Atlantis Beneath the Ice by Rand Flem-Ath

battered hearts. No horror of tomorrow could compete with the devastation they had left behind, buried under the falling snow that was now smothering their island home. But their solitude was not total as they believed, tossed and tormented in their ships, so tiny in the ocean’s vastness.
    Equally shocked as the Atlanteans were the survivors in the highlands that had escaped the tidal waves. Shivering in their mountain-top shelters were the remaining hunters and gatherers of the earth. Clinging to the comfort of ways that had stood them well for hundreds of thousands of years, little did they suspect that those ancient routines would be overturned in a peaceful revolution brought by strangers from the sea.
    The hunters and gatherers were strong, uncoddled people, secure in the proven ways of their ancestors who had carved a living from the bounties of nature wherever they found them. They had fought the ravages of nature before: the droughts, the storms, the famines, and the thousands of dangers of chance. But nothing in their memory had been like this. Nothing had prepared them for the day the earth’s crust shifted, carrying them forever away from their familiar existence. And so, shivering in their mountain retreats, they began to eke out a new life in the land, until they were joined by strangers from the sea. They shared nothing with these strangers but a vivid memory of the past that had been swept away by the earth’s anger and a mutual fear of the future.
    We can only imagine the conflict that raged within Atlantean and non-Atlantean alike at the joy of finding other living souls. Aliens to each other they truly were: but aliens bound together by a mutual need to conquer the circumstances that threatened to destroy them all.
    The first task was to secure the future with a stock of food. Maps of the globe would become invaluable in the future, but the survivors of the flood were facing a critical problem—the need to feed themselves. They had to reboot agriculture. The earliest experiments with agriculture began in the same century that Atlantis fell. The chances of such a coincidence are astronomical.
    Plato, who preserved the legend of Atlantis from ancient Egyptian sources, wrote about those first desperate days after the ocean broke across its boundaries.
    A THENIAN : Do you consider that there is any truth in the ancient tales?
    C LINIAS : What tales?
    A THENIAN : That the world of men has often been destroyed by floods, plagues, and many other things, in such a way that only a small portion of the human race survived.
    C LINIAS : Everyone would regard such accounts as perfectly credible.
    A THENIAN : Come now, let us picture to ourselves one of the many catastrophes—namely, that which occurred once upon a time through the Deluge.
    C LINIAS : And what are we to imagine about it?
    A THENIAN : That the men who then escaped destruction must have been mostly herdsmen of the hills, scanty embers of the human race preserved somewhere on the mountain-tops.
    C LINIAS : Evidently . . .
    A THENIAN : Shall we assume that the cities situated in the plains and near the sea were totally destroyed at the time?
    C LINIAS : Let us assume it . . .
    A THENIAN : Shall we, then, state that, at the time when the destruction took place, human affairs were in this position: there was fearful and widespread desolation over a vast tract of land; most of the animals were destroyed; and the few herds of oxen and flocks of goats that happened to survive afforded at the first but scanty sustenance to the herdsmen? 1
    Plato’s account represents the earliest rational explanation for the appearance of domesticated animals. His theory postulates the emergence of agriculture, beginning with the domestication of animals, as a reappearance of a skill learned long before in Atlantis. As we shall see, the dating of the earliest experiments with agriculture appears to match the century of Atlantis’s fall. In the highlands of Turkey two of the