need to look underwater.

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The trail of missed clues begins here, in Grand Harbour, the letter.

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We have ancient accounts which continue right through until the 17th century that speak of an enormous megalithic temple harshly submerged in the waters of Grand Harbour.

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And then those accounts stop.

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And today, no trace remains.

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Then in 1999, reports surfaced on the internet that another underwater temple had been located a few miles away off the coast at Sleema.

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Over the following year, I made more than 50 dives in the area where the ruins were set to lie, but was unable to relocate them.

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Perhaps the sea grass had obscured them.

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Frustrated, I was beginning to doubt they ever existed.

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Then I discovered someone else had claimed to have found an underwater temple there.

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In 1994, a highly respected figure, Commander Salvatore Cicluna, who carried out marine archaeological investigations for the Royal Navy, had also reported the discovery of a prehistoric temple in 25 feet of water.

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Commander Salvatore Cicluna has since passed away, but his friend Joseph Elul remembers the discovery.

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He told me there is a temple under the sea outside St. Julian's.

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He recorded his findings in the Maltese Sunday Times, Malta's most prestigious newspaper, but they were largely ignored.

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He's saying that he's found in 25 feet of water, a prehistoric temple at Sleema.

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Joseph, what I don't understand is, this is 1994, didn't the archaeologists in Malta follow this up?

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The archaeologists in Malta are not interested.

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My 50 dives hadn't located what the commander saw, but at least I'm looking.

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Archaeologists seem to attach no weight to tales from ancient cultures of a flood which destroyed civilization.

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The most famous is the Greek writer Plato's fabled story of Atlantis, the island city of the first civilized people, said to have been wiped out by a terrible flood.

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Plato wrote in the fourth century BC that said that the cataclysm took place thousands of years earlier.

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Excessively violent earthquakes and floods occurred, and after the onset of an unbearable day and night, the Isle of Atlantis likewise sank below the sea and disappeared.

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Plato positioned Atlantis beyond the pillars of Hercules, the ancient gateway to the Mediterranean, in other words, in the Atlantic Ocean.

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He says the flood had equally devastating effects within the Mediterranean, where the survivors had to begin again like children, with no memory of what went before.

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What's highly unusual is that Plato gives us an exact date for the flood, 9,000 years before the story reached the Greeks.

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That puts the submergence of Atlantis 11 and a half thousand years ago.

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And a remarkably similar tale from the south of India speaks of a great civilization swallowed by the sea around the very same date.

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Archaeologists treat Atlantis and its ancient date as a laughing stock.

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But now geology shows that at exactly the time Plato gives for the cataclysm, huge areas of land were indeed being submerged all around the world.

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The cause was one of three major pulses of global flooding at the end of the Ice Age.

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Professor John Shaw argues that the second dramatic pulse, between 11 and 12,000 years ago, could be the actual basis of Plato's story.

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I would be surprised if there wasn't a connection.

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It seems to me that if sea level is going to rise catastrophically in a matter of days, it's going to become a major element of your history.

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I imagine that many of these myths are based on reality, and the reality is that sea level rose very quickly.

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You look at the rate at which the sea level was rising, there are times when this rose in a peak, like around 14,000 years ago, under 11,000 years ago.

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You see a lot of evidence of sudden outflow of water from the ice sheets.

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In fact, so rapid it would have created huge mountainous waves of water.

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I call these glacier waves avalanches that start at the top of the ice sheet.

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As it traveled and descended in altitude, this avalanche would have gained speed and gathered up more and more water.

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By the time it reaches the bottom of the ice sheet, a wave could be going several hundred miles per hour,

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a couple thousand feet high, and maybe even a thousand miles in length.

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It strikes me that there's a remarkable coincidence between that spike in flooding at around 11,000 or so years ago,

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and the chronology that Plato gives us.

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Right, that particular date that Plato gave is the date that we have found was the end of the ice age.

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And it also coincided with a lot of melt water discharge at that time.

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The experts argue about how fast and violently the sea rose.

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But either way, I've come to realize how incomplete the archaeologists' model of the past is.

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Very few have taken account of the 10 million miles of lost land.

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It's a big haystack.

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But I'm going to search for the needle and follow the next lead back in Malta.

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Back on Malta, a group of medical doctors who've taken a keen scientific interest in prehistory and published extensively,

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have made the radical suggestion that Malta was a part of Plato's Atlantis.

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An important element of their thesis on land concerns the strange groove channels or canals, popularly known as cart ruts, which littered the Maltese islands.

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The function of these cart ruts has never been settled, but everyone agrees they're man-made and thousands of years old.

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Dr. Anton Mifsud, president of the Malta Prehistoric Society, has recently suggested that these canals are explicitly referred to in Plato's text.

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They dug several forms, several kinds of canals, but over the terrain.

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And I believe that these rock canals, the so-called cart ruts, that were sitting on, actually are one type of canal as described by Plato.

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A few people say that they were used to transport megaliths from the quarries through temples.

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And there is also the hypothesis that they are served to transport agricultural produce from the fields, right up to the habitations.

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And that's what, in fact, Plato attributes to the function of these, of the same ruts, of the same canals.

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Right.

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Going over the physical features as described by Plato, I could see that they built a lot of temples to the gods.

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But there's nowhere else in the world in which such megalithic temples are present in such a concentration.

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One of Mifsud's co-authors told me of similar cart ruts which have been found underwater off Malta's northwest coast.

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Another possible clue to the missing undergrowth.

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So, Chris, we're going to dive first at the two sides on the west.

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The northwest side, the canals and the steps.

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Yes, yes.

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We set off on a local fishing boat converted for diving.

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Submarished car truts or canals have been seen by a number of divers over the years in various locations around Malta.

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Geologists tell us that this part of the island is slowly rising.

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The submerged ruts we're going to see would have last stood above water more than 11,000 years ago.

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They're just coming.

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They're coming.

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OK.

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Cut it.

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OK.

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OK.

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OK.

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OK.

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OK.

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OK.

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OK.

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OK.

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OK.

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OK.

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The underwater ruts are heavily overgrown with sea grass, but their appearance is unmistakable.

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Deeply incised into a plateau of hard limestone bedrock, they are the same phenomenon exactly

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as the mysterious prehistoric cart ruts that are found above water.

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Scraping away the sea grass, we can make out cleanly carved grooves and channels that seem

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to have been cut by tools rather than worn down by the wheels of carts.

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Where the cart ruts end, we drop off the edge of the underwater plateau and follow a vertical

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wall down to a depth of 80 feet.

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We come to the entrance of a cave.

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The ceiling appears to have been artificially squared off.

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Even more interesting is the internal architecture of the cave.

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In a sheltered position, unexposed to waves, currents or other erosive forces, there are

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a series of right angled ledges that again appear to have been made by man.

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a very interesting cave down there with a squared off entrance.

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And caves with squared off entrances are found above water all over Malta and they've been

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lived in for thousands of years.

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We're finding undoubtedly man-made submerged cart ruts at about six meters here on the section

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of the island that's rising.

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That means those cart ruts are extremely old.

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And I think it casts into question the whole interpretation and the whole dating of the cart

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ruts phenomenon on Malta.

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11,000 years ago, the cart ruts would have stood above water.

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At that time, much of the world was still gripped in the Ice Age deep freeze.

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But perhaps not Malta.

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Increasingly scientists are coming to the view that Malta was a subtropical haven at the

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end of the Ice Age.

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Evidence for this is coming from a group of geologists in Durham in the north of England.

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I took a trip there to find out whether they could shed light on Malta's mysterious underwater

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structures.

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Dr. Glenn Milne built state-of-the-art computer models of the earth as it looked thousands of

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years ago.

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It turns out that 15,000 years ago Malta's southerly latitude meant it enjoyed a relatively temperate

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climate.

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Crucially back then, sea level was far lower, and much of what is now the seabed was above

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water.

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Malta was part of a large land mass joined to the island of Sicily, 50 miles away.

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The orange areas showed that part of the land that was exposed about 20,000 years ago.

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All that area was flooded within about 10,000 years.

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There's a couple of periods where we had quite a sharp jump in sea level.

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One at about 14,000 years ago, and one at roughly 11,500 years ago.

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You're talking about a period of earth history that's very cold.

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So people are going to go from northerly latitudes to more southerly latitudes.

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So they're going to migrate towards the equatorial regions where you see a lot of this land is exposed.

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If we take all of these areas that were exposed at the peak of the ice age, and we add them together,

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because they're all now underwater, how much land was lost?

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Roughly about 25 million square kilometers.

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About 10 million square miles.

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Wow.

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Yeah, it's phenomenal.

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Loss of land area.

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It's an area in total that's the size of Australia, Canada, and America put together.

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So here you can see the coastline geometry in the western Mediterranean around 16,000 years ago.

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And as you progress from about 16,000 years to 14,000 years, keeping an eye on the land bridge between Malta and Sicily,

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you can see that between those time periods, Malta and Sicily break off from one another.

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Right.

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Right there.

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Okay.

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Well, let's look at the next map.

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So we're going from about 14 and a half to 13 and a half.

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Uh-huh.

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You can see a huge change.

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For me, that is a very big change.

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A very large area of land here to the east of Malta has been lost.

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It's difficult to say with the resolution.

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We're probably looking at the three Maltese islands, Malta, Camino, and Gozo being joined into one still at that point.

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Yeah.

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But it's beginning to take on its modern character.

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Unrecognizable.

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Yeah.

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So Malta was a much bigger place then than it is now.

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Yet archaeologists pay no attention to its lost ice age lands.

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I think it's very possible that the Kartras and the rumored remains of underwater temples are all part of a forgotten ice age civilization.

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If we could recover this heritage, archaeologists will be forced to reassess the origins of Malta's extraordinary temple builders, perhaps even of civilization itself.

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The whole atmosphere of today's capital of Malta, Valletta, can stand as a metaphor for all the mystery and intrigue of this ancient Mediterranean stronghold.

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Down through the thousands of years, so many different peoples have been here.

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The ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Crusaders, each with their secrets.

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The Letters Museum of Archaeology contains a magnificent collection of artifacts.

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The spiral designs from various temple bases are very similar to those of Skakarnak in France and elsewhere in Megalithic Europe.

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But many of the sculptures here look like they belong to a much earlier time.

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The archaeologists call them fat ladies for obvious reasons.

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Or the Venuses of Malta, or Mother Goddesses.

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They are the central religious symbols of the great megalithic temples of Malta.

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Archaeology situates these figures in the Neolithic, about 5,000 years ago.

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What they remind me of is the art of Stone Age Europe, 15, 20, even 30,000 years ago,

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where we find the same Mother Goddess figures.

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The Venus of Willendorf from Austria, 15,000 years old.

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The figure of Moravia, 27,000 years old.

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So whatever the age of the megalithic temples themselves,

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I feel sure that we are dealing with a very ancient religious symbol here.

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With its roots deep, deep in the past.

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Here in Malta, they are taught that the first people only arrived around 5,200 B.C.

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But could have forgotten Ice Age civilization have been here before that?

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The problem with stone artefacts, temples or satches,

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is that they can't be carbon dated directly because they contain no organic materials.

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So in the last few decades, the age of stone monuments has been established by carbon dating remains in wood and bone,

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and other organic materials found close to them.

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In Malta now, some of the most senior archaeologists, such as Professor Anthony Bonanno,

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are beginning to recognize that the cultures they are uncovering here may date back much further than previously thought.

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There are some indications that man could have reached more than before, 5,000 B.C.

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As a matter of fact, one should remember that during the Ice Age there were periods when the islands were not islands at all,

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but were the higher land that extended from Italy, incorporating Sicily, as well as the Maltese islands.

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So that rendered physically possible for man to cross over to the islands, as in fact so many animals did at the same time.

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The problem is that the evidence so far, the so-called evidence, is not stringent enough to permit us to make a definitive statement in that regard,

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that man actually did breach a mortar.

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The so-called evidence concerns the discovery of human teeth amongst layers of prehistoric animal remains,

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deposited in a spectacular natural cave called Gardallam.

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The animal remains were deposited by massive floods that filled the caves several times during the Ice Age.

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One layer, made up almost entirely of an extinct species of European red deer, had been washed in some time before 12,000 years ago.

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The teeth were found in this layer, suggesting very strongly that humans were here long, long before archaeologists say they were.

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Researcher Dr. Charles Ventura tells me why archaeologists are still refusing to accept the finds.

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The suggestion was that during excavations, these teeth might have been displaced from the upper layers downwards.

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Yes. And they fell down to the lower layer.

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What I find goes against that argument is that there was another tooth, at least another tooth, and this tooth was found under a stalagnetic sheet.

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It was highly unlikely for it to have been displaced from the above layers, because if it fell, it would have fallen towards the middle of the trench, not under the sheet.

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In fact, it suggests that the sheet formed on top of it.

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Yeah, that's it.

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So really, what seems to be happening here is that a beautiful archaeological theory that Malta was uninhabited by human beings before 7,200 years ago is threatened by an inconvenient fact,

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which is a two or three teeth in very clear stratification that suggests they're much older than that.

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These teeth did not make any sense. They were just pushed aside, slowly pushed aside and ignored.

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The teeth had been sent to London for tests to determine their age.

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The results were ambiguous, but were claimed by archaeologists to support the orthodox position.

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Ventura's colleague, Dr. Anton Mifsud, who had first shown me the cart ruts, decided to re-examine the test data in 1996.

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What I did, I wrote to the Museum of Natural History in London.

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They gave me access to the total set of results at the time.

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And these included other tests, including the fluorine tests and later uranium oxide.

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These tests were used to date samples by measuring chemicals that are absorbed at a regular rate over time.

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If you take two specimens which were lying on the same horizon and you compare their fluorine and their uranium oxide,

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you have a very valuable tool in relative data.

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These other tests show that the teeth are actually ancient.

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Right. And they will not be published until I published them in 1997.

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The controversy is still raging, but the full test results cast doubt on the received wisdom that the teeth are less than 7,200 years old and could rewrite Malta's prehistory.

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Dig a little deeper and you find that in other key sites, the archaeology here is seriously questionable.

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Take the Hypogeum, the vast underground temple complex near Malta's Grand Harbor.

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Thousands of human remains discovered over 50 years ago have simply disappeared.

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There are even rumors that ancient wall paintings have been scrubbed off.

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Based on the style of the few artifacts found, it's thought to be about 5,000 years old.

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But could it be older?

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You know, patterns of red ochre, faded, almost invisible, decorate the ceilings.

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And they're part of a series of red ochre paintings that once existed inside the Hypogeum,

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most of which have now completely vanished.

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Father Marguerite, a Jesuit priest, was the first to excavate the site early in the 20th century.

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He came across thousands of human bone fragments in total disarray.

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And it was estimated that the remains of 7,000 people were amongst the jumbled mass.

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Later, some of those estimates increased to 30,000.

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So imagine my surprise when I tried to track down these remains to find that only six skulls now survive.

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So, Mark, this is basically all that's left from the sort of treasure trove of human remains that was found in the Hypogeum.

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Pretty much. It seems that they were not in very good condition when found,

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and they were lost shortly after the excavation.

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I should point out that the original excavator, Father Manuel Marguerite,

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was unfortunate enough to die while on a mission in Tunisia,

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before he could actually publish his notes.

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As an archaeologist, don't you find it a bit disappointing that you don't have all those other remains?

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I find it extremely disappointing that we don't have,

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because nowadays with modern techniques of analysis, even statistical,

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not merely scientific analysis as such of the composition,

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but if it was statistical analysis, statistical incidents, you'd need a large sample,

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which unfortunately was lost.

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Why is it that the remains of 7,000 individuals from the Hypogeum are no longer present?

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It is extremely worrying.

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It is extremely worrying.

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I mean, it is somewhat sinister, and it does not reflect well on Maltese's archaeology.

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Have the skulls been carbon dated, even though the teeth haven't?

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Not even that.

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Not even the skulls were carbon dated.

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What has been carbon dated from the Hypogeum?

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Nothing at all.

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The fact that even simple tests like these hadn't been done,

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made me appreciate how flimsy the Maltese model of the past had become.

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It made me even keener to follow any new underwater lease.

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I got a call from Chris Agius, who I'd first dived with on the underwater car tracks.

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He's located an intriguing submerged archway, which could be part of a man-made structure at Aura Point,

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this time off the northeast side of the island.

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Do you want to check it out with scuba before we come in?

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Or would you like to go down to get there?

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If you're confident that you found the location, we might as well...

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Yes, no, the location is this, I'm sure.

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Okay, cool.

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Come on there, come on there!

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Come on there!

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Come on there!

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Come on there!

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Come on there!

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Come on there!

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Come on there!

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The structure is quite deep, with the top of the arch at 65 feet,

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and the sand-filled bottom of the channel below it at 80 feet.

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Swimming through the arch, it's hard to miss the nicely squared-off sides of the channel

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and difficult to imagine what natural erosive forces could have created such a feature.

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But most interesting is the clear north-south alignment of the channel,

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which adds to the sense that human beings could have been involved in shaping it.

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A north-south channel, an archway covering it.

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Maybe nature does it, but it doesn't look natural to me.

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If it is the work of human beings, then they were here more than 12,000 years ago,

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when this deep site last stood above water.

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On land, archaeology has failed to establish what it teaches us,

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that humans only came to Malta 7,000 years ago, just 1,500 years before the first megalithic temples were built.

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Under water, there's increasing evidence that our ancestors were here much earlier than that,

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and were in the construction business from the very beginning.

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The Maltese temples are one of the great enigmas of prehistory.

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I don't feel that archaeology has done justice to them, or their builders,

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until a proper investigation of the submerged Ice Age land bridge to Sicily has been made.

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Until then, we have to be open to the possibility that what we've learned above water so far,

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may only be a fragment of the story.

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But Malta's not the only place to look for flooded kingdoms of the Ice Age.

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I'm on my way to Bimini, a tiny island in the Bahamas lying 40 miles off the coast of Miami, Florida.

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I'm here to investigate the so-called Bimini Road, the mecca of Atlantis researchers.

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Parallel rows of submerged stone blocks stretching for 2,000 feet,

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so large you can only see all of it from the air.

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We're down here on South Bimini, as you can see on this large-scale map.

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I've enlisted the help of Trigg Adams, a former airline pilot and now an underwater researcher,

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who first found the structures in the 1960s.

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As you'll see from there, it's quite striking.

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I have seen it flying over from 30,000 feet.

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It's that large. It's such an enormous thing.

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It is that large.

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We're heading east out of Bimini, out over the flats that is the Grand Bahama Bank.

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It was Trigg's co-pilot, Bob Brush, who first noticed the structures here.

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He was constantly flying cargo planes all over the area of Central and South America, and he called me and he said,

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Listen, I've spotted something.

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There's a big J-shaped formation in the water, and we were terribly excited by this.

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And we flew over here, we circled around, we took some pictures.

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In fact, some of the first pictures that were in the newspapers that went around the world were taken by Bob.

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Okay, Peter, we're coming up on the road.

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Okay, Peter, we're coming up on the road.

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Okay, Peter, we're coming up on the road.

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Soon after its discovery, claims were made that it was a remnant of Atlantis.

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But within three years, archaeologists and geologists have dismissed it as a natural phenomenon,

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and no further serious research has been done.

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So we are approximately right here.

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We're going to go in the water, we're going to swim up along this limb,

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reverse course, come down along this side.

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It's a very unusual shape altogether.

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Yeah, the whole thing is.

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Yeah.

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Well, I think the best thing is get in the water and try it out.

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Yeah.

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Let's try it.

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The giant blocks ought to speak for themselves, so structured and symmetrical they seem obviously to have been shaped by human beings.

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But scientific tests show them to be made up of a type of beach rock which can fracture under wave action into regular patterns.

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Some of the blocks are propped up by what look like small pillars, although none of the archaeologists who've dismissed the road have noticed this.

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There's also disagreement over the age of these blocks.

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Some experts say they're just 3,000 years old.

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Others say nearer 7,000.

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I think there are enough holes and contradictions in the orthodox case to justify a fresh look at this enigma.

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The material we're dealing with is undoubtedly beach rock.

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I think the only question is whether human beings had a hand in its arrangement.

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What I've been seeing a lot of on this dive is the big pillow blocks on top of small blocks which appear to be holding them up off the bedrock.

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Trigg pointed out a number of other anomalies that don't quite fit the orthodox picture of an entirely natural structure.

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There's a perfect example of a key joint, but one of the big stones has moved out of position, forming a perfect rectangular area where it used to be.

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What makes me very interested in it is the existence during the last ice age of an enormous island right here.

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And just the kind of place where people would have been attracted to live, particularly when North America was gripped by the ice age and practically uninhabitable in many large areas.

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This probably would have been quite a paradise.

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If this were built when the sea level were lower, perhaps even a couple of hundred feet lower, this would have been a high point.

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Yeah.

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It would have been a natural point for a fortress or a temple.

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The Bimini Road hardly looks like a fortress or a temple, since it's only one course high.

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But people around here say it was once much larger.

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An American, Captain Webster, is said to have brought barges and cranes here in the 1920s to quarry blocks of valuable granite that sat on top of the road.

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And granite is not found naturally anywhere on the Bahamas.

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A tall story?

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I thought so until we tracked down someone who actually remembers Captain Webster and his salvage crew lifting granite off the Bimini Road, where no granite remains today.

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Alvin Taylor is an eighty-year-old former fisherman who watched the operations as a boy.

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He would bring in two barges.

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Yeah.

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To his talk boat.

402
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The talk boat was named after the two.

403
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He had a crane and a regular divers.

404
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In those days they used to use this hand pump.

405
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Yep.

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Diamond fur.

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The surface feet.

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Yeah.

409
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Yeah.

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Like I said, you'd fill those barges up.

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And then what did he do with the stone that he'd brought up?

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Well, he takes it, he takes it to the States, right?

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He took it back to the States.

414
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Yeah, because that's where they built up those jetties.

415
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We used to watch them, because it was something to watch for us at that time, you know.

416
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Yeah.

417
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He must have moved a lot of stone from here.

418
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Oh, you know, every summer, as far as I can remember growing up.

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Yeah, yeah.

420
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He made many trips.

421
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Where do you think that stone came from, all that stone, all that granite?

422
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I tell you, the whole thing is still a mystery.

423
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Those stones, right, there were a couple of tons.

424
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Yeah.

425
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Some of those stones.

426
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Yeah, yeah.

427
00:42:46,000 --> 00:42:49,000
So, how the heck did they get there?

428
00:42:49,000 --> 00:42:51,000
It's quite a mystery, huh?

429
00:42:56,000 --> 00:43:01,000
I think there's some evidence that might back up Arvin's story.

430
00:43:01,000 --> 00:43:04,840
The

431
00:43:05,000 --> 00:43:09,000
The

432
00:43:09,000 --> 00:43:13,000
Trigidae came across a large collection of blocks on the seabed off the north of the island.

433
00:43:13,000 --> 00:43:17,000
Hundreds of blocks, what turns out to be granite.

434
00:43:17,000 --> 00:43:21,000
A type of rock that we know doesn't occur naturally on Bimini.

435
00:43:21,000 --> 00:43:30,000
Archaeologists argue that the blocks are just ship's barless that was either dumped here or went down in a wreck.

436
00:43:30,000 --> 00:43:40,000
And there is a shipwreck.

437
00:43:40,000 --> 00:43:44,000
But what the wreck looks like to me is a 1920s barge.

438
00:43:44,000 --> 00:43:50,000
Could it be one of Webster's, perhaps sunk by the sheer weight of granite that he was attempting to carry?

439
00:43:50,000 --> 00:43:59,840
Granite that Arvin Taylor and other eyewitnesses testify was salvaged from the Bimini road, leaving only the foundations of local beach rock that we see today.

440
00:43:59,840 --> 00:44:02,840
The

441
00:44:02,840 --> 00:44:05,680
Such speculation is hard to prove.

442
00:44:05,680 --> 00:44:18,520
One thing that is certain is the existence of a great island at the end of the ice age, now lost to the sea, at the northwestern tip of which the Bimini road once stood.

443
00:44:18,520 --> 00:44:24,520
Professor John Gifford, of the Miami Marine Institute, doesn't believe that the structures so far discovered are unmated.

444
00:44:24,520 --> 00:44:28,520
But I asked him whether he considered the existence of this former island.

445
00:44:28,520 --> 00:44:32,520
That's something that has occurred to a number of people, including myself.

446
00:44:32,520 --> 00:44:41,520
And so the first step, of course, would be to go to the Bahamas and look for very early archaeological sites.

447
00:44:41,520 --> 00:44:44,520
Not only underwater, but on land.

448
00:44:44,520 --> 00:44:50,520
So what have all of the archaeological surveys that have been done today on all the islands in the Bahamas?

449
00:44:50,520 --> 00:44:55,520
The oldest site that has ever been found on land is only about 3,000 years old.

450
00:44:55,520 --> 00:44:57,520
There's simply nothing older than that.

451
00:44:57,520 --> 00:44:58,520
On land?

452
00:44:58,520 --> 00:44:59,520
On land.

453
00:44:59,520 --> 00:45:01,520
How much marine archaeology has been done in the Bahamas?

454
00:45:01,520 --> 00:45:04,520
Well, prehistoric marine archaeology, very, very little.

455
00:45:04,520 --> 00:45:12,520
If you've got an exposed Bahama bank, thousands of square kilometers, and you've got people wandering around,

456
00:45:12,520 --> 00:45:19,520
at least some of those people are going to leave some traces on the high points, which are then going to become the islands,

457
00:45:19,520 --> 00:45:25,520
which would then be places where land archaeologists would have found some traces.

458
00:45:25,520 --> 00:45:27,520
That's a fair point.

459
00:45:27,520 --> 00:45:29,520
It's not a conclusive one.

460
00:45:29,520 --> 00:45:37,520
If we treat the Grand Bahama Bank as an ice-age island, the archaeology that has been done above water,

461
00:45:37,520 --> 00:45:42,520
you'd still be only touching about 10 or 15 percent of the former islands.

462
00:45:42,520 --> 00:45:45,520
So that means, say, 90 percent of the former islands has never been looked at at all.

463
00:45:45,520 --> 00:45:46,520
True.

464
00:45:46,520 --> 00:45:54,520
I mean, it's just a fact of life in this case that no organization is going to fund a prehistoric underwater archaeological survey of the Bahamas.

465
00:45:54,520 --> 00:46:01,520
Since it's believed that nothing of interest will be found underwater around the Bahamas,

466
00:46:01,520 --> 00:46:06,520
it's impossible to get funding to do any serious underwater research.

467
00:46:06,520 --> 00:46:13,520
I'm still not certain whether the Bimini Road is a natural structure or a man-made megalithic site.

468
00:46:13,520 --> 00:46:19,520
I think the jury's out until the flooded ice-age kingdom that once stood above the waves here has received attention.

469
00:46:19,520 --> 00:46:29,520
But the Grand Bahama Bank is just a fraction of the 10 million square miles of habitable lands lost at the end of the Ice Age.

470
00:46:29,520 --> 00:46:36,520
Obvious places for human settlement, perhaps even for the emergence of what we think of today as civilizations.

471
00:46:36,520 --> 00:46:43,520
I don't see how it can be good science for the experts to be so confident in established opinion,

472
00:46:43,520 --> 00:46:46,520
to ignore all the world's flood nets,

473
00:46:46,520 --> 00:46:51,520
or to believe so passionately that they've grasped the whole story of civilization

474
00:46:51,520 --> 00:46:55,520
when a vast, uncharted underworld gapes unexplored beneath.

475
00:46:55,520 --> 00:47:02,520
It's too vast an area for a host of researchers, let alone me,

476
00:47:02,520 --> 00:47:05,520
but I can try to narrow down the search.

477
00:47:05,520 --> 00:47:12,520
India has powerful flood nets rooted in its culture

478
00:47:12,520 --> 00:47:16,520
and lost huge amounts of land to the sea at the end of the Ice Age.

479
00:47:16,520 --> 00:47:23,520
The myths lead me to spectacular underwater ruins.

480
00:47:23,520 --> 00:47:29,520
In next week's episode, I'm going there.

481
00:47:29,520 --> 00:47:35,520
So that's next Monday at 9.

482
00:47:35,520 --> 00:47:40,520
And the book Underworld, My Graham Hancock, is in the shops now, priced £20.

483
00:47:40,520 --> 00:47:44,520
To order a signed copy, call 0870-1234-3444

484
00:47:44,520 --> 00:47:47,520
or click onto channel4.com shop.

485
00:47:47,520 --> 00:47:50,520
Numbers of signed copies are limited.