Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Joe McCormick. Today is Saturday, so we're reaching
Speaker 1: into the vault for an older episode of the show.
Speaker 1: This one originally published November twenty eighth, twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: and it's part one of our series called The Sunken Lands.
Speaker 2: Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production
Speaker 2: of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 3: is Robert.
Speaker 1: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And in today's episode,
Speaker 1: we're going to be kicking off a series that we're
Speaker 1: calling The Sunken Lands that is about the idea of
Speaker 1: lands submerged under waters. Now, not too long ago, we
Speaker 1: did a series of episodes on the tendency. People have
Speaker 1: to quite readily interpret any weird looking, low resolution photograph
Speaker 1: as evidence of our highly speculative theory of choice, whatever
Speaker 1: you like. So here's a picture of a shape that
Speaker 1: maybe doesn't look organic in origin, so it is evidence
Speaker 1: of an alien spacecraft that crash landed on our planet
Speaker 1: five thousand years ago. But then, as we discussed in
Speaker 1: that series, often if you're able to get a higher
Speaker 1: resolution image of the same object, or just get more
Speaker 1: contextual information. Oh wait, it's actually a rock. But one
Speaker 1: very popular genre of imagery for this exercise is underwater photography.
Speaker 1: It happens with, you know, images of things in the
Speaker 1: sky as well or things just obscured in various contexts,
Speaker 1: But underwater photography is especially juicy here, I think because
Speaker 1: the conditions of underwater photography naturally lend themselves to the
Speaker 1: kind of tantalized state of low information that sets our
Speaker 1: imagination running wild. Unlets you fill in the gaps with
Speaker 1: whatever you were excited about. And when the weird looking
Speaker 1: thing is underwater, the highly speculative theory people used to
Speaker 1: explain it might still be aliens, as we discussed in
Speaker 1: the example of one underwater object, probably a glacial erratic
Speaker 1: boulder that people did in some cases interpret as a
Speaker 1: crashed alien spacecraft. But another common explanation for weird looking
Speaker 1: things underwater is the sunken civilization, most often Atlantis, but
Speaker 1: there are other candidates as well, and the idea of
Speaker 1: a lost civilization vanished under the sea is so captivating
Speaker 1: to people it is hard to resist the urge to
Speaker 1: see an underwater rock with sharp corners and say that's
Speaker 1: not a rock, that's a building. This is one of
Speaker 1: their ancient skyscrapers, and now it's hidden under the waves.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's basically the same energy, but in a different
Speaker 3: temporal direction. Instead of looking to aliens from beyond, you're
Speaker 3: looking for some sort of advance to civilization from the
Speaker 3: past that may or may not match up with realistic
Speaker 3: expectations of.
Speaker 1: The past right now. Of course, in some limited cases,
Speaker 1: there are examples of human artifacts or human built edifices
Speaker 1: that can be found underneath the water. Now we'll probably
Speaker 1: talk about some of those examples, but in most cases
Speaker 1: we can say with pretty high confidence that the things
Speaker 1: people are looking at in these images are not even
Speaker 1: intelligently designed artifacts. It's usually like a rock or some
Speaker 1: kind of undersea creature, something like that. And for various
Speaker 1: reasons that we might get into, even if what you
Speaker 1: find under the water was designed by humans, there are
Speaker 1: strong reasons for doubting anybody who says, aha, we have
Speaker 1: discovered Atlantis.
Speaker 3: Rob.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you want to talk about this
Speaker 1: now or later, but there are reasons for thinking Plato's
Speaker 1: allegory of Atlantis was maybe not even meant to refer
Speaker 1: to an actually existing place, or if there, or if
Speaker 1: it was, there's no reason to think that it's anything
Speaker 1: more than a legend, that it's like a thing we
Speaker 1: should actually be looking for on Earth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's let's get back to Atlantis in just a second.
Speaker 3: That we could easily devote an entire podcaster more to
Speaker 3: just chasing the idea of Atlantis around, but we'll try
Speaker 3: and keep it contained.
Speaker 1: But while all of that is true, while Atlantis hunting
Speaker 1: is probably a misguided exercise, it's also true that there
Speaker 1: actually are some places on planet Earth where what is
Speaker 1: now the seafloor was relatively recently land land that could
Speaker 1: have been or in some cases was occupied by humans.
Speaker 1: And so that's what we want to talk about in
Speaker 1: this series, places on Earth that are now under the
Speaker 1: waves but were once part of the world above.
Speaker 3: And while we're mostly I guess talking like that, we
Speaker 3: talk about the waves, we think about it land as
Speaker 3: we think about the ocean. But we may also touch
Speaker 3: on some examples that have been lost underneath rivers or lakes,
Speaker 3: sometimes with man made lakes in play. But perhaps we'll
Speaker 3: come back to that in another episode.
Speaker 1: Oh that's a good variation. Yes, Now, one thing to
Speaker 1: be clear about is that part of what makes these
Speaker 1: sunken lands interesting is merely a question of time. Because
Speaker 1: of course Earth is geologically active. It has a dynamic surface,
Speaker 1: and over millions of years, the crust of the Earth
Speaker 1: undergoes changes. There's continental drift, there are all kinds of
Speaker 1: changes that happen to the crust of the earth. Areas
Speaker 1: that were formerly exposed are buried. Areas that were formerly
Speaker 1: buried are exposed. Areas that used to be ocean become land,
Speaker 1: Areas that used to be land become ocean. So we
Speaker 1: know that happens on a geological time scale. What we're
Speaker 1: talking about here are lands that have become covered in
Speaker 1: water relatively recently, maybe on the order of thousands of
Speaker 1: years or even less. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we have these basic geologic realities to keep
Speaker 3: in mind, but then we see them reflected in different
Speaker 3: ways in our folklore, our mythology, our religion. Like even
Speaker 3: if you weren't if you were, if you somehow avoided
Speaker 3: any scientific inquiry, in any scientific understanding about these changes,
Speaker 3: you would perhaps be exposed then to religious ideas about
Speaker 3: these changes. The various religious and mythological ideas that go
Speaker 3: way back in multiple different faiths, involving global or regional
Speaker 3: flooding that is attributed to divine causation in many cases.
Speaker 3: So given all of this, though again it should come
Speaker 3: as no shock that just the mere idea of sunken islands,
Speaker 3: lost islands, phantom islands, lost continents, et cetera, this has
Speaker 3: long stirred the human imagination, and a lot has been
Speaker 3: written on this. But interestingly enough, one of the more
Speaker 3: like well regarded to books on this, now it's a
Speaker 3: slightly older book, came out, I believe, nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 3: so it doesn't reflect, you know, decades upon decades of
Speaker 3: additional contemplation and discovery. But L. Sprague de Camp, who
Speaker 3: of nineteen oh seven through two thousand wrote a book
Speaker 3: titled Lost Continents The Atlantis Theme in History, science, and Literature. Now,
Speaker 3: De Camp is an interesting fellow because he was also
Speaker 3: an influential sci fi author, whose works include nineteen thirty
Speaker 3: nine's Less Darkness Fall. He was also a posthumous collaborator
Speaker 3: with Conan creator Robert E. Howard, so he actually contributed
Speaker 3: quite a bit to the literary world of Conan the Barbarian,
Speaker 3: And interestingly enough, he served as an advisor on both
Speaker 3: nineteen eighties Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer movies,
Speaker 3: as well as nineteen ninety seven's Cole of a Conqueror,
Speaker 3: which does not have Arnold in it, but is an
Speaker 3: adaptation of a Conan novel.
Speaker 1: Idea is okay, so that's the one that's got Kevin.
Speaker 3: Sorbo and right right, Kevin Sorbo. But in these hercules, yeah,
Speaker 3: so they I think it was based on a Conan novel,
Speaker 3: but then they just changed his name to Cull the Conqueror,
Speaker 3: who's another character in Robert Y Howard's world. But I'm
Speaker 3: not super familiar with this movie or this other character.
Speaker 1: I've never seen that one. But my mind is aroused
Speaker 1: at the thoughts of scripts that Schwarzenegger said no to.
Speaker 3: Now, it is worth noting that Roberty Howard was one
Speaker 3: of numerous Pulp era authors to make use of lost
Speaker 3: and sunken islands, and a lot of this, you know,
Speaker 3: does have to do as sort of the timeline of
Speaker 3: interest in these fantastic ideas. I'll touch on a few
Speaker 3: other examples from the pulp era in just a minute,
Speaker 3: but in this book, de Camp discusses it at length,
Speaker 3: this idea of human fascination, literary, pseudohistorical, pseudo geogological, various
Speaker 3: interests in this idea of lost lands, lost continents, etc.
Speaker 3: And he points out that a lot of it comes
Speaker 3: back to this idea of a lost land that is
Speaker 3: often situated as some sort of utopia. It's a utopian ideal,
Speaker 3: or where it's an eden. It is a place where
Speaker 3: where we got it right, or things were right before
Speaker 3: the fall. You know, this idea that Okay, things are
Speaker 3: not great, but there must have been a point in
Speaker 3: time where things were in balance. And of course, and
Speaker 3: in summoning this idea, there is at least implied the
Speaker 3: idea that we might be able to return to it,
Speaker 3: either by our own efforts or by some sort of
Speaker 3: divine intervention.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's interesting and that that's correct. A
Speaker 1: lot of these stories about sunken lands and the civilizations
Speaker 1: that inhabited them, I guess there are some exceptions, but
Speaker 1: they don't usually seem to be well, this is just
Speaker 1: another place like many others, you know, that was just
Speaker 1: happened to be low lying and was swallowed by the waves,
Speaker 1: or there was some kind of weather event. It almost
Speaker 1: always is idealized in some way. It's a place that
Speaker 1: is especially good or especially advanced, or especially bad in
Speaker 1: some way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and yet in some manner or another, this place
Speaker 3: ties it all together, Which comes back to so many
Speaker 3: of these these threads that we've discussed in conspiracy thinking
Speaker 3: and and so forth, the idea that like, Okay, I
Speaker 3: have found something, and if true, and of course I
Speaker 3: believe it is true, it will explain all these other mysteries. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, you drop this in the middle of everything,
Speaker 3: and it all makes sense. It's the master key.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 3: So I don't really want to do an exhaustive list
Speaker 3: of every mythical and fictional sunken land. I mean, there's
Speaker 3: just there's a lot there, and a lot of them
Speaker 3: are also closely connected. I mean just in fantasy alone.
Speaker 3: It's like who anybody engaging in some broad world building
Speaker 3: is going to have perhaps in Atlantis or at least
Speaker 3: a lost land. I mean, it's just it's too attractive
Speaker 3: a trope to give up on, right, But I thought
Speaker 3: we might hit some notable examples in the three or
Speaker 3: four categories you might consider mythology, fiction, pseudoscience. But I
Speaker 3: do want to note that some entries will move between
Speaker 3: these classifications because once once you introduce an idea and
Speaker 3: other folks will come and and use it may be
Speaker 3: drifted into another category. So in mythology, I thought I
Speaker 3: might mention Avalon, of course, the magical island where King
Speaker 3: Arthur was taken, taken after sustaining mortal wounds. It's also
Speaker 3: the origin place of his sword EXCaliber, and in general
Speaker 3: just a magical land of Authorian legend, possibly linked in
Speaker 3: origin to Fadimorgana or Glastonbury Tor. Note that this isn't
Speaker 3: even the only sunken island in Authorian legend, though there
Speaker 3: are there are others. It's just like an irresistible magical idea,
Speaker 3: though again one that that may be rooted in strange observations.
Speaker 3: Islands that seem to be there but are not that
Speaker 3: are you know, fatam Organa, that are due to an
Speaker 3: illusion of one sort or another, or just a mistake
Speaker 3: of cartography, of trying to figure out what's out there
Speaker 3: and making mistakes.
Speaker 1: Both direct perceptual illusions and knowledge illusions give rise to
Speaker 1: the idea of islands that used to be there, but
Speaker 1: now you can't find them right.
Speaker 3: And then, of course in the background, again the geologic
Speaker 3: reality that things do change, and it is perhaps not
Speaker 3: beyond the realm of possibility that a lost island could
Speaker 3: truly be lost. It could have been a physical place
Speaker 3: and is no more. Another one is Brazil or High Brazil.
Speaker 3: This has generally nothing to do with Brazil, the South
Speaker 3: American country. This is an Irish lost isle of myth,
Speaker 3: a phantom island that is covered by myst most of
Speaker 3: the year, but then that mist opens up. Sometimes featured
Speaker 3: on old maps and was sought after by cartographers because
Speaker 3: again you have anytime you have this idea of an
Speaker 3: island that is thought to exist, and then it seems
Speaker 3: like it doesn't exist. I mean, that's a mystery that
Speaker 3: has to be explored. Now. It doesn't have to be
Speaker 3: an island, of course, you can also have coastal areas
Speaker 3: that are swallowed up. There's a mythical city in the
Speaker 3: traditions of Brittany and France. And I may be pronouncing
Speaker 3: this one wrong. Yes, I believe it's ys. I assume
Speaker 3: it's not Wise, but anyway, allegedly consumed by the ocean,
Speaker 3: and it's featured into a number of creative works, especially
Speaker 3: in French traditions. But of course the whole other realm
Speaker 3: is fiction, of course, and once something has been introduced
Speaker 3: in myth, given enough time, it may enter into fiction.
Speaker 3: And this leads us to Atlantis, as we've already discussed. Yeah,
Speaker 3: the lost continent of Atlantis, so called, has a prominent
Speaker 3: place in pseudo science and conspiracy thinking and fiction. Among
Speaker 3: the many entries here, I have to point out a
Speaker 3: couple of things from nineteen eighty two. One I've brought
Speaker 3: up many times before, but if you have not seen
Speaker 3: the commercial for Atari's Atlantis video game from nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 3: to look it up. It's marvelous. I think I saw
Speaker 3: this when I was like four years old, and it
Speaker 3: scared and amazed me.
Speaker 1: Rarely does a thirty second TV commercial have such a
Speaker 1: bone chilling plot twist it does.
Speaker 3: They really packed a lot into this one. I have
Speaker 3: no idea if the game was fun at the time
Speaker 3: or is well remembered as like a retro experience. But
Speaker 3: as I was revisiting this, because anytime this comes up,
Speaker 3: I have to go rewatch it. And then I discovered,
Speaker 3: weirdly enough that the brothers Hildebrand did a wall calendar
Speaker 3: of original art themed around Atlantis the same year, and
Speaker 3: I kept thinking, well, these have to be connected. There
Speaker 3: must have been some connective tissue here. If there is,
Speaker 3: I couldn't find it. But I love the Brother's Hilda brand.
Speaker 3: They did, of course, a lot of great Tolkien work,
Speaker 3: and they did Tolkien calendars back in the day. And yeah,
Speaker 3: they have this one calendar of Atlantis art with all
Speaker 3: sorts of like fantastic adventures going on, some sort of
Speaker 3: like demon Lord, a drag and so forth. So many
Speaker 3: people don't realize that their origins are of Atlantis are
Speaker 3: also based in fiction. You go back to around three
Speaker 3: fifty five BCE. That's when Greek philosopher Plato discusses the
Speaker 3: concept of Atlantis in a pair of dialogues Tomaeus and Critias.
Speaker 3: Atlantis is described as a naval empire that rules the
Speaker 3: western known world, but they ultimately fail when they come
Speaker 3: up against the Athenians. Then they fall out of favor
Speaker 3: with the gods, and their world is consumed by the
Speaker 3: Atlantic Ocean. It's described along the lines as being like
Speaker 3: the ideal of Plato's Republic. But here's the thing. There's
Speaker 3: no other surviving mention of Atlantis in the ancient Mediterranean world,
Speaker 3: aside from commentaries and responses to Plato's work. So, in
Speaker 3: other words, there's no indication that this was a pre
Speaker 3: existing idea, that this was something that was considered actual history,
Speaker 3: or even like a pre existing I guess you would
Speaker 3: say literary trope.
Speaker 1: Right so, it's not even clear that it was thought
Speaker 1: to actually be a place.
Speaker 3: Right now, among those various commentators over many years, it
Speaker 3: looks like many took it as med of metaphor and
Speaker 3: or as myth, though you do have some folks that
Speaker 3: pop up that end up taking a more literal approach
Speaker 3: to it, or so it seems, based again on surviving texts.
Speaker 3: As such, you end up with a legacy of varying interpretations,
Speaker 3: which de Camp summarizes is either taking it on as
Speaker 3: a fiction, finding actual societies that you can compare to Atlantis,
Speaker 3: the investigation of land bridges and islands with Atlantis in mind,
Speaker 3: and also just the wholesale acceptance of the concept as
Speaker 3: historical truth. And of course this approach especially is widely
Speaker 3: regarded as pseudohistory at the very least now. Again, though,
Speaker 3: just because something is introduced in fiction doesn't mean it
Speaker 3: stays in fiction like these. That's one of the interesting
Speaker 3: things about this, and I guess in general about about
Speaker 3: human imagination is once something has has been imagined, it
Speaker 3: doesn't have to stay in that realm of sort of
Speaker 3: safe unreal and fiction. It can move into other categories
Speaker 3: of the unreal, the mythological, the uh you know, the
Speaker 3: pseudo scientific, the pseudohistorical, the pseudo archaeological, et cetera.
Speaker 1: I have to wonder if in thousands of years they're
Speaker 1: going to be people being like, uh, you know when
Speaker 1: Tolkien talked about the elves going to Vallen or across
Speaker 1: the ocean? Uh, was that referring to the island of Cuba?
Speaker 3: Do you think, yeah, exactly, And you do end up
Speaker 3: with that sort of inquiry. I mean in part of that,
Speaker 3: of course, too, is you have someone like Plato who
Speaker 3: has such high standing and sort of the intellectual world
Speaker 3: for centuries and centuries. You know, people are going to
Speaker 3: come back and and reanalyze everything that they wrote. Now,
Speaker 3: in terms of fiction, I will just mention in passing
Speaker 3: like a few examples. I love the work of Clark
Speaker 3: Ashton Smith, and a lot of his stories involved lost continents.
Speaker 3: I think he has three different lost continents, well, though
Speaker 3: one of them is a continent from the future that
Speaker 3: doesn't exist now, So it's sort of kind of again,
Speaker 3: kind of the same concept, but put in reverse, taking
Speaker 3: into the future and saying in the future there will
Speaker 3: be a new continent and these are the sort of
Speaker 3: adventures that will take place there. And of course J R.
Speaker 3: Tolkien got in on the action as well. We have
Speaker 3: the lost Kingdom of Middle Earth Numanor. This was corrupted
Speaker 3: by Sauron in his fair form, and then it's destroyed
Speaker 3: in a cataclysm as the kingdom turns against the valor.
Speaker 1: Oh is Newmanor swallowed by waters. I never understood that,
Speaker 1: I guess I just thought of it as like an
Speaker 1: empire that fell.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like a star shaped island, I believe, according
Speaker 3: to the maps and the recent Amazon series, I believe
Speaker 3: depicts the fall of Numanor. I'm having trouble remembering offhand.
Speaker 3: I need to revisit it before they put out another season.
Speaker 1: I guess I haven't watched that yet, but I've been
Speaker 1: meaning to check it out at some point.
Speaker 3: High production values, yeah, now in the pseudoscientific world, and
Speaker 3: again there's a lot of overlap with these these sort
Speaker 3: of loose categories. You have the island of MoU. This
Speaker 3: is both a place of pseudoscience and fantasy, according to
Speaker 3: de Camp, proposed in the nineteenth century by British American
Speaker 3: archaeologist and photographer Augustus Leplogion, who used it to connect
Speaker 3: Mayan civilization to ancient Egyptian civilization. Again, this is one
Speaker 3: of those classic examples of like, if this exists, it
Speaker 3: explains everything, and getting into this idea of like, well, look,
Speaker 3: we have things in Mayan civilization, we have things in
Speaker 3: ancient Egyptian civilization. They remind me of each other. There
Speaker 3: must be some like missing link to connect them. Otherwise
Speaker 3: this doesn't make sense to me.
Speaker 1: They both built pyramids sort of, so that couldn't be
Speaker 1: explained by them both just figuring out how to build pyramids, right.
Speaker 3: But then on top of this, British occultist James Churchward
Speaker 3: would go on to write about Moo as well, associating
Speaker 3: it with Lemuria, which we'll get to in a second
Speaker 3: in works of pseudoscience that argue that it was the
Speaker 3: not only was it this kind of like missing link
Speaker 3: in terms of understanding global civilizations, but it was the
Speaker 3: location of the Garden of Eden and a cultural connection
Speaker 3: for various ancient civilizations. And then Atlantis also enters the
Speaker 3: mix here. Even though its origins I think most serious
Speaker 3: scholars would agree is as a metaphor, is as a
Speaker 3: work of fiction. Various individuals have made arguments for the
Speaker 3: discovery of a lost Atlantis or have gone all in
Speaker 3: on the idea of Atlantis, And according to the kamp
Speaker 3: a great deal of modern Atlantis mania stems from sixteenth
Speaker 3: century enthusiasm for the concept, and a lot of this
Speaker 3: enthusiasm coincided with excitement for the new world of the Americas.
Speaker 3: So you know, again you have a lot of energy,
Speaker 3: like new lands are discovered, and then you have this
Speaker 3: idea of Atlantis, and then people were proposing things like, well,
Speaker 3: are the Americas Atlantis? Well no, but I guess you
Speaker 3: can lean into that interpretation if you so desire.
Speaker 1: You know, I was just thinking about the sort of
Speaker 1: common strain of thinking that connects conspiracy thinking with with
Speaker 1: highly speculative lost civilization thinking, and like why you would
Speaker 1: typically find both beliefs in the same brain, Like why
Speaker 1: people are drawn to one if they're often if they're
Speaker 1: drawn to the other. The idea of a lost civilization
Speaker 1: that was vanished beneath the waves. Is a is a literal,
Speaker 1: physical manifestation of the type of hidden knowledge or covered
Speaker 1: up knowledge that that you know, guide's conspiracy thinking. Like
Speaker 1: if you're a you're a conspiracy thinking person. You think
Speaker 1: that there is a there is a mechanism somehow that
Speaker 1: explains all these disparate phenomena, but the but the nature
Speaker 1: of that mechanism is being covered up. It is hidden
Speaker 1: from you somehow. Usually it's a social mechanism. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, an agreement of people, or it's a you know,
Speaker 1: an extraterrestrial mechanism there are aliens doing things or something
Speaker 1: like that. The lost civilization under the waves is kind
Speaker 1: of like that. It explains history in a similar way,
Speaker 1: but it has been literally physically covered up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and and again it goes back to this idea
Speaker 3: of lo fi information to support an idea. Though interestingly enough,
Speaker 3: like coming back to the idea of Mayan and Egyptian civilizations.
Speaker 3: So obviously, like the Great Pyramids are are not lo
Speaker 3: fi evidence. Likewise, you know, various megastructures in the Americas
Speaker 3: are not lo fi evidence either. But you're using both
Speaker 3: of these as evidence for this third thing that doesn't exist.
Speaker 3: Then they do become kind of low five, because again
Speaker 3: there is there is not a thing there to prove
Speaker 3: there is not this lost civilization that connects the two.
Speaker 1: You might also though, be coming at them from a
Speaker 1: position of low information, in that you don't have a
Speaker 1: lot of contextual knowledge about these these civilizations, and thus,
Speaker 1: you know, you just see like similarly shaped buildings and
Speaker 1: think like has to be a common source between them. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, now I don't want to make it seem like,
Speaker 3: you know, just the idea of lost continents and lost
Speaker 3: lands that aren't there, you know, are entirely rooted in
Speaker 3: you know, conspiracy thinking and and sort of non logical inquiry.
Speaker 3: Because another example to touch on coming back to Lemuria
Speaker 3: is this, this was an eighteenth century hypothesis to explain
Speaker 3: similarities between species on distant continents. You know, we have
Speaker 3: organisms that look like like this here, there are organisms
Speaker 3: that look like this over here, and there's just too
Speaker 3: much distance. How can we possibly explain this? And so
Speaker 3: was this was one idea, Well, perhaps there is a
Speaker 3: lost land mass, something is missing between these continents that
Speaker 3: would explain these species being in both places. However, a
Speaker 3: much better theory came around that of continental drift. But
Speaker 3: once introduced again, the idea of Lemuria ends up taking
Speaker 3: on additional qualities to various interpreters. You know, it becomes
Speaker 3: the cradle of human civilization in various occult world views
Speaker 3: and in various fictions. And you often see this kind
Speaker 3: of loop, I think, with serious theories feeding occult nonsense
Speaker 3: and feeding fantasy, feeding you know, you know, things that
Speaker 3: are you know, just purely enjoyable, and then that may
Speaker 3: feed back into other things as well. So there are
Speaker 3: more examples, to be sure, and we may come back
Speaker 3: to some of these, but I think these examples nicely
Speaker 3: sum up some of the association and ideas here. It's
Speaker 3: kind of a missing link concept, the lost place that
Speaker 3: could more easily explain the world, and or a lost
Speaker 3: golden age. And in this the concept is closely connected
Speaker 3: to the con to various ideas of spiritual lands just
Speaker 3: beyond the reach of mundane experience. So you know, there
Speaker 3: might be like a like there's a shambala in Tibetan Buddhism.
Speaker 3: I think there are various kingdoms and Russian folklore, you know,
Speaker 3: almost like cities in the sky that are just beyond reach,
Speaker 3: and you find these in various various form. I mean
Speaker 3: avalon is basically the idea, you know, this place that
Speaker 3: is now beyond the reach of the mortal world.
Speaker 1: So across the whole spectrum of fiction, myth, legend and
Speaker 1: obsolete scientific hypotheses, there have been ideas of lands that
Speaker 1: were covered over by the waves or vanish beneath the
Speaker 1: waters somehow. But now I want to talk about a
Speaker 1: real and firmly establi published provable example of lands that
Speaker 1: were in quite recently sunk beneath the waters within the
Speaker 1: span of human history.
Speaker 3: Is it Atlantis?
Speaker 1: It is not Atlantis, Okay. So I want to start
Speaker 1: with an anecdote about a strange find, and a lot
Speaker 1: of my details here are coming from an article published
Speaker 1: in Archaeology magazine by Jason Urbanas called Mapping a Vanished Landscape.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen thirty one, one night in September, there
Speaker 1: was a British fishing boat called the Kolinda which was
Speaker 1: trawling in the North Sea off the eastern coast of
Speaker 1: England around the county of Norfolk. If you're not familiar
Speaker 1: with trawling, it is a method of fishing where you
Speaker 1: drop a large cup shaped net into the water and
Speaker 1: you pull it behind the boat, and there's midwater trawling
Speaker 1: and bottom trawling. With midwater trawling you drag the net
Speaker 1: through the middle of the water column. With bottom trawling,
Speaker 1: you let the net sink to the bottom, and the
Speaker 1: net has weights that keep it stuck to the bottom
Speaker 1: and keep the mouth of the net open, So the
Speaker 1: boat drags the net along the seabed, sort of bulldozing
Speaker 1: the top layer of sediment and scooping up whatever is
Speaker 1: in its path large enough to get trapped in the net.
Speaker 1: The Klinda was trawling off the coast of Norfolk, about
Speaker 1: twenty five miles out at a place where the water
Speaker 1: was roughly one hundred and twenty feet deep or about
Speaker 1: thirty seven meters. After hauling up the net from a
Speaker 1: bottom trowl, a guy named Pilgrim Lockwood, who was the
Speaker 1: skipper of the boat, noticed a big chunk of peat
Speaker 1: stuck in the catch and bottom trawling often creates a
Speaker 1: lot of what's called bycatch. That term usually refers to
Speaker 1: unwanted animals that you get in the net that are
Speaker 1: not part of what you're fishing for, but also it
Speaker 1: just gets a bunch of objects from the sea floor,
Speaker 1: because again it's kind of like bulldozing the top layer
Speaker 1: of sediment as it gets dragged along, So a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff ends up in the net and that stuff
Speaker 1: has to be discarded. Now, this peat from the bottom.
Speaker 1: Here's a really good I came across. I've seen sources
Speaker 1: that mentioned that these chunks of pete pulled up from
Speaker 1: the ocean like this were often referred to in England
Speaker 1: as moor logo r l og nice. Is there a
Speaker 1: band I didn't check that'd be a good bog metal
Speaker 1: band name.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I can see the album cover right now
Speaker 3: with like a bog mummy on it.
Speaker 1: So the skipper, Pilgrim Lockwood, he's got this chunk of
Speaker 1: pete that's part of the you know, not what they're
Speaker 1: fishing for. Obviously, he's stuck in the net, so he
Speaker 1: gets it out. He starts to smash the peete up
Speaker 1: with a shovel. But while he was doing that he
Speaker 1: found something rigid lodged inside and he actually said that
Speaker 1: it sounded when his shovel hit this object. He said
Speaker 1: it sounded like it was clanging against metal. It was
Speaker 1: not a rock. He pulled it out, and what he
Speaker 1: found was a sharp instrument about eight and a half
Speaker 1: inches or twenty two centimeters in length, with a pointed
Speaker 1: tip at one end and barbs or teeth running most
Speaker 1: of the way down its length, like some kind of weapon.
Speaker 1: And it was a weapon. This is not a case
Speaker 1: where you know, it was actually some deep sea organism
Speaker 1: that you know, was mistaken for a human artifact. This
Speaker 1: was an artifact. This was technology. It was ancient technology,
Speaker 1: and this artifact came to be known as the Kolinda harpoon.
Speaker 1: So experts from the British Museum studied the artifact and
Speaker 1: they determined that it was the tip of a fishing
Speaker 1: sphere from the Mesolithic period or the Middle Stone Age,
Speaker 1: which would have been somewhere between ten thousand and four
Speaker 1: thousand BCE. It's an intriguing looking weapon. So it's got
Speaker 1: the sharp end, it's got the saw teeth, but it's
Speaker 1: also got these ridges sort of gashed in it along
Speaker 1: the opposite end from the tip.
Speaker 3: You know, it does remind me a little bit of
Speaker 3: the fabled weapon of coculon the oh oh, you know,
Speaker 3: that was supposed to be in some cases like barbed
Speaker 3: like like the barb of a stingray. Yeah, though, of
Speaker 3: course to your point, clearly this is this is not
Speaker 3: a nature fact, This is an artifact. This is something
Speaker 3: that that was carved and made through human craft and ingenuity.
Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely made by human hands. But that raises questions
Speaker 1: how did this Stone Age weapon end up buried in
Speaker 1: peat in the ocean more than twenty miles off the
Speaker 1: coast of modern day Britain. Like, was it possible that
Speaker 1: ancient hunter gatherers carried it out to sea that far
Speaker 1: on a boat or a raft and then dropped it
Speaker 1: to the bottom. At the time it was found, that
Speaker 1: seemed possible, but not very likely. Today we know more
Speaker 1: about the Klinda harpoon. According to the Norfolk Museums, the
Speaker 1: harpoon tip was made from the antler of a red
Speaker 1: deer that's the species service Elaphus, and it has been
Speaker 1: radiocarbon dated to about eleven, seven hundred and ninety years ago.
Speaker 1: Mentioned in the Archaeology magazine article is another strange fact.
Speaker 1: A year after the Colinda harpoon was discovered, scientists analyzed
Speaker 1: the pollen contained in the peat or the moor log
Speaker 1: from around where the spear tip was discovered, and they
Speaker 1: found something bizarre. Even though the peat was more than
Speaker 1: one hundred feet under the water, it had been formed
Speaker 1: in a fresh water context, lakes and rivers and topside bogs,
Speaker 1: not ocean floors. So the person carrying the Colinda harpoon
Speaker 1: Althose thousands of years ago had not been a sea goer,
Speaker 1: but an earthwalker, possibly fishing in a river. And this
Speaker 1: isn't the only Stone Age human artifact recovered from the
Speaker 1: bottom of the North Sea. We can come back to that,
Speaker 1: but I want to move on to something else, because
Speaker 1: the Colinda Harpoon was not the first indication that there
Speaker 1: was something odd about the sea to the east of
Speaker 1: Great Britain. I would now like to read a passage
Speaker 1: from a book called Submerged Forests, published in nineteen thirteen
Speaker 1: by the British geologist Clement Reed. Clement Reed writes, quote,
Speaker 1: most of our seaside places of resort lie at the
Speaker 1: mouths of small valleys, which originally gave the fishermen easy
Speaker 1: access to the shore and later on provided fairly level
Speaker 1: sites for building. At such places, the fishermen will tell
Speaker 1: you of black, peaty earth with hazel nuts, and often
Speaker 1: with tree stumps still rooted in the soil, seen between
Speaker 1: tide marks when the overlying sea sand has been cleared
Speaker 1: away by some storm or unusually persistent wind. If one
Speaker 1: is fortunate enough to be on the spot when such
Speaker 1: a patch is uncovered, this submerged forest is found to
Speaker 1: extend right down to the level of the lowest tides.
Speaker 1: The trees are often well grown oaks, though more commonly
Speaker 1: they turn out to be merely brushwood of hazel, sallow
Speaker 1: and alder, mingled with other swamp plants such as the
Speaker 1: rhizomes of osmuda. These submerged forests, or quote Noah's woods
Speaker 1: as they are called locally, have attracted attention from early times,
Speaker 1: all the more so owing to the existence of an
Speaker 1: uneasy feeling that, though, like most other geological phenomena, they
Speaker 1: were popularly explained by Noah's deluge, it was difficult thus
Speaker 1: to account for trees rooted in their original soil and
Speaker 1: yet now found well below the level of high tide.
Speaker 1: And Ooh, thinking about the submerged forests, it gives me
Speaker 1: a spooky feeling. So at the lowest level of the tide,
Speaker 1: when when the water goes back farthest, even all the
Speaker 1: way down to that level, you will sometimes find, especially
Speaker 1: if there has been maybe a violent storm that has
Speaker 1: shifted the sediment around and pushed sand out of the way,
Speaker 1: you will find uncovered tree stumps, still rooted, apparently in
Speaker 1: their original position. Trees can't grow in the salt water,
Speaker 1: so what was happening there?
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is enticing and it does remind me though
Speaker 3: that something we've discussed in the past and the show
Speaker 3: that you know, for most of human history, we didn't
Speaker 3: have a high resolution understanding of the world beneath the waves,
Speaker 3: and and so a lot of it was based on
Speaker 3: guesswork and uh, and there were a lot of ideas
Speaker 3: about cities and forests beneath the sea, and like this
Speaker 3: general idea that anything that you certainly see in Western discourse,
Speaker 3: that anything that exists in the surface world would have
Speaker 3: an analog beneath the water. So you have a lion
Speaker 3: up here, well, you have a sea lion under there.
Speaker 3: You have a horse up here, you have a sea
Speaker 3: horse beneath the waves.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you have people up here, you have marror
Speaker 1: people down there. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So like there, you know, you have that huge category.
Speaker 3: You have these you know, accounts of great floods and
Speaker 3: so forth. So there's a lot of there's a lot
Speaker 3: of like background mythology and observational data to feed intoto
Speaker 3: any kind of discovery like this.
Speaker 1: So how do you explain these submerged forests? In this work,
Speaker 1: Clement Reid goes on to document and make all kinds
Speaker 1: of observations about them, but he reached a strange but
Speaker 1: unavoidable conclusion. Sea levels were not constant, and the sea
Speaker 1: had to be higher now than it was in the past,
Speaker 1: much higher now than it was in the past, meaning
Speaker 1: that much of what was once the relatively shallow North
Speaker 1: Sea had actually been not a sea but a vast
Speaker 1: alluvial plain at the hidden lowlands of ages past, and
Speaker 1: these lands were most recently covered with trees. There are
Speaker 1: still places today where when the tide is at its lowest,
Speaker 1: you can find indications that there used to be forests
Speaker 1: on lands that are now covered by the North Sea,
Speaker 1: and of course recently enough for remains of tree trunks
Speaker 1: and stumps to still be preserved there. One commonly cited
Speaker 1: example is a place called pet Level Pett pet Level
Speaker 1: Beach in Sussex, where the remains of a forest can
Speaker 1: still be seen at low tide with indications of oak trees,
Speaker 1: elm U and beach.
Speaker 3: Rob.
Speaker 1: I've got some pictures for you to look at. Both
Speaker 1: these pictures here from pet But another example that I
Speaker 1: came across is from the remains of a submerged forest
Speaker 1: that is still fully submerged. So this appeared in the
Speaker 1: media within the last decade. I was reading from an
Speaker 1: article in BBC News Norfolk and its attached video segment.
Speaker 1: This was from twenty fifteen and it was called Ancient
Speaker 1: Underwater Forests Discovered off Norfolk Coast and the report says
Speaker 1: that it was documented by a couple of research divers
Speaker 1: named Rob Spray and Dawn Watson. This was after a
Speaker 1: major storm had shifted sediments in an underwater region off
Speaker 1: the north Norfolk coast. So just like Clement Reid was saying,
Speaker 1: you know, it's especially after there's been some violent event,
Speaker 1: maybe a big dorm moves the sediment around and uncovers things.
Speaker 1: In an interview for this news segment, Dawn Watson, one
Speaker 1: of the divers, describes coming across this region by accident.
Speaker 1: She said she had been swimming for a while, she
Speaker 1: was almost out of her air supply, towards the end
Speaker 1: of a dive when she came across an enormous mass
Speaker 1: on the seafloor. She says, it was quote almost a
Speaker 1: standing wave of black stuff in front of me. It
Speaker 1: took me a while to work out what it was,
Speaker 1: and it was just wood shaped like a wave. So
Speaker 1: she says, at first she thought it was a shipwreck,
Speaker 1: maybe it looked like the hull of a boat, but
Speaker 1: then she realized it was actually a huge hunk of
Speaker 1: unprocessed solid wood, not the planks of a wooden ship's hull,
Speaker 1: but the trunk of a tree laying down horizontally. And
Speaker 1: the divers, after examining this location, say that it seems
Speaker 1: to be the remains of an ancient forest, probably primarily
Speaker 1: oak tree, lying horizontal. So the trees appear to have
Speaker 1: been knocked flat by some event, you know, long ago.
Speaker 1: They speculate, possibly outwash from a glacier, but we don't
Speaker 1: know for sure. And when you see the footage in
Speaker 1: this video segment, it's amazing how much in some ways
Speaker 1: it still looks like a tree trunk. You can even
Speaker 1: see what look like, you know, knots in the wood
Speaker 1: or maybe trunk wounds, little holes in the trunk which
Speaker 1: have now charmingly been inhabited by starfish and crabs. Ra
Speaker 1: I attached to a screen shop for you to look at,
Speaker 1: and you can see crabs getting down in the little
Speaker 1: heidi holes.
Speaker 3: Oh nice, Yeah, there they are.
Speaker 1: And the divers in this interview emphasized that they almost
Speaker 1: missed it. It is pure luck that the forest was
Speaker 1: exposed by the violence of a recent storm and that
Speaker 1: they just happened to come across it at the end
Speaker 1: of a dive. But they also point out an interesting
Speaker 1: thing about marine biology, just about under sea life. As
Speaker 1: soon as this buried timber from thousands of years ago
Speaker 1: was exposed, see organisms flooded in, just like with In fact,
Speaker 1: we've done episodes on this in the past, like with shipwrecks,
Speaker 1: you know, that come to resemble in some ways the
Speaker 1: habitat dynamics of coral reefs. A hard surface at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the ocean quickly becomes a teeming habitat. Bottom
Speaker 1: dwelling organisms can build a whole world around a solid floor.
Speaker 1: So maybe smaller organisms like the hard surface that they
Speaker 1: can attach to, or they like little nooks and crannies
Speaker 1: and pieces of shelter they come in, they inhabit it,
Speaker 1: then bigger organisms come in to eat them, and it
Speaker 1: creates this whole ecosystem. Oh and another thing I've got
Speaker 1: for you to look at here, rob, I took a
Speaker 1: screenshot of part of this ancient submerged forest. It's just
Speaker 1: got starfish all over it, which we know from our
Speaker 1: recent headlessness episodes. The starfish they're not without a head,
Speaker 1: they are all head So we're just seeing like dozens
Speaker 1: of heads all smushing into each other here on this
Speaker 1: ancient tree trunk. So you put all this together, these
Speaker 1: ancient human artifacts, miles and miles off the east coast
Speaker 1: of Britain, oak forest preserved on the bottom of the sea,
Speaker 1: so that we can still see the stumps and crabs
Speaker 1: can make a home in the wood. What does all
Speaker 1: of that point to? Well, today scientists have firmly established
Speaker 1: what explains it all. This is not a highly speculative theory.
Speaker 1: This is clearly what's the case. It is all evidence
Speaker 1: of an ancient land mass known as Doggerland. So what
Speaker 1: was Doggerland? Doggerland was an area of what used to
Speaker 1: be dry land during the peak of the Last Ice Age,
Speaker 1: when much of the world's water was locked up in
Speaker 1: polar glaciers during the peak of the Last Ice Age,
Speaker 1: and this land is now submerged beneath the sea. It
Speaker 1: was a large stretch of low lying earth, mostly flat
Speaker 1: alluvial plains, extending north from the Netherlands in Germany, connecting
Speaker 1: Great Britain to the rest of continental Europe and at
Speaker 1: the eastern end dogger Lands seem to have gone up
Speaker 1: against what is today Jutland or you know, the Denmark peninsula.
Speaker 3: Wow, this is impressive. You included an illustration here showing
Speaker 3: like what this would have looked like. We're not an
Speaker 3: illustration of map, and it is quite impressive, like essentially
Speaker 3: like a thick land bridge connecting like you said, UK
Speaker 3: to mainland Europe.
Speaker 1: Right, So, at the time Great Britain was not an
Speaker 1: island but a peninsula. It was connected to the rest
Speaker 1: of Europe by land. So not all sunken lands are
Speaker 1: misinterpretations of ancient writings or pseudoscience or pseudohistory. There are
Speaker 1: actually sunken lands that played a significant role in ancient ecosystems,
Speaker 1: in how life developed on ancient continents and were in
Speaker 1: some cases occupied by humans. And now despite the difficulty
Speaker 1: of trying to do things like archaeology in areas that
Speaker 1: are now underneath the sea. There's a lot we can
Speaker 1: know about them. So in the rest of this series,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk more about dogger Land, what happened
Speaker 1: to it, what we know about it, and more of
Speaker 1: the sunken lands of planet Earth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so who knows what we'll get into and who
Speaker 3: knows what will emerge from the deep darkness of the
Speaker 3: ocean or various lakes and rivers in the episode or
Speaker 3: episodes ahead. All right, we're gonna go ahead and close
Speaker 3: this episode out, though we'll be back on Thursday. Just
Speaker 3: a reminder once more that' Stuff to Blow Your Mind
Speaker 3: is primarily a science podcast, with new episodes new core
Speaker 3: episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do listener mail. On Mondays,
Speaker 3: we tend to do a short form artifact or monster
Speaker 3: fact episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we set aside
Speaker 3: most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie
Speaker 3: on Weird House Cinema. If you follow us on social media,
Speaker 3: check out those feeds, because we've our social media team
Speaker 3: has been putting out a little bits of to let
Speaker 3: you know what the latest episode is and that includes
Speaker 3: some neat little video stuff in there. If you if
Speaker 3: you are on Instagram and you don't follow us, we
Speaker 3: are STBYM podcast there, so give us a follow. We're
Speaker 3: trying to build up our followers after we've lost access
Speaker 3: to our old account and uh yeah, what else do
Speaker 3: you have, Joe?
Speaker 1: I can't think of anything else we lost access to.
Speaker 3: It's like a lost civilization. It's like a it's an
Speaker 3: Atlantis that's sunk beneath the waves. I think it has
Speaker 3: like an episode on airships, or maybe it's the Herzog
Speaker 3: interview are right up there at the top, and then
Speaker 3: it's at some point after that that accounts sunk beneath
Speaker 3: the waves.
Speaker 1: Whoop see never to be reclaimed. Huge thanks as always
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would
Speaker 1: like to get in touch with us with feedback on
Speaker 1: this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
Speaker 1: the future, or just to say hello, you can email
Speaker 1: us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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