Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Speaker 2: Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is a good
Speaker 2: old fashioned episode of Stuff you Should Know. It's got
Speaker 2: history as geology has lost lands, it has abbreviations like KYA,
Speaker 2: all sorts of great stuff in it.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, my friend. If I know Josh Clark loves
Speaker 1: something it is submerged or lost.
Speaker 3: Lands, it really is.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 3: I know this kind of thing really really float your boat.
Speaker 2: It does. It floats my submerged land. We're talking about
Speaker 2: Dogger Land, by the way, everybody.
Speaker 1: That's right, we should probably just say kind of what
Speaker 1: it is first, right before we get into the details.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we've talked about it here there. I could not,
Speaker 2: for the life of me remember what episode, but it's
Speaker 2: come up once or twice, but I think it bears
Speaker 2: repeating for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a you know, a lost land, a submerged
Speaker 1: land mass off the coast of Europe. It's in the
Speaker 1: North Sea, probably anywhere from fifty to sixty to one
Speaker 1: hundred feet down and it used to be a you know,
Speaker 1: it used to be land. It used to connect they
Speaker 1: pretty much firmly believe now connect the UK and Europe.
Speaker 1: And not only that, but was a land where that
Speaker 1: kind of flourished depending on when you're talking about with
Speaker 1: plants and animals and even people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they think that it's possible. So this was really
Speaker 2: populated during the Mesolithic area or era and the area.
Speaker 2: They think that this area during the Mesolithic era was
Speaker 2: one of the most densely populated places in all of Europe.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: And by the way, did you ever see Taylor Swift
Speaker 1: on her area's tour.
Speaker 2: I didn't, but I can feel a Taylor Swift area
Speaker 2: coming on.
Speaker 1: Eventually she through the concert. She sort of walked the
Speaker 1: audience through all of her different areas.
Speaker 3: This is my knee, the left one, knees and toes,
Speaker 3: knees and toes.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I mean it sounds kind of like, wait,
Speaker 2: that's it. There's like a land mass that once connected
Speaker 2: the UK and Europe.
Speaker 3: That's enough.
Speaker 2: Like you can see somebody making an absurd or obscene
Speaker 2: hand motion talk thinking about that, right, but.
Speaker 3: No, listen exactly what you're saying.
Speaker 2: Stick with us, because this is it's fantastically interesting. Even
Speaker 2: though we know very very little about it. The stuff
Speaker 2: we do know is so tantalizing that it's like the
Speaker 2: archaeologists who are studying this are just they want to
Speaker 2: just say, like, so bad, there's so much stuff down there,
Speaker 2: we just know it. But they're they're being deliberate and methodical,
Speaker 2: so they're not letting themselves say that. But we can
Speaker 2: say it for them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's called Doggerland and that's just cool. It
Speaker 1: sounds like a movie title or something.
Speaker 2: You know, it does starring Lily Tomlin, you know, the
Speaker 2: younger one Alan, No.
Speaker 3: Not that young von stup. No, why is her name
Speaker 3: con Taylor?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 3: Oh really, she was.
Speaker 2: In a movie called maybe dog Face or something like
Speaker 2: that or.
Speaker 3: Dog Oh yeah, dog Dogfight.
Speaker 2: No, it doesn't matter. We should probably edit this out.
Speaker 2: If we were a different podcast, we would edit this.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Man, I came up with like four or five lilies.
Speaker 2: You got to leave that in, Okay, true, true dah.
Speaker 2: But I don't even remember how I got on the
Speaker 2: Lily thing.
Speaker 1: Well, I said it would be a good movie, and
Speaker 1: you reckon that Lily Taylor would be a good Oh
Speaker 1: star yet that movie?
Speaker 2: Because you were talking about it's a cool name and
Speaker 2: The name comes after the Dogger Bank, which is a
Speaker 2: shallow fishing area, very productive fishing area in the North Sea.
Speaker 2: And the Dogger Bank is named after a type of
Speaker 2: Dutch cod fishing boats that were used for hundreds of
Speaker 2: years in the area. So there you go, Doggerland.
Speaker 3: That's right. I hope we got all that right.
Speaker 1: But it's a pretty shallow sea as far as seas go,
Speaker 1: about two hundred and twenty thousand square miles, and it
Speaker 1: sits in between the UK and Europe, of course, and
Speaker 1: because if there was a land bridge that connected those two,
Speaker 1: that's where the North Sea would be. It has long
Speaker 1: been a very crucial shipping route and trade route. And
Speaker 1: as for this story, you know, it's pretty key that
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties and then sixties gas and oil
Speaker 1: reservoirs were found there and companies started licking their chops.
Speaker 1: And they will come into play later, oil companies and
Speaker 1: gas companies being as being actually in you know, finally
Speaker 1: kind of key to helping out science, you know, and
Speaker 1: scientists and their explorations.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that will come in later. It's also there's
Speaker 2: a lot of shipping that goes on apparently that's a
Speaker 2: very ancient thing. People have been shipping things over the
Speaker 2: North Sea for a very long time, and then now
Speaker 2: it's become a really attractive site for renewable energy, as
Speaker 2: we'll see. So the North Sea is very important and
Speaker 2: it's been used for a very long time, but its
Speaker 2: depths were just unknown, like people hadn't explored it. They
Speaker 2: didn't have the means to really.
Speaker 1: Yeah, even though it's fairly shallow, it's still deep for
Speaker 1: back then.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one hundred feet what are you going to do?
Speaker 2: Hold your breath exactly. I mean the moment you get
Speaker 2: down on the bottom of you if you come right
Speaker 2: back up, it's terrible for exploration holding your breath this. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but there were some tantalizing clues that came up over
Speaker 2: the years that did strongly suggest that there was something
Speaker 2: down there that had once been above the sea's surface.
Speaker 3: That's right. The first thing that happened late nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: They started, you know, better fishing technology came along and
Speaker 1: you could fish a little bit deeper. So they started
Speaker 1: fishing a little bit deeper, which is great because you
Speaker 1: can get you know, a lot more fish down there.
Speaker 1: But it was kind of a pain because they started
Speaker 1: dragging up what they called moor log, which is, you know, pete,
Speaker 1: this kind of nasty clump together pete. And in that
Speaker 1: pete sometimes they would find animal bones, not fishbones, but
Speaker 1: like mammal bones, and I guess it was a nineteenth
Speaker 1: century so it just sort of hassled their fishing progress.
Speaker 1: So they would just usually toss them overboard. Occasionally, if
Speaker 1: they had some like really well preserved you know, skull
Speaker 1: or deer femur or something like that, they might keep it.
Speaker 1: But that's when the first sort of whisperings of like
Speaker 1: something used to be down there started happening.
Speaker 2: Exactly and then in usual fashion, it's worth mentioning H. G. Wells.
Speaker 2: It was probably one of the best speculators in the
Speaker 2: history of speculative fiction.
Speaker 3: This is pretty cool.
Speaker 2: He heard about some of those fines and he wrote
Speaker 2: a story called the Story of the Stone Age, which
Speaker 2: is basically like, there's a continent under the North Sea
Speaker 2: between the UK and Europe.
Speaker 3: Don't forget right.
Speaker 2: This guy is the guy who in the late nineteenth
Speaker 2: century wrote stories about humans sending rockets up into space. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and placed the launches at Cape Canaverl. Like, that's how
Speaker 2: smart this guy was. As far as seeing in the
Speaker 2: future goes, I love it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. He's pretty great writer too.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Interesting, dude, man, we should do one on HG. Wells.
Speaker 1: He deserves his own show, I think. Okay, all right,
Speaker 1: all right, moving on, as we crawl through Noah's Woods. Now,
Speaker 1: before the nineteenth century and those bones and that morlog
Speaker 1: Pete started coming up, there were whispers then, I said,
Speaker 1: the first whispers came in the late nineteenth century. It's
Speaker 1: not exactly true because during low tide, way back when
Speaker 1: the water levels would drop, and some of these folks
Speaker 1: living in the UK at the time would see these
Speaker 1: tree stumps and this is like medieval times, and they
Speaker 1: called it Noah's Woods, with the idea that this was,
Speaker 1: you know, possibly the area where Noah from the Bible
Speaker 1: lived before God decided to flood the earth because he
Speaker 1: was grumpy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And here was plane right in your face evidence
Speaker 2: of it. So that had stuck around since the medieval age,
Speaker 2: and apparently, according to UK or early British low this
Speaker 2: is where Robinson Caruso, who was the model for Robin Hood,
Speaker 2: emerged from the water and gave Arthur the sword and
Speaker 2: the stone.
Speaker 3: That's right, So Noah's Woods was.
Speaker 2: Just kind of like a local thing. I'm sure the
Speaker 2: churchy types really talked about it more than anybody else,
Speaker 2: but scientists hadn't paid much attention to it until a
Speaker 2: very forward thinking scientist and his wife, Clement and Eleanor Reid,
Speaker 2: came forward and they started looking into it, and they
Speaker 2: kind of were the first people to put together Noah's Woods,
Speaker 2: the fact that there are tree stumps, weirdly ancient ones
Speaker 2: in the sea. People are pulling up animal bones for
Speaker 2: terrestrial animals.
Speaker 3: Pulling up pretty obvious what's happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're like, there is something submerge that used to
Speaker 2: be above the water, and we think it's a land
Speaker 2: bridge that connected the UK and Europe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they and I noticed there were a couple of scientists,
Speaker 1: married couples that worked on this along the area.
Speaker 2: It's kind this is a golden age for that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirteen they published Submerged Forests, which was the
Speaker 1: very first study on those woods, and yeah, that's when
Speaker 1: they really kind of put it out there and it
Speaker 1: was you know, it was the kind of thing where
Speaker 1: they didn't have any hard evidence other than these peat samples.
Speaker 1: But when they started finding like willow leaves and hazel
Speaker 1: and birch and fern. They were like, hey, not only
Speaker 1: do I think there was something down there, but it
Speaker 1: seems to have existed at least partially at a time.
Speaker 1: That was like maybe kind of nice. Yeah, they like, temperature.
Speaker 2: Wise, sounds pretty nice. Actually, I'd like to live in
Speaker 2: dogger Land, but it wasn't called Doggerland yet, as we'll see.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: So the Reeds had this pretty great theory. Apparently. I
Speaker 2: read that they concluded that the only possible explanation for
Speaker 2: this was that sea level rise had flooded and sunk
Speaker 2: in this land. So they were really red on the money.
Speaker 2: But this is a very obscure theory. People weren't paying
Speaker 2: much attention to it, even in academic circles. It was
Speaker 2: pretty obscure. But then there was a discovery in nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty one that really grabbed the archaeologists in the area
Speaker 2: by the throat, shook them to their tongues turned blue
Speaker 2: and hung out of their mouths, and it said, look
Speaker 2: at this, this is important.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: Did you say nineteen thirty one, because that's when it
Speaker 1: was That's when a trawler called the Kalinda was fishing
Speaker 1: off the coast of Norfolk came along and again a
Speaker 1: big old chunk of morlog was hauled in in the
Speaker 1: net and they were digging through that. And this guy's
Speaker 1: got a great name. The skipper of the Clinda's name
Speaker 1: was Pilgrim Lockwood.
Speaker 2: So good. I would say that's a hotel check in name,
Speaker 2: but it's just a little too eye catching.
Speaker 3: That's too suspicious.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it is pretty suspicious.
Speaker 3: Actually, yeah, hi, Pilgrim Lockwood checking in. Yeah, okay, buddy,
Speaker 3: what's your real name? And who do you think you are?
Speaker 1: So Pilgrim Lockwood is busting up this peete with his shovel,
Speaker 1: just like out of a movie. Hits something hard, reaches
Speaker 1: in and finds and this is the kind of discovery
Speaker 1: that all of a sudden, like you said, everyone's going
Speaker 1: to be like, okay, there's really something happening here. Because
Speaker 1: it was an eight and a half inch long harpoon head,
Speaker 1: a harpoon point carved with hands out of an antler.
Speaker 1: But here's the At first they were like, okay, I
Speaker 1: mean this is kind of cool, and they even offered
Speaker 1: it to the British Museum, but they said, nah, we've
Speaker 1: got some harpoons.
Speaker 3: We're all set. We got a couple of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the idea was that everyone thought like, hey,
Speaker 1: this is probably just was lost over the side of
Speaker 1: a boat or something.
Speaker 3: What's the big deal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're like pretty cool. I mean, like, don't throw
Speaker 2: it back on it. Yeah, because it was very clearly
Speaker 2: fashioned by humans. I think in addition to just being
Speaker 2: smoothed out to be fashioned into a harpoon, I think
Speaker 2: it was decorated as well, so there's no arguing that
Speaker 2: it was a human artifact. It had been found in
Speaker 2: a moorlog so a chunk of pete, and then somebody
Speaker 2: along the way, another married couple, Harry and Margaret Godwin, said,
Speaker 2: let us see that pete. We have a little hypothesis
Speaker 2: we want to test. And they looked at that pete
Speaker 2: and they said, everybody, get this. That pete was formed
Speaker 2: in a fresh water environment, meaning that it could only
Speaker 2: have been formed above the sea's surface on land in
Speaker 2: a wetland, but on land, and the harpoon being in
Speaker 2: there means that a human was on land above the
Speaker 2: sea's surface when they were using it, and it they
Speaker 2: lost it in the peat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I picture Margaret Godwin just storming in
Speaker 1: the room and saying that didn't fall off of any boat.
Speaker 2: And then even better, the British Museum gets in touch
Speaker 2: with Pilgrim Lockwood after this and he's like, well, well,
Speaker 2: well look who's come crawling back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that would have been pretty great actually. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: they used a pollen analysis to figure this out, and
Speaker 1: later on they were able to date this thing in
Speaker 1: this harpoon head they found was about fourteen thousand years
Speaker 1: old neat, which would place it kind of squarely in
Speaker 1: the Mesolithic.
Speaker 2: Era, well about toward the beginning of it, I think.
Speaker 3: Because this was this is in the area.
Speaker 2: It's a sweee, it's a squishy one. And the other
Speaker 2: thing that's so exciting about Doggerland and finding stuff out
Speaker 2: about it is we have very little information about Mesolithic
Speaker 2: people of this area of the time.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, everybody.
Speaker 2: In addition to all that chuck, there were some more
Speaker 2: things that came up during the twentieth century that were
Speaker 2: like this, this is there's something really interesting down there.
Speaker 2: They were finding bits of textile. Yeah, they found a
Speaker 2: Neanderthal skull fragment that they managed to It was between
Speaker 2: seventy thousand and forty thousand years old. We'll talk about
Speaker 2: it a little later, but there's a facial reconstruction, you
Speaker 2: know they love to do like the three d oh. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they have the guy smiling, just a huge, big, sweet
Speaker 2: goofy smile. And I thought that was a nice touch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's always nice. That's like when they recreated what
Speaker 1: they thought Jesus would really look like, and he looked
Speaker 1: like he was on the Simpsons or something.
Speaker 2: Right, or he's doing the eyewink and the double guns.
Speaker 2: I've seen that before too.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that's classic.
Speaker 1: But despite all the fines, kind of throughout the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: they still the scientific community still were like, okay, so
Speaker 1: there were people there, but like this was just they
Speaker 1: were just traveling along the road like nobody lived there.
Speaker 2: They were rambling on.
Speaker 3: They were rambling on through the area and the era.
Speaker 3: And maybe we.
Speaker 1: Should take a break. Yeah, all right, we'll be right
Speaker 1: back with more on dogger Land. All right, So you
Speaker 1: mentioned before the break at some point that Doggerland was
Speaker 1: not named Doggerland. At this point, it would be I
Speaker 1: think nineteen ninety eight before that name would finally be coined.
Speaker 1: And again, this was still like just sort of the
Speaker 1: scientific community that was pretty excited. Like even the broader
Speaker 1: archaeological community was still not super pumped on this area yet.
Speaker 3: They were studying it in the seventies.
Speaker 1: But in the nineteen ninety eight a archaeologist name Brionny
Speaker 1: Coles put out a paper called Doggerland colon a speculative
Speaker 1: survey wherein And this is what made the scientific community
Speaker 1: kind of say, like, ooh, what's she talking about. She
Speaker 1: named it Doggerland after that sand bank, the Dogger Bank,
Speaker 1: like you were talking about.
Speaker 3: And she's the first one that.
Speaker 1: Said, you know what, everyone, I think people like lived here,
Speaker 1: and I think it was kind of pretty awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this was in a land bridge. This is essentially
Speaker 2: like it was an extension of the European continent and
Speaker 2: a lot of people lived there and a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff happened there.
Speaker 3: And maybe she busted into the room and said that
Speaker 3: was no land bridge.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So yeah, and there's this this collection of archaeologists
Speaker 2: and scholars and it's getting increasingly elbow to elbow in
Speaker 2: there and hot because there's no ac for some reason
Speaker 2: in this room. Okay, and it's July, and there's a
Speaker 2: lot of rotting fish in the in the room too
Speaker 2: for some reason.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a weird edition. Everyone wondered about this fish.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then somebody is eating leftovers of Vietnamese food
Speaker 2: and that's loaded with shrimp paste.
Speaker 3: Oh man, that shrimp paste.
Speaker 2: And then there's one guy who's got leather patches on
Speaker 2: his elbows and it's chafing the people on either side
Speaker 2: of him. Oh God, be wearing short sleeves.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Neil always wears that thing.
Speaker 2: So it's really difficult to get across how groundbreaking Briany
Speaker 2: Cole's study was because she was working with really minimal information.
Speaker 2: I saw that she went to the extent of like
Speaker 2: collecting anecdotes from old fishermen who had brought up stuff
Speaker 2: where they were trawling, like, and she took all this
Speaker 2: and put it together, and not only like just wrote
Speaker 2: a book like hey, get this, this is what's really
Speaker 2: down there. She created maps of what Doggerland would have
Speaker 2: looked like, not just once, but throughout different areas of
Speaker 2: the time period that it was above water. So what
Speaker 2: she did was an amazing triumph of intellect. Like it's
Speaker 2: really tough to get across, Like, how big a deal
Speaker 2: what she did was, and that's why people started to
Speaker 2: get into Doggerlank because it was so convincing too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, you know, these these different little pictures
Speaker 1: of different points in time. She said, Hey, I think
Speaker 1: during the Paleolithic it might have gone all the way
Speaker 1: from the Shetland Islands of Scotland to the Netherlands. Maybe
Speaker 1: I think during the Holocene period that sea began to
Speaker 1: rise and it became an island for a while. And
Speaker 1: then finally she put it at fifty five hundred BC.
Speaker 1: She figured it disappeared entirely. We've seen anywhere between five
Speaker 1: thousand and seven thousand years ago is what people speculate.
Speaker 1: But she even despite all that, was like, hey, this
Speaker 1: is just I'm speculating here, everybody. Much later, a archaeologist
Speaker 1: named Vincent Gaffney, along with a graduate student named Simon
Speaker 1: Fitch Fitch or Finch, yeah, Fitch in two thousand and
Speaker 1: one got on the scene, and after about eight years
Speaker 1: of work, Gaffney said, you know what, she was reasonably
Speaker 1: correct with all this stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, nice, nice work.
Speaker 2: And Gaffney was in a really good position to say
Speaker 2: that because, like you said, he worked for years and
Speaker 2: years and years on a project that he had come
Speaker 2: up with with Simon Fitch. That was pretty clever. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they were like, there are a lot of oil exploration
Speaker 2: companies that have been like mapping the seafloor of the
Speaker 2: North Sea for decades. Now, surely they have some amazing
Speaker 2: data sets that they'll share with us. So they started
Speaker 2: going around to oil companies and they finally found one, actually,
Speaker 2: Petroleum Geo Services, and PGS said sure, we'll share, We'll
Speaker 2: share a little bit of our undersea mapping with you,
Speaker 2: and they gave them data for twenty three thousand square
Speaker 2: kilometers of the North Sea and Vincent Gaffney feinted, but
Speaker 2: luckily Simon Fitch was there to catch him. And that
Speaker 2: was just that was what Simon Fitch is all about.
Speaker 2: He's always there to catch you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And this was a situation where like to the
Speaker 1: oil company, they were like, let's just give him a
Speaker 1: little bit of our stuff and maybe they'll stop calling us.
Speaker 1: Archaeology Magazine later called that the largest geophysical survey ever
Speaker 1: made available to archaeologists.
Speaker 2: Pretty cool.
Speaker 3: So that's sort of the.
Speaker 1: Difference between the sort of the oil company sector and
Speaker 1: the scientific community and what they consider a little bit
Speaker 1: of data.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this was really groundbreaking for underwater archaeology because
Speaker 2: this was underwater archaeology this point was like dive down
Speaker 2: in scuba gear, hope you find something there. There were
Speaker 2: some techniques where you can actually kind of excavate something
Speaker 2: that's close to the surface. They have big vacuums that
Speaker 2: they go through the silt that's taken up on board
Speaker 2: the ship above. So it's not like it was just
Speaker 2: completely just a concept at the time, but this really
Speaker 2: opened it up, this underwater mapping. But Simon Fitch and
Speaker 2: Vincent Gaffney found out these maps are the resolutions not
Speaker 2: enough to be like there's a site, there's a site,
Speaker 2: a look that skeletons waving at us, let's go investigate there,
Speaker 2: but it was enough to give it give them a
Speaker 2: big picture of Doggerland and it was very clear that
Speaker 2: this was not just some land bridge. This was Yeah.
Speaker 2: Again like it essentially a new country that they had
Speaker 2: discovered under the sea, and they were able to match
Speaker 2: that with existing finds. Yeah, like they're like, well, there's
Speaker 2: this masted on skull found over here, and that makes
Speaker 2: sense that it would be here, so let's kind of
Speaker 2: look for humans over there. That's the kind of technique
Speaker 2: that they managed to come up with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: And in the end they basically said, we think this
Speaker 1: was not only were there people here, but they think
Speaker 1: it was quote a significant Mesolithic population. And you know,
Speaker 1: it was, like you said, it was pretty groundbreaking. I
Speaker 1: thought we did an episode on underwater.
Speaker 3: Archaeology, but I think.
Speaker 1: It might have just been that I wrote that article
Speaker 1: for HowStuffWorks dot Com back in the day.
Speaker 2: Oh we should do that then, Eh, No, okay.
Speaker 3: I don't know if it was something I wrote. Not
Speaker 3: sure it's.
Speaker 2: Now are You've written tons of good stuff?
Speaker 1: Oh you're sweet in twenty twenty two, well, I guess
Speaker 1: we should mention. In twenty fourteen, Gaffney started working at
Speaker 1: the University of Bradford and he founded the Submerged Landscape
Speaker 1: Research Group there because he was dogged about Doggerland. And
Speaker 1: then eventually in twenty twenty two, I guess.
Speaker 3: Seven this years later.
Speaker 1: Eight years later he joined the Unpathed Waters Research Project
Speaker 1: and that was a pretty cool initiative to make the
Speaker 1: maritime history of the United Kingdom just kind of put
Speaker 1: it out there for the public to digest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so did you check this map out.
Speaker 3: Yeahs cool, Yeah.
Speaker 2: It is. So the resolution is it's very like Pitfall.
Speaker 2: It's that level of bit resolution. The reason why is
Speaker 2: because if they took all the data that they actually
Speaker 2: have and rendered it in some sort of way that
Speaker 2: looked kind of whiz bang, it would crash your computer
Speaker 2: the moment you started to try to load it, right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So they had to because there's so much information that
Speaker 2: they have, they had to kind of narrow it back
Speaker 2: down into that kind of lower resolution version. But the
Speaker 2: stuff that it does is amazing. Like you can go
Speaker 2: forward in time, backward in time, you can see the
Speaker 2: sea level rise and fall. You can actually control people
Speaker 2: by setting up a camp and then sitting back and
Speaker 2: watching what they do. And if there's like a caribou
Speaker 2: or a moose or something nearby, they'll go kill it
Speaker 2: and then they process the carcass and that just does
Speaker 2: all this different super cool stuff. It's definitely worth checking out.
Speaker 2: The Unpathed Waters, undreamed sure Lines.
Speaker 3: I think, wow, that's a very pretty name.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 1: Uh should we take another break and talk about what
Speaker 1: was there? Uh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's take let's take that break, all right, Chuck.
Speaker 2: So ever since Briany Coles came up with the dogger
Speaker 2: Land Speculative Maps, and Vincent Gaffney and Simon Finch and
Speaker 2: all of the projects that they've worked on have have
Speaker 2: you know, improved that information. In addition to all that,
Speaker 2: more and more artifacts have been coming up, and apparently
Speaker 2: there's a good working relationship between archaeologists who are studying
Speaker 2: Doggerland and the trawling fishermen who bring in these fines.
Speaker 2: Because before it was like, hey, check out this, this
Speaker 2: uh what they call the moorlogs, this big chunk of
Speaker 2: and look there's a probably what a mastet on tooth,
Speaker 2: is that what that is? And they'd say, well, where'd
Speaker 2: you get this? Andy'd be like, I don't know. I
Speaker 2: was over somewhere in the East North Sea and that
Speaker 2: didn't help very much. But now that they've kind of
Speaker 2: formed this relationship with these fishermen, the fishermen are like, well,
Speaker 2: here's the here's the GPS data for where we pulled
Speaker 2: that up. And now that our underwater archaeologists can go
Speaker 2: and look and say like, yep, this this seems like
Speaker 2: a good site to explore the problem is this the
Speaker 2: the this area is so covered in sediment that even
Speaker 2: for underwater archaeology. This is a challenging place to find
Speaker 2: artifacts because there's so many rivers that flow into the
Speaker 2: North Sea, and unlike rivers that flow into the ocean,
Speaker 2: that sediment doesn't just disperse. It gets trapped between the
Speaker 2: UK and Europe, so it just settles and there's a
Speaker 2: lot of sediment on top.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very messy scene, but nevertheless they have persevered and
Speaker 1: learned a lot about what was there through these spines.
Speaker 1: In twenty seventeen, they were trying to you know, they're
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what plants and animals were there,
Speaker 1: and they figured Hey, during the Younger Dryas, which we
Speaker 1: all know now because we did that episode very recently
Speaker 1: on the Younger Dryas.
Speaker 2: That was a happy episode too.
Speaker 1: They said Doggerland was a tundra. It was just ferns
Speaker 1: and shrubs and grasses. The climate started warming over the
Speaker 1: course of thousands of years and during the preboreal period,
Speaker 1: the Holocene, there were birch and pine trees and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden it went from a tundra to a forest.
Speaker 1: And then later during the actual boreal period, birds got
Speaker 1: replaced by hazel and you got these freshwater lakes which
Speaker 1: is you know, early on, remember when they found that
Speaker 1: they did the pollen analysis and they found the freshwater evidence,
Speaker 1: so that kind of explains that. And as far as
Speaker 1: the animals living there, that is shifting along with the
Speaker 1: climate basically over the period of you know, tens and
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because those animals were adapted to the ice age,
Speaker 2: and so when the younger drives was like ice age
Speaker 2: is back. Those animals hadn't died out yet, so they're like, awesome,
Speaker 2: we got another thirteen hundred years. But after the younger
Speaker 2: dryas ended and the ice age finally came to an
Speaker 2: end about eleven six hundred years ago, the things like
Speaker 2: the wooly rhinoceros and mammoths and reindeer had really nowhere
Speaker 2: to go and largely died off or else migrated northward
Speaker 2: and they were replaced by while boar birds came along,
Speaker 2: which is always a good thing. Otters showed up if yeah,
Speaker 2: if you've ever seen otter holding hands with another otter,
Speaker 2: you're glad that those otters showed up. Beavers one of
Speaker 2: our favorite animal episodes. It was just a huge change
Speaker 2: in not only the vegetation but also the animal life,
Speaker 2: and the animal life also included humans too.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean we mentioned there were people there, and there
Speaker 1: were the first hominids there. Well they weren't human actually,
Speaker 1: so I sort of misspoke. But they were called Homo antecessor,
Speaker 1: which was the predecessor to humans, and they were there
Speaker 1: about eight hundred thousand years ago. And then finally, you know,
Speaker 1: we mentioned that Neanderthal fragment skull fragment they moved in
Speaker 1: when Doggerland was a tundra, and I guess it was
Speaker 1: two thousand and one when they found that skull fragment.
Speaker 1: This is off the coast of the Netherlands and they
Speaker 1: named this one. I love it when they name these,
Speaker 1: you know, ancient humans. But I'm not even going to
Speaker 1: try and pronounce it. It's kr i j n. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure how you would say that in Dutch.
Speaker 2: I saw that it was one syllable, so I'm not
Speaker 2: sure either. But it's not krijan like I was saying
Speaker 2: that Jay's got to be silent, right, it does something weird, Yeah, it.
Speaker 1: Does something weird. But they reckon that fossil. They dated
Speaker 1: it to about seventy thousand years old, and they said
Speaker 1: this guy probably ate a lot of meat as his diet,
Speaker 1: maybe some fish, but definitely was chouned down on some
Speaker 1: pretty good food. And then you know, they found all
Speaker 1: sorts of stuff over the years on the coast of
Speaker 1: the Netherlands. Netherlands, just like a bone point or an
Speaker 1: axe or any kind of carved pointed you know, arrowhead
Speaker 1: or harpoon head would just wash up on shore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is some of the evidence that we have
Speaker 2: that Neanderthals were pretty smart and actually well adapted or
Speaker 2: suited to cold climates. So they were still around during
Speaker 2: the younger dryest humans had kind of come along before
Speaker 2: the younger dryas the younger dryis came along, they beat
Speaker 2: him back. And then finally after the younger dryas, Homo
Speaker 2: sapiens really start to show up. Yeah, I think as
Speaker 2: early as I fourteen thousand years ago. And again this
Speaker 2: is the beginning of the Mesolithic in Europe, and they
Speaker 2: were hunter gatherers. They just basically migrated westward from continental
Speaker 2: Europe because they could get there by walking from Europe
Speaker 2: to the UK. And they were like this Doggerland place
Speaker 2: is pretty nice. We're gonna stick around here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So you know, for a while they were migrating around,
Speaker 1: following the animals, going where the food was. But they said,
Speaker 1: you know, they're basically like anyone else from that time
Speaker 1: in that place, from that era and area. Man, this
Speaker 1: is really just fitting together like a glove.
Speaker 3: You know, I love it.
Speaker 1: They were, you know, carving things from stone, carving things
Speaker 1: from antlers we have direct evidence of both, and animal
Speaker 1: bones that were wearing animal skins. But they said they
Speaker 1: think eventually, like you said, they decided like, hey, this
Speaker 1: place is nice, let's set up camp here and maybe
Speaker 1: even farmed there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is where the transition from the Mesolithic
Speaker 2: to the Neolithic happens. It's pretty much what they consider
Speaker 2: the change or the beginning of the Neolithic was when
Speaker 2: people started farming, and that happened on dogger Land. This
Speaker 2: is where they essentially found the place that they could
Speaker 2: grow crops. It was warmer then around this time than
Speaker 2: it was than it is now in that area, so
Speaker 2: they were very easily raising crops, figuring it out as
Speaker 2: they went along. So that because they were raising crops,
Speaker 2: they were more sedentary, which means that their populations grew
Speaker 2: a little larger. So some of the things they're starting
Speaker 2: to find are like evidence of villages. There's a really
Speaker 2: amazing underwater archaeological site called Boldener Cliff off the Isle
Speaker 2: of Wight, and they've found what seems to be like
Speaker 2: a dock that probably went out into an ancient river.
Speaker 2: There was like burials there, houses and pits, like, there's
Speaker 2: a lot of really cool stuff. And this is a
Speaker 2: really tantalizing view of and I can't use that word
Speaker 2: enough in this episode, tantalizing. This is a tantalizing view
Speaker 2: of all the stuff that's probably probably underwater throughout Doggerland.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I guess we should talk about why it's
Speaker 1: underwater this, you know, I think we already kind of
Speaker 1: gave it away that it didn't happen all at once.
Speaker 1: It happened over hundreds of thousands of years, little by
Speaker 1: little glaciers of melting.
Speaker 3: Sea levels are rising.
Speaker 1: And there's you know, like I said, estimates anywhere from
Speaker 1: five thousand to eight thousand years ago or seven thousand
Speaker 1: rather of when people think it finally like you know,
Speaker 1: was completely submerged, and it may not, you know, it
Speaker 1: may have become so uninhabitable, you know, long before that,
Speaker 1: maybe even thousands of years before that.
Speaker 3: Why well, I mean, there's a couple of theories.
Speaker 1: There's a tsunami theory that says about eight thousand years
Speaker 1: ago there were a bunch of massive tsunamis that you know,
Speaker 1: pummeled the coast of Britain and completely wiped out Doggerland,
Speaker 1: and they were caused by these submarine landslides in the
Speaker 1: Norwegian Sea called the Storrega slides. But Gaffney was like,
Speaker 1: I don't think.
Speaker 3: It was that.
Speaker 1: Actually, I think it was a climate change because I
Speaker 1: think Doggerland itself, like he didn't doubt the tsunamis happened,
Speaker 1: but he said, I think Doggerland itself was kind of
Speaker 1: protected by the wooded, hilly terrain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but still a lot of people would have died
Speaker 2: because they think that the tsunami swept twenty five miles inland,
Speaker 2: which is yes, a lot of settlements that you can
Speaker 2: take out twenty five miles in And I don't know
Speaker 2: if you remember, but in our Younger Driest episode we
Speaker 2: talked about isostatic rebound or adjustment, where the glaciers and
Speaker 2: ice sheets were so heavy that they actually pushed the
Speaker 2: earth downward and it took some areas of land down
Speaker 2: with it, like Scotland, but it raised other areas up,
Speaker 2: kind of like if you put a bowling ball on
Speaker 2: a mattress, which you know you usually do, and one
Speaker 2: of the areas that got raised up was Doggerland, right,
Speaker 2: So when the glaciers melted, Doggerland started to sink. And
Speaker 2: then in addition to that, the glaciers melting made the
Speaker 2: sea levels rise, which is why this stuff was happening
Speaker 2: so quickly. They think that possibly sea level rise was
Speaker 2: happening as fast as a meter over a century, which
Speaker 2: doesn't sound like much, but right now the sea level
Speaker 2: rise we're worried about is happening like thirty centimeters a century,
Speaker 2: so that is a really fast sea level rise. So
Speaker 2: it's not like it would have caught people off guard,
Speaker 2: but their way of life would have been disrupted pretty
Speaker 2: significantly by the tsunamis and the sea level rise.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I saw even you know, potentially up to two
Speaker 1: meters per century. So that's you know, super fast.
Speaker 2: Super that's like twice as fast at least. So as
Speaker 2: the as the sea levels rose and Doggerland sank, Scotland,
Speaker 2: by the way, is still rising. The land wasn't just
Speaker 2: some flat mass there were highlands, there were hills and
Speaker 2: all that. So little by little it was submerged, and
Speaker 2: they think that the last bit was probably Dogger's Bank,
Speaker 2: because so it's one of the most shallow parts of
Speaker 2: the North Sea. And by the time it was completely submerged,
Speaker 2: all the people who had moved upward in the British
Speaker 2: Isles were now officially British. They were cut off from
Speaker 2: Europe now for the first time. Like you said, that
Speaker 2: was between five thousand and seven thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: These days there's sort of a new threat to the
Speaker 1: idea of a lot more science happening there because of
Speaker 1: those wind farms you mentioned early on. It's a pretty
Speaker 1: great area for wind farming, but it's threatening, you know,
Speaker 1: parts of the North Sea. Like we said, it's fairly
Speaker 1: shallow as far as seas go, and there's lots of
Speaker 1: great wind there. And the plan is by twenty thirty
Speaker 1: that the southern part of the North Sea is just
Speaker 1: going to be riddled with wind farms. The downside of that,
Speaker 1: I mean, this great renewable energy, but the downside is
Speaker 1: that this stuff is really disruptive to the ecology there
Speaker 1: and certainly disruptive to all those dogger Land sites that
Speaker 1: they're still hoping to explore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was reading that because the North Sea is
Speaker 2: so shallow, the kind of wind farms that they can
Speaker 2: put in can actually be bolted to the bedrock, which
Speaker 2: is way cheaper than like the floating version. So they're
Speaker 2: salivating over putting wind farms there. But again, that means
Speaker 2: that they're bolting wind turbines to Doggerland, which is nay
Speaker 2: good for the archaeological aspect. It's naggd right, that's exactly right,
Speaker 2: So they don't. I mean, it seems like these wind
Speaker 2: farms are going on. Stupid wind farms, always ruining the
Speaker 2: environment for everybody. Yeah, and I don't know that anybody's
Speaker 2: going to be able to change it, because everybody thinks
Speaker 2: Dogland's cool, but not necessarily disrupt progress as far as
Speaker 2: renewable energy goes cool. Yeah, so I guess that's it
Speaker 2: for Doggerlin.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 2: Chuck said, that's right, which means everybody, it's time for
Speaker 2: listener mail.
Speaker 1: This is from Andy. Hey, guys, been listening since COVID
Speaker 1: twenty twenty. I've heard your entire library, and I've almost
Speaker 1: agreed with everything that Chuck says. I think it was
Speaker 1: a title brother from another mother. We're close in age,
Speaker 1: so we have similar childhood memories. And this morning, when
Speaker 1: Chuck brought up the guitar solo from my Sharona, I
Speaker 1: knew that we were made from the same cloth, because
Speaker 1: for many years now I've touted that guitar solo as
Speaker 1: my most favorite.
Speaker 3: Solo of all time. Wow, I'm glad here, though.
Speaker 1: I'm not alone. So thank you Chuck for being like
Speaker 1: a brother to me. On another note, you failed to
Speaker 1: mention the true father of AM radio guys, Nikola Tesla.
Speaker 1: Tesla actually patented the technology before Marconi did, make him
Speaker 1: the actual father of radio. Marconi quote bothered end quote
Speaker 1: Tesla's technology and ran with it. And he was just
Speaker 1: a much better businessman than Tesla, so he was able
Speaker 1: to monetize the technology, earning him the notoriety that he
Speaker 1: has today.
Speaker 3: Is the father of radio.
Speaker 2: So Jefferson's Starships should have said, Tesla plays the mambo.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 2: Tesla played the mamba.
Speaker 1: It works.
Speaker 3: It would have worked. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Read many books on Nikola Tesla and his inventions and
Speaker 1: find him one of the most fascinating men of all time.
Speaker 1: Without him we might not have had such things as
Speaker 1: the remote control of robotics and wireless transmission.
Speaker 3: Thanks for everything, guys.
Speaker 1: You make my commute to work relaxing and educational three
Speaker 1: days of the week.
Speaker 3: And that is Andy McDonald.
Speaker 2: Thanks Andy, that was a good email. Surely then, if
Speaker 2: you've listened to our back catalog you're aware of the
Speaker 2: Electricity Wars we went over with Edison Tesla, but I
Speaker 2: feel like Tesla could definitely stand his own episode two.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Maybe, Okay, Well, let's see if you want to get
Speaker 2: in touch with this, like Andy, you can do that,
Speaker 2: Send us an email and say whatever you want. Send
Speaker 2: it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 3: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 3: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2: Yeah,