The Ancient Nephite City of Tiahuanacu – Part V

As shown in the last posts, modern scientists claim Tiwanaku is 15,000 years old based upon their findings of animal depictions, ancient seashore lines, seaport wharves and docks, and misalignment of astronomical sightings. However, as stated in the last post, there is a simpler, far more accurate understanding of these findings than to create an unknown and unproven event thousands of years ago in a so-called Pleistocene extinction and sinking of Atlantis.

First of all, animal depictions of a so-called Pleistoceneera Cuverionius, called a toxodon, is highly imaginative, and in drawings of the ancient Peruvians look as much like an elephant as any other animal known to man. However, since elephants are not a common idea to the Andean area, scientists look for some extinct animal rather than a more common elephant—the animal the Jaredites brought to the Land of Promise. Of course, we do not know exactly what the Jaredite elephants looked like, and may have been some early from of the later animal we know, just as the camelids llama and alpaca are another form of the camel.

Secondly, the tilted seashore lines, the seaport and wharves, are more easily identified with the fact that Tiwanaku was once a seaport at sea level, where the Atlantic Ocean, as Charles Darwin claimed, reached the eastern side of what is now the Andes, which according to him, were at sea level in very recent times. Thus, Tiwanaku was a seaport where hundreds of ships could dock, the wharves built of solid rock slabs now scattered over the landscape. From here the Nephites in early times could have sailed along the East Sea in “their shipping” (Helaman 3:14).

Thirdly, this leads to the understanding that Tiwanaku, once at sea level and now at 12,500 feet, was part of the cataclysm depicted in 3 Nephi when a 3-hour earthquake struck the area and the Andes mountains, “whose height is great” were raised to their present height and the land beyond, which was once underwater, to lift the full continent of South America out of the sea and form the present configuration of the land. While geologists all agree that at one time the area east of the Andes was once under water, and the deep sea drilling rig Glomar Challenger proved that the Isthmus of Panama was once not connected to South America above water, the difference is in the time frame. The book “Scientific Fallacies and Other Myths” shows conclusively how these time periods match the occurrences described in 3 Nephi.

This two-mile movement upward of Tiwanaku obviously threw structures out of alignment, as well as toppling blocks of stone weighing over 100 tons, and some over 200 tons, leaving them scattered over the ground. For this cataclysm to have happened, the geologic lifting of the land east of the present Andes would have caused a tidal wave of some proportions moving inland toward what was the shore of the East Sea, flooding cities and villages along the eastern shore of the land, such as Jerusalem, Onihah and Mocum, which were covered with water (3 Nephi 9:7). This also shows why Tiwanaku was covered with lime deposits and silt, and how a gigantic wave struck the entire city, without having to create an unknown cataclysmic event during some so-called prehistoric period.

Finally, if Tiwanaku is the city depicted in the Book of Mormon as Jerusalem, it matches the events described by archaeologists that befell Tiwanaku.

(See the next post, “The Ancient Nephite City of Tiahuanacu – Part VI,” to see the construction and placement of the city complex)