Dr Glenn Milne dates submergence of Mahabalipuram structures to 6000 BP
First posted by Graham Hancock on the Message Board of this site, 10 April 2002

I mentioned the other day that I would ask Dr Glenn Milne of the Department of Geology at Durham University to run his computer model on the Mahabalipuram submerged structures.

He has just emailed me (see below) to let me know that as far as he can establish the last time these structures would have been above water was around 6000 years ago.

Prevailing archaeological opinion recognises no culture in India 6000 years ago capable of building anything much -- let alone a series of vast megalithic structures on the scale and extent that confronts us at Mahabalipuram.

Here's the relevant passage from Glenn Milne's email:

"I had a chat with some of my colleagues here in the Dept. of Geological Sciences and it is probably reasonable to assume that there has been very little vertical tectonic motion in this region [i.e. the coastal region around Mahabalipuram] during the past five thousand years or so. Therefore, the dominant process driving sea-level change will have been due to the melting of the Late Pleistocene ice sheets. Looking at predictions from a computer model of this process suggests that the area where the structures exist would have been submerged around six thousand years ago. Of course, there is some uncertainty in the model predictions and so there is a flexibility of roughly plus or minus one thousand years is this date."