Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3: My name is Robert Land, and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 3: And we're back with part two in our series called
Speaker 3: The Sunken Lands, about places where what was relatively recently
Speaker 3: dry land has now vanished beneath the waters.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: In the last episode, we talked about the history of
Speaker 3: fascination with the idea of lands, and especially human civilizations
Speaker 3: occupied lands that were swallowed by the sea, the most
Speaker 3: famous of these stories, of course, being Atlantis, a probably
Speaker 3: originally fictional island civilization described by Plato in some of
Speaker 3: his dialogues that was, according to the story, punished for
Speaker 3: its hubris by being drowned in the ocean. And even
Speaker 3: though most experts on the original sources think this story
Speaker 3: he probably did not refer to a place existing in reality,
Speaker 3: there are still people all the time who love to
Speaker 3: hunt for remains of Atlantis and similar drowned empires, or
Speaker 3: to interpret any strange underwater imagery or other phenomena or
Speaker 3: artifacts as evidence of such. Here's a weird looking artifact
Speaker 3: from under the water. Maybe it's from Atlantis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's 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 amorphous quality to
Speaker 2: it as we proceed.
Speaker 3: Right, So, despite the fact that hunting for a literal
Speaker 3: physical Atlantis is probably the wrong track to be on,
Speaker 3: there are absolutely examples of real places on Earth where
Speaker 3: land has relatively recently become covered in water. And the
Speaker 3: main real world example we talked about in the last
Speaker 3: episode was what has come to be known as dogger Land,
Speaker 3: a vast plain stretching mostly east of Great Britain and
Speaker 3: north of the coastlines of continental Europe, off the north
Speaker 3: coastlines of what is today France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands,
Speaker 3: occupying much of the area that is now filled in
Speaker 3: with the North Sea. Now, last time we talked about
Speaker 3: some of the fascinating early hints, early pieces of evidence
Speaker 3: that pointed to the existence of a past Doggerland, such
Speaker 3: as observations going back centuries. Actually that sometimes low tide
Speaker 3: on the British coast would reveal the remains of apparently
Speaker 3: ancient trees and trunks still rooted in their original soil,
Speaker 3: but now underneath the ocean. How's that possible? As well
Speaker 3: as the discovery of terrestrial animal remains and even human
Speaker 3: artifacts like the Kolinda Harpoon, a Stone age spear tip
Speaker 3: dragged up from the bottom in a fishing net about
Speaker 3: twenty five miles off the coast of Great Britain in
Speaker 3: the nineteen thirties. In nineteen thirty one. So today we're
Speaker 3: back to talk more about the sunken lands. And I
Speaker 3: wanted to kick off this episode by exploring Doggerland in
Speaker 3: more depth. So Doggerland used to be land, now it's
Speaker 3: covered in sea. What happened to it? Well, I'm going
Speaker 3: to lay out a rough timeline here and I just
Speaker 3: want to mention at the top here a couple of
Speaker 3: really good articles about the archaeology of Doggerland that I
Speaker 3: was reading. One was called Europe's Lost Frontier. This was
Speaker 3: a feature published in the journal Science by Andrew Curry
Speaker 3: in January twenty twenty. Another is called Mapping Vanished Landscape.
Speaker 3: This was in Archaeology Magazine by Jason Urbanus in the
Speaker 3: March April twenty twenty two edition. So the Doggerland timeline
Speaker 3: goes like this. During the Late Pleistocene, the last part
Speaker 3: of the most recent ice age, between about one hundred
Speaker 3: and twenty five thousand and twelve thousand years ago, much
Speaker 3: of the world's water was locked in glaciers and the
Speaker 3: North Sea was much lower than it is today. It
Speaker 3: was about four hundred and fifty feet lower than the
Speaker 3: present average. So at this time during the Late Pleistocene,
Speaker 3: Doggerland was a cold, dry place, a freezing grassland step
Speaker 3: occupied mostly by megafauna like wooly mammoths or wooly rhinoceroses,
Speaker 3: but other large large animals that can withstand cold environments,
Speaker 3: like reindeer and the aurux, the ancestor of modern cattle. Then,
Speaker 3: after the conclusion of the Pleistocene, we transition into the
Speaker 3: geological epic known as the Holocene, which extends up until today.
Speaker 3: This is the warming period after the most recent ice age.
Speaker 3: So this period is characterized by a steady increase in
Speaker 3: temperatures which caused glaciers to begin to melt. So for
Speaker 3: thousands of years, you know, I think back roughly ten
Speaker 3: thousand years ago or so, for thousands of years, Doggerland
Speaker 3: was still above sea level, but the warming climate and
Speaker 3: the melting glaciers transformed it from a cold arid step
Speaker 3: a tundra like landscape into an increasingly lush land of
Speaker 3: forests and then marshes, rivers and lakes, and many sources
Speaker 3: described this post glacial landscape as a kind of hunter
Speaker 3: gatherer paradise. So who were these hunter gatherers? While there
Speaker 3: were multiple waves of them. In fact, there's some indication
Speaker 3: that the human relative, the ancient human relative Homo antecessor,
Speaker 3: had existed in Doggerland going way back during the cold
Speaker 3: arid Step period. The Neanderthals occupied Doggerland. It would have
Speaker 3: been a harsh existence. This would be a very cold
Speaker 3: and dry place where people would have survived by hunting
Speaker 3: large animals. But Neanderthals did occupy the Dogerland Step. We
Speaker 3: know that through evidence of artifacts axeheads and other flint
Speaker 3: artifacts that have in some cases been clearly subjected to
Speaker 3: a type of birch barqu tar that the Neanderthals would
Speaker 3: use that they manufactured, and then after the Neanderthals during
Speaker 3: the Holocene, when the area was warming up, it was
Speaker 3: clearly inhabited by Middle Stone Age Homo sapiens. And the
Speaker 3: article in Archaeology Magazine that I mentioned a minute ago
Speaker 3: quotes a curator of prehistoric collections at the National Museum
Speaker 3: of Antiquities in Leyden named Luke Amkroutz, who says, quote,
Speaker 3: during the Holocene, Doggerland was a wooded environment, but with
Speaker 3: really extensive coastlines and enormous wetlands. These were the richest
Speaker 3: areas to live in. There were forest resources, deer, wild boar,
Speaker 3: and berries, but also fish, migrating birds, otters, and beavers.
Speaker 3: It was a garden of Eden for them, a wetland wonderland.
Speaker 3: So if you were a hunter gatherer in Mesolithic Europe,
Speaker 3: especially after the glaciers began to melt and the climate
Speaker 3: began to warm, Doggerland was awesome. Jason Urbanis, writing this
Speaker 3: article says that it is quote by any estimation, the
Speaker 3: most attractive landscape in northwestern Europe for Mesolithic hunter gatherers,
Speaker 3: and perhaps the continent's most densely populated region at the time.
Speaker 3: So sometimes when you think about a previously exposed piece
Speaker 3: of land that is in many sources referred to as
Speaker 3: quote a land bridge because it is bridged the mainland
Speaker 3: continental Europe with Great Britain, you think of a kind
Speaker 3: of transitional place, you know that people just walked across.
Speaker 3: But no, it's not just a transitional place that allowed
Speaker 3: people to get from one highland to another. This was
Speaker 3: apparently about the best place you could be in this
Speaker 3: area of Europe at the time. 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 utopia, 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 3: Much like the Garden of Eden, it couldn't last forever,
Speaker 3: though in this case it apparently has nothing to do
Speaker 3: with a snake. It has to do with, in fact,
Speaker 3: the exact same forces that made it a land of
Speaker 3: plenty in abundance in the beginning ended up dooming it.
Speaker 3: So a warming climate and melting glaciers first changed dogger
Speaker 3: Land from an arid tundra into a lush paradise, and
Speaker 3: then the same trends transformed it to the drowned Stone
Speaker 3: Age graveyard it is today.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: So from the end of the Last Ice Age, the
Speaker 3: level of the North Sea steadily rose. Ice is melting,
Speaker 3: the world is warming, the sea levels are rising, and
Speaker 3: Urbanis writes in the archaeology article that for a period
Speaker 3: of roughly three thousand years, the sea rose six feet
Speaker 3: every hundred years, and then, adding to the steady creep
Speaker 3: up of the waterline, there was a sudden cataclysmic event
Speaker 3: that would have horribly affected the Mesolithic populations living in
Speaker 3: the remaining coastal areas of that region towards the en
Speaker 3: end of that warming period, so more than eight thousand
Speaker 3: years ago, around sixty two hundred BCE. Again, at this point,
Speaker 3: much of Doggerland had already been submerged, but what was
Speaker 3: left above the water line was hit with a catastrophic
Speaker 3: tsunami caused by an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway.
Speaker 3: It was actually one of a series of these underwater
Speaker 3: land slide events known as the Storega slides STORGGA. And
Speaker 3: I've seen different estimates for the exact height and power
Speaker 3: of the tsunami wave. That article I mentioned in Science
Speaker 3: by Andrew Curry cites an estimate of at least ten
Speaker 3: meters high for the wave that hit Doggerland, but a
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one study of its effects on the eastern
Speaker 3: coast of Scotland. So this is looking at Scotland analyzed
Speaker 3: soil deposits to estimate that the water might have come
Speaker 3: 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 3: Right, So if you are in range of the tsunami,
Speaker 3: catastrophic event also may have had some effect in like
Speaker 3: moving around sediments and possibly washing out some existing areas
Speaker 3: of land.
Speaker 2: Right right, that again, we're already exposed due to the
Speaker 2: rising the sea levels.
Speaker 3: Right, and actually one of the last pieces of land
Speaker 3: remaining above water from Doggerland was the now submerged Dogger
Speaker 3: Bank from which Doggerland gets its name. It remained as
Speaker 3: an island for a while, so Doggerland came to be
Speaker 3: known as Doggerland when the name was given to it
Speaker 3: by an archaeologist named Briany Coles, and it was named
Speaker 3: after the sand bank in the North Sea known as
Speaker 3: the Dogger Bank, which got its name because it was
Speaker 3: a popular fishing spot used by these Dutch boats called doggers.
Speaker 3: So the dogger boats go out, they fish around the
Speaker 3: sand bank. There's good catch there and those doggers give
Speaker 3: their name to the area. And apparently that that sandbank
Speaker 3: was once an island, that was one of the last
Speaker 3: parts of it left. Now there's an interesting contradiction, which
Speaker 3: is that we know that it was probably one of
Speaker 3: the most densely populated places in Stone Age Europe. It
Speaker 3: was full of abundant resources. There were lots of humans
Speaker 3: living there in the Middle Stone Age, but it's hard
Speaker 3: to study archaeologically for obvious reasons. You can't just go
Speaker 3: dig it's underwater, and also the water is deep and
Speaker 3: cold and murky and stormy. It's just a difficult place
Speaker 3: to explore, even with divers. So how can archaeologists learn
Speaker 3: things about Doggerland other than just waiting for the occasional
Speaker 3: artifact to get dredged up in a trawling net like
Speaker 3: we talked about with the Kolinda harpoon. Well, actually, this
Speaker 3: is one of the main subjects of that article in
Speaker 3: Archaeology magazine Mapping a Vanished Landscape by Jason Arbanis, and
Speaker 3: it talks about some interesting ways that scholars have come
Speaker 3: up with or come across by accident to study Doggerland
Speaker 3: and see what we can learn about it. So one
Speaker 3: effort described in this article is associated with a University
Speaker 3: of Bradford archaeologist and named Vince Gaffney and colleagues. Gaffney
Speaker 3: is quoted extensively in this article and he talks about
Speaker 3: how he and colleagues used data from seismic reflections surveys
Speaker 3: originally done by offshore oil and gas companies to find
Speaker 3: mineral deposits. So the way this works is that you
Speaker 3: have a ship, it goes out in the water. It
Speaker 3: emits sound waves into the water which bounce off of
Speaker 3: the seafloor. And then are picked up by ship based
Speaker 3: detectors and the physical features of the seafloor affect how
Speaker 3: the sound is altered when it bounces back, and then
Speaker 3: this information can be used to map shapes and contours
Speaker 3: and anomalies deep under the water. Now they figured out
Speaker 3: that that same seismic data, which was again proprietary, it
Speaker 3: was owned by these energy companies, how that could be
Speaker 3: used by archaeologists to assemble an approximate picture of what
Speaker 3: Doggerland was like before it flooded, to study the hidden landscape.
Speaker 3: And the archaeologists were actually able to get data from
Speaker 3: I think multiple companies, at least one company called Petroleum
Speaker 3: Geoservices or PGS, And they talk about how they used
Speaker 3: data from this company to map a patch of CEA
Speaker 3: roughly twenty three hundred square miles in size, and when
Speaker 3: they assembled the map, they realized they were looking at
Speaker 3: a place where a large river had once cut through
Speaker 3: what is now the submerged dogg Or Bank. So imagine
Speaker 3: that you're like looking at this seismic reflection data and
Speaker 3: then you realize it's showing you a map of what
Speaker 3: the land looked like before the water covered it, and
Speaker 3: you can see the river bed and all that.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And at the time of this article their maps had
Speaker 3: expanded to cover more than seventeen square miles, so they
Speaker 3: know a lot more about the landscape of Doggerland than
Speaker 3: we did in the past. They have maps depicting a
Speaker 3: lost landscape of lakes, rivers, hills and valleys. So that's
Speaker 3: one way of understanding Doggerland is with this mapping project.
Speaker 3: But there's another interesting thing this mentioned in both of
Speaker 3: these articles, which is that, of course many more Mesolithic
Speaker 3: artifacts from Doggerland have been found since the Colindo Harpoon.
Speaker 3: There are lots of them now, especially a lot of
Speaker 3: these these spear tips and sharp points, and a lot
Speaker 3: of them have been found as an accidental byproduct of
Speaker 3: beach fill efforts that are used to help, in one sense,
Speaker 3: to protect the coastlines of places like the Netherlands from
Speaker 3: rising sea levels, but also to counteract coastal erosion. So basically,
Speaker 3: you have these big boats that go out and dredge
Speaker 3: up gigantic amounts of sand from the sea bottom miles
Speaker 3: off shore, and then they come back and they dump
Speaker 3: it at the water's edge to expand the existing land footprint.
Speaker 3: Maybe to build more harbor infrastructure or something, or to
Speaker 3: fix a roding coastline, or to build up a sand
Speaker 3: barrier to help protect the inland areas from rising seawater.
Speaker 3: And it just so happens that when they do this,
Speaker 3: when these boats dredge up the seafloor for Beachville, they
Speaker 3: often end up depositing previously buried artifacts of Doggerland on
Speaker 3: the beaches where they can be picked up by collectors.
Speaker 3: And these articles describe archaeologists who are in contact with
Speaker 3: these sort of beach walking artifact collectors and they're just
Speaker 3: getting artifacts from Doggerland all the time. Now people are
Speaker 3: writing them to say, oh, here, they've got arrowheads, axes,
Speaker 3: barbed spear tips made from antler or bone, much like
Speaker 3: the Kolinda harpoon. Remember that was made from the antler
Speaker 3: of a red deer. And there's a lot we can
Speaker 3: learn from this stuff. Because the low oxygen soiled posits
Speaker 3: at the bottom of the North Sea tend to preserve
Speaker 3: organic materials very well, so the researchers have been able
Speaker 3: to do a lot of analysis on these organic remains,
Speaker 3: including skeletal remains of the humans from these periods. And
Speaker 3: this includes DNA analysis, so we know a lot more
Speaker 3: than we used to. The downside, of course, is that
Speaker 3: if you are just finding like artifacts or human remains
Speaker 3: that have been scooped up in this haphazard process where
Speaker 3: they're you know, dredged from the ocean floor and then
Speaker 3: spit out on a beach somewhere, you know nothing about
Speaker 3: the context really. I mean, you might have some rough
Speaker 3: ideas about where it comes from, but you know, archaeologists
Speaker 3: want not just an artifact, but they want to understand
Speaker 3: the context of the artifact. What soil did it come from,
Speaker 3: What where exactly was that located, what was the situation
Speaker 3: in which this 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 3: That's right, And so the archaeologists described in these articles
Speaker 3: have actually in some cases been able to identify artifacts
Speaker 3: in their original context. So one question, it asks, is, okay,
Speaker 3: so we know that Doggerland was probably a very desirable
Speaker 3: location during this warming period, for the few thousand years
Speaker 3: that it was warming and wet but not yet submerged.
Speaker 3: So when people lived there, where did they live? Finding
Speaker 3: the location of settlements as obviously difficult underwater, but they
Speaker 3: say that generally the people of Mesolithic Europe were nomadic,
Speaker 3: but if there was a sheet with you know, if
Speaker 3: there was a great abundance of resources, they might create
Speaker 3: semi permanent settlements. And the places you would look for
Speaker 3: those semi permanent settlements might be things might be on
Speaker 3: the like high ground close to wetland areas, so the
Speaker 3: wetlands would have resources that you would want, but you
Speaker 3: would want an elevated area above that. Now I'm going
Speaker 3: to read a brief passage from this article in Archaeology
Speaker 3: magazine describing efforts by Vince Gaffney and colleagues to identify
Speaker 3: an underwater site with the help of this mapping and
Speaker 3: then extract artifacts from the underwater site so you'd understand
Speaker 3: more about the original context. One of these sites quote,
Speaker 3: was a shallow, fifteen mile long seafloor ridge known as
Speaker 3: Brown Bank, where a wealth of archaeological objects, including a
Speaker 3: thirteen thousand year old engraved aurex bone had been snared
Speaker 3: by fishing trawlers in the past. The other was an
Speaker 3: area along a now submerged river channel and estuary off
Speaker 3: the Norfolk Coast known as the South Although the weather
Speaker 3: did not fully cooperate, cutting the team's time at sea short,
Speaker 3: they were able to scoop up sediment deposits from the
Speaker 3: Southern River estuary site. When they examined the material, they
Speaker 3: were stunned to find it contained a fragment of a
Speaker 3: stone tool known as a hammerstone. So I was pretty
Speaker 3: amazed by that. The idea that they could use these
Speaker 3: maps to find sites at the bottom of the North
Speaker 3: Sea where they would expect humans to have lived because
Speaker 3: of the value of those sites compared to the natural
Speaker 3: resources around them, and then go scoop up sediment from
Speaker 3: under the water and actually find human artifacts where they
Speaker 3: expected to look for them. That is impressive, And so
Speaker 3: the article goes on to say that while this individual
Speaker 3: find of the hammerstone might not be incredibly significant, the
Speaker 3: fact that this technique generally works for could or generally
Speaker 3: could work for finding artifacts of this type could teach
Speaker 3: us a lot more about the societies of ancient Doggerland.
Speaker 3: Now another archaeological note that I wanted to mention this
Speaker 3: is from that article in Science by Andrew Curry from
Speaker 3: January twenty twenty, and just as a funny side note,
Speaker 3: the dateline on this report is from a place in
Speaker 3: the Netherlands called Monster. I don't know if I'm pronouncing
Speaker 3: it right, but that is a town in South Holland, Monster,
Speaker 3: which is near a beach that had been constructed via
Speaker 3: the sand motor process that I was talking about. So
Speaker 3: a lot of Doggerland artifacts and human remains could be
Speaker 3: found on the beach there and are found by people
Speaker 3: walking around looking for artifacts. So this article covers a
Speaker 3: lot of the same ground as the other one I
Speaker 3: was talking about. But one interesting question it asks is, okay,
Speaker 3: we've got a good amount now of physical evidence available
Speaker 3: from Doggerland, does it reveal anything about what ancient people
Speaker 3: did in response to these steadily rising sea levels? And
Speaker 3: there actually has been some research on this that they
Speaker 3: of course know that the rising water gradually transformed Doggerland
Speaker 3: from a land of rivers and forests into a wetland
Speaker 3: with marshes and estuaries in the lower lying areas and
Speaker 3: then scattered highlands which stayed drier, and analysis of human
Speaker 3: bones recovered from across this transition period shows changes in
Speaker 3: what people ate. So as the landscape changed, people apparently
Speaker 3: shifted their diet from land based animals to freshwater fish.
Speaker 3: And then one last little fact I wanted to mention
Speaker 3: that I came across. This was in an article by
Speaker 3: Johannis Decker at All published in the Journal of Archaeological
Speaker 3: Science Reports in twenty twenty one called human and servid
Speaker 3: osseous materials used for barbed point manufacture in Mesolithic Doggerland.
Speaker 3: The fact was sort of contained in the title there.
Speaker 3: We have already talked about how a lot of these
Speaker 3: sharp spear points that have been recovered from the people
Speaker 3: who lived here were made of antler and bone. These
Speaker 3: are primarily animal bones, of course, you know, so they
Speaker 3: might be using parts of a deer carcass or something
Speaker 3: like that to make a lot of these weapons. But
Speaker 3: apparently the authors of this study report at least two
Speaker 3: barbed points like spear or harpoon tips that were made
Speaker 3: out of human bone.
Speaker 2: That's fascinating and it makes one wonder, you know, what,
Speaker 2: what could have been the context for that. Was it
Speaker 2: a matter 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 3: Yeah, the mind always races when you get a detail
Speaker 3: like that. You think like, is this was this a
Speaker 3: 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 topic at all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was not really either. I mean reading about Doggerland,
Speaker 3: including some of the articles I've talked about today, is
Speaker 3: sort of what made me want to discuss it in
Speaker 3: the context of this broader subject of submerged lands. And
Speaker 3: 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 Stomel. This is a really really
Speaker 2: fun book. He spends a lot of time just talking
Speaker 2: about like why people are just so fascinated with islands
Speaker 2: in general. It talks about like just the idea of
Speaker 2: an island is attractive to us. You know, it's kind
Speaker 2: of like this miniature world that we can comprehend in
Speaker 2: our head and so therefore real and you know, definitely
Speaker 2: real islands, existing islands are of great interest to us.
Speaker 2: And the idea of lost islands, well.
Speaker 3: This is only half formed, but I feel like we
Speaker 3: are attracted to stories that are set in the location
Speaker 3: with clear boundaries. Like we like stories that are set
Speaker 3: in a particular house. You know, there's like a haunted mansion,
Speaker 3: and we just know the stories about that mansion. It's there,
Speaker 3: And the island is kind of the same way. You know,
Speaker 3: It's like it's got a clear boundary. It's surrounded by water,
Speaker 3: so we have an idea of the setting that is
Speaker 3: 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 you'll have
Speaker 2: the dry arid lands, you'll have the rainforest that even
Speaker 2: snow tipped mountains in some cases, and you'll have it
Speaker 2: all in just such a tight and contained space relatively speaking. Now,
Speaker 2: the author of this book, Stowmall, points out that nineteenth
Speaker 2: century nautical charts feature a good two hundred islands that
Speaker 2: we know now just don't exist, and he writes that
Speaker 2: most of these were situations of poor location determination and
Speaker 2: or reporting errors. So, in one example, nineteenth century cartographers
Speaker 2: ended up including Gang's Island in the Pacific, apparently as
Speaker 2: a concession to various reports of a reef or an
Speaker 2: island at its sighted coordinates. So, you know, you'd imagine
Speaker 2: a situation where the map makers are like, okay, well,
Speaker 2: some 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 we're just safer to say, okay, we'll
Speaker 2: put it on there. But by nineteen thirty three it
Speaker 2: was clear that there was nothing there.
Speaker 3: That raises an interesting question. If you have ambiguous evidence,
Speaker 3: I'll say your evidence, you think it's like fifty to
Speaker 3: fifty that an island is in a place or not
Speaker 3: And you're a map maker, should you err on the
Speaker 3: side of putting it there or not putting it there?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Like which would do which would do the least harm
Speaker 3: 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. Uh. He also mentions optical illusions as we've
Speaker 2: we've noted already and you know and we discovered discussed
Speaker 2: in our Fata Morgana episodes in the past. But he
Speaker 2: also stresses quote that some volcanic islands do pop up
Speaker 2: and down and this is this is the uh, this
Speaker 2: is what I want to dive into for the remainder
Speaker 2: of this episode.
Speaker 3: UH.
Speaker 2: He mentioned specifically the alleged islands of Los uh Tuanahi
Speaker 2: or Tuanaki near the Cook Islands in the South Pacific.
Speaker 2: This is one of several sites noted in the book
Speaker 2: Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific by Patrick Nunn.
Speaker 2: His website, by the way, is Patrick Nunn that's in
Speaker 2: you in inn dot org. UH really good website with
Speaker 2: links to all his books. He's a scientist and author
Speaker 2: of multiple books dealing with sunken lands, and seems to
Speaker 2: be one of the leading living authorities on this subject.
Speaker 2: In Vanished Islands nonethlests twenty one Pacific islands that he
Speaker 2: classifies as quote satisfactorily authenticated or partially authenticated islands and
Speaker 2: in parentheses probably real islands, while also identifying a longer
Speaker 2: list of islands that are likely mythical. And I have
Speaker 2: to say, I really wasn't expecting that there to be
Speaker 2: so many to be, you know, there to be a
Speaker 2: list of twenty one Pacific islands that are you know,
Speaker 2: retained at least within oral traditions of the peoples who
Speaker 2: have lived in this area that have just vanished, that
Speaker 2: were real at one point and are now gone. But
Speaker 2: of course, as we'll discuss, it is a geologically active area.
Speaker 3: 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 exactactly 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: through 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 lost islands
Speaker 2: that align with our previously discussed tropes of utopias and
Speaker 2: golden ages. None rights quote. Many such stories have been
Speaker 2: believed in literally so that at various times, oftentimes of famine,
Speaker 2: people have searched of these fabled islands of plenty, but
Speaker 2: only one canoe has ever was ever heard from again.
Speaker 2: So you know, you have these sorts of stories where
Speaker 2: there was this place that we came from, this place
Speaker 2: that was known, and it was rich and it was abundant,
Speaker 2: and during times of famine it might be a place
Speaker 2: that people seek for again but cannot find.
Speaker 3: So what you would get is the story of the
Speaker 3: 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 a 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 the apparently the sinking of Tinemanu was
Speaker 2: really rapid, with only a few individuals escaping via canoe,
Speaker 2: but enough is to pass on their accounts into the
Speaker 2: oral tradition. And this is interesting because some of the
Speaker 2: details line up with what we were just talking about
Speaker 2: with Doggerland, but none says that the island was apparently
Speaker 2: affected by a large seafloor earthquake that destabilized the underwater
Speaker 2: ridge that the island was situated on, causing it to
Speaker 2: slide into deeper waters as tsunami waves washed over the land.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, so this was not just continually increasing sea levels.
Speaker 3: This was a rapid, sudden seismic event that caused a
Speaker 3: sudden end to the land.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, this is a real cataclysm. This is
Speaker 2: kind of ironically the sort of thing that the imagination
Speaker 2: may summon when you bring up the idea of Atlantis
Speaker 2: sinking into the ocean. But I do have to point
Speaker 2: out that he stresses that nothing you could describe as
Speaker 2: a sunken continent exists in the Pacific Ocean. The various
Speaker 2: lost islands he references are not at all on the
Speaker 2: scale of pseudoscientific lands like MoU and Limuria.
Speaker 3: Right, So you really can't interpret any of the real
Speaker 3: world examples as giving credence to any of these stories
Speaker 3: of lost civilizations like Atlantis or Limoria or whatever, just
Speaker 3: 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 out 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 Hawaiki, 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 waves.
Speaker 2: In this case, Non rights that while some pseudoscience writers
Speaker 2: 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 Hawaukee sank is not a widespread detail in actual
Speaker 2: Pacific island myths and was likely an invention of Western writers.
Speaker 3: Oh that's interesting. So maybe people reporting the stories told
Speaker 3: by other cultures, but with their own gloss and the
Speaker 3: 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 Noun'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. Now,
Speaker 2: I may come back to more of Nun's work in
Speaker 2: the next episode. Again, there's so much of it. If
Speaker 2: you're fascinated 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 3: Okay, So the picture I'm getting correct me if this
Speaker 3: is wrong is there are a lot of stories of
Speaker 3: vanished islands. There are a few cases where it seems like, yes,
Speaker 3: this really did happen, but the majority of cases are
Speaker 3: seemed to be a mistake or a legend of some kind.
Speaker 3: And there are a lot of different explanations, correct explanations
Speaker 3: for the mistakes. So yeah, what would those be.
Speaker 2: Well, one of them that he brings up is, of course,
Speaker 2: floating vegetation. We've discussed this before. You know, things like
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 you'll 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 some some sort
Speaker 2: of land mass. It could just be the white scum
Speaker 2: of the poe low low worm.
Speaker 3: I've never even heard of this. 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.
Speaker 3: To me, they kind of look like a cross between
Speaker 3: an earthworm and a centipede.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I imagine something like that living in the
Speaker 2: seafloor substrate. So then they live down there, they live
Speaker 2: in their their holes and so forth. But as breeding
Speaker 2: season approaches, they begin to change. So first the tail
Speaker 2: of the worm undergoes a great deal of alteration. Muscles
Speaker 2: and organs degenerate, the appendages down there become more pass alike,
Speaker 2: and the reproductive organs grow. They swell in size and
Speaker 2: end up taking up more of the real estate and
Speaker 2: that back half of the organism. And then, in line
Speaker 2: with the phases of the moon, all of the plolo
Speaker 2: worms stick their back halves out of their holes, and
Speaker 2: then they rupture. They break in two, the tail section
Speaker 2: full of reproductive cells and again augmented. Now for swimming.
Speaker 2: It's broken off and it swims up to the surface,
Speaker 2: while the rest of the worm stays down in the
Speaker 2: seafloor muck and regenerates. So the part that stays down
Speaker 2: there and regenerates is the atok. And then the epitopes
Speaker 2: are the bits that go swimming up to the surface.
Speaker 3: Okay, so they're going up to the surface taking sex
Speaker 3: 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's uh, it's
Speaker 2: it's It sounds like a site to behold now. As
Speaker 2: with a lot of mass spawning incidents in the ocean,
Speaker 2: this of course attracts the attention of a lot of predators.
Speaker 2: If you're some sort of a predatory fish in the
Speaker 2: vicinity and this is occurring, well you've got more than
Speaker 2: an easy meal on your hands. You've got to go
Speaker 2: there and get a bite. And this applies to human
Speaker 2: beings as well. Plolo worms and their relatives are considered
Speaker 2: quite a delicacy in various cultures. 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: what 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 caviar of the Pacific.
Speaker 3: Ooh, yeah, so savory, seafoody kind of taste. That sounds wonderful. Actually,
Speaker 3: 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 pololo 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 caviar meets noodles.
Speaker 3: I don't know if it's just the lighting in this picture,
Speaker 3: it almost looks kind of blue. It's a like a blue, yeah,
Speaker 3: wilted wilted green kind of appearance spread across a piece
Speaker 3: 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 it, write in and share.
Speaker 2: We'd love to hear your take on it.
Speaker 3: Well, I did not expect things to go in this direction.
Speaker 3: I am mighty intrigued. I do want to try this food.
Speaker 3: But wait a minute, I'm we got to convict. How
Speaker 3: 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 it, again,
Speaker 2: the breeding is carried out, but apparently the rest of
Speaker 2: it then just kind of rots and disintegrates on the
Speaker 2: surface of the water into this white oily scum. I
Speaker 2: found multiple especially older like Western descriptions clearly describing it
Speaker 2: as a scum, an oily scum, And apparently this is
Speaker 2: what we could then potentially mistake for an island. I'm guessing,
Speaker 2: especially by individuals who are not familiar with the organizm
Speaker 2: because you know, obviously there would be locals who would
Speaker 2: know about this, because they know what is left behind
Speaker 2: after they've gone out and harvested their share of the
Speaker 2: pololo worms. But if you didn't know what you're looking at,
Speaker 2: you might see like a big sort of gleaming oily
Speaker 2: white mass and you might think that it is some
Speaker 2: sort of a land mass.
Speaker 3: Well, so this reminds me of something we've actually talked
Speaker 3: about on the show before, which is pummus rafting phenomenon.
Speaker 3: Sometimes after a volcanic eruption in one of these islands,
Speaker 3: there will be a great outflow of pummus low density
Speaker 3: rocks that actually rocks that float on the surface of
Speaker 3: the water and all kind of clump together. And if
Speaker 3: you look up pictures of this, it looks extremely weird.
Speaker 3: It's like a parking lot floating in the middle of
Speaker 3: the ocean. So all of these floating phenomena, Yeah, you
Speaker 3: can have a floating vegetation potentially mistaken for something that
Speaker 3: you know you should mark as an island on a map.
Speaker 3: I guess could imagine a pump us raft though that's
Speaker 3: a fairly transient phenomenon related to these volcanic eruptions, and
Speaker 3: now we've got to add a worm sex to the list.
Speaker 3: 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 3: Amazing. But hey, we are not done, are we. We've
Speaker 3: got to talk about more sunken lands. So we will
Speaker 3: be back next time to explore this topic further.
Speaker 2: That's right. In the meantime, will remind you that stuff.
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