This book radically changes the conventional view of prehistory by locating the lost `Eden' - the cradle of civilisation - not in the Middle East, but in Southeast Asia. At the end of the Ice Age, a catastrophic rise in sea level drowned the coastal cultures and continental shelf of Southeast Asia. Using evidence from oceanography, archaeology, linguistics, genetics and comparative mythology, Oppenheimer argues that it was this flood-driven population dispersal that fertilised the cultures of China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Crete.