The Lost World of Aquaterra: The Ice Age Landmass That Rewrites Human History
Geographer Jerome Dobson has named a vast Ice Age landmass that once stretched along the world's coastal shelves—an area comparable to South America. During the last Ice Age, this region, called Aquaterra, supported grasslands, woodlands, and tropical forests teeming with mammoths, aurochs, and other megafauna. Humans may have settled there after migrating out of Africa, developing seafaring, permanent settlements, and social hierarchies millennia before Mesopotamia and Egypt. But rising seas submerged it entirely by 6,000 years ago, taking much of our past with it.
It may have been here, in fact—millennia before the rise of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt—that many of the developments we associate with “civilization” first occurred.