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The Richat Structure is the result of natural geological processes. Other than having concentric circles, it doesn't match Plato's description of Atlantis, and

The Richat Structure is the result of natural geological processes. Other than having concentric circles, it doesn't match Plato's description of Atlantis, and there is no evidence that any large city was ever there.

FloorEgg 2y ago
"The Richat Structure is the result of natural geological processes." - this is irrelevant "Other than having concentric circles, it doesn't match Plato's description of Atlantis" - in what way? Be specific. "and there is no evidence that any large city was ever there." - lol, there has never been a thorough archeological survey, and the surveys that have been done have turned up evidence that points to noteworthy human activity. What about the tens of thousands of axe heads found all concentrated in one spot? Assuming that the city was destroyed in a significant flood, we need to assume the evidence will be hard to find, and therefore we have to look hard for it before we can say it's not there.
- saturn_vk 2y ago
  > this is irrelevant I think OP mentions this due to your mention of meteor impacts > What about the tens of thousands of axe heads found all concentrated in one spot? According to Wikipedia, Stone Age axes. It seems reasonable to believe that the site provided easy access for material
  - FloorEgg 2y ago
    > I think OP mentions this due to your mention of meteor impacts I thought I was pretty clear about the strikes being in North America, but ill emphasize that point again. The formation is natural and the theory is that human settled in it for its logistical and defensive advantages (back when the area around it was lush), and then got wiped out by floods caused by global climate shifts caused by massive meteorite strikes in North America and possibly the Atlantic ocean. > According to Wikipedia, Stone Age axes. It seems reasonable to believe that the site provided easy access for material Sure, but given how little investment has been made into archeological studies of the area, isn't it interesting that we found evidence of some significant human activity? It doesn't prove the theory, but its an observation that if anything lends to the theory. The scientific method is a process of making observations, developing a theory, forming falsifiable hypotheses, testing them carefully, and then drawing conclusions, and updating the theory as appropriate. I don't take issue with people being skeptical about all this, I just take issue with people confidently stating that it's been proven false. Their stance seems less scientific to me than the people who want to pursue experiments that validate or invalidate (or refine) the theory. I for one just would like to know the truth, whatever it might be. Edit: To the people who are downvoting this comment, I wish you would respond to it and explain why you think it deserves to be downvoted.
    - protocolture 2y ago
      >and then drawing conclusions, and updating the theory as appropriate. This bit never happens. What does occur is that the hypothesis just twists to ignore new data. Hancock has claimed that as he isn't a scientist he doesn't need to include the facts that disagree with his ideas. He sees himself as a champion of an idea, and cherry picks facts to craft the best possible case for that idea. IE: Hes a massive fraud and waste of time. > I just take issue with people confidently stating that it's been proven false. I take issue with the idea that this entire argument has to happen again, politely and fresh, for anyone who pops up on the internet having read some cherry picked nonsense about atlantis. Why is it our collective responsibility to educate you. Its not even the responsibility of scientists to prove or disprove your claims, if you are making positive claims you should be either presenting or locating evidence for those claims. Also to note, evidence doesnt mean "Hey this sounds a bit like some old folklore". >I for one just would like to know the truth, whatever it might be. All offense intended, but the people who go on about this stuff have already arrived at their desired truth, and they are simply defending their truth from the slings and arrows of reality. Get on a boat, go investigate the Richat structure, come back with evidence, otherwise the current evidence stands.
    - InsideOutSanta 2y ago
      >I just take issue with people confidently stating that it's been proven false There is no need to "prove Atlantis false" since there is no evidence for its existence. The only "evidence" is Plato, but if you read Plato, it's pretty clear that he is not talking about a real place, but making up Atlantis to make a point. So the onus is on the people who believe in Atlantis to provide compelling evidence that they are right, not on everybody else to disprove it. Imagine you live 3000 years in the future, and you read Harry Potter. You assume that it describes real events and that Hogwarts is real. Most people look at the book and conclude it is fiction, but you disagree. Is it a compelling argument for you to say, "Well, unless they prove that there is no structure like Hogwarts anywhere on earth, I take issue with people confidently stating that Harry Potter is fiction"? I don't think it is. I think the reasonable position is to state that Harry Potter is fictional confidently, and only reconsider that opinion when people provide compelling evidence that it is not.
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  > this is irrelevant Plato pretty clearly describes the city as man-made. Perhaps Atlantis was real, but he was mistaken about how it was built, so let's give you that. However, everything else still doesn't match. >in what way? Be specific That's a bit bossy. It's funny that you ask me to be specific, given that you're providing no evidence for your claim other than "it's round." Plato is pretty specific in how he describes Atlantis. He says there's a mountain 9 km away from the city. That does not match the geography of the structure. He says there are three concentric circles of land; it's unclear what would even count as a circle of land in the structure, but it doesn't look like three. Plato claims Atlantis was about 500km in diameter, but the city (i.e., the concentric rings) was only a few km, much smaller than the structure. He said there was a passage for ships into the city, half a km wide, which does not exist in the structure. He also says Atlantis controlled Libya, Egypt, Asia, and parts of Europe. And yet there are no traces of anything? Nowhere? Nothing at all? But Plato knew about it, and nobody else? >What about the tens of thousands of axe heads found all concentrated in one spot? There is nothing there. There are no clay pots, no walls, and no abundance of metals or technological artefacts that should be there if this were Atlantis. There are no walls, and nothing. It's just nothing.
  - FloorEgg 2y ago
    Apologies for coming off as bossy! Thank you for the respectful response. Keep in mind my goal here isn't to prove the theory - my stance is that the theory is falsifiable and hasn't yet been proven or disproven. My response below is based on the assumption that misalignments between the reality of the Richat structure and Plato's descriptions of the Atlantis capital aren't material enough to dismiss the theory with confidence. I also hope that you can agree with me that if we represent the theory fairly in order to disprove it we have to acknowledge that the details will have been muddied by 9000+ years and multiple translations, etc. between the theoretical city and Plato's descriptions. That said, I have responded to each of your points below: "He says there's a mountain 9 km away from the city. That does not match the geography of the structure." There is a 200-250 meter jump in elevation 9km north of the outermost ring of the richat structure. I agree it's not exactly a "mountain" but considering my point above, can we agree that this could be what Plato was referring to? "He says there are three concentric circles of land; it's unclear what would even count as a circle of land in the structure, but it doesn't look like three." - Odd, it does to me... Have you tried using google earth and checking the elevation at different points in the area? "Plato claims Atlantis was about 500km in diameter, but the city (i.e., the concentric rings) was only a few km, much smaller than the structure." - The innermost circle is about 9km in diameter. The full concentric ring structure is about 50km, and the distance between the Richat structure and the ocean is about 500km. This theory assumes that the Richat structure was connected to the ocean by a river, and the civilization would also have built up along that river (hence the 500km figure). It seems reasonable to mix up the 9km inner circle with the whole concentric ring structure. "He said there was a passage for ships into the city, half a km wide, which does not exist in the structure." - Relative to the size of the structure, half a KM wide is only 1% of the diameter. The theory is that the city was wiped out in a biblical flood, so there would have been significant erosion and earth movement which could make evidence of specifically where this channel was located harder to determine. There may be no evidence of it, or there may be subtle evidence of it, I don't know. Of all your points, I find this one the hardest to debate, but I also think its inconclusive. "There is nothing there. There are no clay pots, no walls, and no abundance of metals or technological artefacts that should be there if this were Atlantis. There are no walls, and nothing. It's just nothing." - As far as I know, no one in modern times has actually dug under the surface to check? I don't understand where your confidence in "there is nothing there" comes from. It's like a developer who has written a few unit tests stating "there are no bugs", just because you haven't encountered one. This confidence in "there is no evidence" I find unscientific, and its the attitude that bothers me the most in these discussions. Can't you just say "We haven't found any conclusive evidence yet, but we also haven't looked very hard"? Do you honestly disagree with this statement? I appreciate you engaging with me, and I hope you don't interpret my labelling your one comment unscientific as a criticism of your skepticism. Its good that you are skeptical, I only take issue with the conflation between "there is no evidence" and "we haven't found any evidence". I honestly don't know if the Richat structure was Atlantis, and my overall stance on it is neutral. If there was significant research done into it that turned up no evidence of a significant human population I would accept it. My desire isn't to prove the theory, its to be supportive of people being able to do more work to more conclusively prove or disprove the theory.
- masswerk 2y ago
  Please, see "No – Atlantis Has Not Been Discovered in North Africa" by Steven Novella (2018): https://theness.com/neurologicablog/no-atlantis-has-not-been-discovered-in-north-africa/ https://theness.com/neurologicablog/no-atlantis-has-not-been... BTW, there's still the problem of claiming that (a) Plato's account is a true and faithful transcript of an actual conversation, and that (b) all the various accounts reproduced in this rather complex game of telephone are faithful, as well. If, on the other hand, we conceded that neither the conversation nor the various narrator(s) were real, but rather a figure of speech and and a rhetorical vehicle, it's kind of difficult to claim at the same time unconditional veracity for the narrative conveyed by this. Maybe, the mode of introduction and framing already gives it away? (Moreover, there was no broader tradition before this, it just popped up with the dialogs. So it should be difficult to claim that Plato just stated the obvious in another context. How comes that this knowledge should have come down to Plato exclusively, by this complex line of famous men, via a complex chain of witnesses, without any of them having been attributed for anything alike before or after this?)
  - FloorEgg 2y ago
    Hey there are lots of reasons to be skeptical of the theory, but I haven't yet seen a reason to claim the theory is false (or the specific theory of Atlantis relating to a civilization occupying the Richat structure as unfalsifiable). If we set aside "Atlantis" and Plato for a moment, and consider that 13,000 years ago the area around the Richat structure was lush with fauna and flora, and that there's geological evidence that around that time there were multiple cataclysmic meteorite strikes in North America (and maybe the Atlantic ocean), rapid global temperature changes, and flooding, then maybe: - Given the very unique geography of the area it would have been a likely place for people to settle and flourish. There would have been both defensive and logistical advantages to the structure. - They could have developed further there than anywhere else in the continent at the time - They might have been wiped out by cataclysmic flooding that makes evidence of their presence significantly harder to detect than the civilizations we do have strong evidence for.
    - masswerk 2y ago
      While I do not doubt that Northern Africa has cradled human civilization for a long time, to me, connecting the Richat structure and Plato is stretching it quite a bit, though. Why not say Plato's Atlantis is actually Göbekli Tepe – it's in the wrong direction and also not an island, but there are concentric structures and is actual man made? If we are to neglect that Plato clearly states that his rhetorical vehicle is situated outside of Africa, but the Richat structure is in the then known parts of Africa, why should direction matter? While we may discuss the Richat structure, we should do so separately. There's no need to connect these things and no indication of why we should do so. Regarding features, given the total population of that time (at least, as far as our estimates go), controlling a circular structure of 25km diameter may have been a bit ambitious. (It may have been pretty disadvantageous in actuality, as you would have to control and defend rather extensive perimeters with what would only account to thousands (in the low single digits). And, if you failed to do so, the very same features would have hosted your enemies. — Compare this to what Plato thought to be a more realistic size for what must have been then a remarkably extensive population.)

FloorEgg 2y ago

"The Richat Structure is the result of natural geological processes." - this is irrelevant "Other than having concentric circles, it doesn't match Plato's description of Atlantis" - in what way? Be specific. "and there is no evidence that any large city was ever there." - lol, there has never been a thorough archeological survey, and the surveys that have been done have turned up evidence that points to noteworthy human activity. What about the tens of thousands of axe heads found all concentrated in one spot? Assuming that the city was destroyed in a significant flood, we need to assume the evidence will be hard to find, and therefore we have to look hard for it before we can say it's not there.

saturn_vk 2y ago
> this is irrelevant I think OP mentions this due to your mention of meteor impacts > What about the tens of thousands of axe heads found all concentrated in one spot? According to Wikipedia, Stone Age axes. It seems reasonable to believe that the site provided easy access for material
- FloorEgg 2y ago
  > I think OP mentions this due to your mention of meteor impacts I thought I was pretty clear about the strikes being in North America, but ill emphasize that point again. The formation is natural and the theory is that human settled in it for its logistical and defensive advantages (back when the area around it was lush), and then got wiped out by floods caused by global climate shifts caused by massive meteorite strikes in North America and possibly the Atlantic ocean. > According to Wikipedia, Stone Age axes. It seems reasonable to believe that the site provided easy access for material Sure, but given how little investment has been made into archeological studies of the area, isn't it interesting that we found evidence of some significant human activity? It doesn't prove the theory, but its an observation that if anything lends to the theory. The scientific method is a process of making observations, developing a theory, forming falsifiable hypotheses, testing them carefully, and then drawing conclusions, and updating the theory as appropriate. I don't take issue with people being skeptical about all this, I just take issue with people confidently stating that it's been proven false. Their stance seems less scientific to me than the people who want to pursue experiments that validate or invalidate (or refine) the theory. I for one just would like to know the truth, whatever it might be. Edit: To the people who are downvoting this comment, I wish you would respond to it and explain why you think it deserves to be downvoted.
  - protocolture 2y ago
    >and then drawing conclusions, and updating the theory as appropriate. This bit never happens. What does occur is that the hypothesis just twists to ignore new data. Hancock has claimed that as he isn't a scientist he doesn't need to include the facts that disagree with his ideas. He sees himself as a champion of an idea, and cherry picks facts to craft the best possible case for that idea. IE: Hes a massive fraud and waste of time. > I just take issue with people confidently stating that it's been proven false. I take issue with the idea that this entire argument has to happen again, politely and fresh, for anyone who pops up on the internet having read some cherry picked nonsense about atlantis. Why is it our collective responsibility to educate you. Its not even the responsibility of scientists to prove or disprove your claims, if you are making positive claims you should be either presenting or locating evidence for those claims. Also to note, evidence doesnt mean "Hey this sounds a bit like some old folklore". >I for one just would like to know the truth, whatever it might be. All offense intended, but the people who go on about this stuff have already arrived at their desired truth, and they are simply defending their truth from the slings and arrows of reality. Get on a boat, go investigate the Richat structure, come back with evidence, otherwise the current evidence stands.
  - InsideOutSanta 2y ago
    >I just take issue with people confidently stating that it's been proven false There is no need to "prove Atlantis false" since there is no evidence for its existence. The only "evidence" is Plato, but if you read Plato, it's pretty clear that he is not talking about a real place, but making up Atlantis to make a point. So the onus is on the people who believe in Atlantis to provide compelling evidence that they are right, not on everybody else to disprove it. Imagine you live 3000 years in the future, and you read Harry Potter. You assume that it describes real events and that Hogwarts is real. Most people look at the book and conclude it is fiction, but you disagree. Is it a compelling argument for you to say, "Well, unless they prove that there is no structure like Hogwarts anywhere on earth, I take issue with people confidently stating that Harry Potter is fiction"? I don't think it is. I think the reasonable position is to state that Harry Potter is fictional confidently, and only reconsider that opinion when people provide compelling evidence that it is not.
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
> this is irrelevant Plato pretty clearly describes the city as man-made. Perhaps Atlantis was real, but he was mistaken about how it was built, so let's give you that. However, everything else still doesn't match. >in what way? Be specific That's a bit bossy. It's funny that you ask me to be specific, given that you're providing no evidence for your claim other than "it's round." Plato is pretty specific in how he describes Atlantis. He says there's a mountain 9 km away from the city. That does not match the geography of the structure. He says there are three concentric circles of land; it's unclear what would even count as a circle of land in the structure, but it doesn't look like three. Plato claims Atlantis was about 500km in diameter, but the city (i.e., the concentric rings) was only a few km, much smaller than the structure. He said there was a passage for ships into the city, half a km wide, which does not exist in the structure. He also says Atlantis controlled Libya, Egypt, Asia, and parts of Europe. And yet there are no traces of anything? Nowhere? Nothing at all? But Plato knew about it, and nobody else? >What about the tens of thousands of axe heads found all concentrated in one spot? There is nothing there. There are no clay pots, no walls, and no abundance of metals or technological artefacts that should be there if this were Atlantis. There are no walls, and nothing. It's just nothing.
- FloorEgg 2y ago
  Apologies for coming off as bossy! Thank you for the respectful response. Keep in mind my goal here isn't to prove the theory - my stance is that the theory is falsifiable and hasn't yet been proven or disproven. My response below is based on the assumption that misalignments between the reality of the Richat structure and Plato's descriptions of the Atlantis capital aren't material enough to dismiss the theory with confidence. I also hope that you can agree with me that if we represent the theory fairly in order to disprove it we have to acknowledge that the details will have been muddied by 9000+ years and multiple translations, etc. between the theoretical city and Plato's descriptions. That said, I have responded to each of your points below: "He says there's a mountain 9 km away from the city. That does not match the geography of the structure." There is a 200-250 meter jump in elevation 9km north of the outermost ring of the richat structure. I agree it's not exactly a "mountain" but considering my point above, can we agree that this could be what Plato was referring to? "He says there are three concentric circles of land; it's unclear what would even count as a circle of land in the structure, but it doesn't look like three." - Odd, it does to me... Have you tried using google earth and checking the elevation at different points in the area? "Plato claims Atlantis was about 500km in diameter, but the city (i.e., the concentric rings) was only a few km, much smaller than the structure." - The innermost circle is about 9km in diameter. The full concentric ring structure is about 50km, and the distance between the Richat structure and the ocean is about 500km. This theory assumes that the Richat structure was connected to the ocean by a river, and the civilization would also have built up along that river (hence the 500km figure). It seems reasonable to mix up the 9km inner circle with the whole concentric ring structure. "He said there was a passage for ships into the city, half a km wide, which does not exist in the structure." - Relative to the size of the structure, half a KM wide is only 1% of the diameter. The theory is that the city was wiped out in a biblical flood, so there would have been significant erosion and earth movement which could make evidence of specifically where this channel was located harder to determine. There may be no evidence of it, or there may be subtle evidence of it, I don't know. Of all your points, I find this one the hardest to debate, but I also think its inconclusive. "There is nothing there. There are no clay pots, no walls, and no abundance of metals or technological artefacts that should be there if this were Atlantis. There are no walls, and nothing. It's just nothing." - As far as I know, no one in modern times has actually dug under the surface to check? I don't understand where your confidence in "there is nothing there" comes from. It's like a developer who has written a few unit tests stating "there are no bugs", just because you haven't encountered one. This confidence in "there is no evidence" I find unscientific, and its the attitude that bothers me the most in these discussions. Can't you just say "We haven't found any conclusive evidence yet, but we also haven't looked very hard"? Do you honestly disagree with this statement? I appreciate you engaging with me, and I hope you don't interpret my labelling your one comment unscientific as a criticism of your skepticism. Its good that you are skeptical, I only take issue with the conflation between "there is no evidence" and "we haven't found any evidence". I honestly don't know if the Richat structure was Atlantis, and my overall stance on it is neutral. If there was significant research done into it that turned up no evidence of a significant human population I would accept it. My desire isn't to prove the theory, its to be supportive of people being able to do more work to more conclusively prove or disprove the theory.
masswerk 2y ago
Please, see "No – Atlantis Has Not Been Discovered in North Africa" by Steven Novella (2018): https://theness.com/neurologicablog/no-atlantis-has-not-been-discovered-in-north-africa/ https://theness.com/neurologicablog/no-atlantis-has-not-been... BTW, there's still the problem of claiming that (a) Plato's account is a true and faithful transcript of an actual conversation, and that (b) all the various accounts reproduced in this rather complex game of telephone are faithful, as well. If, on the other hand, we conceded that neither the conversation nor the various narrator(s) were real, but rather a figure of speech and and a rhetorical vehicle, it's kind of difficult to claim at the same time unconditional veracity for the narrative conveyed by this. Maybe, the mode of introduction and framing already gives it away? (Moreover, there was no broader tradition before this, it just popped up with the dialogs. So it should be difficult to claim that Plato just stated the obvious in another context. How comes that this knowledge should have come down to Plato exclusively, by this complex line of famous men, via a complex chain of witnesses, without any of them having been attributed for anything alike before or after this?)
- FloorEgg 2y ago
  Hey there are lots of reasons to be skeptical of the theory, but I haven't yet seen a reason to claim the theory is false (or the specific theory of Atlantis relating to a civilization occupying the Richat structure as unfalsifiable). If we set aside "Atlantis" and Plato for a moment, and consider that 13,000 years ago the area around the Richat structure was lush with fauna and flora, and that there's geological evidence that around that time there were multiple cataclysmic meteorite strikes in North America (and maybe the Atlantic ocean), rapid global temperature changes, and flooding, then maybe: - Given the very unique geography of the area it would have been a likely place for people to settle and flourish. There would have been both defensive and logistical advantages to the structure. - They could have developed further there than anywhere else in the continent at the time - They might have been wiped out by cataclysmic flooding that makes evidence of their presence significantly harder to detect than the civilizations we do have strong evidence for.
  - masswerk 2y ago
    While I do not doubt that Northern Africa has cradled human civilization for a long time, to me, connecting the Richat structure and Plato is stretching it quite a bit, though. Why not say Plato's Atlantis is actually Göbekli Tepe – it's in the wrong direction and also not an island, but there are concentric structures and is actual man made? If we are to neglect that Plato clearly states that his rhetorical vehicle is situated outside of Africa, but the Richat structure is in the then known parts of Africa, why should direction matter? While we may discuss the Richat structure, we should do so separately. There's no need to connect these things and no indication of why we should do so. Regarding features, given the total population of that time (at least, as far as our estimates go), controlling a circular structure of 25km diameter may have been a bit ambitious. (It may have been pretty disadvantageous in actuality, as you would have to control and defend rather extensive perimeters with what would only account to thousands (in the low single digits). And, if you failed to do so, the very same features would have hosted your enemies. — Compare this to what Plato thought to be a more realistic size for what must have been then a remarkably extensive population.)