Forget about the lost city of Atlantis.
Scientists have stumbled upon a large, forgotten colony off the coast of Australia that was once home to hundreds of thousands of people.
A variety of artifacts and signs of human life were found on the northwest shelf of Sahul, which lies off the coast of the northern Kimberley region on the mainland connecting to New Guinea, according to a study in Quaternary Science Reviews.
A submerged piece of land is likely an ecosystem that flourished during the Late Pleistocene period, which began about 2.5 million years ago.
The land area now submerged is nearly 250,000 square miles — more than 1.6 times the size of the United Kingdom.
The Para – once considered a desert – is filled with habitable freshwater and saltwater lakes, rivers and streams, as well as a large inland sea, which can hold between 50,000 and 500,000 people.
It may have also served as a bridge for people to walk to Australia before it became the large island it is today.
Hundreds of thousands of people once lived on the northwestern Sahul shelf near Australia, according to a new study. StockByM It probably also served as a bridge for people to walk to Australia before it became the big island it is known as today. wallix
About half of the shelf drowned between 12,000 and 9,000 years ago during the first of two periods of rapid global sea-level rise.
“This may have caused the decline of the human population, registering as a peak in the intensity of occupation at the archaeological site,” the scientists wrote.
Those channeling to the islands on the shelf would be “the first maritime explorers from Wallacea, creating a familiar environment for their maritime economy to adapt to the vast landmass of Sahul.”
The land area now submerged is nearly 250,000 square miles — more than 1.6 times the size of the United Kingdom. Live Science
Scientists are still working to uncover the history behind the lost colonies and plan to continue to reconstruct the paleoecology of the landscape.
“Now submerged continental margins clearly played an important role in early human expansion around the world,” the study said.
“Improvements in seabed archeology in Australia will contribute to a growing worldwide picture of early human migrations and the impact of climate change on Late Pleistocene human populations.”
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
