[Oxymoron]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/201 ... ersiangulf

Veiled beneath the Persian Gulf, a once-fertile landmass may have supported some of the earliest humans outside Africa some 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, a new review of research suggests.

At its peak, the floodplain now below the Gulf would have been about the size of Great Britain, and then shrank as water began to flood the area. Then, about 8,000 years ago, the land would have been swallowed up by the Indian Ocean, the review scientist said.

[Prosthetic Conscience]

Not really 'Atlantis', is it?

well-built, permanent stone houses, long-distance trade networks, elaborately decorated pottery, domesticated animals, and even evidence for one of the oldest boats in the world

You may be pushing it to call that 'civilisation'. It sounds like Neolithic communities, but nothing that's "the earliest ever found" - just one of the oldest boats. The theory that the shore communities recently found didn't develop very fast, but had predecessors now undersea, sounds reasonable. And it's a nice suggestion that it could be the origin of the area's flood myths (better than the Black Sea flood, perhaps, since it's closer to the region of the oldest myths known). But it's always possible that such a myth just came from someone who knew about river floods, and had a good enough imagination to think "what if the whole world flooded?"

[Figlio di Moros]

It's possible the story was retold over countless generations, each w/ imagination, each aggandizing and exaggerating a bit until the predecessor myth was created.