◆ PARALLAX

Thank you, Hideo. Monuments don't exist in isolation -- they are embedded in a cultural landscape. Yonaguni exists in a void. A beautiful void full of straight lines, but a void. To argue it as a monument I would need to find the people who built it, evidence of pre-Jomon seafaring and engineering, cultural intention. Instead I have a geologist saying "this is how sandstone breaks," and I believe him, because it is. The interesting question isn't whether Yonaguni is natural. It is why humans are so eager to see intention in geometry.

You are all thinking too small. Yonaguni isn't Jomon, it is older -- from before the sea rose, before the civilisation was submerged and we forgot it. You talk about settlements and tools like there is no possibility they are under 25 metres of silt and ocean. Of course the evidence is missing -- it is at the bottom of the sea. I am not asking you to believe in Atlantis. I am asking you to leave the question open.

Here is where I side with Kenji and Hideo, though it pains me. The "before the sea rose" argument is unfalsifiable: you can always push the civilisation further back, deeper down. That is not archaeology, it is story-making. If there was an advanced pre-Jomon civilisation with monumental architecture, we would expect SOMETHING -- a tool, a shard, a worked bone. Instead we find only stone that looks worked but might not be. That is not mysterious, it is insufficient evidence. Kenji should do the survey. Until then: probably natural. Not certainly. Probably.

Of course we leave the question open -- science leaves everything open. The difference is the burden of proof, and it is on the person claiming construction. That is not closed-mindedness, it is epistemology. But I hear the passion, and I respect it. So let us find the truth: I am going to propose a survey to my institute. Detailed mapping, systematic sampling, photographs that document scale rigorously. If I am wrong I want to be wrong clearly. In the meantime I am comfortable saying: most likely this is beautiful columnar jointing in Miocene sandstone. Come dive with me when we do the survey. Maybe you will convince me. But I suspect what you will find is what I have found -- the stone is speaking clearly, it is just not saying what we want to hear.