Earlier this month, Archaeo News published a short article entitled "An ancient 'lost civilization' in Cuba?" discussing the discovery of what are alleged to be the ruins of large structures submerged in waters off the western end of Cuba.
The article references an earlier piece published in National Geographic in 2002 ("New Underwater Finds Raise Questions About Flood Myths," by Brian Handwerk). That article notes that the structures are located in waters at depths between 1,900 feet and 2,500 feet. It also cites a geologist who declares, "If I had to explain this geologically, I would have a hard time" (in other words, he would find it difficult to come up with geological processes that could have created the structures, rather than the deliberate hand of man).
The National Geographic article leaves the impression that the end of the Ice Age and the rising seas that would result can explain sunken ruins, this explanation runs into some problems. Most importantly, unlike the man-made ruins located off the coast of Japan and India, these ruins are under thousands of feet of water. The melting of the Ice Age ice sheets would probably be able to account for no more than three hundred feet of sea level rise world-wide.
Another problem conventional explanations encounter is the fact that current theories of mankind's ancient history argue that man was a primitive hunter-gatherer during those distant millennia before the ice sheets melted, and only began to live in cities and have division of labor and the ability to construct sophisticated stone monuments much later.
Nevertheless, the National Geographic article confidently declares: "While images of catastrophic floods are popular, many scholars argue that the real rising sea level slowly invaded the Stone Age hunting territories for thousands of years, and the stories compress this event into overnight floods, storms, and destruction," apparently without realizing the contradiction of describing "Stone Age hunting territories" and submerged ruins built by a civilization that was clearly not a bunch of Stone Age hunters.
If these Cuban ruins are in fact genuine remnants of human civilization, they create big problems for conventional theories (perhaps this is why the academic community does not seem to be in any particular hurry to examine them more closely).
However, they would not pose a problem for the hydroplate theory of Walt Brown, discussed in previous posts. According to Dr. Brown's theory, the events surrounding a cataclysmic global flood led to continents being violently buckled like train cars in a train wreck, which thickened the continental plates and led to a period during which the continents were higher and the seas lower. Over time, the force of gravity caused the continents to sink and the sea floors to experience a corresponding rise, which raised the sea levels by thousands of feet.
The hydroplate theory explains many geological mysteries around the globe, but it has been largely ignored as an explanation for the many archaeological mysteries of mankind's ancient past. Alternative theorists have largely focused on theories such as a near miss from a planet or the crustal-displacement theory. The Mathisen Corollary discusses the possibility that the hydroplate theory could explain mankind's ancient past much better, and certainly better than the prevailing theories, which are full of contradictions, as we can see from this discussion of the undersea Cuban ruins.