Malta's cart ruts could be simply a relic of stone age agricultural enterprise and not tracks leading to Atlantis, according to a report carried in The Guardian newspaper.

Archaeologist Claudia Sagona, from Birmingham University, inspired by the evidence of the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland, has demolished both the myths and the conventional explanations about the cart ruts.

Like Stonehenge and Avebury, the Maltese temples are magnets for alternative theories and new age believers, who see the island as a centre of goddess worship and the builders as creators of solar, lunar or star observatories, the newspaper reports.

Because in places the tracks plunge into the sea they have also been embraced as evidence that Malta was the lost Atlantis.

The conventional explanation has been that the ruts were worn by heavy carts or sledges, moving tons of stone miles across the landscape. However, there are problems with this theory since the tracks continue up steep slopes, across deep fissures and chasms and to sheer cliff faces.

At an international conference in Malta recently, Dr Sagona suggested that as thunderstorms and torrential rain washed away up to a metre of soil from exposed sites, the farmers 6,000 years ago were struggling to feed a growing population from the scarce poor soil of islands which are basically solid rock.

Her clue came from the Aran Islands, where generations of farmers created fertile fields out of sand and rotted seaweed, protected by dry stone walls, through generations of backbreaking work.

Dr Sagona suggested the Maltese farmers built up similar fields and also scored channels into the rock to channel away and save rainwater and protect the precious soil.

Her theory could also explain the greatest mystery on Malta: What happened to the temple builders who appeared 7,000 years ago and who over the next 3,000 years manipulated slabs of limestone into temples?

Dr Sagona believes the farmers had pushed agriculture to its limits so that minor climate change could have caused catastrophic crop failures.

"It may be that where we see cart ruts we are seeing failed and abandoned fields," Dr Sagona said.

Only recently, a new publication challenged the theory that Malta was Atlantis and claimed instead that the fabled city lies off the southern tip of Cyprus.