[spycatcher]

Good post. Unfortuantely "mainstream Archeologists" don't have much credibility either when it comes to new ideas and discoveries. The Atlantic article posted earlier does a great job showing how they often just dismiss findings that may throw off their ideas and rock boats (see man-made global warming scientists). There's never enough proof for them if you're an outsider. I may not bother going out of my way trying to please them either. Let the research stand for itself, it may take a while to fully resolve but the truth will come out one way or another in the end.

I don't hinge my understanding only on those toxicology studies anyhow. The info in The Atlantic and other info posted above should be taken as a whole. The chance that there wasn't *any* contact between east and west is almost zero. The examples may be explained with various theories, but when there's a different reason to explain each "coincidence" it's a weak response to the overall pattern.

[Anotherpundit]

Oh, yes, certainly there was *some* contact, of *some* kind, on *some* level. But to leap from that, to saying there was enough contact for detailed legends to be transmitted through several different cultures and finally reach Plato, well, that's a bit more of leap; especially when there are several other stories and myths in the Republic that are obvious and total fabrications.

I don't have a problem believing that any one of these things happened seperately, but I have a big problem leaping from there to an established relationship between the two -- just because a city sank somewhere at some point in time, doesn't mean Plato based his account of a city sinking on that event. If it was anything at all beyond pure imagination, Plato's atlantis was probably a heavily-embroidered rendering of the sinking of Crete by volcanic eruption.