Lost underwater Indian city could change everything we know about civilization

Mythical underwater cities such as Atlantis have fascinated humanity for a long time, but real civilizations submerged in the ocean keep emerging from the depths from time to time. In 2001, a team of oceanographers from India's National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) were doing routine pollution checks in the trumpet-shaped Gulf of Cambay on the western coast of India, in Dwarka, Gujarat. Using side-scan sonar technology, they sent sound waves to the bottom of the ocean, and their instrument reported strange geometrical structures covering a vast portion of the ocean bed at a depth of about 120 feet.

Upon analyzing these structures, researchers concluded that they were remnants of a city that was nearly 9,500 to 12,000 years old, making it older even than the Harrapan civilization that existed 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. This indicated that this lost underwater city was once the cradle of the oldest civilization. The discovery raised questions about the previous understanding of human civilization, reported Indy100. In early 2002, BBC reported that the massive geometrical structures included several interesting artifacts including pottery, beads, sculptures, sections of walls and human bones and teeth. The artifacts were processed through radiocarbon dating and were found to be around 9,500 years old. In an announcement made on 19 May 2001, India’s then science and technology minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, said that these artifacts provided evidence of a civilization that was even older than the Bronze Age Indus Valley or Harappan civilization.

An Indian civil servant and the country’s leading expert on the ancient Indus script, Iravatham Mahadevan, told Frontline that the geometrical structures and artifacts discovered were most likely to be man-made rather than natural. Many archaeologists rejected the “9,500-year-old” antiquity claim, especially for a piece of wood discovered from the ocean floor. But Chairman of the Paleoclimate Group and founder of Carbon-14 testing facilities in India, Dr. D.P. Agrawal, confirmed that the piece was dated twice, at separate laboratories. He argued that 20,000 years ago the Arabian Sea was 100 meters lower than its current level, and the rising sea levels eventually drowned the forests, to which the piece of wood belonged.

On the other hand, author and filmmaker Graham Hancock said in an episode of his documentary, "Exploring the Lost City of Dwarka,” that this lost Indian city “could be linked to the Ice Age,” as per Daily Express. “There's a huge chronological problem in this discovery. It means that the whole model of the origins of civilization with which archaeologists have been working will have to be remade from scratch," he told BBC then.

Writing in Archaeology Online, Dr. S.Badrinaryan, who was chief geologist for NIOT’s scientific team at the time, said, “It was generally believed that a well-organized civilization could not have existed prior to 5500 [before the present day]. Many were reluctant to accept that the flood myths mentioned in many ancient religious writings held some grains of truth.” However, he added that it looked like the ancient civilization got submerged in the water and was therefore missing from history books.

Presently, the site of this discovery is known by the name “Gulf of Khambhat Cultural Complex,” and is regarded as a melting pot of valuable archaeological information. However, even to this day, details of how this ancient civilization disappeared under the ocean, remain unknown. "We have to find out what happened then ... where and how this civilization vanished," Joshi told BBC News.