You may be familiar with the so-called roads of Atlantis off Bimini in the Bahamas area. The sea floor looks just like a submerged road bed. Howver, wood samples from tree roots coiled inside the formation were dated by radiocarbon method at about 9,000 yrs. Nope, can't be roads. There was no civilzation back then.   Has to be something else. Since I don't have the references on this, the information remains anecdotal, at least in this newsgroup. There is hard data that they are something else.  Again, it has nothing to do people dismissing ideas out of hand as suggested above.  Rather the roads of Atlantis have been studied by geologists and archaeologists and found on the basis of hard evidence to be natural features.   There are three posts concerning the Bimini Roads as they are called and related claims at: A.  http://www.intersurf.com/~heinrich/Bimini1.html B.  http://www.intersurf.com/~heinrich/Bimini2.html C.  http://www.intersurf.com/~heinrich/Bimini3.html Since the limestone (beachrock) composing the so-called roads of Atlantis or Bimini Roads has been dated by radiocarbon dates as ranging in age from about 2750 to 3500 B.P. (McKusick and Shinn 1980), it would take some rather remarkable circumstances for trees to have grown in them around 9,000 B.P. some 6,000 to 6,250 years before the beachrock composing these roads even existed.   I have read claims of 9,000 B.P. dates from wood.   So far, I have yet to find any published documentation, i.e. sample numbers; the laboratory that did these dates; the details of the stratigraphy of the wood samples; and so forth, showing that these dates actually exist.  Given that none of the geologists and archaeologists, i.e. Ball and Gifford (1980) and McKusick and Shinn (1980), who have examined these roads in detail found any sign of roots associated with them, I am inclined to conclude in the absence of documentation to the contrary that the 9,000 B.P. dates are just part of the folklore that has grown up around the Bimini Roads. To a large extent, the age of the so-called roads is irrelevant because they are not roads, but rather natural limestone called beachrock which has formed along Late Holocene shorelines.  It has fractured into rectangular blocks as such beachrock sometimes does.  This is documented by Ball and Gifford (1980), McKusick and Shinn (1980), and Randi (1981).   More detailed can be found at: A.  http://www.intersurf.com/~heinrich/Bimini1.html References Cited: 1. Ball, Mahlon M., and Gifford, John A., 1980, Investigation of submerged beachrock deposits off Bimini, Bahamas. Research Reports National Geographic Society. vol. 12., p. 21-38. Randi, J., 1981, Atlantean Road: the Bimini beach-rock. Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 5, n0. 3, pp. 42-43. 3. McKusick, M., and Shinn, E. A., 1980, Bahamian Atlantis reconsidered. Nature, vol. 287, no. 5777, pp. 11-12. Sincerely, Paul V. Heinrich           All comments are the This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it     personal opinion of the writer and Baton Rouge, LA            do not constitute policy and/or                            opinion of government or corporate                            entities.  This includes my employer. To persons uninstructed in natural history, their country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. - T. H. Huxley