24 Km Long Underwater Wall in India Is At Least 8000 Years Old.

Originally posted by KilgoreTrout

Originally posted by Harte

The other side of the plate - the western side of India, is undergoing it's own subduction as it presses into Asia, forming the Himalayas. Thats' the locale this thread is about.

So...in geographical time, the Indian sub-continent crashes into Asia and the impact forces the Himalayas up, and continues to do so. I understand that much. I think. I found this, I am sure, fascinating article...

The most spectacular example of a plate convergence event on Earth is the motion of the Indian plate towards Eurasia at speeds in excess of 18 cm yr−1 (ref. 1), and the subsequent collision. Continental buoyancy usually stalls subduction shortly after collision, as is seen in most sections of the Alpine–Himalayan chain. However, in the Indian section of this chain, plate velocities were merely reduced by a factor of about three when the Indian continental margin impinged on the Eurasian trench about 50 million years ago. Plate convergence, accompanied by Eurasian indentation, persisted throughout the Cenozoic era1, 2, 3, suggesting that the driving forces of convergence did not vanish on continental collision. Here we estimate the density of the Greater Indian continent, after its upper crust is scraped off at the Himalayan front, and find that the continental plate is readily subductable. Using numerical models, we show that subduction of such a dense continent reduces convergence by a factor similar to that observed. In addition, an imbalance between ridge push and slab pull can develop and cause trench advance and indentation. We conclude that the subduction of the dense Indian continental slab provides a significant driving force for the current India–Asia convergence and explains the documented evolution of plate velocities following continental collision.

www.earthbyte.org...

...unfortunately it is beyond my scope of understanding, as yet, we live and learn, one day it may make perfect sense, but until then, does this mean that India's coast could be bobbing up and down like Australia? Presumably, there is some general momentum upwards, responsive to impact, but is it also, at times, being re-aligned by the subduction process? Lifting back up to level it out or the such like.

I apologise for my gross ignorance, and/or silly questions.

Actually, to lift up the entire Indian subcontinent or lets say to keep it floating, we need 100million gallons of H2SO4 or sulphuric acid, Sulphuric acid would react with Thorium oxide deposits the indian coastline has underwater.

reply to post by Heliocentric


Hey there Heliocentric,

Great thread ... now whilst the fantacist side of me would like to believe that this ancient civilization built the wall to keep some King-Kong-like or Dinosaur-type creature from ravaging their land and women-folk ... I guess a more realistic and (for me at least) a more exciting probability ... could be that the wall was in fact built because they had actually worked out that sea-levels were rising ... and it was an attempt to delay the inevitable for as long as possible.

Similar to how we see the sea defense walls built along crumbling coastlines nowadays ... especially near me on the North East Coast of England (known as the 'Dinosaur Coast' for obvious reasons) which is eroding at an alarming rate.

I'm pretty sure that if they had the intelligence to construct such a feat of engineering back then ... then they would also have been aware of the ecological situation.

S&F for this. Woody

Fantastic thread and info I missed Marking this for later.

How come no one called me?

reply to post by woodwytch


Hi there,

i tend to agree with you , when i first saw the images in the OP i thought it odd that they run parallel to the shore line. so i immediately thought that they could be old sea defences.

snoopyuk

reply to post by Heliocentric


Good post.

Very very interesting indeed.

Originally posted by Heliocentric

Originally posted by WhoKnows100
I'm concerned about a growing trend here on ATS - every morsel of old ruins being described as "advanced" civilisations without evidence in some cases - this is a case in point. Right now we have a long wall.

Whilst completely fascinating, it is arousing suspicion about a possible agenda/ - it is putting out an idea that is not supported by any evidence in this case.

1. We all know that a civilisation/s existed before what many call the great flood in many of our religions
2. There have been many ruins underwater that have been discovered over the past decades

I do love reading these posts, but the "advanced civilisation" angle, when not supported by any known evidence, should be in a speculative like forum

I suppose it depends on how you define the word "advanced". It is a rather flexible word after all.

Were the ancient Greeks an advanced civilization? Yes they were. With the investigation of the Antikythera mechanism, we now also know they were far more advanced in mechanics than we even remotely suspected before, which makes them even more advanced.

Ar we (the Western, industrialized world, or whoever you want to read into it) an advanced civilization? Logistically, technologically yes. But in terms of resource managing we're surprisingly primitive, and inferior to many ancient civilizations. Socially and ethically, I would also say we're behind many of our ancestors (there are not that many equivalents in ancient cultures of people walking into McDonald's and shooting people down just because they can't find any meaning to their lives). So you see, there are many ways of using the word.

If we're talking about the underwater wall outside of Konkan coast, I would say that it was built by an advanced civilization. Advanced in the sense of social organization. A 24 km long wall is a building site, and you need to organize a building site. It takes a certain amount of manpower and a certain amount of work hours. Someone has to quarry the stone and someone has to pay for the labour. You need an economy to do it. I would personally exclude that it was done by hunter gatherers. You need at least an agrarian society, probably a city state society with some type of centralized government to pull it off IMO.

Or someone just wanted a wall in front of the ocean. I think the best word here is "intelligent". They were an intelligent civilization. First we need to definitively date the structure then we can examine the data. I would not go so far as calling this advanced though.

S+F

Thank you,

Really enjoyed your OP,
Some great contributions to learn't a lot one of my Favorite places and subjects

It becomes so profoundly clear day by day we have not a full grasp of Humanities true full unabridged history.

Edit to add:

Originally posted by zorgon
Fantastic thread and info I missed Marking this for later.

How come no one called me?

Lol I am sure we will hear more on this topic, from your kind self in the future on ATS

Kind Regards,

Elf

Originally posted by Harte

Originally posted by eagleeye2

Its interesting how sea level was way lower back then.

I remember reading somewhere, here on ATS, about a submerged road or bridge that looked similar. But this one seems to be west of the maintaind, ill try to find the thread back to compare the location. Anyway, i say thanks for posting this I really like those finds. tbh i'm pretty sure ancient India hides alot of secrets.

Sea level rises and falls, of course. But land also rises and sinks. Most likely, if this is a real relic, that is what happened. The land sank.

Harte

That is the question that we should also be interested in studying in addition to the culture itself that might be responsible for its construction. I do know there were few EQ's in that vicinity of the country (mainly Gujarat State). The sea levels definitely rose around the world and there are several evidences scattered across the globe. I'm sure the engineering wasn't up there with some of the other ancient civilizations around the world (including the ones flourished in India) but this is a good find with respect to learning a thing or two from History or our Past

Originally posted by Harte
Subduction zones are created when a chunk of continent breaks off and falls into the mantle below.
This usually happens where two plates are coming together.
It takes millions of years for the chunk to drift down throught the semi-plastic mantle. In the meantime, the continents move on. As they drift, they leave the subduction zone and part ways with the other plate that they were up against for so long.
But the chunk continues to fall, and the subduction zone stays where it is.

so your a geologist now:

When Japan recently had the big on, it happened because Japan sits on an constantly moving subduction zone (several but that in not relevant right now) As the plate moves underneath Japan Japan is pushed up. When the plates get stuck, pressure builds up and folds a piece of land downwards... as the pressure builds you get a sudden release and the land snaps back up and forward. Japan moved about 8 meters west and the plate beneath about 30 meters east in a very short time

A subduction zone is not created by a piece of falling continent

Sumatra's subduction zone



Japan's subduction zone

Originally posted by zorgon

Originally posted by Harte
Subduction zones are created when a chunk of continent breaks off and falls into the mantle below.
This usually happens where two plates are coming together.
It takes millions of years for the chunk to drift down throught the semi-plastic mantle. In the meantime, the continents move on. As they drift, they leave the subduction zone and part ways with the other plate that they were up against for so long.
But the chunk continues to fall, and the subduction zone stays where it is.

so your a geologist now:

No, I can read. Can you?

Originally posted by zorgon
A subduction zone is not created by a piece of falling continent

Perhaps you decided to ignore the part where I say ancient subduction zones.

Indeed, in the late 1970s and early 1980s Clement G. Chase uncovered the opposite pattern. When Chase, now at the University of Arizona, considered geographic scales of more than 1,500 kilometers, he found that the pull of gravity is strongest not over cold mantle but over isolated volcanic regions called hot spots. Perhaps even more surprising was what Chase noticed about the position of a long band of low gravity that passes from Hudson Bay in Canada northward over the North Pole, across Siberia and India, and down into Antarctica.

Relyingon estimates of the ancient configuration of tectonic plates, he showed that this band of low gravity marked the location of a series of subduction zones—that is, the zones where tectonic plates carrying fragments of the seafl oor plunge back into the mantle—from 125 million years ago. The ghosts of ancient
subduction zones seemed to be diminishing the pull of gravity. But if cold, dense chunks of seafl oor were still sinking through the mantle, it seemed that gravity would be high above these spots, not low, as Chase observed.

SNIP

Australia is bordered by a subduction zone, a deep trench where the tectonic plate to the east plunges into the mantle. The sinking plate (blue) pulls the surrounding mantle and the eastern edge of Australia down with it. Later, subduction ceases, and the continent begins to drift eastward. The entire eastern half of Australia sinks about 300 meters below sea level as the continent passes eastward over the sinking tectonic plate. About 20 million years later the plate’s downward pull diminishes as it descends into the deeper mantle. As a result,
the continent then pops up again.

Read all about it in a decade-old Scientific American special issue: Here

So, roll your eyes and remain ignorant, or open your eyes and learn something.

Harte

a reply to: Heliocentric

You really have to define "Advanced" its an objective definition, viewed from the subjective standpoint. If you got up in the morning and spent about twenty hours a week hunting and gathering. Comparatively speaking that might to many people be considered advanced compared to working twelve hours a day for peanuts. Then just the amount of rubbish we are creating, that's gets buried and takes up land. Ancient people were the same as us, but seemed to have a very green lifestyle, their only remaining rubbish is pottery shards. So we might not be as advanced as we think we are. We might live longer, but the quality might just be a tad down, on say a Viking exploring the known world.

This "8,000 year old wall," made of stones, is actually a babe in comparison to other known walls (one at Jericho dates to at least 4,000 years older than this one,) yet the ability of these occupants exhibits "advanced" qualities?

Harte

To be frank, from an academic standpoint, finding ruins of any sort off the coasts of India isn't exactly exciting news. We know the sea levels rose and encroached upon established Vedic civilization in ancient India, we find evidence of this pretty frequently. We're not discovering some previously unknown, "advanced" civilization. Nobody is rocking the foundations of accepted history, either. Ancient peoples built cities on the coast all the time. And sometimes sea levels rise, and when they do those populations slowly moved more and more inland as the coast moved.

For some reason laypeople are always shocked to find out coastal peoples get displaced from time to time and the structures they built wind up covered in sea life a few meters below the sea. There's a sunken city off the coast of Egypt, too. It's called Herakleion, or Port Royale Jamaica, which has a huge chunk that got swallowed by the ocean in the 1700s. Atlit-Yam lies sunken near Haifa, Israel (it's a neolithic village, btw). Or Pavlopetri, off the coast of Greece. These instances happen, and they actually happen pretty frequently. And a wall doesn't even seem abnormally advanced for the region either. It's a neat find, and it's anthropologically fascinating, but it's certainly not going to completely rewrite our understanding of history, nor does it in any way hint to some secretly advanced, lost civilization. None of this is unexpected. Really cool pictures, though.

If these guys were such great engineers, how come they made such a crappy wall?

a reply to: Blue Shift

Because when you're building something, theoretically, to keep the waves away from your home, you go for function not form.

originally posted by: obscurepanda
To be frank, from an academic standpoint, finding ruins of any sort off the coasts of India isn't exactly exciting news.

I have a hard time taking this in. I've seen fellow archaeologists jump up and down of joy from finding a single pottery shard. Clearly you don't have the passion for archaeology within you, academic standpoint or not.

originally posted by: obscurepanda
We know the sea levels rose and encroached upon established Vedic civilization in ancient India, we find evidence of this pretty frequently. We're not discovering some previously unknown, "advanced" civilization. Nobody is rocking the foundations of accepted history, either. Ancient peoples built cities on the coast all the time. And sometimes sea levels rise, and when they do those populations slowly moved more and more inland as the coast moved.

It seems to me you're not putting this into its proper archaeological context. If these walls are properly dated to 8000 BP or more, it places it right in the beginning of a crucial transition period of the Mesolithic age in India, when people went from a nomad hunter gatherer life style to a sedentary food production life style, with domesticated animals and crops. We do need to know more about this time period and this find is extremely precious in that sense. It's not a question of “rocking the foundations of accepted history” as you said, it's simply about learning as much as we can about our past.

As to the word 'advanced', that seems to upset more than one person in this forum, it has a rather wide array of meaning. I use it in the sense of a well-developed culture, more or less ahead of other cultures. As an example, a culture with a more developed stone tool technology than other contemporary cultures is therefore an advanced culture in that domain.

As to these walls, the way I see it they could have had a few functions. They could have been field boundaries, they could have had defensive functions, or they could have been part of building structures. The fact they all sit along an ancient beach line however makes me think that they were levees.
In any case, it tells us two important things. One is that they claimed this land as theirs, and it was precious to them. Nomad hunter gatherers would simply have moved on to other lands when water levels rose, these people decided to stay and protect their land. It tells us they're already sedentary people cultivating or mining this land. It also tells us that they're organized. A 24km long wall, 2.7m in height, and around 2.5m in width isn't just a simple dry wall thrown together by a family and a few cousins. This a structured, engineered attempt to save a vast area of land, and the easiest way to explain the coordination is that a grand counsel or a ruler took the decision to do so. Such an organization in Mesolithic India 8000 years ago is worthy of mention and scientific study as far as I'm concerned.
When you say that “sea levels rose and encroached upon established Vedic civilization in ancient India, we find evidence of this pretty frequently .”, are you insinuating that there are many known 8000 year old coastal habitations in India? I'm not saying that there aren't any, but none of the examples that you referred to (except Atlit Yam) are that old, or even on the Indian subcontinent.

originally posted by: obscurepanda
For some reason laypeople are always shocked to find out coastal peoples get displaced from time to time and the structures they built wind up covered in sea life a few meters below the sea. There's a sunken city off the coast of Egypt, too. It's called Herakleion, or Port Royale Jamaica, which has a huge chunk that got swallowed by the ocean in the 1700s. Atlit-Yam lies sunken near Haifa, Israel (it's a neolithic village, btw). Or Pavlopetri, off the coast of Greece.

I don't know what laypeople you refer to, but I've worked in archaeology professionally all my life, and I was rocked when I came across this. All in all, I feel that it is an exceptional find. Just my personal take on it.

Excellent information; well done OP

Much new evidence as of late has produced solidified
pre-archaic intelligence of technology we yet today
are only beginning to acknowledge...an advanced technology
we have not openly possesed.

We are entering the portal once specified where our technology
will lead us to the hidden knowledge left by prior man as a
message to our amnesiac history..a time of enlightenment and rebirth.

Be well all.
E.NOCH