Speculations about lost civilizations like Atlantis are always interesting. Thanks, Geoff, for your article!
What's difficult, of course, is to distinguish fact from fantasy, or at least plausible ideas from implausible speculations. Scientists with careers in archaeology to protect, and trained in collection and evaluation of evidence, are naturally wary of sheer speculation. The rest of us are free to conjecture.
There seems to be some plausibility to the idea that folk tales can contain ancient cultural memories. It has long struck me that the giants in the Grimm brothers' fairy tales may derive from ancient memories of our Neanderthal cousins. Also, I have read a couple of books in this area that impressed me. One is "The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age" by Richard Rudgley. The other is "Noah's Flood" by William Ryan and Walter Pitman. For me, both books presented accounts that, while speculative, seemed plausible.
Specifically, it seems to me quite possible that one or more ancient, pre-ice-age civilizations, located in the Mediterranean basin, in the Black Sea basin, or where the Sahara Desert now is, were destroyed as sea levels rose as ice melted and those basins were flooded by overflow from the Atlantic Ocean, and as fertile land with temperate climate just south of the Mediterranean became desert.
I have more difficulty accepting ideas that ancient people had technologies more advanced than ours, perhaps acquired from space aliens, or that their knowledge of mathematics and science was greater than ours. For example, assertions that the Egyptian pyramid builders must have known about the number Pi because some ratios of pyramid dimensions are close to Pi have been easily debunked by people who have pointed out that the pyramid builders almost certainly used wheels as measuring and surveying devices, and that the ratio of the circumference of a wheel to its diameter is (by definition) Pi, whether the users of the wheel know that or not.
Nevertheless, I am always interested in hearing new ideas about human history, but it will take some doing to convince me that our modern civilization, for all its flaws and dangers, is somehow "fallen" from a more advanced. or more spiritually aware ancient civilization that we have collectively forgotten or whose memory has been actively suppressed.
