Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Joe McCormick. Rob and I are out this week,
Speaker 1: so we are going to be continuing our vault series
Speaker 1: which began last Saturday on the Sunken Lands. So today's
Speaker 1: episode is going to be part two of that series.
Speaker 1: This originally published November thirtieth, twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production
Speaker 2: of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 2: My name is Robert.
Speaker 1: Land, and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
Speaker 1: part two in our series called the Sunken Lands, about
Speaker 1: places where what was relatively recently dry land has now
Speaker 1: vanished beneath the waters. Now, in the last episode, we
Speaker 1: talked about the history of fascination with the idea of lands,
Speaker 1: and especially human civilizations occupied lands that were swallowed by
Speaker 1: the sea, the most famous of these stories, of course
Speaker 1: being Atlantis, a probably originally fictional island civilization described by
Speaker 1: Plato in some of his dialogues that was, according to
Speaker 1: the story, punished for its hubris by being drowned in
Speaker 1: the ocean. And even though most experts on the original
Speaker 1: sources think this story probably did not refer to a
Speaker 1: place existing in reality. There are still people all the
Speaker 1: time who love to hunt for remains of Atlantis and
Speaker 1: similar drowned empires, or to interpret any strange underwater imagery
Speaker 1: or other phenomena or artifacts as evidence of such. Here's
Speaker 1: a weird looking artifact from under the water. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: from Atlantis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and in many cases it's harmless. But you know,
Speaker 2: as we've been discussing, these kind of ideas can bleed
Speaker 2: into pseudoscience, pseudo archaeology, and pseudo geology, and in some
Speaker 2: of these areas are perhaps harmless as well, but they
Speaker 2: can become increasingly less harmless depending on what form they
Speaker 2: end up taking within a given culture. I guess I
Speaker 2: would just drive home that there's kind of an amorphous
Speaker 2: nature to a lot of the concepts that we've been
Speaker 2: discussing with the idea of lost islands, and there's going
Speaker 2: to continue to be this kind of a morphous quality
Speaker 2: to it as we proceed.
Speaker 1: Right. So, despite the fact that hunting for a literal,
Speaker 1: physical Atlantis is probably the wrong track to be on,
Speaker 1: there are absolutely examples of real places on Earth where
Speaker 1: land has relatively recently become covered in water and the
Speaker 1: main real world example we talked about in the last
Speaker 1: episode was what has come to be known as dogger Land,
Speaker 1: a vast plain stretching mostly east of Great Britain and
Speaker 1: north of the coastlines of Continental Europe, off the north
Speaker 1: coastlines of what is today France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands,
Speaker 1: occupying much of the area that is now filled in
Speaker 1: with the North Sea. Now, last time we talked about
Speaker 1: some of the fascinating early hints, early pieces of evidence
Speaker 1: that pointed to the existence of a past Doggerland, such
Speaker 1: as observations going back centuries. Actually that sometimes low tide
Speaker 1: on the British coast would reveal the remains of apparently
Speaker 1: ancient trees and trunks, still rooted in their original soil,
Speaker 1: but now underneath the ocean. How's that possible? As well
Speaker 1: as the discovery of terrestrial animal remains and even human
Speaker 1: artifacts like the Kolinda Harpoon, a Stone Age spear tip
Speaker 1: dragged up from the bottom in a fishing net about
Speaker 1: twenty five miles off the coast of Great Britain in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties. In nineteen thirty one, so today we're
Speaker 1: back to talk more about the sunken lands, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to kick off this episode by exploring Dogland in
Speaker 1: more depth. So Doggerland used to be land. Now it's
Speaker 1: covered in sea. What happened to it? Well, I'm going
Speaker 1: to lay out a rough timeline here, and I just
Speaker 1: want to mention at the top here a couple of
Speaker 1: really good articles about the archaeology of Doggerland that I
Speaker 1: was reading. One was called Europe's Lost Frontier. This was
Speaker 1: a feature published in the journal Science by Andrew Curry
Speaker 1: in January twenty twenty. Another is called Mapping a Vanished Landscape.
Speaker 1: This was in Archaeology Magazine by Jason Urbanas in the
Speaker 1: March April twenty twenty two edition. So the Doggerland timeline
Speaker 1: goes like this. During the Late Pleistocene, the last part
Speaker 1: of the most recent ice age, between about one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty five thousand and twelve thousand years ago, much
Speaker 1: of the world's water was locked in glaciers and the
Speaker 1: North Sea was much lower than it is today. It
Speaker 1: was about four hundred and fifty feet lower than the
Speaker 1: present average. So at this time during the Late Pleistocene,
Speaker 1: Doggerland was a cold, dry place, a freezing grassland step
Speaker 1: occupied mostly by megafauna like wooly mammoths or wooly rhinoceroses,
Speaker 1: but other large large animals that can withstand cold environments,
Speaker 1: like reindeer and the aurux, the ancestor of modern cattle.
Speaker 1: Then after the conclusion of the Pleistocene, we transition into
Speaker 1: the geological epic known as the Holocene, which extends up
Speaker 1: until today. This is the warming period after the most
Speaker 1: recent ice age. So this period is characterized by a
Speaker 1: steady increase in temperatures which caused glaciers to begin to melt.
Speaker 1: So for thousands of years, you know, to think back
Speaker 1: roughly ten thousand years ago or so, for thousands of years,
Speaker 1: doggerland was still above sea level, but the warming climate
Speaker 1: and the melting glaciers transformed it from a cold, arid
Speaker 1: step a tundra like landscape into an increasingly lush land
Speaker 1: of forests and then marshes, rivers and lakes, and many
Speaker 1: sources describe this post glacial landscape as a kind of
Speaker 1: hunter gatherer paradise. So who were these hunter gatherers? Well,
Speaker 1: there were multiple waves of them. In fact, there's some
Speaker 1: indication that the human relat the ancient human relative Homo
Speaker 1: antecessor had existed in Doggerland going way back during the
Speaker 1: cold arid Step period, the Neanderthals occupied Doggerland. It would
Speaker 1: have been a harsh existence. This would be a very
Speaker 1: cold and dry place where people would have survived by
Speaker 1: hunting large animals. But Neanderthals did occupy the dog Land Step.
Speaker 1: We know that through evidence of artifacts axeheads and other
Speaker 1: flint artifacts that have in some cases been clearly subjected
Speaker 1: to a type of birch bark tar that the Neanderthals
Speaker 1: would use that they manufactured. And then after the Neanderthals
Speaker 1: during the Holocene, when the area was warming up, it
Speaker 1: was clearly inhabited by Middle Stone Age Homo sapiens. And
Speaker 1: the article in Archaeology Magazine that I mentioned a minute
Speaker 1: ago quotes a curator of prehistoric collections at the National
Speaker 1: Museum of Antiquities in Leyden named Luke Amkroutz, who says
Speaker 1: quote during the Holocene, Doggerland was a wooded environment, but
Speaker 1: with really extensive coastlines and enormous wetlands. These were the
Speaker 1: richest areas to live in. There were forest resources, deer,
Speaker 1: wild boar, and berries, but also fish, migrating birds, otters,
Speaker 1: and beavers. It was a Garden of Eden for them,
Speaker 1: a wetland wonderland. So if you were a hunter gatherer
Speaker 1: in Mesolithic Europe, especially after the glaciers began to melt
Speaker 1: and the climate began to warm, dog ker Land was awesome.
Speaker 1: Jason Urbanis, writing this article, says that it is quote
Speaker 1: by any estimation, the most attractive landscape in northwestern Europe
Speaker 1: for Mesolithic hunter gatherers, and perhaps the continent's most densely
Speaker 1: populated region at the time. So sometimes when you think
Speaker 1: about a previously exposed piece of land that is in
Speaker 1: many sources referred to as quote a land bridge, because
Speaker 1: it is what bridged the mainland continental Europe with Great Britain,
Speaker 1: you think of a kind of transitional place, you know
Speaker 1: that people just walked across. But no, it's not just
Speaker 1: a transitional place that allowed people to get from one
Speaker 1: highland to another. This was apparently about the best place
Speaker 1: you could be in this area of Europe at the time.
Speaker 1: It was full of resources.
Speaker 2: This is also amazing that he directly compares it to
Speaker 2: the Garden of Eden. That he compares it to not
Speaker 2: only a land of plenty but a utope which lines
Speaker 2: up with so many of these ideas of a lost
Speaker 2: and or sunken land, of a land from which people
Speaker 2: came but can no longer return to or may one
Speaker 2: day return to. But in this case it does seem
Speaker 2: to line up with the idea of it actually being
Speaker 2: a land of plenty, actually being a place where resources
Speaker 2: were abundant, but.
Speaker 1: Much like the Garden of Eden, it couldn't last forever.
Speaker 1: Though in this case it apparently has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with a snake. It has to do with in fact,
Speaker 1: the exact same forces that made it a land of
Speaker 1: plenty in abundance in the beginning ended up dooming it.
Speaker 1: So a warming climate and melting glaciers first changed dogger
Speaker 1: Land from an arid tundra into a lush paradise, and
Speaker 1: then the same trends transformed it to the drowned Stone
Speaker 1: Age graveyard it is today.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 1: So from the end of the Last Ice Age, the
Speaker 1: level of the North Sea steadily rose. Ice is melting,
Speaker 1: the world is warm, the sea levels arising, and Urbanis
Speaker 1: writes in the Archaeology article that for a period of
Speaker 1: roughly three thousand years, the sea rose six feet every
Speaker 1: hundred years and then adding to the steady creep up
Speaker 1: of the water line, there was a sudden cataclysmic event
Speaker 1: that would have horribly affected the Mesolithic populations living in
Speaker 1: the remaining coastal areas of that region, towards the end
Speaker 1: of that warming period, so more than eight thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: around sixty two hundred BCE. Again, at this point, much
Speaker 1: of Doggerland had already been submerged, but what was left
Speaker 1: above the water line was hit with a catastrophic tsunami
Speaker 1: caused by an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway.
Speaker 1: It was actually one of a series of these underwater
Speaker 1: land slide events known as the Storega slides str GGA.
Speaker 1: And I've seen different estimates for the exact height and
Speaker 1: power of the tsunami wave. That article I mentioned in
Speaker 1: Science by Andrew Curry cites an estimate of at least
Speaker 1: ten meters high for the wave that hit Doggerland, but
Speaker 1: a twenty twenty one study of its effects on the
Speaker 1: eastern coast of Scotland, so this is looking at Scotland
Speaker 1: analyzed soil deposits to estimate that the water might have
Speaker 1: come as far as eighteen miles inland.
Speaker 2: Wow. Well, I mean even just looking at the like
Speaker 2: the ten meter high, that would be almost thirty three
Speaker 2: feet high.
Speaker 1: Right, So, if you are in range of the tsunami,
Speaker 1: catastrophic event also may have had some effect in like
Speaker 1: moving around sediments and possibly washing out some existing areas
Speaker 1: of land.
Speaker 2: Right. Right, that again we're already exposed due to the
Speaker 2: rising the sea levels.
Speaker 1: Right. And actually one of the last pieces of land
Speaker 1: remaining above water from Doggerland was the now submerged Dogger
Speaker 1: Bank from which Doggerland gets its name. It remained as
Speaker 1: an island for a while, so Doggerland came to be
Speaker 1: known as Doggerland when the name was given to it
Speaker 1: by an archaeologist named Briany Coles. And it was named
Speaker 1: after the sand bank in the North Sea known as
Speaker 1: the Dogger Bank, which got its name because it was
Speaker 1: a popular fishing spot used by these Dutch boats called doggers.
Speaker 1: So the dogger boats go out, they fish around the
Speaker 1: sand bank. There's good catch there, and those doggers give
Speaker 1: their name to the area. And apparently that that sand
Speaker 1: bank was once an island, that was one of the
Speaker 1: last parts of it left. Now, there's an interesting contradiction
Speaker 1: which is that we know that it was probably one
Speaker 1: of the most densely populated places in Stone Age Europe.
Speaker 1: It was full of abundant resources. There were lots of
Speaker 1: humans living there in the Middle Stone Age. But it's
Speaker 1: hard to study archaeologically for obvious reasons. You can't just
Speaker 1: go dig. It's underwater, and also the water is deep
Speaker 1: and cold and murky and stormy. It's just a difficult
Speaker 1: place to explore, even with divers. So how can archaeologists
Speaker 1: learn things about Doggerland other than just waiting for the
Speaker 1: occasional artifact to get dredged up in a trawling net
Speaker 1: like we talked about with the Colinda Harpoon. Well, actually,
Speaker 1: this is one of the main subjects of that article
Speaker 1: in Archaeology magazine Mapping a Vanished Landscape by Jason Arbanis,
Speaker 1: and it talks about some interesting ways that scholars have
Speaker 1: come up with or come across by accident to study
Speaker 1: Doggerland and see what we can learn about it. So
Speaker 1: one effort described in this article is associated with a
Speaker 1: University of Bradford archaeologist named Vince Gaffney and colleagues. Gaffney
Speaker 1: is quoted extensively in this article and he talks about
Speaker 1: how he and colleagues used data from seismic reflections surveys
Speaker 1: originally done by offshore oil and gas companies to find
Speaker 1: mineral deposits. So the way this works is that you
Speaker 1: have a ship, it goes out in the water. It
Speaker 1: emits sound waves into the water which bounce off of
Speaker 1: the seafloor and then are picked up by ship based detectors.
Speaker 1: And the physical features of the seafloor affect how the
Speaker 1: sound is altered when it bounces back, and then this
Speaker 1: information can be used to map shapes and contours and
Speaker 1: anomalies deep under the water. Now they figured out that
Speaker 1: that same seismic data, which was again proprietary, it was
Speaker 1: owned by these energy companies, how that could be used
Speaker 1: by archaeologists to assemble an approximate picture of what Doggerland
Speaker 1: was like before it flooded, to study the hidden landscape.
Speaker 1: And the archaeologists were actually able to get data from
Speaker 1: I think multiple companies, at least one company called Petroleum
Speaker 1: Geoservices or PGS, And they talk about how they use
Speaker 1: data from this company to map a patch of sea
Speaker 1: roughly twenty three hundred square miles in size, and when
Speaker 1: they assembled the map, they realized they were looking at
Speaker 1: a place where a large river had once cut through
Speaker 1: what is now the submerged dogg Or Bank. So imagine
Speaker 1: that you're like looking at this seismic reflection data and
Speaker 1: then you realize it's showing you a map of what
Speaker 1: the land looked like before the water covered it, and
Speaker 1: you can see the river bed and all that.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And at the time of this article, their maps had
Speaker 1: expanded to cover more than seventeen thousand square miles, so
Speaker 1: they know a lot more about the landscape of Doggerland
Speaker 1: than we did in the past. They have maps depicting
Speaker 1: a lost landscape of lakes, rivers, hills and valleys. So
Speaker 1: that's one way of understanding Doggerland is with this mapping project.
Speaker 1: But there's another interesting thing this mentioned in both of
Speaker 1: these articles, which is that, of course, many more Mesolithic
Speaker 1: artifacts from Doggerland have been found since the Colinda Harpoon.
Speaker 1: There are lots of them now, especially a lot of
Speaker 1: these spear tips and sharp points, and a lot of
Speaker 1: them have been found as an accidental byproduct of beach
Speaker 1: fill efforts that are used to help, in one sense,
Speaker 1: to protect the coastlines of places like the Netherlands from
Speaker 1: rising sea levels, but also to counteract coastal erosion. So
Speaker 1: basically you have these big boats that go out and
Speaker 1: dredge up gigantic amounts of sand from the sea bottom
Speaker 1: miles off shore, and then they come back and they
Speaker 1: dump it at the water's edge to expand the existing
Speaker 1: land footprint, maybe to build more harbor infrastructure or something,
Speaker 1: or to fix roading coastline, or to build up a
Speaker 1: sand barrier to help protect the inland areas from rising seawater.
Speaker 1: And it just so happens that when they do this,
Speaker 1: when these boats dredge up the seafloor for Beachville, they
Speaker 1: often end up depositing previously buried artifacts of Doggerland on
Speaker 1: the beaches where they can be picked up by collectors.
Speaker 1: And these articles describe archaeologists who are like in contact
Speaker 1: with these sort of beach walking artifact collectors and they're
Speaker 1: just getting artifacts from Doggerland all the time. Now people
Speaker 1: are writing them to say, oh, here they've got arrowheads, axes,
Speaker 1: barbed spear tips made from antler or bone, much like
Speaker 1: the Kolinda harpoon. Remember that was made from the antler
Speaker 1: of a red deer, and there's a lot we can
Speaker 1: learn from this stuff because the low oxygen soil deposits
Speaker 1: at the bottom of the North Sea tend to preserve
Speaker 1: organic materials very well. So the researchers have been able
Speaker 1: to do a lot of analysis on these organic remains,
Speaker 1: including skeletal remains of the humans from these periods, and
Speaker 1: this includes DNA analysis, so we know a lot more
Speaker 1: than we used to. The downside, of course, is that
Speaker 1: if you are just finding like artifacts or human remains
Speaker 1: that have been scooped up in this haphazard process where
Speaker 1: they're dredged from the ocean floor and then spit out
Speaker 1: on a beach somewhere, where you know nothing about the
Speaker 1: context really. I mean, you might have some rough ideas
Speaker 1: about where it comes from, but archaeologists want not just
Speaker 1: an artifact, but they want to understand the context of
Speaker 1: the artifact, what soil did it come from, where exactly
Speaker 1: was that located, what was the situation in which this
Speaker 1: artifact would have originally been deposited.
Speaker 2: So we're kind of like robbing future archaeologists who might
Speaker 2: have clearer maps and therefore a little better idea about
Speaker 2: where to search for such artifacts in these sunken lands,
Speaker 2: and also better means of actually investigating these sites and
Speaker 2: exploring them in a way that retains some level of
Speaker 2: context about the remains.
Speaker 1: That's right, and so the archaeologists described in these articles
Speaker 1: have actually in some cases been able to identify artifacts
Speaker 1: in their original context. So one question it asks is, Okay,
Speaker 1: so we know that Doggerland was probably a very desirable
Speaker 1: location during this warming period, for the few thousand years
Speaker 1: that it was warming and wet but not yet submerged.
Speaker 1: So when people lived there, where did they live? Finding
Speaker 1: the location of settlements as obviously difficult underwater, but they
Speaker 1: say that generally the people of Mesolithic Europe were nomadic,
Speaker 1: but if there was a sheet with you know, if
Speaker 1: there was a great abundance of resources, they might create
Speaker 1: semi permanent settlements. And the places you would look for
Speaker 1: those semi permanent settlements might be things might be on
Speaker 1: like high ground, close to wetland areas. So the wetlands
Speaker 1: would have resources that you would want, but you would
Speaker 1: want an elevated area above that. Now I'm going to
Speaker 1: read a brief passage from this article in Archaeology Magazine
Speaker 1: describing efforts by Vince Gaffney and colleagues to identify an
Speaker 1: underwater site with the help of this mapping, and then
Speaker 1: extract artifacts from the underwater site so you'd understand more
Speaker 1: about the original context. One of these sites, quote was
Speaker 1: a shallow, fifteen mile long seafloor ridge known as Brown Bank,
Speaker 1: where a wealth of archaeological objects, including a thirteen thousand
Speaker 1: year old engraved aurex bone, had been snared by fishing
Speaker 1: trawlers in the past. The other was an area along
Speaker 1: a now submerged river channel and estuary off the Norfolk
Speaker 1: Coast known as the Southern River. Although the weather did
Speaker 1: not fully cooperate, cutting the team's time at sea short,
Speaker 1: they were able to scoop up sediment deposits from the
Speaker 1: Southern River estuary site. When they examined the material, they
Speaker 1: were stunned to find it contained a fragment of a
Speaker 1: stone tool known as a hammerstone. So I was pretty
Speaker 1: amazed by that. The idea that they could use these
Speaker 1: maps to find sites at the bottom of the North
Speaker 1: Sea where they would expect humans to have lived because
Speaker 1: of the value of those sites compared to the natural
Speaker 1: resources around them, and then go scoop up sediment from
Speaker 1: under the water and actually find human artifacts where they
Speaker 1: expected to look for them. That is impressive, And so
Speaker 1: the article goes on to say that while this individual
Speaker 1: find of the hammerstone might not be incredibly significant, the
Speaker 1: fact that this technique generally works for could or generally
Speaker 1: could work for finding artifacts of this type could teach
Speaker 1: us a lot more about the societies of ancient Doggerland.
Speaker 1: Now another archaeological note that I wanted to mention this
Speaker 1: is from that article in Science by Andrew Curry from
Speaker 1: January twenty twenty, and just as a funny side note,
Speaker 1: the dateline on this report is from a place in
Speaker 1: the Netherlands called Monster. I don't know if I'm pronouncing
Speaker 1: it right, but that is a town in South Holland, Monster,
Speaker 1: which is near a beach that had been constructed via
Speaker 1: the sand motor process that I was talking about. So
Speaker 1: a lot of Doggerland artifacts and human remains could be
Speaker 1: found on the beach there and are found by people
Speaker 1: walking around looking for artifacts. So this article covers a
Speaker 1: lot of the same ground as the other one I
Speaker 1: was talking about. But one interesting question it asks is, Okay,
Speaker 1: we've got a good amount now of physical evidence available
Speaker 1: from Doggerland, does it reveal anything about what ancient people
Speaker 1: did in response to these steadily rising sea levels, And
Speaker 1: there actually has been some research on this that they
Speaker 1: of course know that the rising water gradually transformed Doggerland
Speaker 1: from a land of rivers and forests into a wetland
Speaker 1: with marshes and estuaries in the lower lying areas and
Speaker 1: then scattered highlands which stayed drier. And analysis of human
Speaker 1: bones recovered from across this transition period shows changes in
Speaker 1: what people ate. So as the landscape changed, people apparent
Speaker 1: currently shifted their diet from land based animals to freshwater fish.
Speaker 1: And then one last little fact I wanted to mention
Speaker 1: that I came across. This was in an article by
Speaker 1: Johannis Decker at All published in the Journal of Archaeological
Speaker 1: Science Reports in twenty twenty one called human and servid
Speaker 1: osseous materials used for barbed point manufacture in Mesolithic Doggarland.
Speaker 1: The fact was sort of contained in the title there.
Speaker 1: We have already talked about how a lot of these
Speaker 1: sharp spear points that have been recovered from the people
Speaker 1: who lived here were made of antler and bone. These
Speaker 1: are primarily animal bones. Of course, you know, so they
Speaker 1: might be using parts of a deer carcass or something
Speaker 1: like that to make a lot of these weapons. But
Speaker 1: apparently the authors of this study report at least two
Speaker 1: barbed points like spear or harpoon tips that were made
Speaker 1: out of human bone.
Speaker 2: That's fascinating and it makes one wonder, you know, what
Speaker 2: could have been the context for that. Was it a
Speaker 2: matter of of some sort of a supply shortage with
Speaker 2: you know, deer or elkbones. Was it maybe something that
Speaker 2: was ritualistic, Was this, you know, the way to honor
Speaker 2: ancestors or you know, or was it just hey, we
Speaker 2: need more bone and we have some human bones on hand.
Speaker 2: Were these enemies? Were these friends? So many questions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the mind always races when you get a detail
Speaker 1: like that. You think like, is this was this a
Speaker 1: question of efficiency or question of choice?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, this whole discussion of Doggerland has been fascinating.
Speaker 2: I really wasn't familiar with this this topic at all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was not really either. I mean reading about Doggerland,
Speaker 1: including some of the articles I've talked about today, is
Speaker 1: sort of what made me want to discuss it in
Speaker 1: the context of this broader subject of submerged lands, and
Speaker 1: of course it is not the only one that's right.
Speaker 2: I want to come back to the topic of lost
Speaker 2: islands that we touched on briefly in the last episode.
Speaker 2: I was reading about the topic in a book titled
Speaker 2: Lost Islands. The Story of Islands that Have Vanished from
Speaker 2: Nautical Charts by Henry Stommel. This this is a really,
Speaker 2: really fun book. He spends a lot of time just
Speaker 2: talking about like why why people are just so fascinated
Speaker 2: with islands in general. It talks about like just the
Speaker 2: idea of an island is attractive to us. You know,
Speaker 2: it's kind of like this this miniature world that we
Speaker 2: can comprehend in our head and so therefore real and
Speaker 2: you know, definitely real islands, existing islands are of great
Speaker 2: interest to us, and the idea of lost islands as well.
Speaker 1: This is only half formed, but I feel like we
Speaker 1: are attracted to stories that are set in the location
Speaker 1: with clear boundaries. Like we like stories that are set
Speaker 1: in a particular house. You know, there's like a haunted mansion,
Speaker 1: and we just know the stories about that mansion. It's there,
Speaker 1: and the island is kind of the same way, you know,
Speaker 1: It's like it's got a clear boundary. It's surrounded by water,
Speaker 1: so we have an idea of the setting that is
Speaker 1: fully contained.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they often do. You know, we've talked about
Speaker 2: the island ecosystems before. You know, you'll you'll often encounter
Speaker 2: a situation where an island feels like a continent made small.
Speaker 2: You know, you'll have that diversity. You'll have the dry
Speaker 2: arid lands, you'll have the rainforest, even snow tipped mountains
Speaker 2: in some cases, and you'll have it all in just
Speaker 2: such a tight and contained space relatively speaking. Now, the
Speaker 2: author of this book, Stonewall, points out that nineteenth century
Speaker 2: nautical charts feature a good two hundred islands that we
Speaker 2: know now just don't exist, and he writes that most
Speaker 2: of these were situations of poor location determination and or
Speaker 2: reporting errors. So, in one example, nineteenth century cartographers ended
Speaker 2: up including Gang's Island in the Pacific, apparently as a
Speaker 2: concession to various reports of a reef or an island
Speaker 2: at its sighted coordinates. So you know, you'd imagine the
Speaker 2: situation where the map makers are like, Okay, well, some
Speaker 2: people are saying there's something there. Some people were not.
Speaker 2: Let's just go ahead and include it. You know, maybe
Speaker 2: it's a situation where it's just safer to say, Okay,
Speaker 2: we'll put it on there. But by thirty three it
Speaker 2: was clear that there was nothing there.
Speaker 1: That raises an interesting question. If you have ambiguous evidence,
Speaker 1: I'll say, your evidence, you think it's like fifty to
Speaker 1: fifty that an island is in a place or not,
Speaker 1: And you're a map maker, should you err on the
Speaker 1: side of putting it there or not putting it there?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Like which would do which would do the least harm
Speaker 1: if you were wrong?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, I think it's that's a fair consideration. He
Speaker 2: also points out that other matters were situations of fraud
Speaker 2: or deception. May come back to that idea in the
Speaker 2: next episode. He also mentions optical illusions as we've noted
Speaker 2: already and you know, and we discussed in our Fata
Speaker 2: Morgana episodes in the past. But he also stresses quote
Speaker 2: that some volcanic islands do pop up and down, and
Speaker 2: this is this is the this is what I want
Speaker 2: to dive into for the remainder of this episode. He
Speaker 2: mentioned specifically the alleged islands of Los Tuanahi or Tuanaki
Speaker 2: near the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. This is
Speaker 2: one of several sites noted in the book Vanished Islands
Speaker 2: and Hidden Continents of the Pacific by Patrick Nunn. His website,
Speaker 2: by the way, is Patrick Nunn. That's You in dot org,
Speaker 2: a really good website with links to all his books.
Speaker 2: He's a scientist and author of multiple books dealing with
Speaker 2: sunken lands, and seems to be one of the leading
Speaker 2: living authorities on this subject. In Vanished Islands, None lists
Speaker 2: twenty one Pacific islands that he classifies as quote satisfactorily
Speaker 2: authenticated or partially authenticated islands and then in parentheses probably
Speaker 2: real islands, while also identifying a longer list of islands
Speaker 2: that are likely mythical. And I have to say, I
Speaker 2: really wasn't expecting that there to be so many, you know,
Speaker 2: there to be a list of twenty one Pacific islands
Speaker 2: that are retained at least within oral traditions of the
Speaker 2: people who have lived in this area, that have just vanished,
Speaker 2: that have that that we're real at one point and
Speaker 2: are now gone. But of course, as we'll discuss, it
Speaker 2: is a geologically active area.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what would be some examples here?
Speaker 2: Well, he brings up the traditions of the people of
Speaker 2: the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia, and apparently there are
Speaker 2: multiple oral traditions of often catastrophic land sinkings. So really,
Speaker 2: ultimately exactly the sort of catastrophic island sinks into the
Speaker 2: ocean sort of events that may pop into your head
Speaker 2: and that you might think, well, this is more like
Speaker 2: the kind of thing that occurs just in fictions and
Speaker 2: fantasy and so forth. But None stresses that you know,
Speaker 2: these have likely occurred throughout human history in these given areas,
Speaker 2: throughout throughout the history of human occupation of these areas,
Speaker 2: with fresh incidents, fresh sinkings, fresh events rejuvenating older traditions
Speaker 2: and older ideas, as well as myths concerning a lot
Speaker 2: lost islands that align with our previously discussed tropes of
Speaker 2: utopias and Golden ages. None rights quote. Many such stories
Speaker 2: have been believed in literally so that at various times,
Speaker 2: oftentimes of famine, people have searched of these fabled islands
Speaker 2: of plenty, but only one canoe has ever was ever
Speaker 2: heard from again, So you know, you have these sorts
Speaker 2: of stories where there was this place that we came from,
Speaker 2: this place that was known and it was rich and
Speaker 2: it was abundant, and during times of famine it might
Speaker 2: be a place that people seek for again but cannot find.
Speaker 1: So what you would get is the story of the
Speaker 1: failed attempt to rediscover the lost land.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, so it would seem. And so this is
Speaker 2: again getting into that area where myth and reality kind
Speaker 2: of feed into each other and it gets very very complex.
Speaker 2: There are so many ways to look at any given
Speaker 2: belief system. But to be clear, there are numerous examples,
Speaker 2: according to the NUN of populated islands in this region
Speaker 2: that sank beneath the waves. One example is tion Imanu,
Speaker 2: previously located in a very seismically active part of the
Speaker 2: Solomon Islands. In its current reduced state, it's known as
Speaker 2: lark Shoal And apparently the sinking of Tanemanu was really rapid,
Speaker 2: with only a few individuals escaping via canoe, but enough
Speaker 2: escaped to pass on their accounts into the oral tradition.
Speaker 2: And this is interesting because some of the details line
Speaker 2: up with what we were just talking about with Doggerland,
Speaker 2: but none says that the island was apparently affected by
Speaker 2: a large seafloor earthquake that destabilized the underwater ridge that
Speaker 2: the island was situated on, causing it to slide into
Speaker 2: deeper waters as tsunami waves washed over the land.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, so this was not just continually increasing sea levels,
Speaker 1: This was a rapid, sudden seismic event that the is
Speaker 1: a sudden end to the land.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, this is a real cataclysm. This is
Speaker 2: I kind of ironically the sort of thing that the
Speaker 2: imagination may summon when you bring up the idea of
Speaker 2: Atlantis sinking into the ocean. But I do have to
Speaker 2: point out that he stresses that nothing you could describe
Speaker 2: as a sunken continent exists in the Pacific Ocean. The
Speaker 2: various lost islands he references are not at all on
Speaker 2: the scale of pseudoscientific lands like Moo and Limuria.
Speaker 1: Right, So you really can't interpret any of the real
Speaker 1: world examples as giving credence to any of these stories
Speaker 1: of lost civilizations like Atlantis or Limoria or whatever, just
Speaker 1: because like the details don't line up at all.
Speaker 2: Right, So none explores various islands at length in a
Speaker 2: couple of the books that I looked at, but one
Speaker 2: I found really interesting. It kind of lines up with
Speaker 2: a lot of what we're talking about in these episodes,
Speaker 2: and it's the land of Hawaiki. So in various Polynesian
Speaker 2: mythologies and under some different specific names, this is the
Speaker 2: homeland from which the people departed to populate the islands
Speaker 2: of the Pacific. It takes on the character of not
Speaker 2: only a place of origin, but especially with the Maori
Speaker 2: spiritual underworld and or a land beneath the sea, a
Speaker 2: place where the gods reside and the world where souls
Speaker 2: return to and none points of that. Hawaki is generally
Speaker 2: positioned in the west in these various traditions, which he
Speaker 2: says certainly matches up with accepted migration patterns of humans,
Speaker 2: you know, the last wave of true human exploration on
Speaker 2: our planet. But he also says that as far as
Speaker 2: mythology is concerned, it also could be more aligned with
Speaker 2: ideas concerning death in the setting of the sun. So
Speaker 2: just a reminder that there's so many factors to consider
Speaker 2: in any given belief system and you ultimately, you know,
Speaker 2: can't latch onto just like one explanation for why people
Speaker 2: believe in something right, And he also stresses that we
Speaker 2: should be culturally respectful and scientifically cautious about jumping to
Speaker 2: any conclusions about Hawakei, which was you know, seems like
Speaker 2: it was likely a real place or real places, not
Speaker 2: the same island of origin for all peoples in this
Speaker 2: region and all cultures. But we should be careful about
Speaker 2: saying that it was an island that sank beneath the
Speaker 2: waves in this case known rights that While some pseudoscience
Speaker 2: writers have kind of picked this up and run with it,
Speaker 2: linking it to concepts like Lemuria, like mu, the idea
Speaker 2: that Hawaiki sank is not a widespread detail in actual
Speaker 2: Pacific island myths and was likely an invention of Western writers.
Speaker 1: Oh that's interesting. So maybe people reporting the stories told
Speaker 1: by other cultures but with their own gloss and the
Speaker 1: sort of background of Atlantis knowledge and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And I guess you could also approach like
Speaker 2: you could also be reading about these other islands that
Speaker 2: did sink, that are lost, and you know, you end
Speaker 2: up looking at that evidence and then you take into
Speaker 2: account this tradition as well. So Nun's work is really interesting.
Speaker 2: He's been one of many voices stressing the threat that
Speaker 2: climate change and rising sea levels pose to islands in
Speaker 2: the West Pacific, where sea levels have risen at two
Speaker 2: or three times the global average over the past few decades,
Speaker 2: thus endangering not only the livelihoods and culture of modern inhabitants,
Speaker 2: but endangering their histories as well. Pacific island reefs, which
Speaker 2: only formed in the last four thousand years, according to Nune,
Speaker 2: are particularly vulnerable to erosion via rising sea levels. He
Speaker 2: stressed this in a twenty seventeen article for The Conversation.
Speaker 2: Now it may come back to more of Nun's work
Speaker 2: in the next episode. Again, there's so much of it.
Speaker 2: If you're by this topic, I definitely recommend checking out
Speaker 2: his work. But he also points to some other natural
Speaker 2: phenomena that have led to past mistakes in erroneous island identification.
Speaker 2: So these errors and saying I think there's an island here,
Speaker 2: and then it turns out there's nothing there.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the picture I'm getting correct me if this
Speaker 1: is wrong. Is there are a lot of stories of
Speaker 1: vanished islands. There are a few cases where it seems like, yes,
Speaker 1: this really did happen, but the majority of cases seem
Speaker 1: to be a mistake or a legend of some kind,
Speaker 1: and there are a lot of different explanations correct explanations
Speaker 1: for the mistakes. So yeah, what would those be.
Speaker 2: Well, one of them that he brings up is, of
Speaker 2: course floating vegetation. We've discussed this before. You know, things
Speaker 2: like the sarcasm, a weed and so forth. You have
Speaker 2: some sort of a big mat of vegetation out there,
Speaker 2: And especially if you're unfamiliar with the area, if you've
Speaker 2: never encountered this before and you're looking at it from
Speaker 2: a distance, you might think, oh, well, there's some sort
Speaker 2: of land out there. I'm not saying a mistake it
Speaker 2: for like a huge, robust island, but you might mistake
Speaker 2: it for something worth marking on a nautical map. The
Speaker 2: other one, the other possibility that I was not prepared for,
Speaker 2: that he mentions in passing, is that it could be
Speaker 2: that what you're gazing out there is not a reef,
Speaker 2: is not something you know, poking out of the water,
Speaker 2: or even like a large expanse of of some some
Speaker 2: sort of land mass. It could just be the white
Speaker 2: scum of the pololo worm.
Speaker 1: I've never even heard of this. What what is this?
Speaker 2: So these are marine anlid worms of the Pacific Islands
Speaker 2: that engage in mass spawning, and it's it's a weird one.
Speaker 2: So these creatures live in the seafloor substrate, and they
Speaker 2: they look like when we say worms, I mean they're
Speaker 2: not like earth worms. They have various appendages, you know,
Speaker 2: and they have these kind of like tentaclely things on
Speaker 2: their their heads. Uh, they're you know, they're they're not.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't say they're grotesque or anything. They're kind of
Speaker 2: beautiful in their own way. To me.
Speaker 1: They kind of look like a cross between an earthworm
Speaker 1: and a centipede.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, imagine something like that living in the seafloor substrate.
Speaker 2: So then they live down there, they live in their
Speaker 2: holes and so forth. But as breeding season approaches, they
Speaker 2: begin to change. So first the tail of the worm
Speaker 2: undergoes a great deal of alteration. Muscles and organs degenerate,
Speaker 2: the appendages down there become more paddle like, and the
Speaker 2: reproductive organs grow. They swell in size and end up
Speaker 2: taking up more of the real estate and that back
Speaker 2: half of the organism. And then, in line with the
Speaker 2: phases of the moon, all of the pololo worms stick
Speaker 2: their back halves out of their holes and then they rupture.
Speaker 2: They break in two. The tail section full of reproductive
Speaker 2: cells and again augmented now for swimming. It's broken off
Speaker 2: and it swims up to the surface, while the rest
Speaker 2: of the worm stays down in the seafloor muck and regenerates.
Speaker 2: So the part that stays down there and regenerates is
Speaker 2: the atok and then the epitopes are the bits that
Speaker 2: go swimming up to the surface.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they're going up to the surface taking sex
Speaker 1: cells with them, yes, yeah, Okay.
Speaker 2: So they go up to the surface and again all
Speaker 2: at once. We're talking in the tens of thousands. This
Speaker 2: is a mass spawning event. And then they just ride
Speaker 2: around and release their gam meats. So it sounds like
Speaker 2: a site to behold now. As with a lot of
Speaker 2: mass spawning incidents in the ocean, this of course attracts
Speaker 2: the attention of a lot of predators. If you're some
Speaker 2: sort of a predatory fish in the vicinity and this
Speaker 2: is occurring, well you've got more than an easy meal
Speaker 2: on your hands. You've got to go there and get
Speaker 2: a bite. And this applies to human beings as well.
Speaker 2: Plolo worms and their relatives are considered quite a delicacy
Speaker 2: in various cultures.
Speaker 1: I love this now.
Speaker 2: I was obviously, I was looking around for a little
Speaker 2: more insight on this. I wanted to know, like, what
Speaker 2: are they cooking with these? So what are they preparing?
Speaker 2: And I did find an article on gastro obscura by
Speaker 2: Sam O'Brien pointing out that, yeah, especially in Samoan traditions,
Speaker 2: the pololos are often fried up with eggs. It's they're
Speaker 2: baked into bread with coconut milk and onions, or they're
Speaker 2: kind of like sprinkled or spread on toast. The author
Speaker 2: here she describes it as a seaweed or caviar flavor,
Speaker 2: but with a noodle texture. And I've seen it elsewhere
Speaker 2: described as quote the caviaar of the Pacific.
Speaker 1: Ooh yeah, so savory, seafoody kind of taste. That sounds wonderful. Actually,
Speaker 1: I want to try it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I included a photo here for you, Joe, and
Speaker 2: I recommend everyone look up that article or just look
Speaker 2: up pictures in general. And the picture I have here
Speaker 2: for you, Joe is I believe it's a piece of
Speaker 2: toast with this pilolo spread on top. And yeah, it
Speaker 2: looks nice, reminiscent of like a cream spinach. I guess
Speaker 2: just based on appearances, but again, the taste profile is
Speaker 2: apparently more like caviare meets noodles.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's just the lighting in this picture,
Speaker 1: it almost looks kind of blue. It's like a like
Speaker 1: a blue yeah, wilted wilted green kind of appearance spread
Speaker 1: across a piece of toast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and yeah. I believe it's also a delicacy. A
Speaker 2: related organism is a delicacy in Japan. So if we
Speaker 2: have any listeners out there who've tried tried these dishes
Speaker 2: or related dishes, please read, write in and share. We'd
Speaker 2: love to hear your take on it.
Speaker 1: Well, I did not expect things to go in this direction.
Speaker 1: I am mighty intrigued. I do want to try this food.
Speaker 1: But wait a minute, I'm we got to convict. How
Speaker 1: could this be mistaken for an island?
Speaker 2: Okay, so, after the breeding is finished, after the predators
Speaker 2: have had their fill, after humans have come and harvested
Speaker 2: their share of the of the spoils, the rest of
Speaker 2: it again, the breeding is carried out, but apparently the
Speaker 2: rest of it then just kind of rots and disintegrates
Speaker 2: on the surface of the water into this white oily scum.
Speaker 2: I found multiple especially older like Western descriptions, clearly describing
Speaker 2: it as a scum, an oily scum, And apparently this
Speaker 2: is what we could then potentially mistake for an island,
Speaker 2: I'm guessing, especially by individuals who are not familiar with
Speaker 2: the organisms, because you know, obviously there would be locals
Speaker 2: who would know about this because they know what is
Speaker 2: left behind after they've gone out and harvested their share
Speaker 2: of the pololo worms. But if you didn't know what
Speaker 2: you're looking at, you might see like a big sort
Speaker 2: of gleaming, oily white mass and you might think that
Speaker 2: it is some sort of a land mass.
Speaker 1: Well, so this reminds me of something we've actually talked
Speaker 1: about on the show before, which is pummice rafting phenomenon.
Speaker 1: Sometimes after a volcanic eruption in one of these islands,
Speaker 1: there will be a great outflow of pummus low density
Speaker 1: rocks that actually rocks that float on the surface of
Speaker 1: the water and all kind of clump together. And if
Speaker 1: you look up pictures of this, it looks extremely weird.
Speaker 1: It's like a parking lot floating in the middle of
Speaker 1: the ocean. So all of these floating phenomena, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: can have a floating vegetation potentially mistaken for something that
Speaker 1: you know you should mark as an island on a map.
Speaker 1: You I guess could imagine a pummus raft, though that's
Speaker 1: a fairly transient phenomenon that related to these volcanic eruptions.
Speaker 1: And now we've got to add a worm sex to
Speaker 1: the list. Worm sex island.
Speaker 2: Worm sex island. Yeah, something that again would be it
Speaker 2: would it would It would occur every year, but it
Speaker 2: wouldn't always be out there, and it seems entirely likely
Speaker 2: that the foreigners to the to these seas mind encounter
Speaker 2: it and make note of it, and you could end
Speaker 2: up with an erroneous island identification. So yeah, I was
Speaker 2: not expecting to talk about worm reproduction in this episode,
Speaker 2: but that's where the research took us.
Speaker 1: Amazing. But hey, we are not done, are we. We've
Speaker 1: got to talk about more sunken lands, So we will
Speaker 1: be back next time to explore this topic further.
Speaker 2: That's right. In the meantime, will remind you that Stuff
Speaker 2: to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, with
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Speaker 1: With this huge things. As always to our excellent audio
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