If Hancock's Ancient Sea Kings Existed (I)

Graham Hancock is not very keen on making firm inferences from this "looks like" and "just asking questions" approach to prehistory. That however just leaves his ideas in the realms of general speculation. It might be instructive to take his premises (which it has to be said do tend to shift depending on the occasion) and see where thet lead us. Let us just do a bit of modelling based on accepting for the sake of the argument the following premises and without trying to delve so deeply into the specialist literature:  

1) In the  deep past in the period before the Holocene and Anthropocene, there are a lost advanced civilization - as proposed by various writers of the genre including Hapgood and Hancock.

2) They were advanced enough to be seafarers (Hapgood and Hancock) 

3) They were able to conduct astronomical observation [assumption repetitively over many years from fixed points "observatories"] over a length of time to untangle complex astronomical sequences and progressions and apply that knowledge to the alignment of monuments (Hancock) and navigate (Hapgood)

4) Their original monuments, like any settlements they used, for the most part have gone or cannot be recognised for what they are (Hancock) - we see their traces in later monuments built by descendants/ survivors using the principles already established (Hancock)

5) the civilization flourished for long enough to allow the development of the features discussed by writers in this genre (for example pyramid construction, development of a strong symbolic language). 

6) The civilisation came to an abrupt end due to some cataclysmic events that are evidenced by the mythologies about the end of such a Golden Age (Atlantis). Floods/sinking beneath waves, or deteriorating climate are invoked.

7. These events are linked with the onset of the Younger Dryas c 12,900 BP. 

Let us leave aside for the moment the issue of what the event/events/phenomenon that brought on this change was.

Hancock does not want to share where he thinks this civilization developed (let's call them the Ancient Sea Kings (ASK) after Hapgood, who Hancock was clearly following in his "Fingerprints of the Gods").

It is clear however that if their period of glory, if not very existence is postulated as due to the event or events that brought on the beginning of the Younger Dryas, these Ancient Sea Kings were flourishing in the Bølling–Allerød Interstadial (Late Glacial Interstadial -LGI), which occurred from 14,690 to c. 12,890 years BP -during the final stages of the Last Glacial Period. The Bølling–Allerød Interstadial was defined by abrupt warming in the Northern Hemisphere, and a corresponding cooling in the Southern Hemisphere. Here's a map of the warming (Obase, Takashi; Abe-Ouchi, Ayako; Saito, Fuyuki (25 November 2021). "Abrupt climate changes in the last two deglaciations simulated with different Northern ice sheet discharge and insolation". Scientific Reports. 11. doi:10.1038/s41598-021-01651-2):

It's probably a fair inference that the ASK civilization would have developed in one of the areas made more amenable to  forming settled societies by a warming of the climate in this interstadial. So we are probably talking about  most of the areas with 'warm' colours in the above map as a potential homeland for the hypothetical civilization.

On the other hand, it is not likely that any area that was tundra or taiga would have the resources to support the growth of communities into a civilization of the nature postulated. Finding maps of these biomes in the Bølling–Allerød Interstadial is rather onerous. There is a nice one by Polish authors for Europe (ignore the spelling mistake in one of the figures)  that shows the southern boundary of the tundra passing through northern France and Archangielsk far south of where it is now. If however we take the modern extent of the tundra and taiga biomes. While that is not as satisfactory as having a global Bølling–Allerød Interstadial vegetation map, it shows where we should almost certainly NOT be looking for this "lost civilisation" of that period.

Since the Bølling–Allerød Interstadial was a period of major ice sheet collapse it was also a period of corresponding sea level rise known as Meltwater pulse 1A This lasted between 13,500 and 14,700 calendar years ago, and in it, the global sea level rose between 16 metres and 25 metres (depending on isostartic rise) in about 400–500 years. Although this is only roughly 40–60 mm/yr, this would have profound effects on settled coastal communities.

Here we have a clue to the chronology of the ASK. They would be less likely to form cities with harbours and shipyards capable of building ocean-going vessels (like those described in the Atlantis account) in an area that would be easily flooded. This is a very strong pointer to the conclusion that the development of this civilisation (in the form postulated by Hapgood and Hancock) can really have only taken place after the stabilisation of a coastline about 13,500BP.

As postulated, it came to an end, scattering survivors, 12,900 BP. That means it lasted about 600 years at most.

But where was it? Hancock has suggested that it could lie under water in a submerged area that the archaeologists have not examined yet or "hidden under the Amazon rainforest" or lost somewhere in the Sahara desert sands.

 The sea level rise issue may be dealt with there was a period of rapid sea level rise after the Younger Dryas (Meltwater Pulses 1B and 1C) beginning about 11000BP and lasting to 7000yBP, when it stabilised over most of the world. In the Younger Dryas - as befits a cooler period, it seems that there was not any appreciable sea-level rise. So the shoreline would have been at a depth that is now 60m below sea level (see the plot by Robert A. Rohde here)

But we can narrow it down by attempting to identify where coastal regions of the continent  were negatively affected by the climate change at the onset of the Younger Dryas to actually bring a civilization down, because the effects were not the same across the globe 

It is therefore worth looking at a climate model for the Younger Dryas (Partin JW, Quinn TM, Shen CC, Okumura Y, Cardenas MB, Siringan FP, Banner JL, Lin K, Hu HM, Taylor FW. Gradual onset and recovery of the Younger Dryas abrupt climate event in the tropics. Nature Communications 2015 Sep 2;6:8061. doi: 10.1038/ncomms9061.  This shows that significant cooling in the Northern Hemisphere took place during the Younger Dryas, but there was also warming in the Southern Hemisphere. Precipitation had substantially decreased (brown) or increased (green) in many areas across the globe.

The above map shows pretty clearly that if the ASK civilization was in either the Amazonian region, the SW Sahara, India, SE Asia and anywhere south of that, climate change (alone) may not have been strong enough to end the civilization as such. This suggests that the Hapgoodians and Hancockians should rather be seeking the traces of their lost thalassocratic civilization in coastal regions of the following areas... (to be continued).