Did Plato's central Atlantic nation exist? Spain investigates

SOME of the earliest humans might actually have had a mid-Atlantic accent and a nation at war with Athens as described by Plato may really have existed – at least, recent findings by scientists at Granada University certainly give plenty of fodder for the imagination.

The Ancient Greek philosopher, in his works Timaeus and Critias, spoke of 'Atlas Island' or 'Atlantis' and how what is now the capital of his home Mediterranean nation repels its attacks 'unlike any other in the known world', showing how Athens is a superior State and the epitome of perfection – in keeping with the 'ideal' as described in his famous Republic.

Atlantis is merely allegorical, or invented to 'prove' how impeccable Athens is, but in addition to inspiring works of literature, including many of the Renaissance humanists – Francis Bacon's New Atlantis being one key example, and Sir Thomas More's Utopia mentions it – the notion of a country or countries between Europe and the Americas led to centuries of dubious scientific claims pointing to its existence in reality, and to many 'wise' scholars believing Plato's description to be a genuine event in history.

And Catalunya-born poet Jacint Verdaguer's 1877 epic, L'Atlàndida, describes it as a tyrannical coloniser of Europe which, nevertheless, brought civilisation to the old world, which ended up in crisis when the island sank.

Yet the latest research in south-eastern Spain points to the likelihood of land-masses in the Atlantic, now vanished – and is anything but dubious.

Before Plato's time...but maybe not before ours as a species

Whilst Plato claimed Atlantis sunk into the sea following its defeat at the hands of Athens around 9,000 years before his time – being about 11,300 years ago – scientists in Granada are looking at a time far further back.

The geo-chronology team led by Dr Fernando Bea and Dr Pilar González is working on the basis of 'micro-continents' in existence between 200 million and 3.2 billion years back, although their investigations to date reveal these might have been above the surface fewer than 600,000 years ago.

This would mean the Atlantic islands coincided in time with the human race, which is thought to have been around in its earliest form some three million years ago and completed its evolution into modern-day homo sapiens about 10,000 years ago.

The team leaders, who are faculty heads of mineralogy and petrology in Granada, and their colleagues examined oceanic rocks dragged up from the bed of the mid-Atlantic, all less than two or three million years old, but containing minerals known to be exclusively European – zircon – and which were much older, up to 3.2 billion years.

'Time capsule': Old-world minerals embedded in new-world rocks

Zircon is considered by mineralogists to be a 'real time capsule', since its elements contain codified information which becomes crystallised, trapping these in their purest states.

This information includes notable levels of radioactive elements such as Thorium and Uranium, which cause various lead particles to break off from them.

It is the ratio between the lead 'offshoots' and the 'parent' radioactive elements that allow geologists to work out, with a high degree of accuracy, how long ago the zircon content crystallised.

The zircon also contains oxygen, the most abundant element in the earth's crust.

How fast the oxygen content has diffused within the zircon is also key, as it affects how well the mineral retains its composition of radioactive elements.

Working out the age of the zircon native to what is now the continent of Europe, and comparing it to that of the much younger Atlantic rocks, has enabled the team to work out how long ago these two current-day land-masses 'shared' territory, and the location of the rocks found gives a strong indication of where islands broken away during the continental drifts might have been before the sea reclaimed them.

Santorini, Canary Islands, Cádiz? Theories on Atlantis' location

At the time of Plato's writings, European philosophers would not have been aware of the full extent of planet earth; their world was much smaller, and theories as to where Atlantis may have been range from off the coasts of the Greek island of Santorini, the Italian island of Sicily, or the island nations of Cyprus and Malta, through to Israel, Turkey, the Black Sea, the Portuguese islands of Madeira and the Azores, and the Canary Islands.

Even as recently as the 21st century location theories were being raised – Sweden being one, the legend's having been inspired on Stone Age Ireland being another, in 2004, and even the Doñana National Park across the provinces of Cádiz and Huelva in 2011.

This latest claim, by Professor Richard Freund of Hartford University in the USA, was refuted by Spanish scientists who had worked with him in the area.

It was during a documentary Professor Freund featured in for the National Geographic Channel, and using data extrapolated from Spanish research from 2007, but CSIC anthropologist Juan Villarías-Robles insisted the US investigator 'sensationalised' their work.

As such, the Doñana salt marshes and its immediate coastline have been ruled out as bearing any evidence of Atlantis' location.

Speculation in the past 40 or 50 years has included possible locations such as Antarctica, Cuba, Bahamas, and even the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

But the rocks found and analysed by the University of Granada team were discovered near the mid-Atlantic sunken 'mountain' range, described as the 'backbone' of this ocean and a long way from any present-day dry land.

Could have been there 300,000 years after humans settled in Europe

As for when the European and American continents broke away from each other, this is worked out by how old the zirconic magma that lives alongside the ancient zircon is.

Magma is a rocky element in the earth's crust that becomes lava when it boils and breaks through the surface in a volcanic eruption.

According to analyses of all these factors at the SHRIMP-IBERSIMS laboratory at Granada University, 'ages as young as 600,000 years' have been demonstrated, the team explains.

“But we cannot rule out even younger ages; thus, there may have been one or several micro-continents in existence inhabited by hominids, if we bear in mind that the ancestor of the homo sapiens was present in Europe 900,000 years ago,” the authors state.

“This age of 600,000 years for the destruction of the Atlantic micro-continents is a maximum estimation. There's no evidence that could rule out that this might have occurred in more recent times; were that to be the case, this geological catastrophe would have been recorded in homo sapiens' myths and legends,” say the writers.

If, indeed, ancient writings, folk tales or allegories had mentioned the breaking up of the mid-Atlantic land-masses, told by eye witnesses, it would need to have happened less than 10,000 years ago, the authors explain.

They would need to find ocean rocks of less than 10,000 years old, containing zircon inherited from Europe, for evidence of this to be credible, the research paper states.

“We hope that our studies currently in progress will eventually be able to clarify this great unknown,” Dr Bea concludes.