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