Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

by Graham Hancock

  The radiocarbon dates of the site, when matched with known Atlantic sea-levels at the same dates, put the megalithic blocks either above or below the tidal zone at the time of their formation. Because of the need for a tidal environment in which to form beachrock, and because sea-levels in the Atlantic for the past thirteen thousand years are the most solid elements of the Bimini problem, we are left with the likelihood that the dates are unreliable.

  [For example] two of the megalithic blocks dated by an early investigator, the first from the seaward side of the site and the second from a position 100 metres toward the beach, yielded dates which conflict with the theory of an in situ origin for them. The seaward block was dated by radiocarbon to c.4000 BC. In its present position it would have been about 23 feet above the tidal zone. Clearly it would have been impossible for it to have formed as beachrock by the known process. The second block, located 100 metres closer to the present beach and at the same depth, was dated by radiocarbon to c.1200 BC. In its present position at that date this block would have been about eight feet below the tidal zone.

  The literature on dating methods suggests that even ground-water contamination on land can render radiocarbon dates too young. How much greater an error might be introduced by the continuous addition of calcium with an ever-increasing proportion of the C-14 isotope as occurs in micritization of beachrock? For all these reasons the dates presently assigned to these blocks would appear to be unreliable.44

  Despite these and other reasoned attempts to keep interest alive in the Bimini Road as a possibly man-made and possibly very ancient site, the Nature and National Geographic reports had hit the scientific credibility of the subject like cruise missiles. Likewise, souring after their initial flirtation with Atlantis and the Cayce prophecy, the tabloid media soon lost interest and moved on.

  In such a way the Road to Atlantis became the road to nowhere.

  24 / The Metamorphoses of Antilia

  It’s just a fact of life in this case that no one and no organization is going to fund a prehistoric underwater archaeological survey of the Bahamas.

  John Gifford, University of Miami, July 2001

  Friends, come, come with us on this voyage! Here you’re creeping about in poverty; come and sail with us! For with God’s help we’re going to discover a land that they say has houses roofed with gold.

  Martin Alonso Pinzon, Captain of the Pinta, recruiting crews for Columbus, 1492

  Before I spent two weeks diving at Bimini in August 1999 this was my honest opinion: David Zink and Manson Valentine were wrong and the marine geologists from Florida were right; the Bimini Road was a natural formation. But after the diving I wasn’t quite so sure.

  I still felt the force of the scientific arguments, but now I’d also experienced the force of the great structure underwater and my reaction to it was not the same as the reaction of the geologists. Where they’d seen a ‘natural’ formation of tabular beachrock with uniform particle sizes, constant dip direction and no tool marks, artefacts or other signs of human intervention, I’d seen something that looked like a majestic work of art or sculpture – perhaps a colossal mosaic – something, at any rate, that felt coherent, organized, purposive, planned, idiosyncratic and designed. It is true that beachrock does fracture into jointed blocks, and that examples of this process can be seen in Bimini today and around many other Bahamian islands (in fact it forms so quickly that bottle tops and other modern items are frequently found cemented in the matrix). However nothing I have ever seen that is definitely and unassailably beachrock, either on Bimini or anywhere else, really looks like the Bimini Road.

  We dived with Trigg Adams, a salty old sea dog and former Eastern Airlines pilot who’d been one of the original discoverers of the Road back in the days of Manson Valentine. We used his yacht the Tryggr, which he brought over the Gulf Stream from Miami under motor power, for the duration of our trip. And we also took advantage of Trigg’s flying skills to go tearing around the skies in a chartered plane for a couple of hours so that we could see the Road and other mysteries of Bimini from the air.

  Despite haze and cloud that morning we had no difficulty in spotting the 800 metre long, 20 metre wide main axis of the reverse-J with its characteristic shoreward curve to the south-east. It was also easy to make out the point at which the axis bifurcated into two narrower parallel piers, each 5 metres wide, separated by a 10 metre wide strip of sand running all the way to the northern terminus of the structure. Through the crystal-clear water we could even see individual blocks – some of them gigantic, some much smaller, all seemingly arranged and oriented in a highly organized manner. The two shorter segments shoreward of the ‘J’ ran absolutely parallel to one another and again showed interesting combinations of small and large blocks – including seven particularly enormous megaliths lying side by side near the southern end of the inner segment.

  Trigg took the plane higher and circled several times over the enormous underwater mosaic. It reminded me, I realized, much less of a road or any kind of thoroughfare than it did of the great earth diagrams – the long straight lines and the animal, insect, bird and fish figures – of the Nazca plateau in southern Peru. Whether by accident or by design these works of geometry and stone sprawled out on an ancient Atlantic beach and, long since submerged beneath the sea, had something of the same sense of scale and grandeur when viewed from the air. I was therefore intrigued to discover, as we continued the flight over Bimini’s two main islands and lagoons, that in several densely wooded and uninhabited areas there were stony mounds with exposed surfaces the size of tennis courts on which nothing grew. The surface of one mound, only visible from the air, took the shape of a huge sea-horse. The surface of another was shaped like a giant fish complete with realistic fins and tail and, again, could only ever have been seen from the air. A third mound was geometrical, offering a rectangular surface to the sky.

  In all the discussions and academic papers I have read in which the Bimini Road is described as a natural beachrock formation I have never once seen any comment, one way or another, on these peculiar and distinctive mounds. Are they also to be dismissed as natural formations of no interest to the archaeologist? And if not – if they are man-made – then shouldn’t they be taken into account in any attempt to judge the provenance of the nearby ‘Road’?

  Diving the Bimini Road

  Shallow dives sometimes don’t feel like real dives. There’s not that sense of challenge, that frisson of danger, that you get when you’re down deep. Just 5 or 10 metres below the surface you would have to be very stupid and very persistent to risk the bends or a lung-expansion injury. So Bimini was a gentle and kindly place to be underwater. Even the occasional nurse shark sulking in the shelter of one of the great blocks just looked like he might be dangerous but wasn’t really. And at these depths a full tank of air went a very long way.

  The typical Bimini block is of dark, extremely hard stone, measures about 2 metres in length by a metre in width by half a metre high, weighs about a tonne, is pillow-shaped, slightly convex, and rounded off at the corners and edges. Many others are much smaller but there are dozens of true monsters of 5 tonnes or more, with a few selected individual blocks verging towards 15 tonnes.

  Outline drawing of the Bimini Road. Based on Zink (1978).

  Contrary to the National Geographic Society research report I found that certain blocks in the 5–15 tonne range – some exceptional examples of which measured as much as 5 metres across – were propped up on small vertical supports, apparently of a completely different stone type, resembling stubby pillars. The effect of these supports – sometimes as many as five at a time – was to lift the big blocks completely clear of the bedrock foundation so that you could see underneath them from one side to the other.

  I supposed that these were the ‘dolmens’ that Manson Valentine had spoken of in one of his reports – certainly there was nothing else on the Bimini Road that fitted this description. But despite a superficial resemblance – bi
g blocks propped on top of smaller blocks – these structures obviously weren’t dolmens. I wondered if the little vertical ‘pillars’ were just bits of loose rock that had been lying around on the sea-bed and that had been washed under the big blocks by tides or storm swells. But if so, why were they only under the biggest and heaviest blocks – the ones that would have been hardest for storms to shift around – and not under the smaller, lighter ones?

  I spent days drifting up and down the Road, trying to get my bearings on it and to figure out what it is. Around noon with the sun most directly overhead and the underwater visibility at its best, the long straight avenues of blocks seemed to stretch away for ever in either direction. Mostly they lay directly on top of the extensive plateau of exposed limestone bedrock but sometimes they would disappear completely under sand-drifts, only to reappear on the other side, keeping the same heading.

  Within the overall theme of parallelism other recurrent patterns were also evident – blocks arranged in circles, groups of three blocks of different shapes combined to form a triangle, seemingly deliberately fashioned cornerstones ‘finishing off’ a square or rectangular arrangement of dozens of blocks – and so on and so forth. There were also groupings of similar-sized blocks such as the seven very large megaliths near the southern end of the inshore pier laid side by side next to much smaller blocks pursuing the same axis. In this case the seven large blocks crossed the full width of the axis. The smaller blocks next to them continued along the same axis and to the same width but were arranged in two parallel rows separated by a cleared area.

  Natural and young, or man-made and old?

  So what is the Bimini Road? Is it a natural formation and not very old? Or, in spite of all the scientific objections, could it be a man-made megalithic structure – even a remnant of Atlantis – covered by rising sea-levels many thousands of years ago?

  To begin with the natural-versus-artificial debate, I do not think that the scientists have either proved that it is a natural formation or proved that it is definitely not a man-made formation – which would amount to the same thing.

  For example, the research report from the National Geographic Society quoted in chapter 23 claims that there is no evidence anywhere on the site of courses of blocks having been piled on top of one another and that not enough scattered blocks lie in the vicinity to have formed a now-destroyed second course. This is taken as evidence in favour of the natural origin of the Bimini Road; however, I see no good or logical reason why humans should not have chosen from the outset to construct a structure one course high. Moreover, no consideration is given to another option – which is that the immense structure did have more than one course in the past but that the blocks are no longer there because the vast majority of them have been removed. Although there may be no connection, elementary research amongst elderly islanders has uncovered several eye-witness reports of barges from Florida that used to quarry stone underwater off Paradise Point during the 1920s and take it back to Miami for use in construction projects. As the islanders tell it, the barges repeatedly visited the area to carry off stones over a period of several years.1

  Another example of the scientific criticism of the proposed artificiality of the Bimini Road that I find disappointing is the National Geographic Society’s claim that there are no regular or symmetrical supports beneath any of the blocks. This is flatly contradicted by my own experiences diving on the Road.

  We’ve even seen that the evidence for microscopic uniformity within the stones, which plays such a key part in the scientific argument for a natural origin of the site, has not gone uncontested. Zink and others have had quite different and equally bona fide results from their own drill cores, which indicate blocks adjacent to one another in the formation that were not formed side by side but in different chemical environments. The implication of this is that, while there is no doubt that the material used in the Bimini Road is beachrock (none of the pro-artificiality researchers have ever argued that it is anything else), it remains possible that beachrock deposits were cut, shaped, manipulated and arranged by human hands.

  In their 1982 paper for the Society for Historical Archaeology’s Conference on Underwater Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, Terry Mahlman and David Zink sum up the central thrust of the pro-artificiality defence:

  The most controversial aspect of this site is the history of the megalithic blocks. More directly put, are they beachrock blocks cut and shaped by man or were they formed naturally in situ? Their composition, most agree, is micritized shell hash, or beachrock, which through the continued process of solution and recrystallization of its cement by sea water rich in calcium carbonate has become extremely hard in comparison with modern beachrock. The authors of this paper theorize that, after their original formation in a beach environment, these blocks were removed, shaped and placed above water by human agency. Later as the sea-level continued to rise after the last glacial period, the blocks were again covered and micritization commenced. Newly formed beachrock is easily worked in comparison with the blocks of the site. Their extreme hardness caused the destruction of the diamond bit of our 80mm core barrel after only 12 cores had been taken.

  Micritization, once again the on-going replacement of the calcium carbonate cement binding the shell hash, also contributes to the problem of dating these blocks. This is because the new cement contains an increasingly higher proportion of Carbon 14, thus making the sample appear younger than it actually is.2

  This brings us to the question of the age of the structure. Have orthodox scientists at least proved their case, as McKusik and Shinn claim, that some of the stones used in the Bimini Road might be less than 3000 years old?

  Again, I don’t think so. The situation of the megaliths is ideally conducive to the production of falsely youthful radiocarbon dates – and these young dates are further contradicted by the depth of submergence of the sites. As McKusik and Shinn themselves admit:

  Testing of submerged features in Florida and one test on North Bimini island shows that the sea level has risen at a rate of about one inch every 40 years for the past 5000 years. This rate of submergence over 2200 to 3500 years [the range of radiocarbon dates for the stones published by McKusik and Shinn] would account for 5.58 to 7.22 feet of the 15 feet of sea observed over the beachrock.3

  Ignoring the fact that the depth of the Bimini Road is generally greater than 15 feet, McKusik and Shinn account for ‘the remaining 7 to 9 feet of sea’ by ‘the undermining of sand, allowing the beachrock to gradually settle’.4 This explanation, however, cannot work in the case of the seaward block cited earlier and carbon-dated to c.4000 BC – i.e., around 6000 years ago. At that date the block would have been well above the tidal zone and thus unable to form as beachrock at all. Mahlman and Zink’s suggestion that there could have been contamination leading to falsely youthful carbon-dates from the tests on the Bimini Road therefore seems a reasonable one.

  The mystery of Caho San Antonio: a possible underwater city off Cuba

  In my opinion a mistake shared by the polarized and mutually suspicious communities that have studied the Bimini Road – both those who favour an artificial origin for the site and those who believe it to be entirely natural – has been to confine the arguments solely to dry debate about drill cores, micritization, shell hash, bedding planes, C-14, and suchlike. Meanwhile other -mainly contextual – issues have been underplayed.

  One entirely new issue, which could well prove to be contextual to the Bimini problem if it checks out, was put before scientists on 14 May 2001, when Reuters News Agency published an astonishing report of the apparent discovery of a complete city submerged in more than 700 metres of water off the west coast of nearby Cuba.5 The team that had made the discovery were not psychic Atlanteans but a consortium of scientists and salvage experts who had secured an exclusive concession from the government of Cuba to conduct searches for shipwrecks in Cuban waters. Such a search has never before been permitted and, though expensive to mount, is
likely to prove very lucrative – since experts believe that billions of dollars’ worth of sunken Spanish treasure ships lie in the deeps off Cuba.6

  What one would not expect to find in water anywhere near as deep as 700 metres would be a sunken city – unless it had been submerged by some colossal tectonic event rather than by rising sea-levels. Mind you, the two are not necessarily contradictory and a colossal tectonic event occurring amidst an epoch of global sea-level rise seems to be exactly what is suggested in the Atlantis myth.

  Some soundbites from the Reuters report:

  ‘It’s a new frontier’, enthused Soviet-born Canadian ocean engineer Pauline Zelitsky, from British Columbia-based Advanced Digital Communications, poring over video images of hitherto unseen seafloor taken by underwater robots.

  ‘We are the first people ever to see the bottom of Cuban waters over 50 meters … It’s so exciting. We are discovering the influence of currents on global climate, volcanoes, the history of formation of Caribbean islands, numerous historic wrecks and even possibly a sunken city built in the pre-classic period and populated by an advanced civilization similar to the early Teotihuacan culture of Yucatan,’ she said.

  The report then tells us that, ADC, Zelitsky’s company, is ‘the heavyweight among four foreign exploration firms here’ and that, merely while testing its equipment in Havana Bay, it successfully located the wreck of the USS Maine which blew up and sank mysteriously in 1898:

  ADC has also been exploring a string of underwater volcanoes about 5000 feet deep off Cuba’s western tip, where millions of years ago a strip of land once joined the island to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.