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“When the mace-heads were excavated in China, some of them were mistaken for strange weapons or spindles,” said Li. The Aymara people of the Bolivian highlands have long told stories of a lost underwater city: Wanaku, the Atlantis of South America. They have whispered tales of a mysterious island in Lake Titicaca, the world's highest navigable lake, with a hidden entrance to underground passageways built by the Inca. Now researchers have found the first concrete evidence that those legends may be true. In August, divers with the Italian firm of Akakor Geographical Exploring conducted a series of 250 dives in Titicaca's murky waters. Led by a 2300-foot-long ancient road, now under water, they found the remains of a 660-foot-long and 160-foot-wide stone temple between 65 tol00 feet below the water's surface. The team also discovered a terrace, a 2600-foot-long containing wall, along with a stone anchor, vases, and bones from cameloid animals such as llama or alpaca that may have been killed in a ritual sacrifice. The ruins lie in the waters between Bolivia's Copacabana Peninsula and Isla del Sol, home to the Tem- ple of the Sun, where the Incan dynasty is said to have been born. They date to between 1,500 and 1,000 years ago, before the rise of the Incan Empire, when the Tiahuanaco people occupied the shores of Titi- caca. The submerged ruins may be the remains of the Aymara's legendary city, or could have been assimilated by the Inca Empire itself. “The underground passageways were reputed to link many parts of the Incan Empire with the capital at Cossack,” says head diver Stefano Castelli. “Somebody else said he removed a stone from the bottom of the lake, and saw water going down inside the hole.” An astonishing number of previously unknown relatives are turning up in the human family scrapbook, as archaeologists dig up the remains of long-lost great-great-uncles and aunts who once shared our planet. The fossils of three more ancient ancestors were reported this year. Scientists have now identi- fied at least 17 prehuman species that once walked on Earth. The skulls and bones of more than 5,000 archaic individuals have been found, some dating more than 5 million years, according to Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution. The latest find, reported earlier this month, appears to introduce the earliest members of our family tree yet discovered — a colony of 5.5 million-year-old forest dwellers living in what is now Ethiopia. Their remains share features common to both apes and humans. Thanks to the rapid pace of discovery, the number of known or suspected human ancestors has almost doubled since the 1980s. Experts have been forced to rewrite their textbooks and encyclopedias. The old idea of a straight line of evolution leading steadily upward from apes to shaggy cavemen to clean-shaven Wall Street brokers has been abandoned. “Our evolutionary history now looks more like a tangled bush than a simple tree,” Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist at University College, London, wrote in the journal Nature. Some of these vanished species were “immensely successful,” Potts reports in his book, “Humanity's Descent.” One line, called Homo erectus, survived for almost 2 million years — at least 10 times longer 293 Appendix D: Scientific Evidence South American Atlantis By Kathy A. Svitil Ancient Skeletons Expand Man's Past By Robert S. Boyd (Knight Ridder Newspapers) A Tangled Family tree Atlantis, Alien Visitation, and Genetic Manipulation