Drowned Indian city could be world's oldest
16:03 18 January 02
Evidence of an ancient "lost river civilisation" has been uncovered off the west coast of India, the country's minister for science and technology has announced. Local archaeologists claim the find could push back currently accepted dates of the emergence of the world's first cities.
Underwater archaeologists at the National Institute of Ocean Technology first detected signs of an ancient submerged settlement in the Gulf of Cambay, off Gujarat, in May 2001. They have now conducted further acoustic imaging surveys and have carbon dated one of the finds.
The acoustic imaging has identified a nine-kilometre-long stretch of what was once a river but is now 40 metres beneath the sea. The site is surrounded by evidence of extensive human settlement. Carved wood, pottery, beads, broken pieces of sculpture and human teeth have been retrieved from along the river banks, according to a report in the Indian Express newspaper. Carbon dating of one of the wooden samples has dated the site to around 7500 BC.
"The carbon dating of 7500 BC obtained for the wooden piece recovered from the site changes the earlier held view that the first cities appeared in the Sumer Valley [in Mesopotamia] around 3000 BC," said B Sasisekaran of India's National Science Academy.
Tom Higham of Oxford University's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit says submerged wood is often well-preserved and should be relatively straightforward to carbon date. "I don't see how you could get it grossly wrong," he says. "In the past, it has been said that you shouldn't pin all your interpretations on a date from one sample. But that's not so true these days. And dating a sample that's between 5000 and 10,000 years old is pretty easy."
Critical examination
If confirmed, the find would also push back the date of India's earliest known civilisation by 5000 years. The Harappan civilisation has been dated to about 2500 BC. The newly identified site "looks like a Harappan-type civilisation but dating way back to 7500 BC," said minister Murli Manohar Joshi.
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'Lost city' found beneath Cuban waters
A team of explorers working off the western coast of Cuba say they have discovered what they think are the ruins of a submerged city built thousands of years ago.
Researchers from a Canadian company used sophisticated sonar equipment to find and film stone structures more than 2,000 feet (650 metres) below the sea's surface.
They say they still do not understand the exact nature of their discovery, and plan to start a thorough analysis of the site - off the tip of the Guanahacabibes Peninsula - in January.
Advanced Digital Communications is one of four firms working in a joint venture with President Fidel Castro's government to explore Cuban waters, which hold hundreds of treasure-laden ships from the Spanish colonial era.
Robot scanner
The explorers first spotted the underwater city last year, when scanning equipment started to produce images of symmetrically organized stone structures reminiscent of an urban development.
In July, the researchers returned to the site with an explorative robot device capable of highly advanced underwater filming work.
The images the robot brought back confirmed the presence of huge, smooth blocks with the appearance of cut granite.
Some of the blocks were built in pyramid shapes, others were circular, researchers said.
They believe these formations could have been built more than 6,000 years ago, a date which precedes the great pyramids of Egypt by 1,500 years.
"It's a really wonderful structure which really looks like it could have been a large urban centre," ADC explorer Paulina Zelitsky told the Reuters news agency.
"However, it would be totally irresponsible to say what it was before we have evidence."
