Lost islands cited in Welsh folklore and poetry are plausible | Hacker News Reader

Lost islands cited in Welsh folklore and poetry are plausible

sciencedaily.com

167 pointsdocmechanic84 comments

I grew up in this part of the world! Quite a strange juxtaposition seeing my home on the front page of this site.

So maybe I can offer some lesser known interesting context:

Wales is only some 300km west of London, yet I have childhood memories (some 35 years ago) of needing to try to speak Welsh to my elderly (in his 80s) neighbour who struggled with English.

There is a theory that English's use of "do" (so-called "Do-support") comes from the Welsh language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-support#Origins

The stones for Stonehenge come from the Preseli mountains, a small range of blue-ish hills exactly on the coast where these lost islands are proposed.

There is a Welsh settlement in Argentina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Wladfa

Not strictly Welsh, but the Severn Estuary, which is the calm, funnel of sea between Wales and England, that invites ships into the harbour of Bristol, points exactly towards Newfoundland in North America. This Welsh-English estuary is where John Cabot made the second recorded voyage of a modern European to the New World[1]. Nowadays, we think of Airports as being the doorways to whole new worlds, but there was a time when it was the coastline and harbours of the South West British Isles that rang and echoed with the adventures, legends, captains, pirates, spices, gems and foreigners of unimaginable far away lands.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot#Second_voyage

> Nowadays, we think of Airports as being the doorways to whole new worlds

I have a habit of parking on the top floors of parking garages for the views. A few months back, I was parked on the top floor of PHX at night waiting to pick up a friend. I sat and watched the planes depart and arrive for 45 minutes or so. From my angle, they were quite small and I was able to take in several runways of activity simultaneously. Looking to the left there were constellations of aircraft lining up to approach the runways.

The scale of "Sky Harbor" was lost on me until that moment, watching these aircraft come to port. Some passenger planes, some cargo, all connecting distant lands. It felt like watching a shipyard. And then I realized the awe I felt at the progress of humanity was probably on-par with someone standing in a shipyard circa 1650. And the relative antiquity we feel towards them in 1650 will be felt towards us in 2300. What they had wasn't any more antiquity than what I have - we both sit at the pinnacle of human civilization so far staring forward into the potential.

Not sure where this ramble is going - but thank you for sharing your story and throwing me back to that moment.

Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoc#:~:text=Madoc%2C%20als....

I hate when the articles have no images, so here are a few:

Wikipedia page about the legend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantre%27r_Gwaelod

The PDF of the research article is in https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/ag/article/view/32596/... (https://doi.org/10.4138/atlgeo.2022.005)

The old map with the islands is in page 5 and a new map with the sea depth is in page 7.

Thank you! Surely there is a Welsh writer of science fiction or fantasy that can make good use of this knowledge ...

Is this a reference to Susan Cooper?

That was my first thought on seeing the headline as well.

No, but she's exactly the sort of writer that I was thinking of.

Wikipedia:

> Legends of the land suggest that it may have extended 20 miles west of the present coast.

Any idea of how large these lands were, area-wise?

From the research article:

> The dimensions of the offshore islands may be estimated in proportion to these respective two sets of measurements, so that the southern island measures approximately 6.6 × 3.8 km (ca. 19.7 km^2) and the northern island 10.7 × 5.8 km (ca. 48.7 km^2), and that the islands lie ca. 3.5–4.0 km from the mainland shore. However, these measurements must be viewed with extreme caution given the poor areal accuracy of the Gough Map.

Later in the article they estimate that the sea erosion was 5-10m/y and the alleged islands disappeared in 5 approximately centuries, so a width of 5km is consistent.

It does make you wonder if the legend of atlantis is simply due to a myriad of ancient civilizations that vanished under rising oceans. Given human population centers cluster around ocean ports/rivers with easy access to fresh drinking water. It seems entirely plausible that estimates of human population size at the end of the last ice age may be substantially off.

Through the grinder of mythology black can become white and up can become down. You can't trust it except in the blurriest sense.

This is what makes science so special and revolutionary. The alternative being normal horrible epistemology like everybody does it all the time since forever.

And yes, even science can be mythologized.

Not all of that older epistemology is horrible. Mathematics and logic and proof are ancient.

There’s a fairly credible theory that Atlantis was a port city in the Richat Structure.

Aka the "Eye of Africa" (wikipedia seems to have scrubbed almost all trace of this commonly used name.)

I don't buy it it all. The lowest point of this structure is presently several hundred meters above sea level. There is almost no archeological trace of human habitation, save for some ancient stone tools (no trace of structures, no middens indicating dense population.) These tools date to the Late Pleistocene to early Holocene, when sea levels were even lower than they are today (in other words, this formation was even further from the sea then.)

Richat Structure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richat_Structure

The whole circularity of this structure actually bring Atlantis and it's rings to mind, and also we must remember that the Sahara had a much different climate not that long ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period

That’s true, but it beggars belief that the civilisation Atlantis conjures to mind would leave zero physical evidence of significant structures behind.

It would also have significant trade and its artifacts would show up along the traderoutes.

Not just zero physical evidence - zero evidence _at all_. Afaik it doesn't appear until Plato uses it, and he claims that its thousands of years old or something like that. That should reasonably have traces in other accounts through the years.

I did hear a fairly credible theory that it is just an allegory invented by Plato, but influenced by various other myths and political centers (such as king Minos rule on Crete).

The island Thera was destroyed by a volcanic eruption some 1200 years before Plato: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorini_caldera. The collapse of the island would have triggered tsunamis all across the Aegean Sea, so it's very likely many coastal towns had their own stories of being "swallowed by the sea".

Though Plato said 10,000 years before, this is the most likely source of the Atlantis story, as the eruption destroyed the Minoan settlement at Akrotiri as well as those on the coast of Crete. It's possible the eruption led to the collapse of the Minoan civilization.

Another quite compelling theory posits the destruction of Thera also caused the Biblical ten plagues of Egypt.

We don't know that it hasn't left any physical evidence behind. The origin of many archaeological artifacts are not known for certain. It's possible that there is pottery and other artifacts from Atlantis that we've already unearthed.

I was commenting in the context of the Eye of Africa, it’s a fascinating structure that happens to have some dimensional characteristics that vaguely resemble Plato’s description. There’s just no physical evidence of any significant architecture there of any kind.

Exactly, Atlantis is in Tunisia: https://medcraveonline.com/IJH/is-atlantis-related-to-the-gr...

Then there is a fringe theory, that a somewhat advanced ancient civilization and a city is sunken off the West Coast of India. And that later travelers from India brought the myth of a Western sunken city into Europe. Then Atlantis would be in the Arabian Sea, East of Europe. But West of India.

It’s not credible at all: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/no-atlantis-ha...

Here's the thing about Atlantis: even if you know exactly where it is, and even if you can prove it, you'll find it's nearly impossible to sell.

The best way to be compensated for its discovery is probably to make a documentary, but this has been done dozens of times already by people who claimed to know where it is. Networks only have so much appetite for it. And even without that hurdle, it's extremely difficult to get a hold of anyone who might be able to help.

And if you went the academic route, you'd essentially be publishing the information for free, running the risk of someone else taking all the credit.

How would you even go about selling Atlantis? I'm seriously asking.

you don't sell discoveries like that. historically speaking, the reward was either some explicit prize, or simply the fame of being the discoverer, and the cost of the exploration, as well as the prize if any, was borne by some deep pocketed entity who wanted the discovery made (the crown, the government or some academic body).

Plenty of wealthy people sail all over the world, looking for interesting things to see and treasure to loot.

And yes, there's a finite appetite for documentaries about "I found a few rocks that kind of look rectangular if you squint real hard, I think it's Atlantis". But if you find something more substantial than that, people will perk up real quick.

There is no "legend" of Atlantis, it's simply an allegory in Plato's works. To the best of our knowledge, no one in the ancient world believed that Atlantis had existed, any more than we believe today that Hogwarts was a real place.

How does one discern whether a story is a history or a fiction, thousands of years afterward? Language and culture shift dramatically in that time. (Actual question, not rhetorical.)

If Plato is the only one who recounts the story, that doesn't show he invented it. Stories of actual events are lost all the time. Why would it be surprising to hear a story about a thing from only one remaining and preserved source?

You can tell by actually reading the account and knowing a little bit about the context. Plato's account is of a civilization that was defeated in a war with Athens ten thousand years before his time. Because Athens did not exist ten thousand years before Plato (something we can confirm through archeology) we know that Plato's account can't be true. Given that the point of the story is to demonstrate the importance of Athens, (according to the character Critias, Athens is so important that people in Egypt are still relating this story of something that happened thousands of years ago,) it's definitely a fiction.

Plato's dialogues were works of fiction that used fictionalized versions of real people as characters in order to illustrate philosophical points. The guy who relates the story of Atlantis is Critias, one of the members of the Thirty Tyrants, a clique who ruled Athens for a while, and Critias claims that he got the story from his distant ancestor Solon who was one of the lawgivers for Athens. To a contemporary of Plato's this would be as if he'd written a story about George Bush, relating a story that he'd gotten originally from George Washington, about how the United States had once fought a war against a long-lost evil empire back in the bronze-age. You weren't supposed to think it was true.

> Plato's account is of a civilization that was defeated in a war with Athens ten thousand years before his time.

To me, this barely seems relevant to any criticism of the story. Plato had, at most, 2000 years of written history to draw upon (and I’d guess far far less at his disposal), so his estimate of the age of an ancient civilization is inevitably going to be quite far off.

I don’t disagree with the conclusion, but that seems like a minor glitch.

I'd say that if Plato's account is so garbled that he gets the date off by thousands of years, the entire story is likely to be useless as a source of actual history.

This is where I think the culture barrier may have a major role. If somebody today says a thing happened ten thousand years ago, the listener has an expectation that the true year of the event is 2022 - 10000 plus or minus, what, 1000? And the more scientific the context of the communication, the smaller the expected error would be.

Is is possible that for an ancient Greek to describe an event as "ten thousand years ago", he means nothing more or less than "too long ago to remember when, exactly"? It may be unfair for us to backport our modern conception of numbers as these very precise values.

I guess your argument isn't convincing for me. A clerical inaccuracy is not evidence that whole account is false. And if Plato has some propagandish agenda about Athens (which I can totally believe), then that warns us the story may be exaggerated or one-sided---but altogether false?

It sounds like you're saying it's clear from reading the text that the dialogue is manufactured, even through the ancient language / ancient culture barrier. But why does that imply the content is manufactured?

If you told me a story about George Bush telling a remarkable story that was passed down to him orally through every president from George Washington, the only reason I'd suspect you were making it up is because it's inconsistent with the many other sources I was taught from, which don't mention such a thing, and I trust that they are relatively complete with respect to important events. Did Plato's readers have analogous sources? Do we still have them today?

>Because Athens did not exist ten thousand years before Plato (something we can confirm through archeology) we know that Plato's account can't be true.

That is an assumption.

We have many places that use the same or similar names (England vs New England (us state). New Mexico(us state) vs Mexico. Its not inconceivable that there was more than 2 locations named Athens. 1 of which is currently lost buried or unknowingly called that.

That is certainly the fringe theory of the long lost civilizatin of Mu (contintent in the Pacific?). Apparently it, Atlantis, and another empire essentially sub-orbital bombed themselves into non-existence causing entire landmasses to submerge. That's the fringe, out there theory anyway.

Don't forget about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger land (I'm sure out near European ancestors wouldn't have).

That is only about 6000bce - when Britain was joined to mainland Europe.

The piece that blows me away is how shallow the North Sea is, but also how all that sea level rise is down to glacial melt - amazing just how much water is/was tied up in glaciers (and the Antarctica).

The sea level rise is not simply because of the addition of glacial meltwater but is apparently because the weight of the glaciers in the north pressed down on the land (which is essentially floating on magma underneath), tilting it towards the north and raising the southern part. When the glaciers melted, the weight was removed and the land is settling back (the north is raising and the south is lowering, like a see saw)

Which would be the south in this example? Britain being south of the Arctic, lowering and creating a new sea?

Yes, effectively the North Sea, the Irish Sea and the English Channel. I don't know where the fulcrum would be exactly but they are all shallow.

> Evidence from the Roman cartographer Ptolemy suggests the coastline 2000 years ago may have been some 13 km further out to sea than it is today.

This sort of stuff doesn't get repeated often enough in this day and age, we live with the illusion that the sea levels as we now have them should remain the same over the next centuries no matter what.

It does not get repeated because it would suggest that sea level changes are natural, as opposed to being caused by industrial CO2 emissions, and limiting CO2 emissions is a huge business right now.

>It does not get repeated because it would suggest that sea level changes are natural

Sea level changes are absolutely natural and have fluctuated wildly over the history of the planet. The sea level was 360 feet lower 13,000 years ago. Certainly human activity has a measurable effect on the environment but it is simply absurd to pretend that our environment (including sea levels) isn't in a constant state of flux.

The problem now is that the change is some orders of magnitude faster than they used to be.

That isn't true at all. The history of the planet is marked by rapid, repeated changes in the climate. The climate is going to change - drastically - just like it has for the entire history of the earth. We should understand that our activity has an influence but it is not the only factor or the dominant one.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ContentFeature/GlobalWarmi...

It's quite incredible to see this level of denialism in 2022

Are you talking about the denialism of people who reject science and the undisputed fact that the environment has changed frequently and at a high velocity, continuously, over the meticulously documented history of the planet? Or are you referring to those who reject science, and insist, despite the detailed and voluminous evidence, that human activity is the predominant cause of environmental change, without which the climate would be stable?

I'm specifically referring to you, who's pathetically muddying the waters on some internet forum.

It is sad and pathetic that so many are unwilling to acknowledge the science and the well-documented data. It is even more sad and pathetic that so many are unable to do so. But, unfortunately, that is why society looks the way it does.

If we for a second disregard the fact that it’s a random graph without any context, even that graph shows changes in thousands of years, not like now when the temperature changes happens within decades.

Conspiracy theory hogwash. Doggerland is well-discussed.

I imagine that most people haven’t thrown gasoline on a fire. Surely they can’t understand making something bad way more worse than it was.

General knowledge and popular culture acknowledge natural climate changes. However I think people often overestimate the length of time involved in those changes, *overestimating the amount of time that has passed since dramatic climate changes in the past. E.g. knowing of "the ice age" but estimating that it happened millions of years ago and took millions of years for these climate changes to naturally occur.

It's certainly not a secret that Manhattan Island was covered by nearly half a mile of ice less than 20,000 years ago, nobody is suppressing this knowledge, but nevertheless I think there's a wide gap between public knowledge and common knowledge.

Firstly sea levels have nothing to do with this at all, these coastal changes were caused by erosion.

Anyway some sea level changes are natural, some look to be man made. Just because natural changes can happen, it doesn’t follow that man made one’s don't happen, or if they do that it’s ok.

> Firstly sea levels have nothing to do with this at all, these coastal changes were caused by erosion.

The paper seems to say these islands were likely formed from unconsolidated glacial till, and subsequently eroded by some combination of melting glaciers and the Holocene sea-level rise.

Islands formed when the sea level was low, and eroded when the sea level was high. When you say sea level rise had 'nothing to do with it', you're contradicting the paper.

The islands have been there since the Holocene sure. The sea level rise was in the Holocene and started the process, but the legends and the historical maps of the islands were made much later than that. The changes since then are due to erosion.

Note that the change of this part of the coastline was caused by sea erosion of the cliff, not a raise of the sea level.

You are mixing up land erosion with sea level rise.

There's no soil erosion that goes 13km inland without an accompanying sea-level rise.

Something like the Cliffs of Dover maybe? That's from sea level fall isn't it (haven't looked into it specifically but I know it made of products of marine organisms, but maybe it was pushed up tectonically originally).

Here they talk about a lose landmass caused by accumulated glacial remains of the last ice age. So it would have likely mostly accumulated originally during a period sea rise.

It's always interesting (for me) to learn of lost lands- from before humans were around, too, but especially those mentioned in human stories. There are many of these [1]- some of which are the subject of fascinating and informative documentaries, such as this one about Doggerland [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_lands?wprov=sfla1

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DECwfQQqRzo

Why do people always think that things from the past are simply not real.

“They”(us in the future) could say the exact same thing about all the things that are real in our current lives.

All these mythical creatures (soon to be extinct)

Having such a surplus of fresh water.

At a certain point they will just deny Dubai was created

It is human nature to glorify the past and romanticize the greatness of "those days". There is nothing wrong in maintaining a healthy skeptical mind towards outrageous claims. Further the onus of proof lies on the person making the claim.

> At a certain point they will just deny Dubai was created

That reminds me of a (reportedly fake) quote attributed to Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum:

“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride a Land Rover, but my great-grandson is going to have to ride a camel again.”

There are plenty of things from the past that are absolutely real. We have tons of physical evidence for settlements all over the world throughout history. I’m sure there’s more yet to be discovered. But until we discover it, it’s just hearsay.

There may well have been a real place that inspired Plato’s mention if Atlantis, but only one. Not the many hundreds of possible locations suggested over the centuries. They can’t all be Atlantis, if any of them are.

200yrs from now well meaning discussion will consider if the long extinct elephant was in fact mythical

Do you expect all the physical evidence of Elephants, such as bones, tusks, genetic samples, stuffed animals, photos and peer reviewed zoological descriptions, to disappear in the next 200 years? If so why? The Dodo went extinct 340 years ago and nobody thinks they were mythical. The mammoth even before that. Even dinosaurs are known to have existed, as a fact. We have vast amounts of physical evidence. So I really don’t understand what point you’re trying to make.

Perhaps he means non academic discussions like whether vaccines actually work that you find on forums. There's loads of people doubting established facts.

Moon landing denialism is a prevalent minority belief. I think it's within the realm of possibility that the Apollo landings may one day be regarded as myth by the majority, if society (once again) takes an anti-intellectual turn. The cynical dismissal of "Hollywood faked it because of the Cold War" is a very neat and tidy meme that spreads well as it is.

It depends, third part evidence of the landings, such as images from other country's lunar orbiters, is only going to get stronger.

The way of vulgar skepticism is to assume something doesn't exist until it has been proven to exist.

In cases like the Lock Ness monster or invisible pink dragons in my garage, that approach happens to yield good results (and so would blanket generic cynicism.) But it falls apart quick when you stray very far from the fantastical, e.g. "masks have not yet been proven to work, therefore masks don't work."

A bayesian approach to skepticism is much better than vulgar skepticism. Bayes asks the skeptic to consider the general outlandishness of a possibility P(A), the basic likelihood of apparent evidence occurring regardless of the hypothesis P(B), and the likelihood of there being evidence at all even if the hypothesis were correct P(B|A).

Lack of evidence? What a stupid comment.

Why do people always think that things from the past are simply not real.

Because the universe popped into existence 1 nanosecond ago.

Try proving me wrong...

> Brasil, also known as Hy-Brasil and several other variants, is a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland. Irish myths described it as cloaked in mist except for one day every seven years, when it becomes visible but still cannot be reached.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasil_(mythical_island)

Could it be that the Ys city legend in Brittany was this Welsh legend transposed in Brittany, when the Bretons (originally Welsh peoples) migrated there... very interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ys

And don't forget Lyonesse, a Cornish lost land, with related language and people - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyonesse

The article says the research was based on the Gough Map. Just look at this thing. Quite impressive.

http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/webmap/thelakes/large/ggh1.jpg

Pretty similar to the story of Rungholt[1], which is clearly no longer myth, but fact, with lots of remnants being found.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rungholt

New study of coastal geography and a medieval map.

Wasn't this posted to Hacker News before?

I only could find this from another URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32542953 (2 points | 12 days ago | 0 comments)

Note that from the FAQ:

> Are reposts ok? If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.

I sometimes link old post with low points or few comments when one of the comments is very interesting and explain or debunk the post. But in this case there is nothing interesting in the old discussion. (Is the other URL better? Both look similar to me.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com