Mysterious 6,000-Year-Old Underwater 'Lost City' Changed Human History

In 2001, marine engineer Paulina Zelitsky and her husband Paul Weinzweig of Advanced Digital Communications (ADC) reported that they had stumbled upon a series of rock structures more than 2,000 feet below the surface near Cuba, the Daily Mail reports.

A sonar scan of the area revealed what appeared to be numerous pyramids, circular structures and other buildings that appeared to belong to a lost city in the Caribbean region.

"This is a truly remarkable structure that looks like it could have been a major urban centre," Paulina Zelitsky said after the opening.

Researchers have suggested that the mysterious city could be more than 6,000 years old, making it significantly older than the Egyptian pyramids and potentially upending the currently accepted timeline of human development.

However, the Daily Mail continues, this discovery left an even bigger mystery uncovered: for more than two decades, no one has returned to explore the supposed lost city. One factor holding back further research was the fact that fellow scientists continued to express their skepticism about the sunken city, arguing that it would have taken up to 50,000 years for the city to sink so deep underwater.

Other critics have argued that the "structures" are natural rock formations, arguing that the entire city would not have survived so well if it had sunk during a catastrophic seismic event.

Abandoned underwater structures have recently resurfaced on social media, with many people claiming that explorers have found the ruins of Atlantis. However, Cuban geologist Manuel Iturralde-Vinent of the Natural History Museum of Cuba was one of the skeptics who warned that the rock structures could be natural formations.

"It would be completely irresponsible to say that this happened until we have evidence," Zelitsky told the BBC in 2001.

Unfortunately, the Daily Mail notes, no further evidence was ever collected, as a subsequent expedition to the Guanahacabibes Peninsula in Cuba never took place.

Social media users continue to question why research into the mysterious site has been abandoned, with some claiming that the presence of a city that predates the ancient Egyptians has led to the information being covered up.

"There were civilizations before the Ice Age, possibly multiple civilizations that rose and fell... Historical knowledge that was lost (or hidden)," says one social media user.

"There is so much hidden history. We find it so fascinating. Everything we have been taught is a lie," said another user.

Despite rampant speculation about an archaeological conspiracy, scientists say there are legitimate reasons why the lost city in Cuba is not real, the Daily Mail notes.

In 2002, Iturralde noted that the structures are so deep underwater that it would have taken much longer than 6,000 years for the area to have sunk nearly half a mile due to shifting tectonic plates. If this were a sunken city that took roughly 50,000 years to reach such depths, it would completely change our understanding of human evolution.

Scientists now conclude that modern humans (Homo sapiens) were hunter-gatherers 50,000 years ago, as there is no evidence that they developed urban communities or complex buildings.

"It's weird, it's wild; we've never seen anything like this before and we have no explanation for it," Iturralde told The Washington Post.

Michael Faught, an underwater archaeologist at Florida State University, also shared his doubts that the structures were man-made. "It would be great if Zelitsky and Weinzweig were right, but that would be a real novelty for anything we've seen in the New World during that time period. The structures are out of time and out of place," Faught told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

The unexplored city is not the first mysterious structure that could potentially rewrite human history, the Daily Mail points out. Archaeologists have indeed discovered several supposedly man-made temples that were built significantly earlier than those in Egypt, including Gobekli Tepe in Turkey - a site thought to have been inhabited from around 9500 BC to at least 8000 BC. That's more than 5,000 years before the Egyptian pyramids were built, and around 6,000 years before Stonehenge.

Another underwater structure discovered near Japan, called the Yonaguni Monument, has several sharp-angled steps about 90 feet high that appear to be made entirely of stone, leading many to believe it was man-made. Tests on the stone have shown it to be over 10,000 years old, meaning that if a civilization built this pyramid by hand, it was before the region went underwater, over 12,000 years ago.

While scientists widely dismiss the Cuban finds as natural phenomena, its location so close to the socialist country has made returning to the site politically difficult. Advanced Digital Communications, a Canadian company that has been mapping the ocean floor in Cuban waters, was contracted by Fidel Castro’s government to conduct the initial expedition. However, the Daily Mail claims that the Cuban government and institutions such as the National Museum have not conducted further research for two decades. Sylvia Earle, an American oceanographer, also reported in 2002 that a planned expedition to the lost city had been cancelled due to funding issues.