mch

178 OUR ANCESTORS CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
not in a volbanic eruption, which is
of event.
a completely different kind
Another much more Kkely theory postulates that the continents
of North and South America together was the fabled Atlantis.
Now, this total area is indeed as big as all of North Africa and
the Near East together and indeed there were elephants roaming
the plains in America 12,000 years ago. Also, both Americas are
rich in metal ores as Atlantis was, and there are many islands
along both coasts.
Finally, this new theory is partially based on recent discoveries
that Hindus and Phoenicians had agricultural colonies in eastern
Mexico where cotton and jute were cultivated 2,900 years ago,
and even older are the Sumerian and Phoenician copper and tin
mines in Peru and Bolivia, which may also have produced gold
and silver as long as 4,300 years ago. Inscriptions resembling the
Cretan linear writing have been found in cliffs of the Upper Amazon,
indicating that sailors from the Aegean passed that way on
regular trade routes.
However, even these finds don't seem quite old enough to fit
the mystery of Atlantis. They go back to only about 1,700 years
before Solon, which is
not the time of the disappearance of the
fabled island. Therefore it seems much more likely that, instead
of covering both Americas, Atlantis was only located in the central
part of the area, from Florida to the estuary of Amazon,
which would be southwest of Gibraltar, or the Pillars of Hercules.
The Tibetan bible, the Book of Dzyan, which goes back to the
very farthest past, records that in the year 9564 B.C. a very large
part of the earth sank into the ocean in what is now the Caribbean
and the Gulf of Mexico. History does not tell us how the
Tibetans of that time, on the other side of the world, learned
about this cataclysmic event, but it is possible that they got it
from the best source—refugees from Atlantis, who went all the
way to Tibet to make sinre they were on firm ground that
wouldn't disappear beneath the waves again. Main thing is,
that the date of the catastrophe was precisely and exactly
recorded and preserved, and the Tibetan record of Atlantis dovetails
nicely with Solon's account, so we have no reason to doubt
it. And as for the location of Atlantis, if one studies a map of the