Atlantis Beneath the Ice by Rand Flem-Ath Page B

(4,920 feet) above sea level.
    In the cruellest of ironies Nikolai Vavilov was targeted by Josef Stalin as a scapegoat for the horrendous famine that the dictator’s wild policies had inflicted on the Russian people and died of starvation in a prison cell in January 1943.
    We aren’t the first world culture to become ensnared in a dependency on sophisticated agricultural techniques. The Atlanteans also were accomplished farmers. They constructed elaborate canals to irrigate immense areas for cultivation. But when the end came, only a few possessed the skill to select the wild plants in the new lands that would sustain them. Those few would be enough.
    In the tropics, three areas (in South America, Thailand, and Ethiopia) offered climatic stability and security (see figure 8.2 ). All were critical sites in the history of tropical agriculture. In addition, all three:
Lay midway between the former and current path of the equator
Received the same amount of annual sunlight both before and after the earth crust displacement
Were located over 1,500 meters above sea level.
    Let’s consider two of these sites. Tropical agriculture suddenly bloomed in South America and Southeast Asia around the same time on exactly opposite sides of the globe. This puzzling phenomenon remains a deep archaeological mystery, but earth crust displacement provides the central missing piece of the puzzle. Rand offered this answer in an article published in the Anthropological Journal of Canada (see appendix). His interest lay in the significance of the uncanny locations of agriculture’s earliest sites. This paper was the first to note that potatoes and rice were domesticated in tropical sites that are antipodal. a
    Of course, the chances of being published in an academic journal if even the whisper of the word Atlantis rippled its pages was impossible. Rand made the decision to present only the scientific facts of the research and thereby eliminate the inevitable prejudice against the new ideas. This strategy worked. The article was accepted for publication as the lead article despite the fact that Rand wasn’t an anthropologist. The abstract read, “A climatic model, based on archaeological evidence is applied to the question of agricultural origins and the sequence of independent civilizations, on a global scale.” 5
    Figure 8.2. Seen from Antarctica, the path of the equator shifted with the last earth crust displacement. Lake Titicaca in the central Andes, Spirit Cave in the highlands of Thailand, and the highlands of Ethiopia were all midway between the current and former path of the equator. These favorable sites were climatically stable and supplied the survivors with raw crops that became potatoes, rice, and millet. The earliest agricultural sites date to 9600 BCE, the same time that Plato says Atlantis perished.
    LATIN AMERICA
    In Latin America, as we have seen elsewhere around the world, agriculture was established in about 9600 BCE. For instance, in the highlands of ancient Mexico, maize, one of the world’s most important cereals, was suddenly and abruptly domesticated at about that time. 6
    Let’ s look at the appearance of agriculture in other places in Latin America. What made them likely sites for this flowering?
    Incan mythology weaves a tale about the arrival of godlike men from the south who introduced a crop-growing civilization immediately after the Great Flood. 7 As we have seen, it’s probable that these people came from Atlantis, but lets’ examine in more detail how they brought the idea of raising crops rather than hunting for food and the impact of this change.
    In 2007, in an area of South America that lies between the current and former locations of the equator, archaeologists unearthed early agricultural remains that included squash, cotton, peanuts, and other “founder crops” such as beans, manioc, chili peppers, and potatoes. 8 Charred remnants of the plants were discovered in houses that date to 11,650 years