NARRATOR: Mediterranean Sea, 6,000 BC--
a wall of water taller than the Statue of Liberty races
across the sea.
[music playing]
The tsunami crashes into the coasts of three continents.
[music playing]
Millions of tons of seawater wash ashore
at more than 30 miles an hour.
It sounds like a freight train coming.
So if you know something about tsunamis, you know what to do.
And that's-- that's run.
[water crashing]
A cheetah would be lucky to outrun this wave.
A person really has no chance.
[water crashing]
NARRATOR: Ancient coastal settlements
are obliterated in an instant.
Sea water penetrates four miles inland.
The water level just starts to rise.
And next thing you know, you have
this entire torrent of a river running through the streets
of your town.
From their perspective, it would have just
happened instantaneously, without any knowledge
that it was coming at all.
NARRATOR: Within hours, the storm has devastated
villages for hundreds of miles.
The entire eastern Mediterranean is in ruins.
8,000 years ago, the sort of architecture and engineering
you saw would have just been obliterated by a tsunami.
[water crashing]
Even today, we see modern buildings,
steel-reinforced concrete just being razed
by the power of these waves.
So you can imagine a prehistoric stone building
or a prehistoric wooden structure,
it would have just been like a paper box, just destroyed.
NARRATOR: As in 2004, it is believed
the waves from the ancient tsunami penetrated far inland.
That is the big problem with the tsunami-- just don't stop.
It's just a never-ending wave that goes in.
So if you have a plain, a very flat land,
then a tsunami can move inland by many, many miles.
We've seen that in 2004.
The tsunami flooded about six miles inland.
[music playing]
NARRATOR: Could the scene of destruction inflicted
upon southeast Asia have been a repeat
of what happened in the Mediterranean 8,000 years
before?
Could this ancient storm also have obliterated thousands
of miles of coastline?
Survivors in Thailand said there was no warning
of the impending disaster.
11,000 people or more--
NARRATOR: Unlike the 2004 tsunami, where
the immense destruction and plight of its victims
were documented for the world to see,
this ancient storm unleashed its destruction
long before recorded history.
The victims and the scale of this prehistoric mega storm
are a mystery.
[non-english speech]
INTERPRETER: The speed of a landslide coming from a volcano
collapse can be very high.
This can mean more than 200 miles per hour, which can be
compared to a Formula One car.
That's an incredibly fast speed.
And it's really, really very fast.
For a huge hunk of debris the size of Manhattan
to be sliding down a mountain that speed
is just a colossal event.
[water crashing]
NARRATOR: They now know both the size of the landslide
and how quickly it hurtled into the sea.
With those two key pieces of evidence,
Italian scientist Maria Teresa Pareschi and her team
are able to create a computer model of the tsunami.
For the first time in 8,000 years,
they can see the storm that raced across the Mediterranean.
[water crashing]
The landslide creates initial waves 165 feet tall.
The first area hit is southern Italy,
pummeled with a 10-story-tall wall of water.
If you could have a 165-foot wave created,
it would be a huge monster.
And it is like a wall, like a cement wall
coming at you on the beach.
The impact of that amount of water
could only possibly be related to the amount
of force of an atomic bomb.
[bomb exploding]
NARRATOR: According to the model,
waves from the ancient tsunami would have reached
as high as 165 feet, larger than any wave in the 2004
Indian Ocean tsunami.
MAN: [non-english speech].
In 2004, there was about a 90-foot
wave at its peak height.
And looking along the coast, you can see basically all
the vegetation and the towns and villages
and everything that were there were removed.
[water crashing]
So a wave that was double that height
would be about double the effect.
NARRATOR: The simulation shows that after hammering Italy,
the ancient tsunami would have raced on
toward Greece and Libya, hitting those coasts
with waves 40 feet tall.
The tsunami would have roared ashore
and penetrated far inland.
You know, imagine the Mississippi
running through the streets of your town,
taking with it everything.
And if you're a person who gets swept into the water,
your situation is very dire.
NARRATOR: But the tsunami did not stop at Libya and Greece.
The model estimates the ancient storm would have been
powerful enough to reach the shores of the Middle East,
more than 1,200 miles from Sicily.
One of the most destructive forces of the tsunami
is the element of surprise.
If this tsunami arrives while you're
sleeping at night, when you're unaware,
it'll just wash you away.
You can drown right in your own home.
NARRATOR: At Atlit Yam, archeologists
had found a huge cache of fish which
had been caught and then prepared by villagers
for consumption or trade.
[music playing]
Instead, the fish were abandoned.
[non-english speech].
INTERPRETER: The Neolithic Era was not
a consumerist one like today.
Such valuable goods could not be thrown away.
And that leads us to believe that all the goods
were suddenly abandoned.
[music playing]
NARRATOR: Archaeologists also discovered
human remains with fractures and missing
teeth, injuries Pareschi says are
common among tsunami victims.
[non-english speech].
INTERPRETER: In 2004, the deaths were caused not only due
to drowning, but also to violent strikes
from objects that were transported by the tsunami
and struck people.
[water crashing]
NARRATOR: Divers also discover some human remains randomly
scattered about the site, a contrast
to the formal graves located in other parts of the village.
[non-english speech]
INTERPRETER: Normally, the dead bodies of a Neolithic village
would have been buried.
We think that some of these scattered bones
may be bodies of tsunami victims.
[music playing]
NARRATOR: With each piece of evidence,
Pareschi becomes more convinced that a tsunami, triggered
off the coast of Sicily 8,000 years ago,
raced 1,200 miles across the Mediterranean
and struck this ancient village.
[music playing]
But not everyone is convinced.
The tsunami hypothesis is fascinating.
It's a very, very interesting scenario.
And it is possible the potential hazard was there.
But we cannot say by the archaeological
evidence that it did happen.
NARRATOR: Ehud Galili, the underwater archaeologist who
founded Atlit Yam, is skeptical that a tsunami
is responsible for the settlement's demise.
When the village was occupied, little by little,
sea level have risen.
We can estimate that the living conditions became so bad
in the region of the village that they
couldn't live there anymore.
[music playing]
We don't have any archaeological evidence that can hint to this.
But we estimate that little by little, families left there.
[music playing]
NARRATOR: Pareschi acknowledges her skeptics,
but remains confident her tsunami theory is correct.
[non-english speech].
INTERPRETER: Perhaps each discovery,
each piece of evidence can be justified differently.
But these same occurrences could also be linked
to a single cause, the tsunami.
Proving something without a doubt
in science is always difficult. In geology,
it's virtually impossible.
So what we find instead, is-- is a lot of disconnected bits
of evidence.
Then we say, well, it's much more likely that this happened.
But-- but smoking guns are rare.