Eden in the East by Stephen Oppenheimer

[shijing]

Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia

by Stephen Oppenheimer

From Amazon:

From Kirkus Reviews

In an exhaustively researched and creatively argued reassessment of mankind's origins, British physician Oppenheimer, an expert in tropical pediatrics, contends that the now-submerged area of Southeast Asia was the cradle of ancient civilization. From time to time, scholars from various disciplines have argued for the existence of a vastly old "founder civilization." Among the most famous was Charles Hapgood, who based his theory of a lost seafaring civilization on his analysis of the famous 16th-century "Piri Re'is" maps of the Antarctic land mass. In this tradition, Oppenheimer blends evidence from geology, genetics, linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology to argue persuasively that such a civilization existed on a submerged land mass in Southeast Asia, which geologists call the Sunda shelf. Pointing to geological evidence for the submersion of the shelf by abrupt rises in the sea level about 8,000 years ago, Oppenheimer contends that the coastal cultures of Southeast Asia were drowned by a great flood, reflected in flood mythologies scattered from the ancient Middle East (such as the biblical story of Noah) to Australia and the Americas. According to the author, tantalizing archaeological evidence exists of settlements under a "silt curtain"* left by the sea floods in drowned coastal regions from Southeast Asia to the Middle East, while linguistic markers indicate that languages spread from Southeast Asia to Australia and the Pacific. The shared flood story is one striking example of similar Eurasian myths according to the author; the ancient Middle East and Asia share other myth typologies, conspicuously including creation and Cain and Abel myths, which point to common origins in a progenitor culture. Absorbing, meticulously researched, limpidly written, and authoritative: should be regarded as a groundbreaking study of the remote past of Southeast Asia, and of civilization itself.

Product Description

This book completely changes the established and conventional view of prehistory by relocating the Lost Eden—the world's first civilization—to Southeast Asia. At the end of the Ice Age, Southeast Asia formed a continent twice the size of India, which included Indochina, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Borneo. In Eden in the East, Stephen Oppenheimer puts forward the astonishing argument that here in southeast Asia—rather than in Mesopotamia where it is usually placed—was the lost civilization that fertilized the Great cultures of the Middle East 6,000 years ago. He produces evidence from ethnography, archaeology, oceanography, creation stories, myths, linguistics, and DNA analysis to argue that this founding civilization was destroyed by a catastrophic flood, caused by a rapid rise in the sea level at the end of the last ice age.

This is the same author that was mentioned in the Jan 30, 2010 session -- see also:

http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=15722.msg132485#msg132485

The book is very good, and is an excellent example of a mainstream source challenging the existing paradigm. While I think that Oppenheimer overreaches a bit in placing the driving force of ancient civilization solely with the peoples of Southeast Asia, he makes a valuable contribution in drawing various lines of evidence together to show that -- far from the Austronesian homeland being Taiwan and involving an improbably difficult and rapid expansion into the Pacific -- the Austronesian homeland was the Dryas Ice Age-era Sunda shelf, which formed a single continent until successive floods (at approximately 14,000, 11,000, and 8,000 years BP) submerged it, leaving the Indonesian archipelago that we see today. A corollary of this is that, instead of Southeast Asian peoples arriving from the west and north and colonizing Southeast Asia a la the Out-of-Africa hypothesis, that they instead were already located in Sundaland in situ during the last Ice Age, and moved instead from Sundaland into Eurasia as their homeland was progressively flooded.

The most interesting part of the book to me was the second half, where Oppenheimer collects a rich array of creation myths and subjects them to typological analysis. I was surprised by how many basic, common themes can be found worldwide which can serve as the basis for reconstruction of a few common motifs. There tends to be quite a bit of commonality between the Eurasian motifs, with less shared by Africa and the Americas, and Oppenheimer argues this is the result of the Southeast Asian maritime expansion across the southern periphery of Eurasian all the way to Mesopotamia. Although this pattern may be amenable to other explanations than Oppenheimer himself presents, the importance of this data lays in the fact that the current mainstream model of global colonization by modern humans can't easily be reconciled with it, so alternative models need to be explored.

*Regarding the "silt curtain", see The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes by Richard Firestone, Allen West, Simon Warwick-Smith.