You Don't Need Magic. Just Ice Age Sailors With Phoenecian-Level Navigation.

Randall keeps the argument grounded in Plato rather than speculation. What the dialogues describe is a maritime culture - one with navigational capabilities comparable to the Minoans or the Phoenicians, perhaps an order of magnitude beyond them. That is the baseline. Nothing supernatural. Just Ice Age seafarers who were very good at open water navigation.

From there the geography does much of the work. The Gulf Stream carries warm equatorial water northward and wraps it directly around the Azores. During the last Ice Age, when northern Europe and North America were locked under glaciers and most of the Atlantic coastline was brutally cold, that warm current would have made the Azores one of the most temperate and habitable locations in the entire North Atlantic.

Randall's point is precise. If you were going to hypothesise where a maritime civilisation might have established itself and thrived during the Ice Age - sheltered from glaciation, warmed by the Gulf Stream, positioned at the centre of Atlantic navigation routes - the Azores is not just a plausible candidate. It is the obvious one. You do not need to invoke lost technology or ancient aliens. You need to assume that someone, somewhere in the Ice Age, had learned to sail well enough to cross from Europe to a group of islands sitting in the warmest water in the North Atlantic.

Join Randall in the field for his upcoming Finger Lakes Tour, Aug 30 Sep 5, 2026