Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia by Stephen Oppenheimer

Description

This book completely changes the established and conventional view of prehistory by relocating the Lost Eden—the world’s first civilisation—to Southeast Asia.

At the end of the Ice Age, Southeast Asia formed a continent twice the size of India, which included Indochina, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Borneo.

In Eden in the East, Stephen Oppenheimer puts forward the astonishing argument that here in southeast Asia—rather than in Mesopotamia where it is usually placed—was the lost civilization that fertilized the Great cultures of the Middle East 6,000 years ago. He produces evidence from ethnography, archaeology, oceanography, creation stories, myths, linguistics, and DNA analysis to argue that this founding civilization was destroyed by a catastrophic flood, caused by a rapid rise in the sea level at the end of the last ice age.

In this ground breaking new book Stephen Oppenheimer reveals how evidence from oceanography, archaeology, linguistics, genetics and folklore overwhelmingly suggests that the lost ‘Eden’ – the cradle of civilization – was not in the Middle East, as is usually supposed, but in the drowned continent of Southeast Asia.