Toward the end of the second part of the article, I suggested that the Taino flood myth describing "how the sea was created" was referring to not the creation of the world's oceans, but the Caribbean Sea in particular, and the land Zuania that the storytellers said was flooded was not South America but was instead the Caribbean Basin.
My theory posited that the Caribbean Basin had plausibly been dry during the existence of behaviorally modern man—an intriguing possibility that could not be ruled out. In this article, I will attempt to provide hard evidence to demonstrate it.
The First Steps Towards Discovery
In the early 17th century, the first telescopes were invented. Like many useful inventions, they were initially regarded as either mere toys or novelties. Later on, the militaries of the time realized that the telescope could be used to detect the coming of ships over the horizon before they could be noticed by the naked eye. But it was not until Galileo Galilei pointed this new invention at the heavens above that the telescope was actually used for what we today most associate it with—observational astronomy.
Though in the long run the new findings that the telescope unveiled came to revolutionize astronomy, awakening it from its Ptolemaic slumber, the astronomers and scholars contemporary with Galileo viewed his discoveries with a hard-headed skepticism at best and hostility at worst. Most surprisingly, some scholars of his day rejected his conclusions not by arguing that Galileo's interpretations of the evidence he had collected were faulty, but rather that the images formed by the telescopes he used were themselves flawed. In other words, the craters on the moon and the blemishes on the sun that he observed were not really there, but were image artifacts produced by the telescope itself.
Over time, such views were discarded as the telescope repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to generate accurate images, and both the scientific community and the average person take for granted that when one peers into the eyepiece of a telescope, “what you see is what you get.” Perhaps our faith in this instrument has gone too far in the opposite extreme, for it is commonplace for scientists to speculate on such profound questions as the creation and ultimate fate of our universe using only the images that appear on an instrument even though the objects that are being viewed appear as they did eons ago and can never be inspected up close due to their distance.
Advancing Technology Unveils Mysteries
It is a common aphorism that we know less about the seafloor than the surface of the moon, and even the other planets in our solar system for that matter. As recently as a decade ago, detailed seafloor maps were expensive and time-consuming to access for the average person. Worse yet, even though the information was there, it was difficult to interpret, as the information was represented in the form of two-dimensional contour maps, whereas we naturally perceive the world through three dimensions. So an interesting feature that was found on the seafloor would only appear as a rather unusual arrangement of contour lines on a map, and such an arrangement could easily be overlooked even by the trained observer let alone an average person.
However, one may fairly say that all of this has changed with Google Earth. Using Google Earth (a virtual globe, map, and geographical information program), anyone with an internet connection and a computer can view the surface of the Earth's land and sea like never before. This is not to say that Google Earth is an infallible instrument, as every instrument has its flaws; for instance, the refracting telescopes used by Galileo to study the heavens law produce a...
