At the bottom of the Persian Gulf, even before the waters of the Indian Ocean flooded there about eight thousand years ago, civilization flourished for at least a hundred thousand years. This powerful claim was made in the latest issue of Current Anthropology by Jeffrey Rose, a British archaeologist at the University of Birmingham
Rose bases her hypothesis on the latest archaeological finds made in recent years during excavations on the coast of the Persian Gulf. There, somehow very unexpectedly, all of a sudden, "literally overnight," as Rose put it, more than 60 ancient settlements, about 7500 years old, were found. There used to be well-built stone houses, an extensive network of trade routes, skillfully decorated pottery, there were pets, and even evidence of the existence of one of the oldest boats in the world was discovered there.
All this appeared as if from nowhere, no more ancient traces of a developing civilization were found in those places. Rose claims that all of these footprints rest at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. And that all these settlements along its banks were built by refugees who managed to escape from the flood. That it was there that there was a huge oasis where one could escape from the deadly dry and hot desert, a place washed by the waters of the Tigris Euphrates, Karun and Wadi Baton; surely there were also underwater sources there, not to mention the proximity of the Indian Ocean. In its best years, Rose says the oasis grew to the size of Britain.
The oasis existed for 75 thousand years, until the fate of the mythical Atlantis overtook it. But, according to Rose, the ancient people got to those places much earlier. As proof, he presents stone products made in East African traditions, but found during excavations in Yemen and Oman. In his opinion, this suggests that people settled in these places a hundred thousand years ago, and maybe even even earlier. In any case, he believes, this changes our understanding of the established models of modern human migration from Africa, which began about 50-70 thousand years ago.