24,000 Years Ago

When two students from Germany’s Dresden University snuck their way past security, entered the Great Pyramid of Giza, and smuggled some pigment from an ancient cartouche depicting Pharaoh Khufu as the builder, they triggered speculation that the Pharaoh was involved in a Twenty-Sixth Century BC conspiracy theory.

What those students claim is that the Pharaoh added artwork to what was already an ancient megalith to take credit for masterminding the construction of not only the Great Pyramid, but two other smaller pyramids surrounding it.

The story enflamed the Egyptian archaeological world. The so-called “accredited” experts on Egyptian history dismissed the claim as a fanciful story that lacked any roots. They argue that more than two centuries of archaeology has amassed “a multitude of scientific research” that clearly ties the Great Pyramids to King Khufu.

Indeed, for contemporary researchers to even suggest their story is wrong would invalidate volumes of scientific journals and books that theorize Khufu and his engineers as the builders.

But evidence supporting the Dresden theory is building as more pyramids have been discovered, long buried under piles of rubble that made them appear as hills, in various places around the world.

Graham Hancock, noted author and historical researcher and an obvious rebel among the stiff-necked kingdom of scientific historical writers, points to a 300-foot-high step-pyramid found in West Java, Indonesia, that is offering evidence of an advanced civilization that existed on Earth as early as 22,000 BC or even earlier.

A team led by architect Pon S. Purajatnika began studying the formation with a geological survey in 2011. The megalithic terraces were quickly recognized as ancient and man-made.

The first radiocarbon dating was done at the Java site on top soils that placed the age of the material at about 1,500 BC. But then after the team used tubular drills and brought up cores from deeper layers, they found fragments of man-made megalithic structures deep under the surface that dated to about 11,000 BC, then 15,000 BC, and after drilling to 90 feet, the material dated to 20,000 and 22,000 BC.

These dates suggest that advanced civilizations were erecting pyramids on the site in the midst of the last Ice Age. This was a time when so much water was frozen at the poles that Indonesia was part of the southeast Asian continent. Geologists have dubbed it Sundaland.

Humanoid creatures were believed to be in existence during this period, but historians have always written them off as primitive hunter gatherers lacking any form of civilization and especially incapable of building megaliths. The first great civilizations in Mesopotamia are said to have developed around 3,500 BC.

So how could a step pyramid exist in Java some 24,000 years ago? This strongly suggests that an advanced civilization rose and perhaps fell between then and the appearance of today's Homo sapiens.

Thus it appears that Plato was right when he wrote of a kingdom called Atlantis that was destroyed by floods and earthquakes an estimated 11,600 years ago.