Lost ‘Atlantis’ continent discovered after 70,000 years

A continent lost under the surface of the ocean, which may have once been inhabited by up to half a million people, has been discovered.

The submerged land is said to be almost twice the size of the UK and has been dubbed “Lost Atlantis”.

Researchers believe the land has been submerged for 70,000 years. It’s found off the coast of Australia and found between the areas of Kimberley and Arnhem Land.

The team behind the findings from the Quaternary Science Reviews also considered sonar mapping which found fresh water lakes – and they consider the land to have been habitable to humans.

Things will have changed for potential inhabitants very rapidly given a dramatic rise in sea levels.

"People would have really seen the landscape change in front of them, and been pushed back ahead of that encroaching coastline quite rapidly," Kasih Norman, who is an archaeologist at Griffith University in Queensland and lead author on the study, said in an interview with Live Science.

Norman added: "We're talking about a landscape that's quite submerged, over 100 meters [330 feet] below sea level today.”

She went on to say: "There's been an underlying assumption in Australia that our continental margins were probably unproductive and weren't really used by people, despite the fact that we have evidence from many parts of the world that people were definitely out on these continental shelves in the past…”

"It's important to bear in mind these aren't real population numbers we're talking about, it's just a matter of projecting the carrying capacity of our landscape," she said. "We're basically saying it could have had that many people."

It comes after geoscientists discovered a continent that had been hiding in plain sight for almost 375 years.

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