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This is part two of a two-part Horizon series about the mystery of Easter Island, the stone statues, and the civilization that erected them.

On a winter night in 373 BC, the classical Greek city of Helike was destroyed by a massive earthquake and tidal wave. The entire city and all its inhabitants were lost beneath the sea. What has bewitched archaeologists about Helike is that it was engulfed just when ancient Greece was reaching its height; when the philosophy and art that inspired the western world for thousands of years were invented.

Horizon puts Graham Hancock's controversial theories about the past to the test, dissecting his evidence for a lost civilisation. Although scientists believe they have categorically disproved the myth of Atlantis, the idea is more popular now than ever before. The latest exponent of the theory of a single lost source for all civilisation, is Graham Hancock. Although he doesn't call it Atlantis, his compelling ideas about a sophisticated society destroyed in a flood 12,000 years ago seem to be based on a reworking of the original Atlantis myth, whose survivors brought culture, religion, monument-building and civilisation to the rest of the world. Divers at the Yonaguni formation It considers the idea that either Antarctica or an extraordinary underwater site at Yonaguni in Japan were the original home of these vanished people. In a film full of contentious debate and powerful arguments, Graham Hancock's claims are pitted against cutting edge scientific analysis to discover whether his popular theory could be true.

A remarkable find in the Northern Territory, Australia, has opened a fierce debate on the prehistory of humans. The date of the find, if correct, dramatically pushes back the date at which people began to create art and language, and triples the date of occupation of Australia. It is, however, strongly contended... Enormous sculpted boulders, described by Australian scientists Richard Fullagar and Paul Tacon as similar in concept to Stonehenge, and thousands of detailed circular engravings have been dated by them at around 75,000 years old, with stone tools dating back to 176,000 years. It seems that human evolution has many more unanswered questions than we previously thought...