> many enlightenment thinkers, such as voltaire, thought that the origin of civilization could be found on the banks of the ganges and the indus. not only did indian myths attribute a fantastic antiquity to their culture, but linguists already knew that the languages of europe were not related to biblical hebrew, while the vast majority had a clear kinship with the so-called aryan languages of india and iran, and that of all the indo-european languages then known, the closest to the common root was sanskrit, the sacred language of ancient india. believing that india was indeed the oldest known civilization, bailly alluded to a supposedly very ancient series of hindu astronomical tablets, whose indications, in his view, suggested that they had been compiled not in south asia, but near the 49th parallel > to this he added zoroastrian legends according to which the ancestors of the iranians came from the north pole and the greek myth of the hyperboreans, a happy people who lived in a land with a mild climate beyond the north wind. he conceived a prehistory according to which atlantis had been located in the extreme north, in the norwegian archipelago of spitzbergen, when the world was warmer > nuclear fission and the radioactive decay processes that we now know keep the earth's interior warm had not yet been heard of (much less the hydrogen fusion process that keeps the sun warm). astronomers at the time thought that our planet had been steadily cooling from the lava ball it had been no more than a few tens of thousands of years ago. according to this idea, the world would have been much hotter a few millennia ago, and within a few more it would have frozen solid
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