By James J Brodell

Understanding of ancient life is highly distorted by the gigantic changes that have extensively modified the Earth.

There are underwater sites in the Black Sea where humans lived 6,000 years ago. The western United States repeatedly was scoured by ravaging glacier meltwater bursting from a forgotten massive lake. Who knows what humans lived along the Hudson River some 20 miles southeast of modern New York City when that land was not submerged as it is today by an estimated 90 meters (295 feet) of Atlantic Ocean. How about the many prospering cities dotted along the present coast of India that are now just soggy ruins. How developed were the settlements in Doggerland, that stretch of land that once connected France, Germany and Denmark with England, after it was exposed as ice Age glaciers temporarily sucked up the world’s water.

Certainly, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, meteor strikes, tectonic uplifts, subsidences and other catastrophes wrought unexpected topographical changes, but the big effect was the 130 m (426 feet) rise in the world’s oceans as the glaciers partly melted. The U.S. state of Florida, for example, was once three times as wide at the glacial maximum.

Plato’s recounting of the Egyptian tale of Atlantis was probably instigated by some real events that flooded land masses, even though the description of an advanced civilization and its major city was probably mythic.

So what else are archaeologists missing as they confidently call Sumer the birthplace of modern civilization. That swampy land at the southern tip of Iraq originally probably was well above the reaches of what today is the Persian Gulf.

In fact, there is the possibility that within the memory of modern humans there was no Persian Gulf. Credit for that idea goes to Kurt Lambeck, emeritus professor of geophysics at the Australian National University, Canberra. He is a Persian Gulf expert who has long believed that “the precursors to the Sumerians (as traditionally defined, and let me call them the ‘modern Sumerians’) had arrived in Sumeria by moving up the gulf floor, driven by a constantly encroaching sea... ”

That theory suggests that the creating of writings, modern agriculture and stable cities were not innovations of the Sumerians but of one or more civilizations that had gone before. At one time the floor of today’s Persian Gulf was a tropical paradise heavy with vegetation and watered by the ancient Tigris and Euphrates Rivers all the way to the current Straits of Hormuz. The gulf today has an average depth of 50 meters (about 164 feet) and a maximum depth of 90 meters (about 295 feet), according to the World Atlas.

Clearly, that land would have been well above sea level during the glacial maximum for many years.

But maybe there was a catastrophic end to this paradise. Researchers with the Holocene Impact Working Group discovered what may be a massive meteor crater. The so-called Burckle Crater is 29 kilometers (95,144 feet) wide and 3,800 meters (12,467) deep. Vestiges of the impact and the subsequent 1,000-foot (305-meter) tsunami in the Indian Ocean can be seen today on the coasts of Madagascar and Australia.

The impact is believed to have happened about 5,000 years ago, well within the time modern humans populated the globe. Certainly, a 1,000-foot tsunami would have caused havoc in the Indian coastal cities of the time. The giant wave might also have shot through the narrow gap at the mouth of today’s Persian Gulf, dealing a devastating shock to anyone who might have still been living. The archaeological records of the Sumer civilization show a wave of new arrivals into the communities there about that time.

So modern researchers must understand that the geography of the world today is vastly different than it once was. And those 19th-century theology students who pored over maps of the Middle East seeking the biblical Garden of Eden might have been better off taking a swim in the Persian Gulf.

Scientific evidence and historical accounts indicate that before sea levels rose after the Last Glacial Maximum, the area that is now the Gulf of Nicoya, in Guanacaste, was a largely exposed coastal plain covered with forests and possibly grasslands.

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James Brodell, A.M. Costa Rica editor emeritus, is a retired journalism professor and a New York Metro area newspaper editor. He has studied U.S. open records and open meeting laws extensively. He can be reached at JBrodell@jamesbrodell.com or Jay@amcostarica.com.

Check out Brodell literary offerings here at 5440north.com or JamesBrodell.com  -Copyright James J. Brodell 2025 -

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The views or opinions expressed in this article are the sole and exclusive responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the opinion of A.M. Costa Rica.

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