Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

by Graham Hancock

  David Trump says it all when he writes:

  One hears frequently of Malta’s ‘land-bridges’. Such there certainly were, at least north to Sicily – they are needed to explain the fossil fauna of Ghar Dalam for example – but not, as far as we know, at a period when there were men to take advantage of them. They are of great interest to the geologist and palaeontologist, but none to the archaeologist.1

  This is from the updated edition (March 2000) of Trump’s Archaeological Guide, published three years after the revelations in Dossier. The loud and clear message that it sends is that there is simply no point in looking underwater along the now-submerged land-bridge to Sicily to increase our knowledge of Maltese prehistory. On the contrary, Trump emphasizes, the land-bridge is of no interest to archaeologists because, ‘as far as we know’, there were no humans to take advantage of it.

  However, it is clear that David Trump, unlike some of his colleagues, is an open-minded man. Interviewed in October 2001, he did not prove to be a stubborn or dogmatic adherent to the orthodox ‘Neolithic-first’ model of Maltese settlement, was genuinely disturbed to learn about the ambiguities and uncertainties in the full gamut of results from the FUN tests carried out by Kenneth Oakley in the 1950s and 1960s and concluded (see chapter 18) that until modern C-14 tests could be conducted to confirm the age of Despott’s molar and the other Ghar Dalam samples, ‘the whole thing is in limbo, really’.

  Since this is also the view of Louise Humphrey at the Natural History Museum in London (again see chapter 18), it seems to me – though no one has perhaps noticed – that a Rubicon has already been crossed. As Trump admitted in his October 2001 interview with Sharif Sakr, the FUN results were so fundamental to the construction of the ‘Neolithic-first’ paradigm of orthodox Maltese archaeology that – if they are discredited – there remains no positive evidence whatsoever for that paradigm: ‘only the complete absence of any other evidence. And one has to admit that negative evidence is never reliable. It may just not have been found.’

  Trump’s openness to the notion that evidence for a Palaeolithic human presence in Malta might simply not yet have been found prompted a question on his current views concerning the land-bridge issue.

  Sharif: OK, we’ll move on. In your Archaeological Guide, you state somewhere … oh yes … the land-bridge idea. You state that the land-bridge is of no interest to the archaeologist – have you changed your opinion on that? It might be relevant to help you gauge the likelihood of finding evidence of Palaeolithic man on Malta in the future.

  Trump: Well, we accept that … But I’d use the word possibility, not likelihood … If there was a land-bridge, that means the sea-level was very much lower – so all the most desirable countryside, coastal plains, etc., are deep underwater and there’s no hope of finding evidence of it.

  Sharif: Well, what about marine archaeology? Would you be in favour in principle of marine exploration to see if there’s anything …

  Trump: Not a hope. I mean if you’ve got shipwrecks or even drowned buildings then fair enough, but if you’re looking for a scatter of flints on the bed of the sea, I don’t think there’s a remotest possibility of ever finding them.

  Sharif: Because Palaeolithic archaeological evidence is so …

  Trump: Scanty. I mean it’s difficult enough, I won’t say impossible, but it’s difficult enough above water. Below water there’s not a remotest hope.

  Woven into Trump’s view is the perception, shared by the vast majority of orthodox archaeologists, that human activity in the Palaeolithic was limited to a very simple material culture that left only scanty remains such as scatters of flints. The perception is a reasonable one, since this is all that any sites definitely recognized as Palaeolithic on land anywhere in the world have ever shown to the excavator. But this reasonable perception is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. It predicts that nothing surprising or unusual about the Palaeolithic – perhaps even ‘drowned buildings’ – who knows? – can be expected to be found at the bottom of the sea. And since this is the case, and the remains of Palaeolithic material culture are in general so scanty, there would not be ‘a remotest hope’ of finding them underwater.

  It is easy to see how out of this perception flows the untested conclusion, at least where Maltese prehistory is concerned, that it is not worth looking underwater at all. Yet the possibility cannot be ruled out that the study of archaeological remains submerged at the end of the Ice Age could shed light on the mysterious origins of Malta’s megalithic civilization with its apparently unprecedented temples, unlike any others known in the world, its elaborate goddess cult – distinctively Palaeolithic in general style and symbolism – and its few surviving traces of cave paintings executed in the same pigments of red ochre and black manganese oxide that were favoured by Palaeolithic artists.

  Refuge Malta

  The closing millennia of the Ice Age, between around 17,000 years ago and the arbitrary ‘end’ of the Palaeolithic 12,000 years ago, were not only a period of rapidly melting ice-caps and rapidly rising sea-levels but also a period in which climate conditions across Europe were wildly unstable and frequently extremely cold and arid (see chapter 3). In the high latitudes, until the kilometres-thick ice-sheets had melted, human life would have been impossible -while even in lower latitudes many of the vast areas of inland Europe that were nominally ice-free were reduced to bleak and inhospitable tundra.

  Given such conditions it would have been natural for human beings – at any level of social development – to migrate towards warmer and more congenial climes. And we can tell from the distribution of fossil remains that this was certainly the survival strategy adopted by all ‘cold-intolerant’ animal species of the period – including game species such as red deer [Cervus elephas) that we know were hunted by Palaeolithic humans. Places of refuge where the local climate was for one reason or another less harsh – scientists studying the Ice Age use the technical term ‘refugia’ for such sanctuaries of life – were inevitably sought further and further south during the worst episodes.

  Straddling the thirty-sixth parallel, Malta is the southernmost point of Europe – indeed it is further south than the cities of Tunis or Algiers in North Africa. And while Malta today is a small archipelago 90 kilometres from Sicily – which is itself separated from the Italian mainland by the Straits of Messina – we know that this was not the case at the Last Glacial Maximum 18,000 years ago.

  We would know this even without the modern science of inundation mapping to show us the changes that transformed the antediluvian Siculo-Maltese land-mass between 18,000 and 10,000 years ago. We would know it, as Trump rightly points out, because of the presence of large quantities of fossil fauna in Ghar Dalam such as the Pleistocene European red deer, wolf, brown bear and fox, which were not big swimmers and could only have come on foot to Malta by way of a land-bridge. Indeed, there is no dispute from any authority that during the extremely cold and arid periods that occurred several times between 17,000 and 10,000 years ago:

  man and animals could migrate from the Italian peninsula, by land, to the warmer climates of the Siculo-Maltese district. Herds of red deer left northern latitudes and settled in all parts of present-day Sicily, the present-day Egadi islands of Favignana and Levanzo, and the Maltese archipelago, the latter site being the warmest of the Siculo-Maltese district during the Pleistocene.2

  So here is the puzzle. On the tiny islands of Favignana and Levanzo, which, like Malta, were joined to Sicily (and hence to the mainland) during the Ice Age, there is abundant and undisputed evidence, including cave graffiti carbon-dated to 12,000 years ago, for the presence of Palaeolithic man.3 Sicily, today the largest Mediterranean island, presents even more abundant evidence of an even more ancient human presence. As Anton Mifsud reminds us,

  Humans have indubitably inhabited it for much of the Palaeolithic, and it has a clear sequence of carbon-dated lithic implements, in places reaching back to the Acheulean [between 600,000 and 75,000 bp).4 The caverns hold th
e same faunal assemblage as that at Ghar Dalam, namely Pleistocene hippo-elephant-deer fauna. Upper Palaeolithic cultures have been identified in all regions of Sicily, including the south-eastern region of the Hyblean plateau which abuts the Siculo-Maltese land-bridge of the Pleistocene …5

  Only an attitude of stupefied indifference to the implications of the land-bridge for the mobility of Palaeolithic humans can explain why archaeologists did not become concerned much earlier by the apparently ‘apalaeolithic’ status of the Maltese islands – a status that seems acutely anomalous when viewed in its regional context and that becomes even harder to explain when we remember that Malta was the furthest south, the warmest and the most suitable refugium of the entire Siculo-Maltese landmass. Obviously, with the same cold-intolerant fauna roaming freely across the whole of that landmass – very much including Malta, as we know from Ghar Dalam – there is no good reason why Palaeolithic humans, who are everywhere else believed to have followed and hunted that same fauna, should not have reached Malta as well.

  And, as we now know, they did.

  The drowning of the land-bridge

  G. A. Milne to Graham Hancock

  13 July 2001, 19:22

  Subject: Maps

  Graham,

  I ran some new high resolution predictions of sea-level change and made maps for the Tyrrhenian6 and Mediterranean Seas. There are four .pdf attachments showing the coastline at the times

  18.3 kyr BP

  16.4 kyr BP

  14.6 kyr BP

  13.4 kyr BP

  (these are all calibrated times). You will see that Malta became isolated between 16.4 and 14.6 kyr bp. The large loss of land area between 14.6 and 13.5 kyr bp is associated with the melting event known as Meltwater Pulse 1-A (about 15–20 metres sea-level rise in about 500 years around 14 kyr bp).7

  I hope the maps are useful. There may have been some significant tectonic motion in this region that is not accounted for in my predictions.

  Cheers,

  Glenn

  This was the second batch of Maltese inundation maps that Glenn Milne had sent me – the first batch, at lower resolution and wider intervals, covered the same Tyrrhenian region of the central Mediterranean as it had looked 21,300 years ago (21.3 kyr BP), 10,600 years ago, 4800 years ago and the present day.

  Scrolling through each of the maps one after the other there were a number of immediate and obvious observations to make:

  Until 16,400 years ago Malta was still joined to Sicily by a land-bridge.

  The land-bridge was severed by rising sea-levels between 16,400 years ago and 14,600 years ago. However, the new straits created were at first extremely narrow and most of the mass of the former isthmus remained above water.

  Between 14,600 years ago and 13,500 years ago there were very dramatic losses of land and all the remaining parts of the antediluvian isthmus were swallowed up by the sea.

  Despite these losses Malta, Comino and Gozo were still joined to form a single larger island 13,500 years ago. But other than an extension a few kilometres in width along parts of the north-east coast, the surface-area of that landmass had been reduced to dimensions only a little larger than those of today.

  By 10,600 years ago the separation of Malta, Comino and Gozo had occurred and the islands were virtually indistinguishable from their modern appearance.

  Before the flood: 18,300 years ago

  The map opposite presents the region as it would have appeared 18,300 years ago. As well as revealing the much greater extent of Italy when global sea-level was at its lowest, particularly on the Adriatic side of the peninsula,8 and the enlargement of Corsica, Sardinia and the North African coast, it demonstrates that the situation of the Maltese islands was utterly different from their situation today. Instead of being a tiny archipelago lost in the central Mediterranean, Malta 18,300 years ago formed an integral part of the Italian mainland through the isthmus then connecting it to Sicily. The isthmus was approximately twenty times larger than the present Maltese islands, running not only 90 kilometres to the north but also extending more than 70 kilometres further to the south and east.

  All along the north-east coast of antediluvian Malta, effectively an extension of the land-bridge, there was an exposed shelf, approximately 8 to 12 kilometres in width.

  Along the south-west coast, although it is beyond the limits of resolution of the map to determine very fine details of the inundation sequence, it is certain that Filfla – which today is separated from Malta by a strait 3 kilometres wide – was not isolated. With that reservation, however, it is notable how relatively minor the changes along this coast seem to have been during the past 18,000 years – a product of the steep cliffs and sheer drop-aways to depths greater than the maximum fall in sea-level of around 120 metres.

  I emphasize that the changes seem to have been minor quite deliberately in view of Glenn Milne’s explicit warning that his model cannot take into account ‘significant tectonic motion in this region’. The caveat is important because the central Mediterranean is one of the world’s tectonic and seismic hotspots and has experienced massive volcanic eruptions and earthquakes routinely throughout the historic and prehistoric periods.9 Sudden elevations and subsidence of land, which might have had dramatic effects on relative sea-levels at specific locations, are entirely possible in such an area. Indeed, as we’ve seen, this is precisely what Anton Mifsud suggests did happen in south-western Malta 4200 years ago following a cataclysmic fault collapse along the submarine Pantalleria Rift.10 In addition to its well-documented Ice Age extensions to the north-east, north, east and south-east, we should therefore keep our minds open to Mifsud’s suggestion that antediluvian Malta may have possessed a substantial extension to the south-west during the Palaeolithic that may have remained above water until it subsided catastrophically into the sea at the end of the temple-building period.

  A final point of observation comes when we zoom out of the above map. With Malta and its land-bridge extending far to the south of the eastern tip of Sicily and with a similar southerly extension to Sicily’s western tip – almost like two horns reaching out to touch the North African coast (itself also greatly enlarged) - the eastern and western sides of the Mediterranean came very close 18,300 years ago to being divided into two separate seas. This enclosing and funnelling of great waters through narrow spaces could have enormously intensified the effects of the post-glacial floods when they hit the region. Indeed, as readers may recall from chapter 3, it has been suggested that at times the meltdown of the European ice-sheet into the Mediterranean was so severe that the Mediterranean ‘bath tub’ filled up more rapidly than the excess waters could drain out through the Straits of Gibraltar (which were reduced to a width of only 8 kilometres at the Last Glacial Maximum).11 It has been proposed that such meltwater surges ‘could have temporarily raised the Mediterranean by some 60 metres’.12

  However, this calculation is based on the bottleneck effect caused by the narrow Straits of Gibraltar alone. Now we know that there would have been a second bottleneck between the Siculo-Maltese landmass and the North African coast which would certainly have made things worse – although how much worse is difficult to calculate. In addition, the consolidation of Corsica and Sardinia into one large island enclosed much of the Tyrrhenian Sea – and this would have further exacerbated the local effects of the meltdown there.

  But hardly a trickle out of the vast reservoirs of meltwater hemmed in on the European ice-cap had yet reached the Mediteranean 18,300 years ago. Hardly a trickle over the previous 3000 years. Hardly a trickle – and spread out over so many generations that individuals would not have noticed the tiny ominous changes taking place.

  Minor erosion: 16,400 years ago

  Over the 1900 years between 18,300 years ago and 16,400 years ago the map opposite shows that there was only further minor erosion of the coastal margins and a narrowing of the Malta-Sicily land-bridge.

  Malta becomes an island: 14,600 years ago

  The map
opposite documents the isolation of Malta some time between 16,400 years ago and 14,600 years ago. The event was not a particularly dramatic one in terms of land-loss, though it would undoubtedly have held great significance for the Palaeolithic Maltese who we now know were present then. For the first time they were cut off from the mainland. Perhaps this Palaeolithic isolation, rather than the Neolithic invasion that occurred more than 7000 years later, was the real genesis of the distinctive character and achievements of Maltese civilization.

  The apocalypse: 13,500 years ago

  It is in the map on page 422 that we see the effects of ‘Meltwater Pulse 1A’ -the first of the three global superfloods into which most of the 10,000-year-long meltdown of the Ice Age was concentrated (see chapter 3). As Milne points out, Meltwater Pulse 1A raised global sea-level by 15–20 metres in just 500 years around 14,000 years ago. That sounds bad enough. However, it is not necessarily the case that this very large rise was evenly spread out over the 500-year period resolved by inundation science. In my view the uncertainties regarding post-glacial events make it possible that all or most of it could have been compressed into a single event of much shorter duration anywhere within that 500-year period.

  What the map at any rate reveals is that the newly isolated Malta of 14,600 years ago had lost 70 kilometres of its width by 13,500 years ago due to the complete and relatively rapid inundation of its former large extension to the east and south. No marine archaeology has ever been done on these submerged lowlands, which may conceal archaeological evidence of vital importance to the full understanding of Malta’s prehistory.