http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Articleshow.asp?art_id=2140338028 City older than Mohenjodaro unearthed REUTERS [ WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16, 2002 6:25:32 PM ] NEW DELHI: Indian scientists have made an archaeological find dating back to 7500 BC suggesting the world's oldest cities came up about 4,000 years earlier than is currently believed, a top government official said on Wednesday. The scientists found pieces of wood, remains of pots, fossil bones and what appeared like construction material just off the coast of Surat, Science and Technology Minister Murli Manohar Joshi told a news conference. "Some of these artefacts recovered by the NIOT (National Institute of Ocean Technology) from the site such as the log of wood date back to 7500 BC, which is indicative of a very ancient culture in the present Gulf of Cambay, that got submerged subsequently," Joshi said. Current belief is that the first cities appeared around 3500 BC in the valley of Sumer, where Iraq now stands, a statement issued by the government said. "We can safely say from the antiquities and the acoustic images of the geometric structures that there was human activity in the region more than 9,500 years ago (7500 BC)," S.N. Rajguru, an independent archaeologist, said. The findings, if confirmed, will dislodge the Harappan Civilisation dating back to 2500 BC as India's oldest civilisation. Subject: [world-vedic] India - New Discovery Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2002 10:45:29 -0000 From: "deandddd" <0108@terra.com.br> Reply-To: vediculture@yahoogroups.com To: vediculture@yahoogroups.com India - New Discovery Suggests Oldest Cities Built 9,500 Years Ago http://www.rense.com/general19/indianew.htm Posted by Dharmapada Subject: [world-vedic] Indian Civilisation '9,000 Years Old'(At Least) Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2002 10:23:32 -0000 From: BBC Reply-To: vediculture@yahoogroups.com To: vediculture@yahoogroups.com Indian Civilisation '9,000 Years Old' FROM BBC NEWS ENGLAND, Jan 17 (VNN) - By Rajyasri Rao in Delhi Marine scientists in India say an archaeological site off India's western coast may be up to 9,000 years old. The revelation comes about 8 months after acoustic images from the sea-bed suggested the presence of built-up structures resembling the ancient Harappan civilisation, which dates back around 4,000 years. The area has been subject to a great deal of archaeological interest due to its proximity to another ancient submerged site - Dwaraka. The Harappan civilisation is the oldest in the subcontinent. Although Palaeolithic sites dating back around 20,000 years have been found on the coast of India's western state of Gujarat before, this is the first time there are indications of man-made structures as old as 9,500 years found deep beneath the sea surface. Search impeded Known as the Gulf of Cambay, the area has been subject to a great deal of archaeological interest due to its proximity to another ancient submerged site - Dwaraka - in the nearby Gulf of Kutch. Harappan remains have been found in India and Pakistan But investigations in the Cambay region have been made more difficult by strong tidal currents running at around two to three metres per second. They impede any sustained underwater studies. Marine scientists led by the Madras-based National Institute of Ocean Technology said they got around this problem by taking acoustic images off the sea-bed and using dredging equipment to extract artefacts. A second round of investigations was conducted about three months ago. 'Glorious past' The Indian Minister for Ocean Technology, Murli Manohar Joshi, told journalists the images indicated not only symmetrical man-made structures but also a paleo-river, running for around nine kilometres, on whose banks all the artefacts were discovered. Experts say submerged pottery may offer a clue Carbon dating carried out on one of these artefacts - a block of wood bearing the signs of deep fissures - suggested it had been around since about 7,595 BC. Mr Joshi said his ministry planned to set up a multi-disciplinary group to look into what this discovery really meant and what relation it might have to other ancient sites in the area. Critics say the minister, who has been in the eye of a storm recently for attempts to Hinduise school history textbooks, may well be presenting these archaeological discoveries as proof of India's glorious and ancient past. But others say only further scientific studies can tell whether such a claim can be made at all. Story URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/ Subject: [world-vedic] Lost city 'could rewrite history' Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 17:20:59 -0500 (EST) From: "" Reply-To: vediculture@yahoogroups.com To: amritasyaputra@excite.com Saturday, 19 January, 2002, 06:33 GMT from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid _1768000/1768109.stm Lost city 'could rewrite history' *************************** The city is believed to predate the Harappan civilisation By BBC News Online's Tom Housden The remains of what has been described as a huge lost city may force historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of ancient human history. Marine scientists say archaeological remains discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old. The vast city - which is five miles long and two miles wide - is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years. The site was discovered by chance last year by oceanographers from India's National Institute of Ocean Technology conducting a survey of pollution. Using sidescan sonar - which sends a beam of sound waves down to the bottom of the ocean they identified huge geometrical structures at a depth of 120ft. Debris recovered from the site - including construction material, pottery, sections of walls, beads, sculpture and human bones and teeth has been carbon dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old. Lost civilisation The city is believed to be even older than the ancient Harappan civilisation, which dates back around 4,000 years. Marine archaeologists have used a technique known as sub-bottom profiling to show that the buildings remains stand on enormous foundations. The whole model of the origins of civilisation will have to be remade from scratch Graham Hancock Author and film-maker Graham Hancock - who has written extensively on the uncovering of ancient civilisations - told BBC News Online that the evidence was compelling: "The [oceanographers] found that they were dealing with two large blocks of apparently man made structures. "Cities on this scale are not known in the archaeological record until roughly 4,500 years ago when the first big cities begin to appear in Mesopotamia. "Nothing else on the scale of the underwater cities of Cambay is known. The first cities of the historical period are as far away from these cities as we are today from the pyramids of Egypt," he said. Chronological problem This, Mr Hancock told BBC News Online, could have massive repercussions for our view of the ancient world. Harappan remains have been found in India and Pakistan "There's a huge chronological problem in this discovery. It means that the whole model of the origins of civilisation with which archaeologists have been working will have to be remade from scratch," he said. However, archaeologist Justin Morris from the British Museum said more work would need to be undertaken before the site could be categorically said to belong to a 9,000 year old civilisation. "Culturally speaking, in that part of the world there were no civilisations prior to about 2,500 BC. What's happening before then mainly consisted of small, village settlements," he told BBC News Online. Dr Morris added that artefacts from the site would need to be very carefully analysed, and pointed out that the C14 carbon dating process is not without its error margins. It is believed that the area was submerged as ice caps melted at the end of the last ice age 9-10,000 years ago Although the first signs of a significant find came eight months ago, exploring the area has been extremely difficult because the remains lie in highly treacherous waters, with strong currents and rip tides. The Indian Minister for Human Resources and ocean development said a group had been formed to oversee further studies in the area. "We have to find out what happened then ... where and how this civilisation vanished," he said. See also: 22 May 01 | South Asia Indian seabed hides ancient remains 12 Feb 01 | South Asia Quake reveals hidden water 19 Jun 00 | South Asia Ancient gold treasure found 04 May 99 | Sci/Tech 'Earliest writing' found Internet links: Archaeological Survey of India Indus (Harappa) Civilisation Harappan Civilisation National Institute of Ocean Technology Subject: [world-vedic] Lost cities show civilisation began 9,500 years ago (London Times) Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 17:36:50 -0500 (EST) From: "" Reply-To: vediculture@yahoogroups.com To: amritasyaputra@excite.com, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-2002031818,00.html London Times SATURDAY JANUARY 19 2002 Lost cities show civilisation began 9,500 years ago ******************************** BY SAM LISTER AND TIM TEEMAN AN ANCIENT metropolis likened to the lost city of Atlantis has been discovered off the west coast of India, suggesting that civilisation may have started 5,000 years earlier than previously believed. A grid of geometric structures thought to be the foundations of two cities, each more than five miles wide, has been detected 120ft below sea level in the Gulf of Khambhat. Fragments of pottery, carved wood, bone and beads have been recovered from the site, 40 miles off the coast of Gujarat, with initial tests dating two of the artefacts to 7500BC. Until now, the earliest human civilisations — the Harrapan and Indus Valley communities — had been dated to about 2500BC. However, experts have speculated that “civilised” communities may have existed much earlier but were lost as sea levels rose at the end of the Ice Age around 8000BC. Other specialists remained sceptical yesterday, dismissing the discovery. Traces of the cities, located at a site that was once the fork of a river, were detected by a team of Indian oceanographers carrying out pollution checks. Sonar scans of the area revealed one six-mile long conurbation, with a second smaller settlement eight miles to the south. Dr S. Kathiroli, the director of India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology, said that the find had astonished him and his team, who returned three times to check their results. “The sonar scans we were carrying out picked up these many large regular geometric patterns, the sort of shapes you would never expect in the sea. We then went back many times to explore the site, when we discovered many artefacts,” he said. As well as indicating many large square and rectangular structures, the foundations also suggested more complex shapes, believed to be a staircase and a courtyard. Other items retrieved from the site included what appeared to be construction material, broken pieces of sculpture and a fossilised jaw bone. Speaking yesterday from the institute’s base in Madras, Dr Kathiroli said that the first carbon dating tests — on two carved logs sent to separate laboratories — had shown both samples dated from about 7500BC. A large stone slab covered in impressions was being studied to see if it was one of the earliest discovered forms of writing. Announcing the first results, the Indian Government said that the discovery could have worldwide implications for theories of civilisation, which would become clearer as further tests were conducted. Some experts are already heralding the find as confirmation that the history of civilisation needs radical revision. Graham Hancock, who has spent ten years investigating the earliest civilisations, said the discovery finally confirmed that complex communities existed in the Ice Age. For three years Mr Hancock has been working on a book, Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age, which is being made into a Channel 4 documentary. He recently visited the site in India and said the scans had shown foundations that suggested buildings up to three storeys high and walls running for more than 400ft. “It is all so highly geometric. The scans show large rectangles and squares which number in their hundreds, even thousands.” Mr Hancock said that it was extremely likely that other civilisations had been at the end of the Ice Age, when 15 million square miles of land were submerged by the sea. He said: “It was a catastrophic period of climate change. The most obvious areas that people would have settled would have been on fertile land near the coasts, and it was these areas that were lost with the rise in sea levels.” Other experts remained sceptical of the discovery. Derek Kennet, a research fellow in archaeology at the University of Durham, said: “It all sounds extremely dubious. If it’s true it means an utter re-evaluation of how we view history. Even the earliest cities came 2,000 years later than this supposed discovery. If this is true we’re looking at a period of about a thousand years after the end of the Ice Age with cavemen building cities. “Up until now we knew that from about 9000BC to about 4000BC there was a period of village economies and people farming. The transition to urbanisation was slow. This discovery would change that completely and put the construction of the cities in the Palaeolithic Age, which is frankly unthinkable.” ============================================ Also http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-2002031819,00.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1768000/1768109.stm Text PAMHO:5196978 (53 lines) [W1] From: Raktambara das (BES SysOp) Date: 09-Feb-02 22:38 (23:38 +0100) To: X (All PAMHO users) [123] Subject: Mysterious sunken city found near Surat ------------------------------------------------------------ (this message is sent to all PAMHO.NET users) Recent Indian archeological find could rewrite history: Mysterious sunken city found near Surat WARANGAL, India – Could the recent discovery of a sunken city off the Northwest Coast of India near Surat revolutionize our concept of history? Michael A. Cremo (aka Drutakarma Dasa), historian of archeology and author of Forbidden Archeology, claims that all the history textbooks would have to be rewritten if this ancient find proves to be of Vedic origin. He recently attended a meeting of ranking Indian governmental officials at which Murli Monohar Joshi, Minister for Science and Technology, confirmed the archeological find by an Indian oceanographic survey team. Radiocarbon testing of a piece of wood from the underwater site yielded an age of 9,500 years, making it four thousand years older than earliest cities now recognized. According to Cremo, “The ancient Sanskrit writings of India speak of cities existing on the Indian subcontinent in very primeval times. Although historians tend to dismiss such accounts as mythological, these new discoveries promise to confirm the old literary accounts.” A leading authority on anomalous archeological evidence, Michael Cremo is currently touring Indian universities and cultural institutions to promote the release of The Hidden History of the Human Race, the abridged Indian edition of Forbidden Archeology (Torchlight Publishing 1993). Asserting the recent find may be just the first step, he says, “It is likely that even older discoveries will follow.” The cultural identity of the people who inhabited the underwater city is as yet unknown. Most historians believe that Sanskrit-speaking people entered the Indian subcontinent about 3,500 years ago, from Central Asia. Other historians accept India itself as the original home of Sanskrit-speaking people, whose lifestyle is termed Vedic culture because their lives were regulated by a body of literature called the Vedas. The case of the mysterious sunken city near Surat may offer further definitive proof to support the ancient origins of man described in Cremo’s controversial bestseller Forbidden Archeology. With over 200,000 copies in print in a dozen languages, Forbidden Archeology documents scientific evidence suggesting that modern man has existed for millions of years. This material can be ordered from our web site at http://www.mcremo.com/ For more information about the Indian Edition of The Hidden History of the Human Race please contact: Rajasekhara Dasa Torchlight Distributors c/o Krishna Balarama Mandira Raman Reti, Vrindavana 281121 U.P. India Phone: (0565) 540-343 Email: rajasekhara108@rediffmail.com (Text PAMHO:5196978) ---------------------------------------