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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> river deltas and coasts of 10,000 BCE are now under 400ft of ocean. What secrets lie buried under the ocean sediments? What will we discover?

With current technology isn’t there a way for us to scan all coastline to detect evidence of large settlements?

If someone truly believes (and moreover fashions their entire career around) in advanced earth civilization before 10,000 BCE, wouldn’t they be figuring out a way to scan all coastline?

This argument seems analogous to me to when someone tries to sell you an investment with unrealistic returns - why wouldn’t they just pocket the entire return instead of sharing?

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I think you underestimate how hard it is to find evidence of human settlement under sediment in the sea floor in 400 ft of water. Anything organic likely is gone, but there might be stone evidence. Unless it's something like Gobleki Tepi, it would be very hard to identify. And sites like that would be very rare, if there are any. It's worse than finding a needle in a haystack.

As far as I know, little effort had been put into it.

You expect a journalist to field tech to scan continental shelves? His role is to call attention to unaddressed questions provoked by evidence. It is historian's and archaeologists' job to answer them.

Looking at the surface of the ocean and speculating what may or may not have been below it 10,000 years ago is not journalism. It's storytelling.

Do I expect the man to go swimming around the ocean's depths? I have no expectation one way or the other. My only expectation is that, having not done such work, he doesn't claim to have the result of the work he didn't do. I assume GP was thinking similarly.

He DID go swimming around the ocean depths, as best a middle class, middle aged writer could.

Look up his book Underworld

I think the frustration comes from people who have already asked these questions and provided answers, which he is ignoring in favor of his own speculations.

He gets attention because they have pointedly avoided addressing the questions, or in cases promoted obvious falsehoods.

He speculates, badly, in a vacuum.

I was thinking that unless he’s filthy rich from book sales, he could spend time convincing a rich, eccentric. Maybe he has tried.

Unfortunately not that easy. Take the Mesopotamian city ur. One theory is that there was earlier cities that were on what is now the gulf that got covered as the sea rose as the last ice age retreated. Unfortunately those cities if they exist were most likely build out of mud brick and thus dissolved.

I'll not address resolving coastline since that's an already known problem and currently has no solution.

For shallow sea discovery, radar is good enough to get a detailed map of terrain and medium to large scale objects. There is also a heuristic that can be applied in finding whether something is man made or occurs organically. Software applying this heuristic was used to debunk suggested "alien" structures on Mars. This same approach can be used to scan and find potential settlements underwater for excavation. At the very least some follow up core drilling.

The only sales pitch needed is one that gets the money to buy some equipment, pay a few people to sit a long time in a boat trolling, and maybe longer at a desk organizing and publishing the data. None of this is magical, requires magical thinking, or magical amounts of money. The issue is convincing enough people its worth at least trying to find new or more evidence.

There is no such technology. Ground penetrating radar can be used to find some large buried artifacts above the water line. For underwater artifacts the only options are side-scan sonar and lidar, but those don't work for anything deeply buried under sediment. A lot of sediment can accumulate in 12K years.

In order to find anything I think the most productive approach would be to make some educated guesses about where settlements might have been located, then excavate those sites. But any sort of underwater archaeology is extremely expensive. And the cost goes up exponentially for anything much deeper than 100 ft / 30 m because that's about the limit for human divers to do useful work with cheap and simple compressed air scuba gear.

I'm guessing that someone in that position has the choice of maintaining their money-making proposition with little further investment. Or investing a lot in something that might confirm what he already earns from, or uncover nothing useful for his journalism.

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