A team of explorers believed they discovered an ancient sunken city that would rewrite human history, but the ruins have mysteriously been ignored for 25 years.
In 2001, marine engineer Paulina Zelitsky and her husband, Paul Weinzweig, from Advanced Digital Communications (ADC), revealed that they had stumbled upon a collection of stone structures over 2,000 feet underwater near Cuba.
Sonar scans of the area showed what looked like multiple pyramids, circular structures, and other buildings that seemed to belong to a lost city in the Caribbean.
‘It’s a really wonderful structure which really looks like it could have been a large urban center,’ Zelitsky said after the discovery.
Researchers 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, an even bigger mystery unfolded after the discovery: no one ever went back to examine the alleged lost city in more than two decades.
One factor that has held back further research has been the fact that fellow scientists have continued to voice their skepticism about the sunken city, saying it would have taken up to 50,000 years for a city to sink that far underwater.
Other critics have contended that the ‘structures’ are natural rock formations, arguing that an entire city wouldn’t have been so well preserved if it sank during a catastrophic seismic disaster.
The alleged lost city of Cuba (pictured) was discovered by a Canadian expedition in 2001, but it has never been studied further
The neglected underwater structures have recently resurfaced on social media, with many people claiming that the explorers found the ruins of Atlantis.
However, Cuban geologist Manuel Iturralde-Vinent of Cuba’s Natural History Museum was one of the skeptics who cautioned that the stone structures could be natural formations.
‘It would be totally irresponsible to say what it was before we have evidence,’ Zelitsky added in a 2001 interview with BBC.
Unfortunately, more evidence was never gathered, as a follow-up expedition to Cuba’s Guanahacabibes Peninsula never took place.
Social media users have continued to question why the research into this mysterious site was abandoned, with some claiming the implications of a city predating the ancient Egyptians have triggered a cover-up.
‘Civilizations that existed before the ice age, perhaps multiple civilizations that rose and fell… The historical knowledge that has been lost (or hidden),’ one person on X said.
‘There is so much hidden history. Finding it so fascinating. Everything we been taught is a lie,’ another person claimed.
Despite rampant speculation of an archeological conspiracy, scientists have argued that there are legitimate reasons why the lost city of Cuba isn’t real.
In 2002, Iturralde noted that the structures were so deep underwater, it would have taken much longer than 6,000 years for this area to sink nearly half a mile due to shifting tectonic plates.
If this were a sunken city that took roughly 50,000 years to reach these depths, it would completely change our understanding of human evolution.
Currently, scientists have concluded that modern humans (Homo sapiens) were hunter-gatherers 50,000 years ago, since there’s no evidence they created urban societies or sophisticated buildings.
‘It’s strange, it’s weird; we’ve never seen something like this before, and we don’t have an explanation for it,’ Iturralde told The Washington Post.
Michael Faught, a specialist in underwater archaeology at Florida State University, also shared his doubts that these structures were man-made.
‘It would be cool if Zelitsky and Weinzweig were right, but it would be really advanced for anything we would see in the New World for that time frame. The structures are out of time and out of place,’ Faught told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
The unexplored city isn’t the first mysterious structure to potentially rewrite human history.
Archeologists have actually found several allegedly man-made temples which significantly predate the Egyptians, including Göbekli Tepe in Turkey – a site believed to have been inhabited from around 9500 BC to at least 8000 BCE.
That’s over 5,000 years before the Egyptian pyramids were built and roughly 6,000 years before Stonehenge.
Göbekli Tepe in Turkey (pictured) was constructed thousands of years before the Egyptian pyramids, according to researchers
Although skeptics have said it’s a natural rock formation, Yonaguni monument (pictured) has a pyramid shape with shockingly straight steps that appear carved by hand
Another underwater structure discovered near Japan, called the Yonaguni monument, features several sharp-angled steps that stand roughly 90 feet tall and appear to be made entirely of stone, leading many to believe it was man-made.
Tests of the stone have shown it to be over 10,000 years old, meaning if a civilization built this pyramid by hand, it would have taken place before this region sank under water – more than 12,000 years ago.
Along with scientists widely discounting the findings in Cuba as a natural phenomenon, its location so close to the socialist national have made returning to the site politically difficult.
Advanced Digital Communications, the Canadian company that was mapping the ocean floor in Cuba’s territorial waters, entered into a contract with the government of President Fidel Castro to conduct the original expedition.
However, the Cuban government and institutions like the National Museum have not pursued further investigations in two decades.
Sylvia Earl, an American oceanographer, also revealed in 2002 that a planned expedition to the lost city was canceled over funding problems.
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