I have always failed to understand why people are 'threatened' by the existence of past civilizations that may have possessed technologies that we don't have. Remember, it was the 'zero' as a place-holder that changed our mathematics and our notion of it. We still tend to marvel at places like Stonehenge because

1) The stones to build it seem to have come from a loooong way away
2) The astronomy was very good

That doesn't imply anything ultra or extra human about the folks who built it. Hell, we went through a dark age and the church hushed up gangs of stuff to do with science. We read in the literature that the notion of a virgin birth predates Christainity by about three hundred years. We notice similarities between languages in different parts of the world and arrive at the conclusion that they share a common place of origin. We find highly complex methods of measurement in older civilizations and wonder how THEY could have figured that out. (They figured it out because they were people and people are incredibly smart.)

Some seemingly simple stuff I still marvel at, and I also marvel at our ability to make much of little. I have read this thread with a wide-eyed astonishment, not because Atlantis may 'finally' be found, but because so few people are willing to await the results before they decide one way or the other if it IS Atlantis. Interesting.

Lucy may or may not be a precursor/ancestor of Homo sapien sapien, but I always loved the picture of that tiny skull because it tells me that something with a human-like head existed half a million years ago, and that is neat. Legends appear from our need for legends. We have made them out of lesser stuff: Pretty Boy Floyd, Robin Hood and King Arthur. (Before I am taken to task on King Arthur, note that I am aware of the West Saxon connection and I have read "The Mabinogian.")

I love the hypotheses to do with the monster blast that occurred in the USSR in 1905 or 1906 (forget which), not because the facts have been established, but precisely because they haven't.

When Sir Isaac Newton established the Gold Standard, he did something that changed the world as much as did his co-discovery of the calculus and his 'laws' of motion and inertia. It is also interesting that he had a Templar connection and they in turn may have had a connection to a phenomenal birth and life sixteen centuries before. Whether any of the speculation is true or not, close or far from the mark is not the issue. It is the other thinking that results that leads to research that may yield returns we cannot even begin to imagine.

I hope what they found proves to be Atlantis, but if it isn't, it will then lead us to search for why whatever place it PROVES to be hasn't been mentioned in any other books. It will become a dull world when we lose our sense of wonder. I am fifty-seven, but I still like being a kid.

Bruce M