No, Scientists Have Probably Not Found Atlantis

The classical Greek philosopher Plato (above) is responsible for some of the earliest serious intellectual work on concepts like truth, knowledge, and government. About 2,400 years ago, he also recorded the history of Atlantis by piecing together second and third-hand whispers. As far as we can tell, Atlantis didn’t actually exist, but that hasn’t stopped people from looking and occasionally claiming to have found the lost civilization. There’s another one of those right now, and archaeologists are skeptical, to put it mildly.

Plato wrote about Atlantis around 360 BCE, but he didn’t have any primary source material. What we know of the supposed lost island comes from stories relayed through various sources that stretch back thousands of years. According to Plato, Atlantis was a powerful and advanced civilization with 10,000 chariots, exotic animals, and a complex system of canals. The people became so enamored with their power and wealth that the gods destroyed Atlantis.

For most of the last two millennia, people considered the tale of Atlantis to be a mere fable — an allegory to decry the influence of material wealth. Interest in Atlantis as a real place picked up in the late 19th century as several other supposedly mythical locations were found to be real. Ever since, someone seems to think they’ve unearthed Atlantis every couple of years. The latest is a UK outfit called Merlin Burrows.

The company started with satellite images to look for locations that could fit with the ancient description. The team focused on the coast of Spain, which checks several of Plato’s Atlantis boxes. He said the location of Atlantis lay outside the “Pillars of Heracles,” which we know today as the Strait of Gibraltar. So, the southern coast of Spain is a match there, and there’s some evidence of an ancient tsunami that could have wiped out a civilization, according to Merlin Burrows researchers.

The team claims to have found several important archaeological clues at a secret site, such as the remnants of a seawall, tower foundations, and ruins that could be the mythical Temple of Poseidon. So, where’s the evidence? This is where things get sketchy. Merlin Burrows is working on a documentary, so it doesn’t want to release too much information. In addition, it has not submitted any papers to peer-reviewed journals.

Archaeologists who evaluated the publicly released information seem unimpressed. The claim might be more compelling if someone found evidence of specific elements from Plato’s account like the ringed canals or some contemporary account of the civilization’s existence. There’s nothing new in the findings, and Merlin Burrows isn’t even the first group to go to Spain looking for Atlantis. Currently, there’s no reason to mark Atlantis “found.”

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