Late-Pleistocene Pacific Maritime Superculture: Ecology, Engineering, and Collapse

During the late Pleistocene, lowered sea levels created vast and resource-rich coastal plains around the Pacific Rim. These stable environments fostered long-term peace, professional specialization, and the emergence of shared technological grammars expressed in stoneworking, navigation, and settlement design. As glacial conditions intensified, abundance gave way to compression, mobility shifted from exploration to necessity, and once-continuous maritime networks fragmented under ecological stress. The subsequent Holocene sea-level rise drowned the coastal heartlands of these communities, erasing harbors, workshops, and population centers while preserving only inland industrial and ritual megaliths as residual signatures. Interdisciplinary evidence—from paleogeography, submerged archaeology, craft transmission, genetics, and seafaring traditions—suggests that these patterns are more parsimoniously explained by a distributed maritime superculture than by independent invention. This paper proposes a testable framework to evaluate that possibility.