The Drowned Corridor Reconstructing Deep-Time Maritime Knowledge Along the Pacific Rim

This paper (Downloadable at Zenodo) explores whether similarities in Pacific Rim megalithic engineering, maritime traditions, and coastal settlement logic may reflect a coherent late-Pleistocene maritime superculture rather than isolated regional developments. During the Last Glacial Maximum, lowered sea levels created extensive, resource-rich coastal plains that supported long-term stability, professional specialization, and shared technological heuristics. As climate conditions deteriorated, these interconnected communities fragmented, and the rapid sea-level rise of the early Holocene drowned most coastal heartlands, leaving only inland quarries, terraces, and megalithic works as surviving traces. Synthesizing paleogeography, submerged archaeology, craft transmission studies, navigation traditions, genetics, and comparative engineering, this paper outlines a testable framework for evaluating the possibility of a distributed Pacific Rim civilization ecology. The aim is not to assert a definitive model but to open a structured inquiry into a plausible, underexplored pattern in human prehistory.