Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

by Graham Hancock

  Wolf: I see what you’re going for.

  GH: Well, what I’m going for is the problem of the path as we come in front of Iseki Point, as we come in front of the main monument. There’s a sheer wall above the path 14 metres high and then the terracing begins. Now, if ever there was a place on this structure where large slabs of stone should have fallen it is here on the path, directly under where the terraces were created. And so what’s bothering me is, if you can accept that the two parallel megaliths fell from a high place and lodged in position in the north-west corner of the monument and stayed there permanently, why don’t we find the path in front of the monument littered with the equally big or bigger slabs of rock that must have been dislodged during the formation of the terraces?

  I sketched the north and south walls of the channel, with the path at the base, and the embankment of ‘orderly rubble’ gathered up against the south wall.

  GH: Piled up here against the south wall is a huge amount of large stones which continue, in fact, up to this level (indicates sketch). And I can very well accept that those stones fell off the top of the south side and found themselves in this position. As a matter of fact Professor Kimura doesn’t say that. Professor Kimura says that these stones were placed here by human beings.

  Wolf: Yes, yes, I know … I know.

  GH: And he may or may not be right on that matter, but I’m prepared to accept that the reasonable possibility, with the forces of gravity as I understand them, is that stones which had been up here along this also rather flat area on top of the south side, may have been washed off in water and tumbled down and piled up here (indicates embankment). And that’s what I see. I see stones that fell from up here on the south side. What I can’t understand, once we come to the huge main terrace with its steps on the north side of the channel, is why under this nice vertical cliff I don’t find any stones at all lying on this 3 metre wide path. And I don’t accept that they all rolled from the [north] side into this embankment [on the south side] conveniently leaving the path immediately beside it free. To me that’s against logic and nature.

  Wolf: We’re just guessing. So imagine that this flat area around the terraces was not removed all in one go. What I mean is little small tiny pebbles, cobbles, whatever, over a long time have fallen down and they have somehow been transported and rode supported by gravity here into this part [indicates embankment area on south side of channel), being sheltered from further transport, first of all, by these large boulders.

  GH: Again I find it difficult to grasp you here. If I stand beside these steps [indicates the two big steps in the main terrace), they tower above my head. This means a layer of rock at least 21/2 metres thick, all the way around here [indicates patio area) has been removed completely to leave behind just the steps.

  Wolf: Yes.

  GH: I mean this patio is, what, 30 or 35 metres in length?

  Wolf: Round about.

  GH: And we have a layer of rock 21/2 metres thick; that’s a hell of a lot of rock.

  Wolf: We’re not talking about two or three years.

  GH: We’re talking of a long period of time. So you’re explaining this by saying that small pieces were broken off little by little and taken away by the tides?

  Wolf: Yes, right … in general.

  GH: Yeah. I find the more elegant explanation is it was tidied up by human beings —

  Wolf: Fine.

  GH: – after they finished their job.

  Wolf: But where should they put it, then? Somewhere here around?

  GH: Wherever they wished.

  Wolf: Come on.

  GH: If human beings do take material away from sites, they take it right away … get it away … this is known human activity … very normal … they don’t leave the rubble lying around on the site, this is normal.

  Wolf: This is clearly what Kimura says.

  GH: It’s Kimura’s argument, and I find it persuasive.

  The Palace

  Our fifth dive was at a site several kilometres to the west of Iseki Point that local divers call the ‘Palace’ and that the Indian archaeologist Sundaresh refers to in his December 2000 report as an ‘underwater cave area’. Sundaresh does not comment on the structural characteristics of the Palace itself, which is indeed surrounded by natural caves, but notes that inside it:

  a boulder about I m diameter engraved with carvings was observed. About 100 m towards the eastern side of the caves more rock engravings were noticed on the bedrock … The rock engravings inside the cave and on the bedrock were probably carved out by means of a tool of some sort.17

  The entry to the ‘Palace’ can be made through a number of holes broken in its roof at about 9 metres water depth or through what I suggest may have been its original entrance at a depth of 14 metres. Here the diver has to squeeze through gaps in a jumble of fallen boulders to enter a small, gloomy, gravel-floored chamber oriented roughly north-south with space for four or five adults standing upright. Its south wall is blocked. In its north wall there is a ‘doorway’, about a metre high, through which visitors would have had to pass crouched, or crawling, when the Palace was above sea-level. The doorway has a rough, damaged appearance with no obviously man-made characteristics, but beyond it is a spacious and beautiful chamber that glows with an otherworldly blue light when the sun projects down through the column of water and illuminates it through the holes in its roof.

  Like the cramped antechamber this atmospheric main room is oriented north-south. It measures approximately 10 metres in length and 5 metres in width. Its height from floor to ceiling is also about 5 metres. While there has been a substantial collapse of its eastern side, its western side is undamaged and presents as a smooth vertical wall of very large megaliths supporting further megaliths that form the roof.

  Roughly at its mid-point the chamber begins to narrow towards the north until the east and west walls come together in a corridor less than 2 metres wide that culminates in another ‘doorway’ – this time a very tall and narrow one. Across the top of its uprights, whether by accident or by design, one of the roof megaliths lies like a lintel.

  After having passed through this second and more impressive doorway at the northern end of the main chamber, the diver comes into a third and final room of the Palace. It is completely unlike the other two, which were ‘built’ (either by nature or by man) out of large blocks piled on top of one another. This third chamber, on the other hand, was hewn or hollowed – it is premature to decide by what – out of a mass of ancient coralline limestone that is exposed in this part of Yonaguni. There are no ‘blocks’ in it at all. It extends only 3 metres in length and a little over a metre in width and culminates at its north end in yet another ‘doorway’ – this time I insist distinctly ‘squared-off’ – which leads into a closed alcove that in turn funnels vertically upwards and opens out through a hole in the roof.

  Comparison of submerged megaliths at Yonugani (left) and on land at Mt Nabeyama, Gifu Prefecture, Japan (right, see page 563).

  All three of the ‘doorways’ in the Palace, the first at the south side of the main room, the second at the north side, and the third leading into the alcove beyond, are positioned in a straight line creating what is, in effect, an aligned passage/chamber system. And since the rear (northernmost) chamber and alcove door are hewn out of a different kind of rock than other materials in the structure, we must assume that some agency brought these two elements (the rock-hewn element and the megalithic element) together – and in alignment -at some point. But was it nature that did this? Or could it have been the Jomon in a hitherto unrecognized phase of their prehistory when they moved gigantic rocks and boulders with apparent ease and set in train the cult of stone in Japan that still permeates the nation’s spiritual life today?

  Wolf would have nothing of it. In his no-nonsense view the Palace is, of course, a wholly natural phenomenon and the alignment of the three doorways is entirely coincidental. Very probably he is right. Yet I retain a sense of deep curiosity abou
t this structure and intend, if I can, to do more work in it at some time in the future. On one previous dive near by I came across parts of what looked like a second megalithic passage/chamber system that I would also like to revisit.

  Whether they are natural or man-made it is likely, by virtue of their depth of submergence, that both systems are thousands of years older than Japan’s mysterious Kofun era, which is thought to have begun around AD 300. Yet both systems powerfully and eerily remind me of the architecture of the great megalithic passageways and burial chambers of the Kofun age – particularly structures such as Ishibutai near Asuka, where the megaliths used are of truly titanic dimensions and weights (see chapter 25). I remind the reader that archaeologists have as yet uncovered no evolutionary background to the advanced megalithic skills that suddenly manifest in Japan in the Kofun era, and raise the possibility for consideration that the knowledge of how to build with megaliths on such a scale may long previously have evolved in areas around Japan’s coasts that are now underwater.

  I realize that this begs more questions than it answers. Still, go figure where the Kofun tradition came from. Some scholars say Korea, but the evidence isn’t good and others scholars disagree. Nobody pays much attention to Japan’s own earlier epoch of stone architecture – witnessed by the stone circles and ‘mountain-landscaping’ of the Jomon age – because up till today a prejudice persists that the Jomon were simple hunter-gatherers and nothing more.

  I do not deny that they were simple hunter-gatherers but the deeper I enter into the labyrinth of Japanese prehistory the more certain I feel that they were also something much more …

  The Face and the Stone Stage

  On our sixth and final dive at Yonaguni in March 2001 I took Wolf to a place called Tatigami Iwa 8 kilometres east of the Palace and about 21/2 kilometres east of the main cluster of monuments around Iseki Point.

  Tatigami Iwa means ‘Standing Kami Stone’ and refers to a rock pinnacle 40 metres high, weirdly gnarled and eroded, left behind thousands of years ago when the rest of a former cliff of which it was once part was washed away. Understandably revered as a deity in local tradition it now stands lashed by the Pacific Ocean 100 metres from shore like a ghost sentry for this haunted island. But it is what is underneath it, in the underwater landscape near by, that really interests me and that led me to choose it as the site for our sixth dive. For here, at a depth of around 18 metres, a huge carving of a human face is to be seen -with two eyes, a nose and a mouth hacked, either by natural forces or by human agency, into the corner of an outcrop of dark rock that juts up prominently from a distinctive ‘blocky’ plain.

  I showed Wolf how the ‘face formation’ manifests a combination of peculiarities. For it is not just a face – or something that looks like one (which nature provides numerous accidental examples of) – but a grim and scary face, which seems designed to overawe, carved with care and attention to the lines and flow of the base rock. Moreover, far from appearing haphazardly with no context, as one would expect with an accidentally formed natural ‘face’, it seems framed within a deliberate ceremonial setting. Thus, a horizontal platform just under 2 metres high and 5 metres wide – called by local divers the ‘Stone Stage’ opens out from the side of the face at the level of the mouth and runs along to the back of the head where a narrow passageway penetrates the whole structure from west to east.

  The ‘Face’, therefore, has to be viewed together with its ‘Stone Stage’ as a single rock-hewn edifice and I note, as does Sundaresh in his report cited earlier, that the flat area out of which the Stage and Face rise is easily large enough to have accommodated thousands of people before sea-levels rose to cover it. Also noteworthy, however, is the fact that Face/Stage edifice is not alone in this big area but is part of a neighbourhood of anomalous rock-hewn and often rectilinear structures clustered around the base of Tatigami Iwa.

  Natural? Or man-made? Or a bit of both? My vote is weird and wonderful nature, enhanced by man, thousands of years ago. But what did Wolf think?

  Wolf: First of all we have to mention that this is a totally different sort of sandstone from what we find at Iseki Point. It’s very thick – a series of very thick and massive banks which consist, contrary to the Iseki Point material, of quite soft sandstone which is very, very sensitive to erosion and erodes generally in more rounded forms than the Iseki Point sandstone or mudstone. Secondly, erosion of rock, all around the world, often produces forms that look accidentally like human faces … So I cannot say very much to the Face. To become clear of that fact, again, you would have to remove all the organisms around because that would give you a free view on the rock and the way it was carved.

  GH: Did you notice, looking into the eyes, the eye sockets of the Face, that both of them had a central prominence?

  Wolf: No. No, sorry … I haven’t looked.

  GH: You didn’t see.

  Wolf: I saw the Face and I thought, ‘Yeah, hmm, what to do with this?’

  GH: Yes.

  Wolf: But you see, I’m used … I’m not used to go straight to the things but to —

  GH: Yeah, to stand back, yeah, I noticed that.

  Wolf: – take a distance and look, hmm, how can this be formed? But it was my first view on that. I don’t have an answer on that at the moment.

  GH: Something else about it too, for me, is the sense that I keep finding these problems – if we look back over our drawings over the last couple of days – well here from our first dive we have, within a short area, parallel curved walls, a ramp, a tunnel, two megaliths. We come round in front of the monument, a clear pathway, and as far as I’m concerned still with the mystery of the missing material – if indeed, as we also agreed earlier, all of this mass of material that we see in the embankment came from the south side – because as you said, it doesn’t look like it belonged on the north side —

  Wolf: On this view, yes.

  GH: - it’s the proximity of all these peculiar things, each of which requires a rather detailed geological explanation and, in some cases, requires hypotheticals such as a cliff which once hung over that area and dropped these two megaliths down there. I find – and this is how I felt always almost from the third or fourth visit that I made to Yonaguni – is that this, this fantastic combination of peculiarities in a very compact area -because as you saw today the peculiarities continue as we go further along the coast to the Face and the Stone Stage –

  Wolf: That’s right, I was deeply impressed when I saw that.

  GH: - the thing that’s striking is that all of these peculiarities occur along the south and east coasts of Yonaguni, and none of them are found along the north coast – at least, if they’ve been found, divers aren’t talking about them, and divers usually do talk about places like this. So, you know, we find them along the south side but not along the north side. We find them compacted into a relatively tight area, and each one requires a rather different, and to my mind, rather complicated geological explanation, you know, disposing of a mass of rock that is 21/2 metres thick and 35 metres in length [and 15 metres wide] is simply banishing it. And attributing that to wave action, to me that’s just going a little bit too far —

  Wolf: I see what you’re getting at.

  GH: – on the strength and the variability of geological forces in a small area, and it catches in my throat. I find that I can’t, I just can’t buy it.

  Wolf: OK. I would ask you to have a look into new or even older geological and geographical literature. You’ll find all these things precisely described in newly published literature and —

  GH: Nowhere in the world – never mind the literature, books are books -but nowhere in the world, not a single place in the world will I find all these things together … because one thing’s for sure, look at the publicity that this structure has attracted.

  Wolf: Because you raised it.

  GH: Actually, not me … it was —

  Wolf: Together with others.

  GH: – many other people … many ot
her people have raised it. Worldwide it has attracted an enormous amount of publicity. I think it’s a fair bet that if something comparable had been found, anywhere else on this planet of ours with its 70 per cent cover by water, if something similar had been found, we would have heard about it by now. And it’s the uniqueness of this structure and the series of structures along the south and east coasts of Yonaguni that really leads me towards the involvement of man. Now I believe that the people who were involved in this were a megalithic culture; they understood rock, and they worked just as currents and erosive forces do, that is, they worked with the natural strike of the rock; where there is a fault, it’s a good place, let’s take advantage of it. Any great sculptor still looks for the natural forms in rock and, indeed, this is an art form in Japan up to this day. So, you know, these are all the factors that lead me to the conclusion that I’m looking at rock that has been overworked by people.

  Wolf: And I would say, on the contrary, that it is a natural miracle … And just to finish that, my definite point of view is that all that we have seen in the last days could have been made by nature alone without the help of man. That does not mean that people did not have any influence on it. I didn’t say that … I would never say that. But I say it can have been shaped by nature alone.