Atlantis: The Evidence of Science

Atlantis, the lost island civilization, the sunken Shangri-La the legend has beguiled us since Plato mentioned it in the fourth century BC. But did it actually exist?Now, cutting-edge scientific evidence from a wide array of disparate fields combine to cast sensational new light on the mystery.Historian Emmet Sweeney persuasively intertwines history and literary references with hard science from archaeology and anthropology to genetics and geology to prove the existence of an ancient trans-Atlantic link between the Old World and the New. Sweeney examines: The geological certainty of a sunken island in the Azores; The Human Genome Project's startling revelation that 3% of Native American DNA is characteristic of people of south-west Europe and the Atlas Mountains whose inhabitants, as late as Roman times, called themselves 'Atlanteans'; Archaeological and cultural proof of a relationship between the Stone Age and Early Bronze Age civilizations of North America and South-West Europe; The occurrence of cocaine and tobacco, two American narcotics, in many Egyptian mummies.Piece by piece, Sweeney constructs a compelling case for not just the probability, but the necessity, of an Atlantic stepping-stone, the missing link that transmitted both the culture and biology of Europe to America, millennia before Columbus!Atlantis: The Evidence of Science argues, as never before, that Atlantis should rise to take its place in history, not myth.