Bits that don’t fit # 3 ~ Kuk
At Kuk in the central highlands of New Guinea something remarkable happened around the time of the fall of Atlantis. So momentous are these discoveries that the area has been designated a World Heritage Site. [1]
New Guinea is the third largest island in the world after Antarctica and Greenland. A mysterious land, Europeans did not penetrate its central highlands until the 1930s and only then using air power.
New Guinea has been occupied for at least 40,000 years.[2] During the first 30,000 years the people lived by hunting and gathering. But then abruptly, around 10,000 years ago, they suddenly moved into the highlands, taking with them plants that had always been cultivated at sea level. They cleared the land and systematically drained a swamp that eventually would become the birthplace of several important domesticated crops, most notably bananas and sugar cane.
Why would people who had been living as hunters and gatherers for thousands of years suddenly climb high up to the central plateau of New Guinea, drain a swamp and plant bananas, a crop that can take twenty years to become viable?
Why would people who had been perfectly adapted to the land for 30,000 years suddenly abandon their long-established and successful means of subsistence and opt for agriculture?
And why did they find it necessary to leave the coastal regions at all?
These questions haunted the Australian archaeologist, Jack Golson, who has spent a life-time trying to solve this New Guinea riddle. [3] Golson and his partner on the quest, Phillip Hughes, became convinced of the radical idea that Kuk was deliberately created as a cradle for agriculture. At an early stage they made the remarkable discovery of a “palaeochannel” a sophisticated landscaping device for draining swamp to create tillable land. [4]
Once again, the occurrence of an earth crust displacement makes sense of the sudden appearance of these advanced tools.
Kuk lies at an altitude of 1,560 meters, making the temperature there several degrees cooler than the hot lowlands where its transplanted wild plants originated.
When it moved some 20 degrees closer to the equator as a result of the earth’s crust shifting around 9600 BC, the sudden rise in annual temperatures forced the New Guineans to adapt. Their obvious solution was to move to the highlands. For every 150 meters they climbed the temperature dropped by one degree.[5] At 1500 meters they could re-establish their settlements and enjoy the temperatures that had previously prevailed at sea level.
But there is something more here than just the adoption of agriculture by people who had lived by hunting and gathering for 30,000 years. We see the invisible hand of the remnants of an advanced civilization that sought to recreate the preconditions for a rebooting of civilization. It was the water management skills of the survivors of Atlantis that were used to drain the highland swamp and it was their botanists who recognized bananas and sugar as crops that could reboot agriculture. Banana trees can take twenty years to ripen before they yield their fruit. The drained swamp, the water cannels, the sudden adoption of agriculture are expected features if survivors of Atlantis made their way to New Guinea.
[1] Muke, John, Tim Denham, and Vagi Genorupa “Nominating and Managing a World Heritage Site in the highlands of Papua New Guinea” World Archaeology, 3, issue 3, September 2007, 324-338.
[2] Denham, Tim “Envisaging Early Agriculture in the Highlands of New Guinea” in Lilley, Ian (Editor) Archaeology of Oceania: Australia and the Pacific Islands, Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, N.J., 2006, 162.
[3] Denham, Tim “Food for Thought”, Nature Australia, 28, issue 4, 2005.
[4] One of their students, Tim Denham, was not convinced that the “palaeochannel” was in fact man-made. He undertook tests that called into question the artificial attributes of the channel. Nevertheless, whether it was by design or just good luck, the people of the highlands of New Guinea made very constructive use of a land that was once a swamp. And they certainly did become very effective water manipulators as time went on.
[5] Temperature drops as one goes up in altitude varying from 1 degree Celsius in “dry” areas to half a degree in “damp’ areas for each 150 meters. In the case of Kuk, the temperature is around 6-10 degrees Celsius cooler than temperatures at sea level.
