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Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My

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Speaker 1: name is Joe McCormick. Today is Saturday, so we're reaching

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Speaker 1: into the vault for an older episode of the show.

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Speaker 1: This one originally published November twenty eighth, twenty twenty three,

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Speaker 1: and it's part one of our series called The Sunken Lands.

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Speaker 2: Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production

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Speaker 2: of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 3: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name

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Speaker 3: is Robert.

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Speaker 1: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And in today's episode,

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Speaker 1: we're going to be kicking off a series that we're

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Speaker 1: calling The Sunken Lands that is about the idea of

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Speaker 1: lands submerged under waters. Now, not too long ago, we

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Speaker 1: did a series of episodes on the tendency. People have

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Speaker 1: to quite readily interpret any weird looking, low resolution photograph

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Speaker 1: as evidence of our highly speculative theory of choice, whatever

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Speaker 1: you like. So here's a picture of a shape that

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Speaker 1: maybe doesn't look organic in origin, so it is evidence

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Speaker 1: of an alien spacecraft that crash landed on our planet

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Speaker 1: five thousand years ago. But then, as we discussed in

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Speaker 1: that series, often if you're able to get a higher

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Speaker 1: resolution image of the same object, or just get more

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Speaker 1: contextual information. Oh wait, it's actually a rock. But one

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Speaker 1: very popular genre of imagery for this exercise is underwater photography.

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Speaker 1: It happens with, you know, images of things in the

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Speaker 1: sky as well or things just obscured in various contexts,

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Speaker 1: But underwater photography is especially juicy here, I think because

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Speaker 1: the conditions of underwater photography naturally lend themselves to the

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Speaker 1: kind of tantalized state of low information that sets our

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Speaker 1: imagination running wild. Unlets you fill in the gaps with

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Speaker 1: whatever you were excited about. And when the weird looking

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Speaker 1: thing is underwater, the highly speculative theory people used to

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Speaker 1: explain it might still be aliens, as we discussed in

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Speaker 1: the example of one underwater object, probably a glacial erratic

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Speaker 1: boulder that people did in some cases interpret as a

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Speaker 1: crashed alien spacecraft. But another common explanation for weird looking

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Speaker 1: things underwater is the sunken civilization, most often Atlantis, but

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Speaker 1: there are other candidates as well, and the idea of

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Speaker 1: a lost civilization vanished under the sea is so captivating

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Speaker 1: to people it is hard to resist the urge to

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Speaker 1: see an underwater rock with sharp corners and say that's

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Speaker 1: not a rock, that's a building. This is one of

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Speaker 1: their ancient skyscrapers, and now it's hidden under the waves.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, it's basically the same energy, but in a different

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Speaker 3: temporal direction. Instead of looking to aliens from beyond, you're

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Speaker 3: looking for some sort of advance to civilization from the

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Speaker 3: past that may or may not match up with realistic

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Speaker 3: expectations of.

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Speaker 1: The past right now. Of course, in some limited cases,

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Speaker 1: there are examples of human artifacts or human built edifices

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Speaker 1: that can be found underneath the water. Now we'll probably

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Speaker 1: talk about some of those examples, but in most cases

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Speaker 1: we can say with pretty high confidence that the things

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Speaker 1: people are looking at in these images are not even

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Speaker 1: intelligently designed artifacts. It's usually like a rock or some

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Speaker 1: kind of undersea creature, something like that. And for various

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Speaker 1: reasons that we might get into, even if what you

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Speaker 1: find under the water was designed by humans, there are

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Speaker 1: strong reasons for doubting anybody who says, aha, we have

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Speaker 1: discovered Atlantis.

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Speaker 3: Rob.

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Speaker 1: I don't know if you want to talk about this

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Speaker 1: now or later, but there are reasons for thinking Plato's

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Speaker 1: allegory of Atlantis was maybe not even meant to refer

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Speaker 1: to an actually existing place, or if there, or if

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Speaker 1: it was, there's no reason to think that it's anything

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Speaker 1: more than a legend, that it's like a thing we

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Speaker 1: should actually be looking for on Earth.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, let's let's get back to Atlantis in just a second.

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Speaker 3: That we could easily devote an entire podcaster more to

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Speaker 3: just chasing the idea of Atlantis around, but we'll try

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Speaker 3: and keep it contained.

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Speaker 1: But while all of that is true, while Atlantis hunting

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Speaker 1: is probably a misguided exercise, it's also true that there

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Speaker 1: actually are some places on planet Earth where what is

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Speaker 1: now the seafloor was relatively recently land land that could

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Speaker 1: have been or in some cases was occupied by humans.

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Speaker 1: And so that's what we want to talk about in

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Speaker 1: this series, places on Earth that are now under the

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Speaker 1: waves but were once part of the world above.

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Speaker 3: And while we're mostly I guess talking like that, we

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Speaker 3: talk about the waves, we think about it land as

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Speaker 3: we think about the ocean. But we may also touch

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Speaker 3: on some examples that have been lost underneath rivers or lakes,

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Speaker 3: sometimes with man made lakes in play. But perhaps we'll

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Speaker 3: come back to that in another episode.

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Speaker 1: Oh that's a good variation. Yes, Now, one thing to

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Speaker 1: be clear about is that part of what makes these

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Speaker 1: sunken lands interesting is merely a question of time. Because

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Speaker 1: of course Earth is geologically active. It has a dynamic surface,

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Speaker 1: and over millions of years, the crust of the Earth

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Speaker 1: undergoes changes. There's continental drift, there are all kinds of

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Speaker 1: changes that happen to the crust of the earth. Areas

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Speaker 1: that were formerly exposed are buried. Areas that were formerly

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Speaker 1: buried are exposed. Areas that used to be ocean become land,

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Speaker 1: Areas that used to be land become ocean. So we

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Speaker 1: know that happens on a geological time scale. What we're

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Speaker 1: talking about here are lands that have become covered in

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Speaker 1: water relatively recently, maybe on the order of thousands of

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Speaker 1: years or even less. Yeah.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, So we have these basic geologic realities to keep

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Speaker 3: in mind, but then we see them reflected in different

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Speaker 3: ways in our folklore, our mythology, our religion. Like even

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Speaker 3: if you weren't if you were, if you somehow avoided

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Speaker 3: any scientific inquiry, in any scientific understanding about these changes,

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Speaker 3: you would perhaps be exposed then to religious ideas about

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Speaker 3: these changes. The various religious and mythological ideas that go

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Speaker 3: way back in multiple different faiths, involving global or regional

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Speaker 3: flooding that is attributed to divine causation in many cases.

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Speaker 3: So given all of this, though again it should come

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Speaker 3: as no shock that just the mere idea of sunken islands,

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Speaker 3: lost islands, phantom islands, lost continents, et cetera, this has

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Speaker 3: long stirred the human imagination, and a lot has been

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Speaker 3: written on this. But interestingly enough, one of the more

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Speaker 3: like well regarded to books on this, now it's a

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Speaker 3: slightly older book, came out, I believe, nineteen fifty four,

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Speaker 3: so it doesn't reflect, you know, decades upon decades of

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Speaker 3: additional contemplation and discovery. But L. Sprague de Camp, who

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Speaker 3: of nineteen oh seven through two thousand wrote a book

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Speaker 3: titled Lost Continents The Atlantis Theme in History, science, and Literature. Now,

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Speaker 3: De Camp is an interesting fellow because he was also

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Speaker 3: an influential sci fi author, whose works include nineteen thirty

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Speaker 3: nine's Less Darkness Fall. He was also a posthumous collaborator

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Speaker 3: with Conan creator Robert E. Howard, so he actually contributed

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Speaker 3: quite a bit to the literary world of Conan the Barbarian,

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Speaker 3: And interestingly enough, he served as an advisor on both

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Speaker 3: nineteen eighties Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer movies,

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Speaker 3: as well as nineteen ninety seven's Cole of a Conqueror,

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Speaker 3: which does not have Arnold in it, but is an

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Speaker 3: adaptation of a Conan novel.

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Speaker 1: Idea is okay, so that's the one that's got Kevin.

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Speaker 3: Sorbo and right right, Kevin Sorbo. But in these hercules, yeah,

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Speaker 3: so they I think it was based on a Conan novel,

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Speaker 3: but then they just changed his name to Cull the Conqueror,

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Speaker 3: who's another character in Robert Y Howard's world. But I'm

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Speaker 3: not super familiar with this movie or this other character.

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Speaker 1: I've never seen that one. But my mind is aroused

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Speaker 1: at the thoughts of scripts that Schwarzenegger said no to.

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Speaker 3: Now, it is worth noting that Roberty Howard was one

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Speaker 3: of numerous Pulp era authors to make use of lost

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Speaker 3: and sunken islands, and a lot of this, you know,

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Speaker 3: does have to do as sort of the timeline of

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Speaker 3: interest in these fantastic ideas. I'll touch on a few

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Speaker 3: other examples from the pulp era in just a minute,

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Speaker 3: but in this book, de Camp discusses it at length,

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Speaker 3: this idea of human fascination, literary, pseudohistorical, pseudo geogological, various

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Speaker 3: interests in this idea of lost lands, lost continents, etc.

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Speaker 3: And he points out that a lot of it comes

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Speaker 3: back to this idea of a lost land that is

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Speaker 3: often situated as some sort of utopia. It's a utopian ideal,

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Speaker 3: or where it's an eden. It is a place where

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Speaker 3: where we got it right, or things were right before

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Speaker 3: the fall. You know, this idea that Okay, things are

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Speaker 3: not great, but there must have been a point in

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Speaker 3: time where things were in balance. And of course, and

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Speaker 3: in summoning this idea, there is at least implied the

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Speaker 3: idea that we might be able to return to it,

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Speaker 3: either by our own efforts or by some sort of

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Speaker 3: divine intervention.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's interesting and that that's correct. A

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Speaker 1: lot of these stories about sunken lands and the civilizations

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Speaker 1: that inhabited them, I guess there are some exceptions, but

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Speaker 1: they don't usually seem to be well, this is just

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Speaker 1: another place like many others, you know, that was just

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Speaker 1: happened to be low lying and was swallowed by the waves,

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Speaker 1: or there was some kind of weather event. It almost

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Speaker 1: always is idealized in some way. It's a place that

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Speaker 1: is especially good or especially advanced, or especially bad in

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Speaker 1: some way.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, and yet in some manner or another, this place

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Speaker 3: ties it all together, Which comes back to so many

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Speaker 3: of these these threads that we've discussed in conspiracy thinking

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Speaker 3: and and so forth, the idea that like, Okay, I

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Speaker 3: have found something, and if true, and of course I

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Speaker 3: believe it is true, it will explain all these other mysteries. Yeah,

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Speaker 3: you know, you drop this in the middle of everything,

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Speaker 3: and it all makes sense. It's the master key.

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Speaker 1: Yes.

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Speaker 3: So I don't really want to do an exhaustive list

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Speaker 3: of every mythical and fictional sunken land. I mean, there's

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Speaker 3: just there's a lot there, and a lot of them

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Speaker 3: are also closely connected. I mean just in fantasy alone.

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Speaker 3: It's like who anybody engaging in some broad world building

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Speaker 3: is going to have perhaps in Atlantis or at least

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Speaker 3: a lost land. I mean, it's just it's too attractive

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Speaker 3: a trope to give up on, right, But I thought

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Speaker 3: we might hit some notable examples in the three or

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Speaker 3: four categories you might consider mythology, fiction, pseudoscience. But I

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Speaker 3: do want to note that some entries will move between

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Speaker 3: these classifications because once once you introduce an idea and

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Speaker 3: other folks will come and and use it may be

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Speaker 3: drifted into another category. So in mythology, I thought I

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Speaker 3: might mention Avalon, of course, the magical island where King

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Speaker 3: Arthur was taken, taken after sustaining mortal wounds. It's also

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Speaker 3: the origin place of his sword EXCaliber, and in general

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Speaker 3: just a magical land of Authorian legend, possibly linked in

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Speaker 3: origin to Fadimorgana or Glastonbury Tor. Note that this isn't

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Speaker 3: even the only sunken island in Authorian legend, though there

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Speaker 3: are there are others. It's just like an irresistible magical idea,

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Speaker 3: though again one that that may be rooted in strange observations.

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Speaker 3: Islands that seem to be there but are not that

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Speaker 3: are you know, fatam Organa, that are due to an

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Speaker 3: illusion of one sort or another, or just a mistake

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Speaker 3: of cartography, of trying to figure out what's out there

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Speaker 3: and making mistakes.

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Speaker 1: Both direct perceptual illusions and knowledge illusions give rise to

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Speaker 1: the idea of islands that used to be there, but

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Speaker 1: now you can't find them right.

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Speaker 3: And then, of course in the background, again the geologic

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Speaker 3: reality that things do change, and it is perhaps not

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Speaker 3: beyond the realm of possibility that a lost island could

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Speaker 3: truly be lost. It could have been a physical place

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Speaker 3: and is no more. Another one is Brazil or High Brazil.

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Speaker 3: This has generally nothing to do with Brazil, the South

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Speaker 3: American country. This is an Irish lost isle of myth,

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Speaker 3: a phantom island that is covered by myst most of

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Speaker 3: the year, but then that mist opens up. Sometimes featured

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Speaker 3: on old maps and was sought after by cartographers because

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Speaker 3: again you have anytime you have this idea of an

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Speaker 3: island that is thought to exist, and then it seems

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Speaker 3: like it doesn't exist. I mean, that's a mystery that

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Speaker 3: has to be explored. Now. It doesn't have to be

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Speaker 3: an island, of course, you can also have coastal areas

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Speaker 3: that are swallowed up. There's a mythical city in the

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Speaker 3: traditions of Brittany and France. And I may be pronouncing

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Speaker 3: this one wrong. Yes, I believe it's ys. I assume

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Speaker 3: it's not Wise, but anyway, allegedly consumed by the ocean,

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Speaker 3: and it's featured into a number of creative works, especially

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Speaker 3: in French traditions. But of course the whole other realm

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Speaker 3: is fiction, of course, and once something has been introduced

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Speaker 3: in myth, given enough time, it may enter into fiction.

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Speaker 3: And this leads us to Atlantis, as we've already discussed. Yeah,

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Speaker 3: the lost continent of Atlantis, so called, has a prominent

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Speaker 3: place in pseudo science and conspiracy thinking and fiction. Among

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Speaker 3: the many entries here, I have to point out a

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Speaker 3: couple of things from nineteen eighty two. One I've brought

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Speaker 3: up many times before, but if you have not seen

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Speaker 3: the commercial for Atari's Atlantis video game from nineteen eighty two,

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Speaker 3: to look it up. It's marvelous. I think I saw

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Speaker 3: this when I was like four years old, and it

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Speaker 3: scared and amazed me.

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Speaker 1: Rarely does a thirty second TV commercial have such a

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Speaker 1: bone chilling plot twist it does.

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Speaker 3: They really packed a lot into this one. I have

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Speaker 3: no idea if the game was fun at the time

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Speaker 3: or is well remembered as like a retro experience. But

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Speaker 3: as I was revisiting this, because anytime this comes up,

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Speaker 3: I have to go rewatch it. And then I discovered,

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Speaker 3: weirdly enough that the brothers Hildebrand did a wall calendar

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Speaker 3: of original art themed around Atlantis the same year, and

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Speaker 3: I kept thinking, well, these have to be connected. There

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Speaker 3: must have been some connective tissue here. If there is,

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Speaker 3: I couldn't find it. But I love the Brother's Hilda brand.

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Speaker 3: They did, of course, a lot of great Tolkien work,

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Speaker 3: and they did Tolkien calendars back in the day. And yeah,

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Speaker 3: they have this one calendar of Atlantis art with all

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Speaker 3: sorts of like fantastic adventures going on, some sort of

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Speaker 3: like demon Lord, a drag and so forth. So many

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Speaker 3: people don't realize that their origins are of Atlantis are

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Speaker 3: also based in fiction. You go back to around three

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Speaker 3: fifty five BCE. That's when Greek philosopher Plato discusses the

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Speaker 3: concept of Atlantis in a pair of dialogues Tomaeus and Critias.

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Speaker 3: Atlantis is described as a naval empire that rules the

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Speaker 3: western known world, but they ultimately fail when they come

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Speaker 3: up against the Athenians. Then they fall out of favor

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Speaker 3: with the gods, and their world is consumed by the

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Speaker 3: Atlantic Ocean. It's described along the lines as being like

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Speaker 3: the ideal of Plato's Republic. But here's the thing. There's

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Speaker 3: no other surviving mention of Atlantis in the ancient Mediterranean world,

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Speaker 3: aside from commentaries and responses to Plato's work. So, in

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Speaker 3: other words, there's no indication that this was a pre

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Speaker 3: existing idea, that this was something that was considered actual history,

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Speaker 3: or even like a pre existing I guess you would

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Speaker 3: say literary trope.

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Speaker 1: Right so, it's not even clear that it was thought

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Speaker 1: to actually be a place.

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Speaker 3: Right now, among those various commentators over many years, it

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Speaker 3: looks like many took it as med of metaphor and

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Speaker 3: or as myth, though you do have some folks that

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Speaker 3: pop up that end up taking a more literal approach

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Speaker 3: to it, or so it seems, based again on surviving texts.

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Speaker 3: As such, you end up with a legacy of varying interpretations,

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Speaker 3: which de Camp summarizes is either taking it on as

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Speaker 3: a fiction, finding actual societies that you can compare to Atlantis,

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Speaker 3: the investigation of land bridges and islands with Atlantis in mind,

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Speaker 3: and also just the wholesale acceptance of the concept as

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Speaker 3: historical truth. And of course this approach especially is widely

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Speaker 3: regarded as pseudohistory at the very least now. Again, though,

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Speaker 3: just because something is introduced in fiction doesn't mean it

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Speaker 3: stays in fiction like these. That's one of the interesting

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Speaker 3: things about this, and I guess in general about about

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Speaker 3: human imagination is once something has has been imagined, it

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Speaker 3: doesn't have to stay in that realm of sort of

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Speaker 3: safe unreal and fiction. It can move into other categories

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Speaker 3: of the unreal, the mythological, the uh you know, the

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Speaker 3: pseudo scientific, the pseudohistorical, the pseudo archaeological, et cetera.

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Speaker 1: I have to wonder if in thousands of years they're

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Speaker 1: going to be people being like, uh, you know when

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Speaker 1: Tolkien talked about the elves going to Vallen or across

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Speaker 1: the ocean? Uh, was that referring to the island of Cuba?

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Speaker 3: Do you think, yeah, exactly, And you do end up

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Speaker 3: with that sort of inquiry. I mean in part of that,

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Speaker 3: of course, too, is you have someone like Plato who

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Speaker 3: has such high standing and sort of the intellectual world

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Speaker 3: for centuries and centuries. You know, people are going to

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Speaker 3: come back and and reanalyze everything that they wrote. Now,

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Speaker 3: in terms of fiction, I will just mention in passing

308
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Speaker 3: like a few examples. I love the work of Clark

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Speaker 3: Ashton Smith, and a lot of his stories involved lost continents.

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Speaker 3: I think he has three different lost continents, well, though

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Speaker 3: one of them is a continent from the future that

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Speaker 3: doesn't exist now, So it's sort of kind of again,

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Speaker 3: kind of the same concept, but put in reverse, taking

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Speaker 3: into the future and saying in the future there will

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Speaker 3: be a new continent and these are the sort of

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Speaker 3: adventures that will take place there. And of course J R.

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Speaker 3: Tolkien got in on the action as well. We have

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Speaker 3: the lost Kingdom of Middle Earth Numanor. This was corrupted

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Speaker 3: by Sauron in his fair form, and then it's destroyed

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Speaker 3: in a cataclysm as the kingdom turns against the valor.

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Speaker 1: Oh is Newmanor swallowed by waters. I never understood that,

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Speaker 1: I guess I just thought of it as like an

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Speaker 1: empire that fell.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like a star shaped island, I believe, according

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Speaker 3: to the maps and the recent Amazon series, I believe

326
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Speaker 3: depicts the fall of Numanor. I'm having trouble remembering offhand.

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Speaker 3: I need to revisit it before they put out another season.

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Speaker 1: I guess I haven't watched that yet, but I've been

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Speaker 1: meaning to check it out at some point.

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Speaker 3: High production values, yeah, now in the pseudoscientific world, and

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Speaker 3: again there's a lot of overlap with these these sort

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Speaker 3: of loose categories. You have the island of MoU. This

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00:19:24,760 --> 00:19:27,840
Speaker 3: is both a place of pseudoscience and fantasy, according to

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Speaker 3: de Camp, proposed in the nineteenth century by British American

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Speaker 3: archaeologist and photographer Augustus Leplogion, who used it to connect

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Speaker 3: Mayan civilization to ancient Egyptian civilization. Again, this is one

337
00:19:41,160 --> 00:19:44,960
Speaker 3: of those classic examples of like, if this exists, it

338
00:19:45,000 --> 00:19:48,520
Speaker 3: explains everything, and getting into this idea of like, well, look,

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Speaker 3: we have things in Mayan civilization, we have things in

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Speaker 3: ancient Egyptian civilization. They remind me of each other. There

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Speaker 3: must be some like missing link to connect them. Otherwise

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Speaker 3: this doesn't make sense to me.

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Speaker 1: They both built pyramids sort of, so that couldn't be

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Speaker 1: explained by them both just figuring out how to build pyramids, right.

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Speaker 3: But then on top of this, British occultist James Churchward

346
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Speaker 3: would go on to write about Moo as well, associating

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Speaker 3: it with Lemuria, which we'll get to in a second

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Speaker 3: in works of pseudoscience that argue that it was the

349
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Speaker 3: not only was it this kind of like missing link

350
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Speaker 3: in terms of understanding global civilizations, but it was the

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Speaker 3: location of the Garden of Eden and a cultural connection

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Speaker 3: for various ancient civilizations. And then Atlantis also enters the

353
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Speaker 3: mix here. Even though its origins I think most serious

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Speaker 3: scholars would agree is as a metaphor, is as a

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Speaker 3: work of fiction. Various individuals have made arguments for the

356
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Speaker 3: discovery of a lost Atlantis or have gone all in

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Speaker 3: on the idea of Atlantis, And according to the kamp

358
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Speaker 3: a great deal of modern Atlantis mania stems from sixteenth

359
00:20:57,760 --> 00:21:01,280
Speaker 3: century enthusiasm for the concept, and a lot of this

360
00:21:01,760 --> 00:21:05,960
Speaker 3: enthusiasm coincided with excitement for the new world of the Americas.

361
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Speaker 3: So you know, again you have a lot of energy,

362
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Speaker 3: like new lands are discovered, and then you have this

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Speaker 3: idea of Atlantis, and then people were proposing things like, well,

364
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Speaker 3: are the Americas Atlantis? Well no, but I guess you

365
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Speaker 3: can lean into that interpretation if you so desire.

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Speaker 1: You know, I was just thinking about the sort of

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Speaker 1: common strain of thinking that connects conspiracy thinking with with

368
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Speaker 1: highly speculative lost civilization thinking, and like why you would

369
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Speaker 1: typically find both beliefs in the same brain, Like why

370
00:21:40,640 --> 00:21:43,040
Speaker 1: people are drawn to one if they're often if they're

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Speaker 1: drawn to the other. The idea of a lost civilization

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Speaker 1: that was vanished beneath the waves. Is a is a literal,

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Speaker 1: physical manifestation of the type of hidden knowledge or covered

374
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Speaker 1: up knowledge that that you know, guide's conspiracy thinking. Like

375
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Speaker 1: if you're a you're a conspiracy thinking person. You think

376
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Speaker 1: that there is a there is a mechanism somehow that

377
00:22:07,480 --> 00:22:11,359
Speaker 1: explains all these disparate phenomena, but the but the nature

378
00:22:11,400 --> 00:22:14,000
Speaker 1: of that mechanism is being covered up. It is hidden

379
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Speaker 1: from you somehow. Usually it's a social mechanism. It's like,

380
00:22:17,080 --> 00:22:19,679
Speaker 1: you know, an agreement of people, or it's a you know,

381
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Speaker 1: an extraterrestrial mechanism there are aliens doing things or something

382
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Speaker 1: like that. The lost civilization under the waves is kind

383
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Speaker 1: of like that. It explains history in a similar way,

384
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Speaker 1: but it has been literally physically covered up.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, and and again it goes back to this idea

386
00:22:38,240 --> 00:22:43,240
Speaker 3: of lo fi information to support an idea. Though interestingly enough,

387
00:22:43,359 --> 00:22:46,639
Speaker 3: like coming back to the idea of Mayan and Egyptian civilizations.

388
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Speaker 3: So obviously, like the Great Pyramids are are not lo

389
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Speaker 3: fi evidence. Likewise, you know, various megastructures in the Americas

390
00:22:57,560 --> 00:23:00,960
Speaker 3: are not lo fi evidence either. But you're using both

391
00:23:01,000 --> 00:23:05,520
Speaker 3: of these as evidence for this third thing that doesn't exist.

392
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Speaker 3: Then they do become kind of low five, because again

393
00:23:08,040 --> 00:23:10,200
Speaker 3: there is there is not a thing there to prove

394
00:23:11,359 --> 00:23:14,240
Speaker 3: there is not this lost civilization that connects the two.

395
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Speaker 1: You might also though, be coming at them from a

396
00:23:18,160 --> 00:23:21,080
Speaker 1: position of low information, in that you don't have a

397
00:23:21,080 --> 00:23:25,639
Speaker 1: lot of contextual knowledge about these these civilizations, and thus,

398
00:23:25,720 --> 00:23:28,560
Speaker 1: you know, you just see like similarly shaped buildings and

399
00:23:28,680 --> 00:23:32,880
Speaker 1: think like has to be a common source between them. Yeah.

400
00:23:33,000 --> 00:23:35,520
Speaker 3: Now, now I don't want to make it seem like,

401
00:23:35,560 --> 00:23:38,480
Speaker 3: you know, just the idea of lost continents and lost

402
00:23:38,560 --> 00:23:41,359
Speaker 3: lands that aren't there, you know, are entirely rooted in

403
00:23:41,640 --> 00:23:47,320
Speaker 3: you know, conspiracy thinking and and sort of non logical inquiry.

404
00:23:47,760 --> 00:23:50,400
Speaker 3: Because another example to touch on coming back to Lemuria

405
00:23:50,920 --> 00:23:54,000
Speaker 3: is this, this was an eighteenth century hypothesis to explain

406
00:23:54,080 --> 00:23:58,439
Speaker 3: similarities between species on distant continents. You know, we have

407
00:23:58,640 --> 00:24:01,720
Speaker 3: organisms that look like like this here, there are organisms

408
00:24:01,760 --> 00:24:04,040
Speaker 3: that look like this over here, and there's just too

409
00:24:04,119 --> 00:24:07,680
Speaker 3: much distance. How can we possibly explain this? And so

410
00:24:08,400 --> 00:24:10,840
Speaker 3: was this was one idea, Well, perhaps there is a

411
00:24:10,840 --> 00:24:14,320
Speaker 3: lost land mass, something is missing between these continents that

412
00:24:14,359 --> 00:24:18,159
Speaker 3: would explain these species being in both places. However, a

413
00:24:18,280 --> 00:24:22,600
Speaker 3: much better theory came around that of continental drift. But

414
00:24:23,040 --> 00:24:26,280
Speaker 3: once introduced again, the idea of Lemuria ends up taking

415
00:24:26,320 --> 00:24:31,520
Speaker 3: on additional qualities to various interpreters. You know, it becomes

416
00:24:31,560 --> 00:24:35,280
Speaker 3: the cradle of human civilization in various occult world views

417
00:24:35,359 --> 00:24:38,119
Speaker 3: and in various fictions. And you often see this kind

418
00:24:38,160 --> 00:24:42,640
Speaker 3: of loop, I think, with serious theories feeding occult nonsense

419
00:24:42,920 --> 00:24:46,119
Speaker 3: and feeding fantasy, feeding you know, you know, things that

420
00:24:46,160 --> 00:24:49,240
Speaker 3: are you know, just purely enjoyable, and then that may

421
00:24:49,240 --> 00:24:53,239
Speaker 3: feed back into other things as well. So there are

422
00:24:53,240 --> 00:24:55,720
Speaker 3: more examples, to be sure, and we may come back

423
00:24:55,720 --> 00:24:58,639
Speaker 3: to some of these, but I think these examples nicely

424
00:24:58,680 --> 00:25:02,160
Speaker 3: sum up some of the association and ideas here. It's

425
00:25:02,240 --> 00:25:05,159
Speaker 3: kind of a missing link concept, the lost place that

426
00:25:05,240 --> 00:25:08,399
Speaker 3: could more easily explain the world, and or a lost

427
00:25:08,440 --> 00:25:12,280
Speaker 3: golden age. And in this the concept is closely connected

428
00:25:12,359 --> 00:25:15,919
Speaker 3: to the con to various ideas of spiritual lands just

429
00:25:15,960 --> 00:25:19,280
Speaker 3: beyond the reach of mundane experience. So you know, there

430
00:25:19,359 --> 00:25:23,320
Speaker 3: might be like a like there's a shambala in Tibetan Buddhism.

431
00:25:24,200 --> 00:25:28,879
Speaker 3: I think there are various kingdoms and Russian folklore, you know,

432
00:25:28,920 --> 00:25:31,639
Speaker 3: almost like cities in the sky that are just beyond reach,

433
00:25:32,200 --> 00:25:35,159
Speaker 3: and you find these in various various form. I mean

434
00:25:35,200 --> 00:25:37,800
Speaker 3: avalon is basically the idea, you know, this place that

435
00:25:37,920 --> 00:25:41,040
Speaker 3: is now beyond the reach of the mortal world.

436
00:25:41,400 --> 00:25:45,800
Speaker 1: So across the whole spectrum of fiction, myth, legend and

437
00:25:46,080 --> 00:25:51,040
Speaker 1: obsolete scientific hypotheses, there have been ideas of lands that

438
00:25:51,680 --> 00:25:54,200
Speaker 1: were covered over by the waves or vanish beneath the

439
00:25:54,240 --> 00:25:57,439
Speaker 1: waters somehow. But now I want to talk about a

440
00:25:57,840 --> 00:26:03,760
Speaker 1: real and firmly establi published provable example of lands that

441
00:26:03,840 --> 00:26:07,639
Speaker 1: were in quite recently sunk beneath the waters within the

442
00:26:07,680 --> 00:26:09,200
Speaker 1: span of human history.

443
00:26:09,680 --> 00:26:10,480
Speaker 3: Is it Atlantis?

444
00:26:10,840 --> 00:26:13,800
Speaker 1: It is not Atlantis, Okay. So I want to start

445
00:26:13,840 --> 00:26:17,000
Speaker 1: with an anecdote about a strange find, and a lot

446
00:26:17,080 --> 00:26:20,200
Speaker 1: of my details here are coming from an article published

447
00:26:20,200 --> 00:26:26,040
Speaker 1: in Archaeology magazine by Jason Urbanas called Mapping a Vanished Landscape.

448
00:26:26,520 --> 00:26:29,959
Speaker 1: So in nineteen thirty one, one night in September, there

449
00:26:30,040 --> 00:26:33,840
Speaker 1: was a British fishing boat called the Kolinda which was

450
00:26:34,040 --> 00:26:37,040
Speaker 1: trawling in the North Sea off the eastern coast of

451
00:26:37,080 --> 00:26:41,320
Speaker 1: England around the county of Norfolk. If you're not familiar

452
00:26:41,359 --> 00:26:43,840
Speaker 1: with trawling, it is a method of fishing where you

453
00:26:44,400 --> 00:26:47,800
Speaker 1: drop a large cup shaped net into the water and

454
00:26:47,840 --> 00:26:50,680
Speaker 1: you pull it behind the boat, and there's midwater trawling

455
00:26:50,720 --> 00:26:54,480
Speaker 1: and bottom trawling. With midwater trawling you drag the net

456
00:26:54,480 --> 00:26:57,120
Speaker 1: through the middle of the water column. With bottom trawling,

457
00:26:57,200 --> 00:26:59,520
Speaker 1: you let the net sink to the bottom, and the

458
00:26:59,560 --> 00:27:02,159
Speaker 1: net has weights that keep it stuck to the bottom

459
00:27:02,240 --> 00:27:04,879
Speaker 1: and keep the mouth of the net open, So the

460
00:27:04,920 --> 00:27:08,560
Speaker 1: boat drags the net along the seabed, sort of bulldozing

461
00:27:08,680 --> 00:27:11,679
Speaker 1: the top layer of sediment and scooping up whatever is

462
00:27:11,720 --> 00:27:14,000
Speaker 1: in its path large enough to get trapped in the net.

463
00:27:14,240 --> 00:27:17,760
Speaker 1: The Klinda was trawling off the coast of Norfolk, about

464
00:27:17,800 --> 00:27:20,760
Speaker 1: twenty five miles out at a place where the water

465
00:27:20,920 --> 00:27:23,600
Speaker 1: was roughly one hundred and twenty feet deep or about

466
00:27:23,600 --> 00:27:27,479
Speaker 1: thirty seven meters. After hauling up the net from a

467
00:27:27,520 --> 00:27:31,280
Speaker 1: bottom trowl, a guy named Pilgrim Lockwood, who was the

468
00:27:31,320 --> 00:27:34,879
Speaker 1: skipper of the boat, noticed a big chunk of peat

469
00:27:35,280 --> 00:27:38,800
Speaker 1: stuck in the catch and bottom trawling often creates a

470
00:27:38,800 --> 00:27:41,600
Speaker 1: lot of what's called bycatch. That term usually refers to

471
00:27:41,840 --> 00:27:44,280
Speaker 1: unwanted animals that you get in the net that are

472
00:27:44,280 --> 00:27:46,720
Speaker 1: not part of what you're fishing for, but also it

473
00:27:46,840 --> 00:27:48,920
Speaker 1: just gets a bunch of objects from the sea floor,

474
00:27:48,920 --> 00:27:51,280
Speaker 1: because again it's kind of like bulldozing the top layer

475
00:27:51,320 --> 00:27:54,240
Speaker 1: of sediment as it gets dragged along, So a lot

476
00:27:54,240 --> 00:27:56,320
Speaker 1: of stuff ends up in the net and that stuff

477
00:27:56,359 --> 00:27:59,160
Speaker 1: has to be discarded. Now, this peat from the bottom.

478
00:27:59,160 --> 00:28:01,920
Speaker 1: Here's a really good I came across. I've seen sources

479
00:28:01,960 --> 00:28:05,960
Speaker 1: that mentioned that these chunks of pete pulled up from

480
00:28:06,040 --> 00:28:08,440
Speaker 1: the ocean like this were often referred to in England

481
00:28:08,480 --> 00:28:14,600
Speaker 1: as moor logo r l og nice. Is there a

482
00:28:14,640 --> 00:28:18,480
Speaker 1: band I didn't check that'd be a good bog metal

483
00:28:18,520 --> 00:28:19,000
Speaker 1: band name.

484
00:28:19,640 --> 00:28:22,120
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I can see the album cover right now

485
00:28:22,160 --> 00:28:23,480
Speaker 3: with like a bog mummy on it.

486
00:28:24,080 --> 00:28:26,480
Speaker 1: So the skipper, Pilgrim Lockwood, he's got this chunk of

487
00:28:26,520 --> 00:28:28,960
Speaker 1: pete that's part of the you know, not what they're

488
00:28:28,960 --> 00:28:31,399
Speaker 1: fishing for. Obviously, he's stuck in the net, so he

489
00:28:31,440 --> 00:28:33,520
Speaker 1: gets it out. He starts to smash the peete up

490
00:28:33,560 --> 00:28:36,600
Speaker 1: with a shovel. But while he was doing that he

491
00:28:36,720 --> 00:28:40,080
Speaker 1: found something rigid lodged inside and he actually said that

492
00:28:40,200 --> 00:28:42,600
Speaker 1: it sounded when his shovel hit this object. He said

493
00:28:42,720 --> 00:28:46,280
Speaker 1: it sounded like it was clanging against metal. It was

494
00:28:46,320 --> 00:28:48,960
Speaker 1: not a rock. He pulled it out, and what he

495
00:28:49,080 --> 00:28:52,840
Speaker 1: found was a sharp instrument about eight and a half

496
00:28:52,880 --> 00:28:56,400
Speaker 1: inches or twenty two centimeters in length, with a pointed

497
00:28:56,520 --> 00:29:00,600
Speaker 1: tip at one end and barbs or teeth running most

498
00:29:00,680 --> 00:29:03,800
Speaker 1: of the way down its length, like some kind of weapon.

499
00:29:04,400 --> 00:29:06,760
Speaker 1: And it was a weapon. This is not a case

500
00:29:06,760 --> 00:29:09,960
Speaker 1: where you know, it was actually some deep sea organism

501
00:29:10,040 --> 00:29:13,040
Speaker 1: that you know, was mistaken for a human artifact. This

502
00:29:13,280 --> 00:29:17,240
Speaker 1: was an artifact. This was technology. It was ancient technology,

503
00:29:17,680 --> 00:29:21,480
Speaker 1: and this artifact came to be known as the Kolinda harpoon.

504
00:29:22,640 --> 00:29:26,239
Speaker 1: So experts from the British Museum studied the artifact and

505
00:29:26,280 --> 00:29:29,640
Speaker 1: they determined that it was the tip of a fishing

506
00:29:29,720 --> 00:29:33,600
Speaker 1: sphere from the Mesolithic period or the Middle Stone Age,

507
00:29:33,640 --> 00:29:36,600
Speaker 1: which would have been somewhere between ten thousand and four

508
00:29:36,640 --> 00:29:40,200
Speaker 1: thousand BCE. It's an intriguing looking weapon. So it's got

509
00:29:40,240 --> 00:29:42,040
Speaker 1: the sharp end, it's got the saw teeth, but it's

510
00:29:42,040 --> 00:29:46,280
Speaker 1: also got these ridges sort of gashed in it along

511
00:29:46,360 --> 00:29:48,120
Speaker 1: the opposite end from the tip.

512
00:29:48,600 --> 00:29:50,280
Speaker 3: You know, it does remind me a little bit of

513
00:29:50,280 --> 00:29:53,960
Speaker 3: the fabled weapon of coculon the oh oh, you know,

514
00:29:54,040 --> 00:29:56,560
Speaker 3: that was supposed to be in some cases like barbed

515
00:29:56,640 --> 00:30:01,120
Speaker 3: like like the barb of a stingray. Yeah, though, of

516
00:30:01,120 --> 00:30:03,480
Speaker 3: course to your point, clearly this is this is not

517
00:30:04,360 --> 00:30:06,600
Speaker 3: a nature fact, This is an artifact. This is something

518
00:30:06,640 --> 00:30:10,760
Speaker 3: that that was carved and made through human craft and ingenuity.

519
00:30:11,000 --> 00:30:14,560
Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely made by human hands. But that raises questions

520
00:30:14,600 --> 00:30:18,360
Speaker 1: how did this Stone Age weapon end up buried in

521
00:30:18,600 --> 00:30:22,600
Speaker 1: peat in the ocean more than twenty miles off the

522
00:30:22,640 --> 00:30:26,040
Speaker 1: coast of modern day Britain. Like, was it possible that

523
00:30:26,240 --> 00:30:30,000
Speaker 1: ancient hunter gatherers carried it out to sea that far

524
00:30:30,360 --> 00:30:32,640
Speaker 1: on a boat or a raft and then dropped it

525
00:30:32,680 --> 00:30:34,800
Speaker 1: to the bottom. At the time it was found, that

526
00:30:34,880 --> 00:30:38,880
Speaker 1: seemed possible, but not very likely. Today we know more

527
00:30:38,960 --> 00:30:42,680
Speaker 1: about the Klinda harpoon. According to the Norfolk Museums, the

528
00:30:42,720 --> 00:30:45,560
Speaker 1: harpoon tip was made from the antler of a red

529
00:30:45,720 --> 00:30:49,800
Speaker 1: deer that's the species service Elaphus, and it has been

530
00:30:49,920 --> 00:30:54,360
Speaker 1: radiocarbon dated to about eleven, seven hundred and ninety years ago.

531
00:30:55,640 --> 00:30:58,720
Speaker 1: Mentioned in the Archaeology magazine article is another strange fact.

532
00:30:59,240 --> 00:31:04,040
Speaker 1: A year after the Colinda harpoon was discovered, scientists analyzed

533
00:31:04,160 --> 00:31:07,440
Speaker 1: the pollen contained in the peat or the moor log

534
00:31:07,960 --> 00:31:11,120
Speaker 1: from around where the spear tip was discovered, and they

535
00:31:11,160 --> 00:31:14,440
Speaker 1: found something bizarre. Even though the peat was more than

536
00:31:14,440 --> 00:31:17,760
Speaker 1: one hundred feet under the water, it had been formed

537
00:31:17,880 --> 00:31:23,360
Speaker 1: in a fresh water context, lakes and rivers and topside bogs,

538
00:31:23,480 --> 00:31:28,040
Speaker 1: not ocean floors. So the person carrying the Colinda harpoon

539
00:31:28,480 --> 00:31:31,880
Speaker 1: Althose thousands of years ago had not been a sea goer,

540
00:31:32,000 --> 00:31:37,120
Speaker 1: but an earthwalker, possibly fishing in a river. And this

541
00:31:37,160 --> 00:31:39,720
Speaker 1: isn't the only Stone Age human artifact recovered from the

542
00:31:39,720 --> 00:31:41,959
Speaker 1: bottom of the North Sea. We can come back to that,

543
00:31:43,240 --> 00:31:45,120
Speaker 1: but I want to move on to something else, because

544
00:31:45,160 --> 00:31:48,680
Speaker 1: the Colinda Harpoon was not the first indication that there

545
00:31:48,760 --> 00:31:51,920
Speaker 1: was something odd about the sea to the east of

546
00:31:51,960 --> 00:31:54,480
Speaker 1: Great Britain. I would now like to read a passage

547
00:31:54,520 --> 00:31:59,800
Speaker 1: from a book called Submerged Forests, published in nineteen thirteen

548
00:32:00,200 --> 00:32:04,680
Speaker 1: by the British geologist Clement Reed. Clement Reed writes, quote,

549
00:32:05,400 --> 00:32:08,479
Speaker 1: most of our seaside places of resort lie at the

550
00:32:08,520 --> 00:32:12,120
Speaker 1: mouths of small valleys, which originally gave the fishermen easy

551
00:32:12,200 --> 00:32:15,520
Speaker 1: access to the shore and later on provided fairly level

552
00:32:15,600 --> 00:32:19,200
Speaker 1: sites for building. At such places, the fishermen will tell

553
00:32:19,280 --> 00:32:23,320
Speaker 1: you of black, peaty earth with hazel nuts, and often

554
00:32:23,360 --> 00:32:27,640
Speaker 1: with tree stumps still rooted in the soil, seen between

555
00:32:27,840 --> 00:32:31,520
Speaker 1: tide marks when the overlying sea sand has been cleared

556
00:32:31,560 --> 00:32:36,760
Speaker 1: away by some storm or unusually persistent wind. If one

557
00:32:36,800 --> 00:32:39,480
Speaker 1: is fortunate enough to be on the spot when such

558
00:32:39,480 --> 00:32:44,080
Speaker 1: a patch is uncovered, this submerged forest is found to

559
00:32:44,160 --> 00:32:47,600
Speaker 1: extend right down to the level of the lowest tides.

560
00:32:48,200 --> 00:32:51,640
Speaker 1: The trees are often well grown oaks, though more commonly

561
00:32:51,680 --> 00:32:54,840
Speaker 1: they turn out to be merely brushwood of hazel, sallow

562
00:32:54,920 --> 00:32:58,440
Speaker 1: and alder, mingled with other swamp plants such as the

563
00:32:58,520 --> 00:33:05,000
Speaker 1: rhizomes of osmuda. These submerged forests, or quote Noah's woods

564
00:33:05,120 --> 00:33:09,200
Speaker 1: as they are called locally, have attracted attention from early times,

565
00:33:09,640 --> 00:33:11,800
Speaker 1: all the more so owing to the existence of an

566
00:33:11,920 --> 00:33:16,239
Speaker 1: uneasy feeling that, though, like most other geological phenomena, they

567
00:33:16,280 --> 00:33:20,240
Speaker 1: were popularly explained by Noah's deluge, it was difficult thus

568
00:33:20,280 --> 00:33:23,840
Speaker 1: to account for trees rooted in their original soil and

569
00:33:23,960 --> 00:33:27,440
Speaker 1: yet now found well below the level of high tide.

570
00:33:27,960 --> 00:33:30,720
Speaker 1: And Ooh, thinking about the submerged forests, it gives me

571
00:33:30,760 --> 00:33:34,120
Speaker 1: a spooky feeling. So at the lowest level of the tide,

572
00:33:34,200 --> 00:33:37,320
Speaker 1: when when the water goes back farthest, even all the

573
00:33:37,320 --> 00:33:40,720
Speaker 1: way down to that level, you will sometimes find, especially

574
00:33:40,720 --> 00:33:42,880
Speaker 1: if there has been maybe a violent storm that has

575
00:33:42,960 --> 00:33:45,880
Speaker 1: shifted the sediment around and pushed sand out of the way,

576
00:33:46,160 --> 00:33:50,840
Speaker 1: you will find uncovered tree stumps, still rooted, apparently in

577
00:33:50,880 --> 00:33:54,960
Speaker 1: their original position. Trees can't grow in the salt water,

578
00:33:55,360 --> 00:33:56,600
Speaker 1: so what was happening there?

579
00:33:57,640 --> 00:34:00,840
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is enticing and it does remind me though

580
00:34:00,880 --> 00:34:02,920
Speaker 3: that something we've discussed in the past and the show

581
00:34:03,760 --> 00:34:07,280
Speaker 3: that you know, for most of human history, we didn't

582
00:34:07,360 --> 00:34:12,080
Speaker 3: have a high resolution understanding of the world beneath the waves,

583
00:34:12,760 --> 00:34:14,640
Speaker 3: and and so a lot of it was based on

584
00:34:14,719 --> 00:34:17,839
Speaker 3: guesswork and uh, and there were a lot of ideas

585
00:34:17,880 --> 00:34:21,640
Speaker 3: about cities and forests beneath the sea, and like this

586
00:34:21,719 --> 00:34:25,240
Speaker 3: general idea that anything that you certainly see in Western discourse,

587
00:34:25,640 --> 00:34:28,400
Speaker 3: that anything that exists in the surface world would have

588
00:34:28,440 --> 00:34:31,319
Speaker 3: an analog beneath the water. So you have a lion

589
00:34:31,400 --> 00:34:33,000
Speaker 3: up here, well, you have a sea lion under there.

590
00:34:33,040 --> 00:34:34,279
Speaker 3: You have a horse up here, you have a sea

591
00:34:34,320 --> 00:34:35,640
Speaker 3: horse beneath the waves.

592
00:34:35,800 --> 00:34:38,040
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you have people up here, you have marror

593
00:34:38,040 --> 00:34:39,280
Speaker 1: people down there. Yeah.

594
00:34:39,360 --> 00:34:43,080
Speaker 3: Yeah, So like there, you know, you have that huge category.

595
00:34:43,160 --> 00:34:45,799
Speaker 3: You have these you know, accounts of great floods and

596
00:34:45,840 --> 00:34:48,000
Speaker 3: so forth. So there's a lot of there's a lot

597
00:34:48,000 --> 00:34:52,759
Speaker 3: of like background mythology and observational data to feed intoto

598
00:34:52,800 --> 00:34:54,239
Speaker 3: any kind of discovery like this.

599
00:35:04,640 --> 00:35:08,040
Speaker 1: So how do you explain these submerged forests? In this work,

600
00:35:08,200 --> 00:35:10,879
Speaker 1: Clement Reid goes on to document and make all kinds

601
00:35:10,920 --> 00:35:15,600
Speaker 1: of observations about them, but he reached a strange but

602
00:35:16,520 --> 00:35:20,759
Speaker 1: unavoidable conclusion. Sea levels were not constant, and the sea

603
00:35:21,239 --> 00:35:24,400
Speaker 1: had to be higher now than it was in the past,

604
00:35:24,680 --> 00:35:27,360
Speaker 1: much higher now than it was in the past, meaning

605
00:35:27,400 --> 00:35:31,200
Speaker 1: that much of what was once the relatively shallow North

606
00:35:31,239 --> 00:35:35,520
Speaker 1: Sea had actually been not a sea but a vast

607
00:35:35,640 --> 00:35:39,880
Speaker 1: alluvial plain at the hidden lowlands of ages past, and

608
00:35:39,960 --> 00:35:44,680
Speaker 1: these lands were most recently covered with trees. There are

609
00:35:44,760 --> 00:35:47,480
Speaker 1: still places today where when the tide is at its lowest,

610
00:35:47,719 --> 00:35:50,759
Speaker 1: you can find indications that there used to be forests

611
00:35:50,800 --> 00:35:52,919
Speaker 1: on lands that are now covered by the North Sea,

612
00:35:53,239 --> 00:35:56,680
Speaker 1: and of course recently enough for remains of tree trunks

613
00:35:56,680 --> 00:35:59,640
Speaker 1: and stumps to still be preserved there. One commonly cited

614
00:35:59,680 --> 00:36:03,600
Speaker 1: example is a place called pet Level Pett pet Level

615
00:36:03,640 --> 00:36:06,920
Speaker 1: Beach in Sussex, where the remains of a forest can

616
00:36:06,960 --> 00:36:09,800
Speaker 1: still be seen at low tide with indications of oak trees,

617
00:36:09,960 --> 00:36:11,440
Speaker 1: elm U and beach.

618
00:36:12,239 --> 00:36:12,439
Speaker 3: Rob.

619
00:36:12,480 --> 00:36:14,480
Speaker 1: I've got some pictures for you to look at. Both

620
00:36:14,520 --> 00:36:19,160
Speaker 1: these pictures here from pet But another example that I

621
00:36:19,280 --> 00:36:23,200
Speaker 1: came across is from the remains of a submerged forest

622
00:36:23,200 --> 00:36:26,400
Speaker 1: that is still fully submerged. So this appeared in the

623
00:36:26,440 --> 00:36:29,200
Speaker 1: media within the last decade. I was reading from an

624
00:36:29,280 --> 00:36:34,400
Speaker 1: article in BBC News Norfolk and its attached video segment.

625
00:36:34,800 --> 00:36:37,040
Speaker 1: This was from twenty fifteen and it was called Ancient

626
00:36:37,120 --> 00:36:41,120
Speaker 1: Underwater Forests Discovered off Norfolk Coast and the report says

627
00:36:41,160 --> 00:36:44,120
Speaker 1: that it was documented by a couple of research divers

628
00:36:44,239 --> 00:36:48,960
Speaker 1: named Rob Spray and Dawn Watson. This was after a

629
00:36:49,080 --> 00:36:53,840
Speaker 1: major storm had shifted sediments in an underwater region off

630
00:36:53,880 --> 00:36:56,640
Speaker 1: the north Norfolk coast. So just like Clement Reid was saying,

631
00:36:56,640 --> 00:36:59,359
Speaker 1: you know, it's especially after there's been some violent event,

632
00:36:59,400 --> 00:37:03,680
Speaker 1: maybe a big dorm moves the sediment around and uncovers things.

633
00:37:05,280 --> 00:37:08,279
Speaker 1: In an interview for this news segment, Dawn Watson, one

634
00:37:08,280 --> 00:37:12,040
Speaker 1: of the divers, describes coming across this region by accident.

635
00:37:12,120 --> 00:37:14,560
Speaker 1: She said she had been swimming for a while, she

636
00:37:14,640 --> 00:37:17,000
Speaker 1: was almost out of her air supply, towards the end

637
00:37:17,000 --> 00:37:21,320
Speaker 1: of a dive when she came across an enormous mass

638
00:37:21,360 --> 00:37:24,520
Speaker 1: on the seafloor. She says, it was quote almost a

639
00:37:24,719 --> 00:37:28,359
Speaker 1: standing wave of black stuff in front of me. It

640
00:37:28,400 --> 00:37:30,319
Speaker 1: took me a while to work out what it was,

641
00:37:30,520 --> 00:37:34,560
Speaker 1: and it was just wood shaped like a wave. So

642
00:37:34,640 --> 00:37:36,960
Speaker 1: she says, at first she thought it was a shipwreck,

643
00:37:37,080 --> 00:37:39,480
Speaker 1: maybe it looked like the hull of a boat, but

644
00:37:39,520 --> 00:37:42,840
Speaker 1: then she realized it was actually a huge hunk of

645
00:37:43,280 --> 00:37:47,360
Speaker 1: unprocessed solid wood, not the planks of a wooden ship's hull,

646
00:37:47,880 --> 00:37:51,719
Speaker 1: but the trunk of a tree laying down horizontally. And

647
00:37:51,760 --> 00:37:55,720
Speaker 1: the divers, after examining this location, say that it seems

648
00:37:55,719 --> 00:37:59,400
Speaker 1: to be the remains of an ancient forest, probably primarily

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00:37:59,480 --> 00:38:03,279
Speaker 1: oak tree, lying horizontal. So the trees appear to have

650
00:38:03,320 --> 00:38:07,880
Speaker 1: been knocked flat by some event, you know, long ago.

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00:38:08,280 --> 00:38:11,319
Speaker 1: They speculate, possibly outwash from a glacier, but we don't

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00:38:11,320 --> 00:38:14,440
Speaker 1: know for sure. And when you see the footage in

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00:38:14,480 --> 00:38:17,160
Speaker 1: this video segment, it's amazing how much in some ways

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00:38:17,200 --> 00:38:19,600
Speaker 1: it still looks like a tree trunk. You can even

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00:38:19,760 --> 00:38:22,520
Speaker 1: see what look like, you know, knots in the wood

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00:38:22,680 --> 00:38:25,879
Speaker 1: or maybe trunk wounds, little holes in the trunk which

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00:38:25,920 --> 00:38:30,520
Speaker 1: have now charmingly been inhabited by starfish and crabs. Ra

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00:38:30,719 --> 00:38:32,680
Speaker 1: I attached to a screen shop for you to look at,

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00:38:32,719 --> 00:38:34,520
Speaker 1: and you can see crabs getting down in the little

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00:38:34,520 --> 00:38:35,200
Speaker 1: heidi holes.

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00:38:35,680 --> 00:38:37,399
Speaker 3: Oh nice, Yeah, there they are.

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00:38:38,200 --> 00:38:41,080
Speaker 1: And the divers in this interview emphasized that they almost

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00:38:41,120 --> 00:38:44,120
Speaker 1: missed it. It is pure luck that the forest was

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00:38:44,280 --> 00:38:47,279
Speaker 1: exposed by the violence of a recent storm and that

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00:38:47,320 --> 00:38:49,200
Speaker 1: they just happened to come across it at the end

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00:38:49,200 --> 00:38:52,160
Speaker 1: of a dive. But they also point out an interesting

667
00:38:52,239 --> 00:38:55,680
Speaker 1: thing about marine biology, just about under sea life. As

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00:38:55,719 --> 00:38:58,560
Speaker 1: soon as this buried timber from thousands of years ago

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00:38:58,640 --> 00:39:03,040
Speaker 1: was exposed, see organisms flooded in, just like with In fact,

670
00:39:03,040 --> 00:39:06,200
Speaker 1: we've done episodes on this in the past, like with shipwrecks,

671
00:39:06,960 --> 00:39:10,400
Speaker 1: you know, that come to resemble in some ways the

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00:39:10,440 --> 00:39:14,360
Speaker 1: habitat dynamics of coral reefs. A hard surface at the

673
00:39:14,360 --> 00:39:18,240
Speaker 1: bottom of the ocean quickly becomes a teeming habitat. Bottom

674
00:39:18,320 --> 00:39:22,000
Speaker 1: dwelling organisms can build a whole world around a solid floor.

675
00:39:22,120 --> 00:39:25,799
Speaker 1: So maybe smaller organisms like the hard surface that they

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00:39:25,840 --> 00:39:28,400
Speaker 1: can attach to, or they like little nooks and crannies

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00:39:28,440 --> 00:39:31,200
Speaker 1: and pieces of shelter they come in, they inhabit it,

678
00:39:31,239 --> 00:39:34,120
Speaker 1: then bigger organisms come in to eat them, and it

679
00:39:34,200 --> 00:39:38,200
Speaker 1: creates this whole ecosystem. Oh and another thing I've got

680
00:39:38,200 --> 00:39:39,920
Speaker 1: for you to look at here, rob, I took a

681
00:39:39,920 --> 00:39:43,560
Speaker 1: screenshot of part of this ancient submerged forest. It's just

682
00:39:43,640 --> 00:39:46,600
Speaker 1: got starfish all over it, which we know from our

683
00:39:46,640 --> 00:39:50,959
Speaker 1: recent headlessness episodes. The starfish they're not without a head,

684
00:39:51,080 --> 00:39:54,239
Speaker 1: they are all head So we're just seeing like dozens

685
00:39:54,280 --> 00:39:57,279
Speaker 1: of heads all smushing into each other here on this

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00:39:57,480 --> 00:40:02,239
Speaker 1: ancient tree trunk. So you put all this together, these

687
00:40:02,280 --> 00:40:05,479
Speaker 1: ancient human artifacts, miles and miles off the east coast

688
00:40:05,520 --> 00:40:09,399
Speaker 1: of Britain, oak forest preserved on the bottom of the sea,

689
00:40:09,480 --> 00:40:12,280
Speaker 1: so that we can still see the stumps and crabs

690
00:40:12,320 --> 00:40:14,319
Speaker 1: can make a home in the wood. What does all

691
00:40:14,360 --> 00:40:18,719
Speaker 1: of that point to? Well, today scientists have firmly established

692
00:40:18,719 --> 00:40:21,600
Speaker 1: what explains it all. This is not a highly speculative theory.

693
00:40:21,680 --> 00:40:25,000
Speaker 1: This is clearly what's the case. It is all evidence

694
00:40:25,080 --> 00:40:30,040
Speaker 1: of an ancient land mass known as Doggerland. So what

695
00:40:30,440 --> 00:40:34,640
Speaker 1: was Doggerland? Doggerland was an area of what used to

696
00:40:34,640 --> 00:40:38,040
Speaker 1: be dry land during the peak of the Last Ice Age,

697
00:40:38,080 --> 00:40:40,880
Speaker 1: when much of the world's water was locked up in

698
00:40:40,960 --> 00:40:44,480
Speaker 1: polar glaciers during the peak of the Last Ice Age,

699
00:40:44,719 --> 00:40:48,960
Speaker 1: and this land is now submerged beneath the sea. It

700
00:40:49,080 --> 00:40:53,240
Speaker 1: was a large stretch of low lying earth, mostly flat

701
00:40:53,280 --> 00:40:58,759
Speaker 1: alluvial plains, extending north from the Netherlands in Germany, connecting

702
00:40:59,120 --> 00:41:01,759
Speaker 1: Great Britain to the rest of continental Europe and at

703
00:41:01,760 --> 00:41:04,120
Speaker 1: the eastern end dogger Lands seem to have gone up

704
00:41:04,160 --> 00:41:09,000
Speaker 1: against what is today Jutland or you know, the Denmark peninsula.

705
00:41:09,520 --> 00:41:13,160
Speaker 3: Wow, this is impressive. You included an illustration here showing

706
00:41:13,840 --> 00:41:15,920
Speaker 3: like what this would have looked like. We're not an

707
00:41:15,920 --> 00:41:19,800
Speaker 3: illustration of map, and it is quite impressive, like essentially

708
00:41:19,840 --> 00:41:24,160
Speaker 3: like a thick land bridge connecting like you said, UK

709
00:41:24,280 --> 00:41:25,200
Speaker 3: to mainland Europe.

710
00:41:25,440 --> 00:41:28,040
Speaker 1: Right, So, at the time Great Britain was not an

711
00:41:28,080 --> 00:41:31,279
Speaker 1: island but a peninsula. It was connected to the rest

712
00:41:31,320 --> 00:41:35,399
Speaker 1: of Europe by land. So not all sunken lands are

713
00:41:36,000 --> 00:41:41,839
Speaker 1: misinterpretations of ancient writings or pseudoscience or pseudohistory. There are

714
00:41:41,960 --> 00:41:47,440
Speaker 1: actually sunken lands that played a significant role in ancient ecosystems,

715
00:41:47,560 --> 00:41:52,399
Speaker 1: in how life developed on ancient continents and were in

716
00:41:52,400 --> 00:41:56,879
Speaker 1: some cases occupied by humans. And now despite the difficulty

717
00:41:56,880 --> 00:41:59,680
Speaker 1: of trying to do things like archaeology in areas that

718
00:41:59,719 --> 00:42:03,120
Speaker 1: are now underneath the sea. There's a lot we can

719
00:42:03,160 --> 00:42:05,280
Speaker 1: know about them. So in the rest of this series,

720
00:42:05,640 --> 00:42:08,200
Speaker 1: we're going to talk more about dogger Land, what happened

721
00:42:08,200 --> 00:42:10,520
Speaker 1: to it, what we know about it, and more of

722
00:42:10,600 --> 00:42:12,360
Speaker 1: the sunken lands of planet Earth.

723
00:42:13,239 --> 00:42:15,799
Speaker 3: Yeah, so who knows what we'll get into and who

724
00:42:15,800 --> 00:42:20,120
Speaker 3: knows what will emerge from the deep darkness of the

725
00:42:20,160 --> 00:42:23,520
Speaker 3: ocean or various lakes and rivers in the episode or

726
00:42:23,560 --> 00:42:26,520
Speaker 3: episodes ahead. All right, we're gonna go ahead and close

727
00:42:26,520 --> 00:42:30,120
Speaker 3: this episode out, though we'll be back on Thursday. Just

728
00:42:30,160 --> 00:42:32,600
Speaker 3: a reminder once more that' Stuff to Blow Your Mind

729
00:42:32,719 --> 00:42:36,200
Speaker 3: is primarily a science podcast, with new episodes new core

730
00:42:36,239 --> 00:42:39,560
Speaker 3: episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do listener mail. On Mondays,

731
00:42:39,560 --> 00:42:42,600
Speaker 3: we tend to do a short form artifact or monster

732
00:42:42,680 --> 00:42:46,480
Speaker 3: fact episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we set aside

733
00:42:46,520 --> 00:42:49,240
Speaker 3: most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie

734
00:42:49,280 --> 00:42:53,200
Speaker 3: on Weird House Cinema. If you follow us on social media,

735
00:42:53,960 --> 00:42:57,000
Speaker 3: check out those feeds, because we've our social media team

736
00:42:57,040 --> 00:43:01,120
Speaker 3: has been putting out a little bits of to let

737
00:43:01,160 --> 00:43:04,360
Speaker 3: you know what the latest episode is and that includes

738
00:43:04,400 --> 00:43:06,839
Speaker 3: some neat little video stuff in there. If you if

739
00:43:06,840 --> 00:43:09,279
Speaker 3: you are on Instagram and you don't follow us, we

740
00:43:09,440 --> 00:43:12,719
Speaker 3: are STBYM podcast there, so give us a follow. We're

741
00:43:12,719 --> 00:43:16,440
Speaker 3: trying to build up our followers after we've lost access

742
00:43:16,480 --> 00:43:21,000
Speaker 3: to our old account and uh yeah, what else do

743
00:43:21,080 --> 00:43:21,600
Speaker 3: you have, Joe?

744
00:43:22,000 --> 00:43:24,160
Speaker 1: I can't think of anything else we lost access to.

745
00:43:24,560 --> 00:43:27,120
Speaker 3: It's like a lost civilization. It's like a it's an

746
00:43:27,160 --> 00:43:29,799
Speaker 3: Atlantis that's sunk beneath the waves. I think it has

747
00:43:30,080 --> 00:43:32,640
Speaker 3: like an episode on airships, or maybe it's the Herzog

748
00:43:32,719 --> 00:43:34,839
Speaker 3: interview are right up there at the top, and then

749
00:43:34,880 --> 00:43:37,720
Speaker 3: it's at some point after that that accounts sunk beneath

750
00:43:37,719 --> 00:43:38,200
Speaker 3: the waves.

751
00:43:38,360 --> 00:43:42,240
Speaker 1: Whoop see never to be reclaimed. Huge thanks as always

752
00:43:42,239 --> 00:43:45,560
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would

753
00:43:45,600 --> 00:43:47,600
Speaker 1: like to get in touch with us with feedback on

754
00:43:47,680 --> 00:43:50,000
Speaker 1: this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for

755
00:43:50,040 --> 00:43:52,560
Speaker 1: the future, or just to say hello, you can email

756
00:43:52,640 --> 00:44:03,760
Speaker 1: us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

757
00:44:03,880 --> 00:44:07,040
Speaker 2: Stuffed Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more

758
00:44:07,080 --> 00:44:10,759
Speaker 2: podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

759
00:44:10,840 --> 00:44:27,160
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,