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198 points isaacfrond | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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Empact ◴[] No.45098579[source]
Given human propensity to settle near bodies of water (exhibited even to this day), and the change in sea levels after the last ice age, the bulk of intra-ice age settlement artifacts are probably submerged within a relatively short distance from our existing coastlines. I would be personally interested in an effort to systematically investigate these areas.
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nradov ◴[] No.45099220[source]
It would be great to see more underwater archaeology, I'm sure there's a lot to find. But due to variations in local conditions it's really tough to systematically investigate: every site has to be treated individually. Plus doing anything underwater becomes at least 10× harder and more expensive. Human scientific divers can only work easily down to about 30m: anything significantly deeper requires commercial diving protocols, submersibles, or ROVs which raise the difficulty and cost even further.
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1. Empact ◴[] No.45099523[source]
I mean something more of the sort of a survey of sea floor and subsurface which would have been coastline at the glacial maxima, boats trawling multispectral scanners to identify candidate locations. There are a few different recent systems that push in the direction of this being feasible, e.g. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/cmhrp/news/usgs-designed-tool-...