If any one you have the details or related books or articles about Poompuhar underwater research done by Graham Hancock on the year of 2002. He says that the Poompuhar site could date back 11,600 years ago. Under this topic if already discussed means please provide me those details. I would like to read those history details.
Personally, looking at the study and at Hancock's article, I feel that he's jumping to several unfounded conclusions. He takes the "U-shaped structure" for example, and somehow concludes that it's 11,600 years old, even though
a) this structure wasn't dated by his own admission, b) the rest of the artifacts recovered have been dated to an earliest date of about 300 BC, and c) it was suggested to him that building that structure would have been beyond the technology of ~9000 BC.
Besides all that, his theories on Atlantis are dicey at best, to be honest. Remember, there's exactly ONE reference anywhere in the world for Atlantis - that of Plato. First, it makes sense to look at Plato's work before running off theorizing about ancient astronauts and glass islands. Plato wrote about Atlantis in two dialogues, Critias and Timaeus. In Critias, he uses the story of Atlantis to contrast between a "good" city (Athens) and a "bad" city (Atlantis), to further develop the ideas from *Republic*. Timaeus, which is incomplete, is more philosophical, and describes the journey of Solon to Egypt where he hears of Atlantis.
Is there any reason to believe that all this is anything more than Plato's fiction? In Republic, he goes on and on about how it's virtuous to make up stories with a moral (aka, fables). Later, the same author talks about a purported city that was swallowed by the sea for being "bad" (by his definition of bad, anyway). He claims that Solon found out about Atlantis in Egypt, but neither do we hear of this from Solon himself, or from the Egyptians who supposedly knew of it. In antiquity, the story was never taken seriously - it was well understood that it was meant to be a metaphor and contrast to traditional Athenian values, made up by Plato, and unfortunately for us, using real historical characters in his stories.
Modern mystics and cranks like Hancock have picked up this story, and gone off in a hundred different directions, each more fanciful than the last, on the flimsy basis of Plato's fiction and questionable speculation on real historical and archaeological evidence, linking every civilization to Atlantis to explain things that are easier explained without even postulating such a connection (that is, the real connections between cultures in the form of trade and other exchanges is enough to explain most of it. Atlantis need never come into play).
I think I've gone on for much longer than I originally planned, so to summarize,
a) Poompuhar seems to have been quite the city in Sangam times - and this is proved by archaeology, not "mere" literary references. b) Other speculations about highly advanced civilizations 11,600 years are unnecessary to explain what we see there.
But finally, I do feel that 300 BC seems rather late for the earliest period there - I think it's possible that new finds may push the date back some more. "Some more", however, cannot be more than 10000 years in my opinion.
I believe that his argument is that -- for a port it must be adjacent to a land, and he supposes that mainland India is the landmass that port served. If that be the case, then the last time such a port at such a distance from current day shoreline would have been during the last ice age, which is dated as 11000 BC. I agree there is a lot of ifs in his argument. Could that port served an island mass adjacent to the current shoreline? I wonder what the geologists have reported. Raj Mutharasan
I might not be an expert on the matter but is there no possibility of what was discovered was an inland port? We do not know what the geography was like 11,000 years ago. And if the river was large enough it could have been used as an inland port like Musiri. If proved it might mean the existence of landmass that was swallowed by the sea little by little leaving the world as we know it. Also i find the legend of Atlantis a little intriguing and there seems to be many connections between our vedas and puranas with the rest of the ancient texts. For example, the Macha avatar of Vishnu and Noah's arc. I find this very intriguing. Can someone shed some light on this matter?