KNYSNA NEWS – On Thursday 28 July the General Meeting of the Knysna branch of the University of the Third Age will take place in the DR Church Hall in Fichat Street.
Dr Hayley Cawthra will be giving a presentation which will reveal the Atlantis on our coast.
"Humans have long been fascinated by, and reliant on, the sea. Along the South African Cape South Coast there is evidence of some of the earliest Homo sapiens coastal communities anywhere on Earth, going back almost 200,000 years.
"With sea-level fluctuations over time, what is now the continental shelf was in fact exposed as a terrestrial landscape for most of human history and on the coastal plain today, what we know and interact with is only a tiny remnant of a much larger system that is now submerged by high sea levels.
"The width of a continental shelf will govern the distances that the land extends out, depending on vertical changes, and on this Cape South Coast a landscape the size of Ireland lies below the water.
"Therefore, the notion of an 'Atlantis' was everywhere around continental margins, several times over. And with modern technologies we can use sophisticated hydroacoustic techniques to see through the water column and unravel the past using fragments of preserved information.
"I will talk about how we discovered an extinct landscape on South African shores, how we mapped it, sampled it, got to know it, and then worked out how it has been used by our early ancestors in the past."
Cawthra is chief scientist for marine geology in the geophysics unit of the Council for Geoscience and is also a research associate at the Nelson Mandela University in the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience, where she supervises students and conducts research.
She has a PhD in geology from the University of Cape Town, carried out postdoctoral research in Bremen, Germany. She has research interests in marine geophysics, continental shelves, Quaternary Era sea-level change and human use of ancient coastlines.
All are welcome to attend this fascinating insight into the past. The doors open at 09:00 when tea, coffee and biscuits will be served, and the presentation starts promptly at 10:00. For more information and ticket prices, contact Judy Dixon on 072 390 6667.
'We bring you the latest Knysna Garden Route news'
