WEBVTT - The Sunken Lands, Part 2 0:00:03.040 --> 0:00:07.040 Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio. 0:00:12.680 --> 0:00:14.640 Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. 0:00:14.760 --> 0:00:17.799 My name is Robert Land, and I am Joe McCormick. 0:00:17.840 --> 0:00:20.720 And we're back with part two in our series called 0:00:21.000 --> 0:00:25.560 The Sunken Lands, about places where what was relatively recently 0:00:25.800 --> 0:00:29.160 dry land has now vanished beneath the waters. 0:00:29.520 --> 0:00:29.720 Now. 0:00:29.720 --> 0:00:33.040 In the last episode, we talked about the history of 0:00:33.479 --> 0:00:38.000 fascination with the idea of lands, and especially human civilizations 0:00:38.080 --> 0:00:41.280 occupied lands that were swallowed by the sea, the most 0:00:41.360 --> 0:00:45.720 famous of these stories, of course, being Atlantis, a probably 0:00:45.800 --> 0:00:50.800 originally fictional island civilization described by Plato in some of 0:00:50.840 --> 0:00:54.280 his dialogues that was, according to the story, punished for 0:00:54.320 --> 0:00:57.440 its hubris by being drowned in the ocean. And even 0:00:57.440 --> 0:01:00.000 though most experts on the original sources think this story 0:01:00.080 --> 0:01:03.040 he probably did not refer to a place existing in reality, 0:01:03.440 --> 0:01:06.200 there are still people all the time who love to 0:01:06.360 --> 0:01:10.959 hunt for remains of Atlantis and similar drowned empires, or 0:01:11.280 --> 0:01:15.720 to interpret any strange underwater imagery or other phenomena or 0:01:15.800 --> 0:01:19.960 artifacts as evidence of such. Here's a weird looking artifact 0:01:19.959 --> 0:01:22.320 from under the water. Maybe it's from Atlantis. 0:01:22.880 --> 0:01:26.920 Yeah, And it's in many cases it's harmless. But you know, 0:01:27.160 --> 0:01:29.760 as we've been discussing, these kind of ideas can bleed 0:01:29.840 --> 0:01:37.640 into pseudoscience, pseudo archaeology, and pseudo geology, and in some 0:01:37.680 --> 0:01:40.520 of these areas are perhaps harmless as well, but they 0:01:40.560 --> 0:01:45.560 can become increasingly less harmless depending on what form they 0:01:45.600 --> 0:01:47.960 end up taking within a given culture. I guess I 0:01:47.960 --> 0:01:49.840 would just drive home that there's kind of an amorphous 0:01:49.920 --> 0:01:52.560 nature to a lot of the concepts that we've been 0:01:52.600 --> 0:01:56.440 discussing with the idea of lost islands, and there's going 0:01:56.520 --> 0:02:00.080 to continue to be this kind of amorphous quality to 0:02:00.120 --> 0:02:01.200 it as we proceed. 0:02:01.840 --> 0:02:05.480 Right, So, despite the fact that hunting for a literal 0:02:05.520 --> 0:02:08.960 physical Atlantis is probably the wrong track to be on, 0:02:09.680 --> 0:02:13.119 there are absolutely examples of real places on Earth where 0:02:13.240 --> 0:02:17.920 land has relatively recently become covered in water. And the 0:02:17.960 --> 0:02:20.560 main real world example we talked about in the last 0:02:20.560 --> 0:02:24.519 episode was what has come to be known as dogger Land, 0:02:24.840 --> 0:02:29.720 a vast plain stretching mostly east of Great Britain and 0:02:29.919 --> 0:02:33.400 north of the coastlines of continental Europe, off the north 0:02:33.440 --> 0:02:36.960 coastlines of what is today France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, 0:02:37.080 --> 0:02:39.760 occupying much of the area that is now filled in 0:02:39.800 --> 0:02:42.880 with the North Sea. Now, last time we talked about 0:02:42.919 --> 0:02:47.160 some of the fascinating early hints, early pieces of evidence 0:02:47.200 --> 0:02:51.120 that pointed to the existence of a past Doggerland, such 0:02:51.160 --> 0:02:55.720 as observations going back centuries. Actually that sometimes low tide 0:02:55.800 --> 0:02:59.560 on the British coast would reveal the remains of apparently 0:02:59.680 --> 0:03:04.240 ancient trees and trunks still rooted in their original soil, 0:03:04.320 --> 0:03:07.600 but now underneath the ocean. How's that possible? As well 0:03:07.600 --> 0:03:11.840 as the discovery of terrestrial animal remains and even human 0:03:11.960 --> 0:03:16.560 artifacts like the Kolinda Harpoon, a Stone age spear tip 0:03:16.680 --> 0:03:19.840 dragged up from the bottom in a fishing net about 0:03:19.840 --> 0:03:23.240 twenty five miles off the coast of Great Britain in 0:03:23.280 --> 0:03:26.399 the nineteen thirties. In nineteen thirty one. So today we're 0:03:26.440 --> 0:03:29.040 back to talk more about the sunken lands. And I 0:03:29.040 --> 0:03:33.160 wanted to kick off this episode by exploring Doggerland in 0:03:33.560 --> 0:03:37.440 more depth. So Doggerland used to be land, now it's 0:03:37.440 --> 0:03:40.320 covered in sea. What happened to it? Well, I'm going 0:03:40.360 --> 0:03:42.800 to lay out a rough timeline here and I just 0:03:42.840 --> 0:03:44.960 want to mention at the top here a couple of 0:03:44.960 --> 0:03:49.560 really good articles about the archaeology of Doggerland that I 0:03:49.640 --> 0:03:53.160 was reading. One was called Europe's Lost Frontier. This was 0:03:53.160 --> 0:03:56.160 a feature published in the journal Science by Andrew Curry 0:03:56.280 --> 0:04:01.320 in January twenty twenty. Another is called Mapping Vanished Landscape. 0:04:01.400 --> 0:04:05.240 This was in Archaeology Magazine by Jason Urbanus in the 0:04:05.280 --> 0:04:08.800 March April twenty twenty two edition. So the Doggerland timeline 0:04:08.840 --> 0:04:12.880 goes like this. During the Late Pleistocene, the last part 0:04:12.960 --> 0:04:15.720 of the most recent ice age, between about one hundred 0:04:15.720 --> 0:04:19.359 and twenty five thousand and twelve thousand years ago, much 0:04:19.480 --> 0:04:23.360 of the world's water was locked in glaciers and the 0:04:23.400 --> 0:04:26.240 North Sea was much lower than it is today. It 0:04:26.240 --> 0:04:28.719 was about four hundred and fifty feet lower than the 0:04:28.720 --> 0:04:33.480 present average. So at this time during the Late Pleistocene, 0:04:33.880 --> 0:04:41.320 Doggerland was a cold, dry place, a freezing grassland step 0:04:41.800 --> 0:04:46.600 occupied mostly by megafauna like wooly mammoths or wooly rhinoceroses, 0:04:46.680 --> 0:04:51.120 but other large large animals that can withstand cold environments, 0:04:51.160 --> 0:04:56.760 like reindeer and the aurux, the ancestor of modern cattle. Then, 0:04:57.000 --> 0:05:02.039 after the conclusion of the Pleistocene, we transition into the 0:05:02.080 --> 0:05:06.560 geological epic known as the Holocene, which extends up until today. 0:05:06.640 --> 0:05:10.200 This is the warming period after the most recent ice age. 0:05:10.680 --> 0:05:14.080 So this period is characterized by a steady increase in 0:05:14.120 --> 0:05:18.159 temperatures which caused glaciers to begin to melt. So for 0:05:18.320 --> 0:05:20.640 thousands of years, you know, I think back roughly ten 0:05:20.680 --> 0:05:24.680 thousand years ago or so, for thousands of years, Doggerland 0:05:25.000 --> 0:05:29.440 was still above sea level, but the warming climate and 0:05:29.480 --> 0:05:34.600 the melting glaciers transformed it from a cold arid step 0:05:35.080 --> 0:05:40.080 a tundra like landscape into an increasingly lush land of 0:05:40.440 --> 0:05:45.440 forests and then marshes, rivers and lakes, and many sources 0:05:45.560 --> 0:05:49.440 described this post glacial landscape as a kind of hunter 0:05:49.600 --> 0:05:53.120 gatherer paradise. So who were these hunter gatherers? While there 0:05:53.120 --> 0:05:55.919 were multiple waves of them. In fact, there's some indication 0:05:56.040 --> 0:06:01.520 that the human relative, the ancient human relative Homo antecessor, 0:06:01.960 --> 0:06:06.040 had existed in Doggerland going way back during the cold 0:06:06.080 --> 0:06:11.080 arid Step period. The Neanderthals occupied Doggerland. It would have 0:06:11.080 --> 0:06:14.200 been a harsh existence. This would be a very cold 0:06:14.240 --> 0:06:18.000 and dry place where people would have survived by hunting 0:06:18.279 --> 0:06:22.719 large animals. But Neanderthals did occupy the Dogerland Step. We 0:06:22.839 --> 0:06:28.239 know that through evidence of artifacts axeheads and other flint 0:06:28.360 --> 0:06:33.360 artifacts that have in some cases been clearly subjected to 0:06:33.600 --> 0:06:36.520 a type of birch barqu tar that the Neanderthals would 0:06:36.600 --> 0:06:41.599 use that they manufactured, and then after the Neanderthals during 0:06:41.640 --> 0:06:44.760 the Holocene, when the area was warming up, it was 0:06:44.839 --> 0:06:49.000 clearly inhabited by Middle Stone Age Homo sapiens. And the 0:06:49.080 --> 0:06:52.080 article in Archaeology Magazine that I mentioned a minute ago 0:06:52.200 --> 0:06:55.880 quotes a curator of prehistoric collections at the National Museum 0:06:55.920 --> 0:07:00.680 of Antiquities in Leyden named Luke Amkroutz, who says, quote, 0:07:00.920 --> 0:07:05.080 during the Holocene, Doggerland was a wooded environment, but with 0:07:05.240 --> 0:07:10.040 really extensive coastlines and enormous wetlands. These were the richest 0:07:10.200 --> 0:07:14.600 areas to live in. There were forest resources, deer, wild boar, 0:07:14.680 --> 0:07:19.440 and berries, but also fish, migrating birds, otters, and beavers. 0:07:19.760 --> 0:07:24.160 It was a garden of Eden for them, a wetland wonderland. 0:07:24.320 --> 0:07:27.120 So if you were a hunter gatherer in Mesolithic Europe, 0:07:27.200 --> 0:07:31.040 especially after the glaciers began to melt and the climate 0:07:31.080 --> 0:07:36.160 began to warm, Doggerland was awesome. Jason Urbanis, writing this 0:07:36.280 --> 0:07:40.400 article says that it is quote by any estimation, the 0:07:40.560 --> 0:07:45.160 most attractive landscape in northwestern Europe for Mesolithic hunter gatherers, 0:07:45.160 --> 0:07:50.320 and perhaps the continent's most densely populated region at the time. 0:07:50.800 --> 0:07:54.320 So sometimes when you think about a previously exposed piece 0:07:54.400 --> 0:07:57.200 of land that is in many sources referred to as 0:07:57.280 --> 0:08:02.000 quote a land bridge because it is bridged the mainland 0:08:02.000 --> 0:08:05.520 continental Europe with Great Britain, you think of a kind 0:08:05.560 --> 0:08:08.560 of transitional place, you know that people just walked across. 0:08:09.240 --> 0:08:12.200 But no, it's not just a transitional place that allowed 0:08:12.200 --> 0:08:15.360 people to get from one highland to another. This was 0:08:15.440 --> 0:08:19.240 apparently about the best place you could be in this 0:08:19.360 --> 0:08:22.680 area of Europe at the time. It was full of resources. 0:08:23.280 --> 0:08:27.400 This is also amazing that he directly compares it to 0:08:27.400 --> 0:08:30.160 the Garden of Eden, that he compares it to not 0:08:30.200 --> 0:08:34.440 only a land of plenty, but a utopia, which lines 0:08:34.559 --> 0:08:37.120 up with so many of these ideas of a lost 0:08:37.480 --> 0:08:42.360 and or sunken land, of a land from which people 0:08:42.480 --> 0:08:45.000 came but can no longer return to or may one 0:08:45.080 --> 0:08:47.720 day return to. But in this case it does seem 0:08:47.720 --> 0:08:50.120 to line up with the idea of it actually being 0:08:50.160 --> 0:08:54.560 a land of plenty, actually being a place where resources 0:08:54.559 --> 0:08:56.160 were abundant, but. 0:08:56.480 --> 0:08:58.920 Much like the Garden of Eden, it couldn't last forever, 0:08:59.280 --> 0:09:01.040 though in this case it apparently has nothing to do 0:09:01.160 --> 0:09:03.680 with a snake. It has to do with, in fact, 0:09:03.760 --> 0:09:06.640 the exact same forces that made it a land of 0:09:06.679 --> 0:09:10.360 plenty in abundance in the beginning ended up dooming it. 0:09:10.440 --> 0:09:14.560 So a warming climate and melting glaciers first changed dogger 0:09:14.640 --> 0:09:18.760 Land from an arid tundra into a lush paradise, and 0:09:18.800 --> 0:09:22.760 then the same trends transformed it to the drowned Stone 0:09:22.800 --> 0:09:24.520 Age graveyard it is today. 0:09:25.320 --> 0:09:25.800 Oh wow. 0:09:26.200 --> 0:09:28.440 So from the end of the Last Ice Age, the 0:09:28.559 --> 0:09:31.600 level of the North Sea steadily rose. Ice is melting, 0:09:31.640 --> 0:09:35.240 the world is warming, the sea levels are rising, and 0:09:35.440 --> 0:09:38.480 Urbanis writes in the archaeology article that for a period 0:09:38.520 --> 0:09:43.560 of roughly three thousand years, the sea rose six feet 0:09:43.600 --> 0:09:47.520 every hundred years, and then, adding to the steady creep 0:09:47.600 --> 0:09:51.360 up of the waterline, there was a sudden cataclysmic event 0:09:51.520 --> 0:09:56.440 that would have horribly affected the Mesolithic populations living in 0:09:56.480 --> 0:09:59.920 the remaining coastal areas of that region towards the en 0:10:00.120 --> 0:10:02.960 end of that warming period, so more than eight thousand 0:10:03.040 --> 0:10:08.080 years ago, around sixty two hundred BCE. Again, at this point, 0:10:08.160 --> 0:10:11.679 much of Doggerland had already been submerged, but what was 0:10:11.760 --> 0:10:15.079 left above the water line was hit with a catastrophic 0:10:15.200 --> 0:10:20.120 tsunami caused by an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway. 0:10:20.160 --> 0:10:22.560 It was actually one of a series of these underwater 0:10:22.640 --> 0:10:28.320 land slide events known as the Storega slides STORGGA. And 0:10:28.360 --> 0:10:32.040 I've seen different estimates for the exact height and power 0:10:32.160 --> 0:10:35.200 of the tsunami wave. That article I mentioned in Science 0:10:35.880 --> 0:10:39.240 by Andrew Curry cites an estimate of at least ten 0:10:39.280 --> 0:10:42.800 meters high for the wave that hit Doggerland, but a 0:10:42.880 --> 0:10:45.840 twenty twenty one study of its effects on the eastern 0:10:45.880 --> 0:10:49.000 coast of Scotland. So this is looking at Scotland analyzed 0:10:49.080 --> 0:10:52.400 soil deposits to estimate that the water might have come 0:10:52.440 --> 0:10:54.600 as far as eighteen miles inland. 0:10:55.080 --> 0:10:57.720 Wow, well, I mean even just looking at the like 0:10:57.880 --> 0:11:00.320 the ten meter high, that would be almost thirty three 0:11:00.320 --> 0:11:00.880 feet high. 0:11:01.200 --> 0:11:03.199 Right, So if you are in range of the tsunami, 0:11:03.400 --> 0:11:07.240 catastrophic event also may have had some effect in like 0:11:07.360 --> 0:11:11.360 moving around sediments and possibly washing out some existing areas 0:11:11.400 --> 0:11:12.160 of land. 0:11:12.520 --> 0:11:16.640 Right right, that again, we're already exposed due to the 0:11:16.800 --> 0:11:18.360 rising the sea levels. 0:11:18.320 --> 0:11:21.880 Right, and actually one of the last pieces of land 0:11:22.080 --> 0:11:28.319 remaining above water from Doggerland was the now submerged Dogger 0:11:28.480 --> 0:11:32.160 Bank from which Doggerland gets its name. It remained as 0:11:32.200 --> 0:11:36.160 an island for a while, so Doggerland came to be 0:11:36.240 --> 0:11:39.240 known as Doggerland when the name was given to it 0:11:39.320 --> 0:11:43.400 by an archaeologist named Briany Coles, and it was named 0:11:43.400 --> 0:11:46.040 after the sand bank in the North Sea known as 0:11:46.080 --> 0:11:48.040 the Dogger Bank, which got its name because it was 0:11:48.080 --> 0:11:52.559 a popular fishing spot used by these Dutch boats called doggers. 0:11:52.720 --> 0:11:55.160 So the dogger boats go out, they fish around the 0:11:55.200 --> 0:11:59.640 sand bank. There's good catch there and those doggers give 0:11:59.679 --> 0:12:02.839 their name to the area. And apparently that that sandbank 0:12:03.440 --> 0:12:05.160 was once an island, that was one of the last 0:12:05.240 --> 0:12:09.800 parts of it left. Now there's an interesting contradiction, which 0:12:09.840 --> 0:12:12.679 is that we know that it was probably one of 0:12:12.720 --> 0:12:16.880 the most densely populated places in Stone Age Europe. It 0:12:16.920 --> 0:12:19.880 was full of abundant resources. There were lots of humans 0:12:19.920 --> 0:12:23.280 living there in the Middle Stone Age, but it's hard 0:12:23.320 --> 0:12:28.040 to study archaeologically for obvious reasons. You can't just go 0:12:28.120 --> 0:12:32.840 dig it's underwater, and also the water is deep and 0:12:32.920 --> 0:12:35.960 cold and murky and stormy. It's just a difficult place 0:12:36.000 --> 0:12:41.559 to explore, even with divers. So how can archaeologists learn 0:12:41.679 --> 0:12:45.720 things about Doggerland other than just waiting for the occasional 0:12:46.160 --> 0:12:48.760 artifact to get dredged up in a trawling net like 0:12:48.800 --> 0:12:51.280 we talked about with the Kolinda harpoon. Well, actually, this 0:12:51.400 --> 0:12:54.000 is one of the main subjects of that article in 0:12:54.280 --> 0:12:58.280 Archaeology magazine Mapping a Vanished Landscape by Jason Arbanis, and 0:12:58.640 --> 0:13:03.280 it talks about some interesting ways that scholars have come 0:13:03.360 --> 0:13:07.480 up with or come across by accident to study Doggerland 0:13:07.559 --> 0:13:09.719 and see what we can learn about it. So one 0:13:09.720 --> 0:13:14.120 effort described in this article is associated with a University 0:13:14.200 --> 0:13:18.520 of Bradford archaeologist and named Vince Gaffney and colleagues. Gaffney 0:13:18.600 --> 0:13:22.920 is quoted extensively in this article and he talks about 0:13:22.960 --> 0:13:28.479 how he and colleagues used data from seismic reflections surveys 0:13:28.880 --> 0:13:32.680 originally done by offshore oil and gas companies to find 0:13:32.720 --> 0:13:36.480 mineral deposits. So the way this works is that you 0:13:36.520 --> 0:13:38.440 have a ship, it goes out in the water. It 0:13:38.520 --> 0:13:41.240 emits sound waves into the water which bounce off of 0:13:41.280 --> 0:13:43.400 the seafloor. And then are picked up by ship based 0:13:43.400 --> 0:13:47.679 detectors and the physical features of the seafloor affect how 0:13:47.679 --> 0:13:50.360 the sound is altered when it bounces back, and then 0:13:50.440 --> 0:13:53.720 this information can be used to map shapes and contours 0:13:53.720 --> 0:13:57.400 and anomalies deep under the water. Now they figured out 0:13:57.520 --> 0:14:01.000 that that same seismic data, which was again proprietary, it 0:14:01.080 --> 0:14:04.800 was owned by these energy companies, how that could be 0:14:04.920 --> 0:14:08.920 used by archaeologists to assemble an approximate picture of what 0:14:09.160 --> 0:14:13.280 Doggerland was like before it flooded, to study the hidden landscape. 0:14:13.880 --> 0:14:17.880 And the archaeologists were actually able to get data from 0:14:18.520 --> 0:14:21.520 I think multiple companies, at least one company called Petroleum 0:14:21.600 --> 0:14:26.240 Geoservices or PGS, And they talk about how they used 0:14:26.280 --> 0:14:29.320 data from this company to map a patch of CEA 0:14:29.480 --> 0:14:32.920 roughly twenty three hundred square miles in size, and when 0:14:32.920 --> 0:14:35.680 they assembled the map, they realized they were looking at 0:14:35.720 --> 0:14:38.760 a place where a large river had once cut through 0:14:38.800 --> 0:14:41.920 what is now the submerged dogg Or Bank. So imagine 0:14:41.920 --> 0:14:46.960 that you're like looking at this seismic reflection data and 0:14:47.000 --> 0:14:49.720 then you realize it's showing you a map of what 0:14:49.880 --> 0:14:52.680 the land looked like before the water covered it, and 0:14:52.720 --> 0:14:54.520 you can see the river bed and all that. 0:14:55.040 --> 0:14:55.560 Wow. 0:14:55.680 --> 0:14:58.080 And at the time of this article their maps had 0:14:58.120 --> 0:15:02.600 expanded to cover more than seventeen square miles, so they 0:15:02.760 --> 0:15:06.520 know a lot more about the landscape of Doggerland than 0:15:06.520 --> 0:15:09.400 we did in the past. They have maps depicting a 0:15:09.480 --> 0:15:13.360 lost landscape of lakes, rivers, hills and valleys. So that's 0:15:13.400 --> 0:15:16.800 one way of understanding Doggerland is with this mapping project. 0:15:16.920 --> 0:15:20.360 But there's another interesting thing this mentioned in both of 0:15:20.400 --> 0:15:24.280 these articles, which is that, of course many more Mesolithic 0:15:24.400 --> 0:15:27.600 artifacts from Doggerland have been found since the Colindo Harpoon. 0:15:27.880 --> 0:15:29.640 There are lots of them now, especially a lot of 0:15:29.640 --> 0:15:34.360 these these spear tips and sharp points, and a lot 0:15:34.400 --> 0:15:38.760 of them have been found as an accidental byproduct of 0:15:39.120 --> 0:15:43.960 beach fill efforts that are used to help, in one sense, 0:15:44.080 --> 0:15:47.800 to protect the coastlines of places like the Netherlands from 0:15:47.920 --> 0:15:52.800 rising sea levels, but also to counteract coastal erosion. So basically, 0:15:52.840 --> 0:15:55.840 you have these big boats that go out and dredge 0:15:55.920 --> 0:15:59.280 up gigantic amounts of sand from the sea bottom miles 0:15:59.280 --> 0:16:02.320 off shore, and then they come back and they dump 0:16:02.360 --> 0:16:06.200 it at the water's edge to expand the existing land footprint. 0:16:06.200 --> 0:16:09.640 Maybe to build more harbor infrastructure or something, or to 0:16:09.760 --> 0:16:13.520 fix a roding coastline, or to build up a sand 0:16:13.600 --> 0:16:17.680 barrier to help protect the inland areas from rising seawater. 0:16:18.120 --> 0:16:20.760 And it just so happens that when they do this, 0:16:20.880 --> 0:16:24.920 when these boats dredge up the seafloor for Beachville, they 0:16:25.240 --> 0:16:30.320 often end up depositing previously buried artifacts of Doggerland on 0:16:30.400 --> 0:16:33.320 the beaches where they can be picked up by collectors. 0:16:33.720 --> 0:16:37.120 And these articles describe archaeologists who are in contact with 0:16:37.160 --> 0:16:40.840 these sort of beach walking artifact collectors and they're just 0:16:40.880 --> 0:16:44.600 getting artifacts from Doggerland all the time. Now people are 0:16:44.920 --> 0:16:48.040 writing them to say, oh, here, they've got arrowheads, axes, 0:16:48.200 --> 0:16:51.040 barbed spear tips made from antler or bone, much like 0:16:51.080 --> 0:16:53.920 the Kolinda harpoon. Remember that was made from the antler 0:16:53.920 --> 0:16:56.640 of a red deer. And there's a lot we can 0:16:56.720 --> 0:17:00.480 learn from this stuff. Because the low oxygen soiled posits 0:17:00.480 --> 0:17:03.240 at the bottom of the North Sea tend to preserve 0:17:03.400 --> 0:17:06.560 organic materials very well, so the researchers have been able 0:17:06.600 --> 0:17:09.480 to do a lot of analysis on these organic remains, 0:17:10.200 --> 0:17:14.680 including skeletal remains of the humans from these periods. And 0:17:14.880 --> 0:17:17.560 this includes DNA analysis, so we know a lot more 0:17:17.600 --> 0:17:21.040 than we used to. The downside, of course, is that 0:17:21.280 --> 0:17:25.520 if you are just finding like artifacts or human remains 0:17:25.800 --> 0:17:28.920 that have been scooped up in this haphazard process where 0:17:28.960 --> 0:17:31.000 they're you know, dredged from the ocean floor and then 0:17:31.080 --> 0:17:33.960 spit out on a beach somewhere, you know nothing about 0:17:34.000 --> 0:17:36.800 the context really. I mean, you might have some rough 0:17:36.840 --> 0:17:41.040 ideas about where it comes from, but you know, archaeologists 0:17:41.119 --> 0:17:44.119 want not just an artifact, but they want to understand 0:17:44.119 --> 0:17:47.720 the context of the artifact. What soil did it come from, 0:17:47.840 --> 0:17:51.399 What where exactly was that located, what was the situation 0:17:51.600 --> 0:17:54.800 in which this artifact would have originally been deposited. 0:17:55.960 --> 0:17:59.480 So we're kind of like robbing future archaeologists who might 0:17:59.560 --> 0:18:03.480 have clearer maps and therefore a little better idea about 0:18:03.520 --> 0:18:06.840 where to search for such artifacts in these sunken lands, 0:18:07.320 --> 0:18:12.400 and also better means of actually investigating these sites and 0:18:12.880 --> 0:18:16.879 exploring them in a way that retains some level of 0:18:16.920 --> 0:18:18.520 context about the remains. 0:18:18.720 --> 0:18:21.720 That's right, And so the archaeologists described in these articles 0:18:21.720 --> 0:18:28.040 have actually in some cases been able to identify artifacts 0:18:28.080 --> 0:18:32.680 in their original context. So one question, it asks, is, okay, 0:18:32.680 --> 0:18:37.000 so we know that Doggerland was probably a very desirable 0:18:37.040 --> 0:18:39.960 location during this warming period, for the few thousand years 0:18:39.960 --> 0:18:43.720 that it was warming and wet but not yet submerged. 0:18:44.520 --> 0:18:48.760 So when people lived there, where did they live? Finding 0:18:48.800 --> 0:18:52.720 the location of settlements as obviously difficult underwater, but they 0:18:52.720 --> 0:18:56.320 say that generally the people of Mesolithic Europe were nomadic, 0:18:56.520 --> 0:18:59.520 but if there was a sheet with you know, if 0:18:59.520 --> 0:19:02.719 there was a great abundance of resources, they might create 0:19:02.800 --> 0:19:06.600 semi permanent settlements. And the places you would look for 0:19:06.640 --> 0:19:09.679 those semi permanent settlements might be things might be on 0:19:09.760 --> 0:19:12.960 the like high ground close to wetland areas, so the 0:19:12.960 --> 0:19:16.000 wetlands would have resources that you would want, but you 0:19:16.000 --> 0:19:20.000 would want an elevated area above that. Now I'm going 0:19:20.040 --> 0:19:23.359 to read a brief passage from this article in Archaeology 0:19:23.400 --> 0:19:28.560 magazine describing efforts by Vince Gaffney and colleagues to identify 0:19:28.720 --> 0:19:31.520 an underwater site with the help of this mapping and 0:19:31.560 --> 0:19:35.920 then extract artifacts from the underwater site so you'd understand 0:19:35.920 --> 0:19:38.919 more about the original context. One of these sites quote, 0:19:39.240 --> 0:19:42.760 was a shallow, fifteen mile long seafloor ridge known as 0:19:42.920 --> 0:19:46.800 Brown Bank, where a wealth of archaeological objects, including a 0:19:46.840 --> 0:19:50.560 thirteen thousand year old engraved aurex bone had been snared 0:19:50.600 --> 0:19:53.280 by fishing trawlers in the past. The other was an 0:19:53.280 --> 0:19:57.400 area along a now submerged river channel and estuary off 0:19:57.440 --> 0:20:01.720 the Norfolk Coast known as the South Although the weather 0:20:01.840 --> 0:20:05.240 did not fully cooperate, cutting the team's time at sea short, 0:20:05.480 --> 0:20:08.159 they were able to scoop up sediment deposits from the 0:20:08.200 --> 0:20:11.639 Southern River estuary site. When they examined the material, they 0:20:11.640 --> 0:20:14.000 were stunned to find it contained a fragment of a 0:20:14.040 --> 0:20:18.159 stone tool known as a hammerstone. So I was pretty 0:20:18.160 --> 0:20:22.160 amazed by that. The idea that they could use these 0:20:22.200 --> 0:20:25.480 maps to find sites at the bottom of the North 0:20:25.520 --> 0:20:30.400 Sea where they would expect humans to have lived because 0:20:30.440 --> 0:20:33.240 of the value of those sites compared to the natural 0:20:33.280 --> 0:20:36.520 resources around them, and then go scoop up sediment from 0:20:36.640 --> 0:20:39.680 under the water and actually find human artifacts where they 0:20:39.680 --> 0:20:42.720 expected to look for them. That is impressive, And so 0:20:43.040 --> 0:20:46.639 the article goes on to say that while this individual 0:20:46.680 --> 0:20:50.760 find of the hammerstone might not be incredibly significant, the 0:20:50.800 --> 0:20:54.920 fact that this technique generally works for could or generally 0:20:54.960 --> 0:20:57.680 could work for finding artifacts of this type could teach 0:20:57.760 --> 0:21:01.040 us a lot more about the societies of ancient Doggerland. 0:21:10.680 --> 0:21:14.120 Now another archaeological note that I wanted to mention this 0:21:14.359 --> 0:21:17.160 is from that article in Science by Andrew Curry from 0:21:17.240 --> 0:21:20.280 January twenty twenty, and just as a funny side note, 0:21:20.440 --> 0:21:22.879 the dateline on this report is from a place in 0:21:22.920 --> 0:21:27.520 the Netherlands called Monster. I don't know if I'm pronouncing 0:21:27.520 --> 0:21:30.000 it right, but that is a town in South Holland, Monster, 0:21:30.920 --> 0:21:33.639 which is near a beach that had been constructed via 0:21:33.720 --> 0:21:35.879 the sand motor process that I was talking about. So 0:21:36.160 --> 0:21:38.920 a lot of Doggerland artifacts and human remains could be 0:21:38.960 --> 0:21:41.119 found on the beach there and are found by people 0:21:41.160 --> 0:21:46.159 walking around looking for artifacts. So this article covers a 0:21:46.200 --> 0:21:47.919 lot of the same ground as the other one I 0:21:47.960 --> 0:21:52.240 was talking about. But one interesting question it asks is, okay, 0:21:52.240 --> 0:21:55.640 we've got a good amount now of physical evidence available 0:21:55.640 --> 0:21:59.560 from Doggerland, does it reveal anything about what ancient people 0:21:59.680 --> 0:22:04.720 did in response to these steadily rising sea levels? And 0:22:04.320 --> 0:22:07.440 there actually has been some research on this that they 0:22:07.880 --> 0:22:11.679 of course know that the rising water gradually transformed Doggerland 0:22:11.720 --> 0:22:16.040 from a land of rivers and forests into a wetland 0:22:16.160 --> 0:22:19.159 with marshes and estuaries in the lower lying areas and 0:22:19.200 --> 0:22:23.840 then scattered highlands which stayed drier, and analysis of human 0:22:23.920 --> 0:22:28.880 bones recovered from across this transition period shows changes in 0:22:28.920 --> 0:22:32.720 what people ate. So as the landscape changed, people apparently 0:22:32.840 --> 0:22:38.480 shifted their diet from land based animals to freshwater fish. 0:22:38.640 --> 0:22:41.240 And then one last little fact I wanted to mention 0:22:41.280 --> 0:22:44.280 that I came across. This was in an article by 0:22:44.440 --> 0:22:47.840 Johannis Decker at All published in the Journal of Archaeological 0:22:47.880 --> 0:22:51.360 Science Reports in twenty twenty one called human and servid 0:22:51.440 --> 0:22:56.640 osseous materials used for barbed point manufacture in Mesolithic Doggerland. 0:22:57.040 --> 0:22:59.240 The fact was sort of contained in the title there. 0:22:59.760 --> 0:23:01.560 We have already talked about how a lot of these 0:23:01.680 --> 0:23:04.160 sharp spear points that have been recovered from the people 0:23:04.160 --> 0:23:07.280 who lived here were made of antler and bone. These 0:23:07.280 --> 0:23:09.520 are primarily animal bones, of course, you know, so they 0:23:09.560 --> 0:23:12.359 might be using parts of a deer carcass or something 0:23:12.440 --> 0:23:15.199 like that to make a lot of these weapons. But 0:23:15.320 --> 0:23:18.680 apparently the authors of this study report at least two 0:23:19.080 --> 0:23:22.879 barbed points like spear or harpoon tips that were made 0:23:22.920 --> 0:23:24.200 out of human bone. 0:23:25.760 --> 0:23:28.879 That's fascinating and it makes one wonder, you know, what, 0:23:29.160 --> 0:23:31.719 what could have been the context for that. Was it 0:23:31.760 --> 0:23:35.240 a matter of some sort of a supply shortage with 0:23:35.960 --> 0:23:40.240 you know, deer or elkbones. Was it maybe something that 0:23:40.359 --> 0:23:43.159 was ritualistic? Was this, you know, the way to honor 0:23:43.240 --> 0:23:45.399 ancestors or you know, or was it just hey, we 0:23:45.720 --> 0:23:48.240 need more bone and we have some human bones on hand. 0:23:48.240 --> 0:23:51.480 Were these enemies? Were these friends? So many questions. 0:23:51.680 --> 0:23:54.720 Yeah, the mind always races when you get a detail 0:23:54.760 --> 0:23:57.240 like that. You think like, is this was this a 0:23:57.320 --> 0:23:59.920 question of efficiency or question of choice? 0:24:00.080 --> 0:24:03.280 Yeah? Well, this whole discussion of Doggerland has been fascinating. 0:24:03.280 --> 0:24:05.880 I really wasn't familiar with this topic at all. 0:24:06.320 --> 0:24:09.600 Yeah, I was not really either. I mean reading about Doggerland, 0:24:10.040 --> 0:24:12.080 including some of the articles I've talked about today, is 0:24:12.080 --> 0:24:15.240 sort of what made me want to discuss it in 0:24:15.280 --> 0:24:19.479 the context of this broader subject of submerged lands. And 0:24:19.560 --> 0:24:22.280 of course it is not the only one, that's right. 0:24:22.720 --> 0:24:24.879 I want to come back to the topic of lost 0:24:24.960 --> 0:24:28.000 islands that we touched on briefly in the last episode. 0:24:28.440 --> 0:24:30.880 I was reading about the topic in a book titled 0:24:30.920 --> 0:24:33.479 Lost Islands, The Story of Islands that have Vanished from 0:24:33.560 --> 0:24:38.400