The Sunken Lands, Part 2

its hubris by being drowned in the ocean. And even though most experts on the original sources think this story he probably did not refer to a place existing in reality, there are still people all the time who love to hunt for remains of Atlantis and similar drowned empires, or to interpret any strange underwater imagery or other phenomena or artifacts as evidence of such. Here's a weird looking artifact from under the water. Maybe it's from Atlantis.

end up taking within a given culture. I guess I would just drive home that there's kind of an amorphous nature to a lot of the concepts that we've been discussing with the idea of lost islands, and there's going to continue to be this kind of amorphous quality to it as we proceed.

land has relatively recently become covered in water. And the main real world example we talked about in the last episode was what has come to be known as dogger Land, a vast plain stretching mostly east of Great Britain and north of the coastlines of continental Europe, off the north coastlines of what is today France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, occupying much of the area that is now filled in

with the North Sea. Now, last time we talked about some of the fascinating early hints, early pieces of evidence that pointed to the existence of a past Doggerland, such as observations going back centuries. Actually that sometimes low tide on the British coast would reveal the remains of apparently ancient trees and trunks still rooted in their original soil,

but now underneath the ocean. How's that possible? As well as the discovery of terrestrial animal remains and even human artifacts like the Kolinda Harpoon, a Stone age spear tip dragged up from the bottom in a fishing net about twenty five miles off the coast of Great Britain in the nineteen thirties. In nineteen thirty one. So today we're back to talk more about the sunken lands. And I wanted to kick off this episode by exploring Doggerland in

more depth. So Doggerland used to be land, now it's covered in sea. What happened to it? Well, I'm going to lay out a rough timeline here and I just want to mention at the top here a couple of really good articles about the archaeology of Doggerland that I was reading. One was called Europe's Lost Frontier. This was a feature published in the journal Science by Andrew Curry in January twenty twenty. Another is called Mapping Vanished Landscape.

This was in Archaeology Magazine by Jason Urbanus in the March April twenty twenty two edition. So the Doggerland timeline goes like this. During the Late Pleistocene, the last part of the most recent ice age, between about one hundred and twenty five thousand and twelve thousand years ago, much of the world's water was locked in glaciers and the North Sea was much lower than it is today. It was about four hundred and fifty feet lower than the

present average. So at this time during the Late Pleistocene, Doggerland was a cold, dry place, a freezing grassland step occupied mostly by megafauna like wooly mammoths or wooly rhinoceroses, but other large large animals that can withstand cold environments, like reindeer and the aurux, the ancestor of modern cattle. Then, after the conclusion of the Pleistocene, we transition into the geological epic known as the Holocene, which extends up until today.

This is the warming period after the most recent ice age. So this period is characterized by a steady increase in

temperatures which caused glaciers to begin to melt. So for thousands of years, you know, I think back roughly ten thousand years ago or so, for thousands of years, Doggerland was still above sea level, but the warming climate and the melting glaciers transformed it from a cold arid step a tundra like landscape into an increasingly lush land of forests and then marshes, rivers and lakes, and many sources described this post glacial landscape as a kind of hunter

gatherer paradise. So who were these hunter gatherers? While there were multiple waves of them. In fact, there's some indication that the human relative, the ancient human relative Homo antecessor, had existed in Doggerland going way back during the cold arid Step period. The Neanderthals occupied Doggerland. It would have been a harsh existence. This would be a very cold and dry place where people would have survived by hunting

large animals. But Neanderthals did occupy the Dogerland Step. We know that through evidence of artifacts axeheads and other flint artifacts that have in some cases been clearly subjected to a type of birch barqu tar that the Neanderthals would use that they manufactured, and then after the Neanderthals during the Holocene, when the area was warming up, it was

clearly inhabited by Middle Stone Age Homo sapiens. And the article in Archaeology Magazine that I mentioned a minute ago quotes a curator of prehistoric collections at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leyden named Luke Amkroutz, who says, quote, during the Holocene, Doggerland was a wooded environment, but with really extensive coastlines and enormous wetlands. These were the richest

areas to live in. There were forest resources, deer, wild boar, and berries, but also fish, migrating birds, otters, and beavers. It was a garden of Eden for them, a wetland wonderland. So if you were a hunter gatherer in Mesolithic Europe, especially after the glaciers began to melt and the climate

began to warm, Doggerland was awesome. Jason Urbanis, writing this article says that it is quote by any estimation, the most attractive landscape in northwestern Europe for Mesolithic hunter gatherers, and perhaps the continent's most densely populated region at the time.

So sometimes when you think about a previously exposed piece of land that is in many sources referred to as quote a land bridge because it is bridged the mainland continental Europe with Great Britain, you think of a kind of transitional place, you know that people just walked across. But no, it's not just a transitional place that allowed people to get from one highland to another. This was apparently about the best place you could be in this

area of Europe at the time. It was full of resources.

level of the North Sea steadily rose. Ice is melting, the world is warming, the sea levels are rising, and Urbanis writes in the archaeology article that for a period of roughly three thousand years, the sea rose six feet every hundred years, and then, adding to the steady creep up of the waterline, there was a sudden cataclysmic event that would have horribly affected the Mesolithic populations living in the remaining coastal areas of that region towards the en

end of that warming period, so more than eight thousand years ago, around sixty two hundred BCE. Again, at this point, much of Doggerland had already been submerged, but what was left above the water line was hit with a catastrophic tsunami caused by an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway. It was actually one of a series of these underwater land slide events known as the Storega slides STORGGA. And I've seen different estimates for the exact height and power

of the tsunami wave. That article I mentioned in Science by Andrew Curry cites an estimate of at least ten meters high for the wave that hit Doggerland, but a twenty twenty one study of its effects on the eastern coast of Scotland. So this is looking at Scotland analyzed soil deposits to estimate that the water might have come as far as eighteen miles inland.

So the dogger boats go out, they fish around the sand bank. There's good catch there and those doggers give their name to the area. And apparently that that sandbank was once an island, that was one of the last parts of it left. Now there's an interesting contradiction, which is that we know that it was probably one of the most densely populated places in Stone Age Europe. It was full of abundant resources. There were lots of humans living there in the Middle Stone Age, but it's hard

to study archaeologically for obvious reasons. You can't just go dig it's underwater, and also the water is deep and cold and murky and stormy. It's just a difficult place to explore, even with divers. So how can archaeologists learn things about Doggerland other than just waiting for the occasional artifact to get dredged up in a trawling net like

we talked about with the Kolinda harpoon. Well, actually, this is one of the main subjects of that article in Archaeology magazine Mapping a Vanished Landscape by Jason Arbanis, and it talks about some interesting ways that scholars have come up with or come across by accident to study Doggerland and see what we can learn about it. So one effort described in this article is associated with a University

of Bradford archaeologist and named Vince Gaffney and colleagues. Gaffney is quoted extensively in this article and he talks about how he and colleagues used data from seismic reflections surveys originally done by offshore oil and gas companies to find mineral deposits. So the way this works is that you have a ship, it goes out in the water. It emits sound waves into the water which bounce off of

the seafloor. And then are picked up by ship based detectors and the physical features of the seafloor affect how the sound is altered when it bounces back, and then this information can be used to map shapes and contours

and anomalies deep under the water. Now they figured out that that same seismic data, which was again proprietary, it was owned by these energy companies, how that could be used by archaeologists to assemble an approximate picture of what Doggerland was like before it flooded, to study the hidden landscape.

And the archaeologists were actually able to get data from I think multiple companies, at least one company called Petroleum Geoservices or PGS, And they talk about how they used data from this company to map a patch of CEA roughly twenty three hundred square miles in size, and when they assembled the map, they realized they were looking at a place where a large river had once cut through

what is now the submerged dogg Or Bank. So imagine that you're like looking at this seismic reflection data and then you realize it's showing you a map of what the land looked like before the water covered it, and you can see the river bed and all that.

But there's another interesting thing this mentioned in both of these articles, which is that, of course many more Mesolithic artifacts from Doggerland have been found since the Colindo Harpoon. There are lots of them now, especially a lot of these these spear tips and sharp points, and a lot of them have been found as an accidental byproduct of beach fill efforts that are used to help, in one sense, to protect the coastlines of places like the Netherlands from

rising sea levels, but also to counteract coastal erosion. So basically, you have these big boats that go out and dredge up gigantic amounts of sand from the sea bottom miles off shore, and then they come back and they dump it at the water's edge to expand the existing land footprint. Maybe to build more harbor infrastructure or something, or to fix a roding coastline, or to build up a sand barrier to help protect the inland areas from rising seawater.

And it just so happens that when they do this, when these boats dredge up the seafloor for Beachville, they often end up depositing previously buried artifacts of Doggerland on the beaches where they can be picked up by collectors. And these articles describe archaeologists who are in contact with these sort of beach walking artifact collectors and they're just

getting artifacts from Doggerland all the time. Now people are writing them to say, oh, here, they've got arrowheads, axes, barbed spear tips made from antler or bone, much like the Kolinda harpoon. Remember that was made from the antler of a red deer. And there's a lot we can learn from this stuff. Because the low oxygen soiled posits at the bottom of the North Sea tend to preserve organic materials very well, so the researchers have been able to do a lot of analysis on these organic remains,

including skeletal remains of the humans from these periods. And this includes DNA analysis, so we know a lot more than we used to. The downside, of course, is that if you are just finding like artifacts or human remains that have been scooped up in this haphazard process where they're you know, dredged from the ocean floor and then spit out on a beach somewhere, you know nothing about

the context really. I mean, you might have some rough ideas about where it comes from, but you know, archaeologists want not just an artifact, but they want to understand the context of the artifact. What soil did it come from, What where exactly was that located, what was the situation in which this artifact would have originally been deposited.

So when people lived there, where did they live? Finding the location of settlements as obviously difficult underwater, but they say that generally the people of Mesolithic Europe were nomadic, but if there was a sheet with you know, if there was a great abundance of resources, they might create

semi permanent settlements. And the places you would look for those semi permanent settlements might be things might be on the like high ground close to wetland areas, so the wetlands would have resources that you would want, but you

would want an elevated area above that. Now I'm going to read a brief passage from this article in Archaeology magazine describing efforts by Vince Gaffney and colleagues to identify an underwater site with the help of this mapping and then extract artifacts from the underwater site so you'd understand

more about the original context. One of these sites quote, was a shallow, fifteen mile long seafloor ridge known as Brown Bank, where a wealth of archaeological objects, including a thirteen thousand year old engraved aurex bone had been snared

by fishing trawlers in the past. The other was an area along a now submerged river channel and estuary off the Norfolk Coast known as the South Although the weather did not fully cooperate, cutting the team's time at sea short, they were able to scoop up sediment deposits from the Southern River estuary site. When they examined the material, they were stunned to find it contained a fragment of a stone tool known as a hammerstone. So I was pretty

amazed by that. The idea that they could use these maps to find sites at the bottom of the North Sea where they would expect humans to have lived because of the value of those sites compared to the natural resources around them, and then go scoop up sediment from under the water and actually find human artifacts where they

expected to look for them. That is impressive, And so the article goes on to say that while this individual find of the hammerstone might not be incredibly significant, the fact that this technique generally works for could or generally could work for finding artifacts of this type could teach us a lot more about the societies of ancient Doggerland.

Now another archaeological note that I wanted to mention this is from that article in Science by Andrew Curry from January twenty twenty, and just as a funny side note, the dateline on this report is from a place in the Netherlands called Monster. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right, but that is a town in South Holland, Monster, which is near a beach that had been constructed via

the sand motor process that I was talking about. So a lot of Doggerland artifacts and human remains could be found on the beach there and are found by people walking around looking for artifacts. So this article covers a lot of the same ground as the other one I was talking about. But one interesting question it asks is, okay, we've got a good amount now of physical evidence available from Doggerland, does it reveal anything about what ancient people

did in response to these steadily rising sea levels? And there actually has been some research on this that they of course know that the rising water gradually transformed Doggerland from a land of rivers and forests into a wetland with marshes and estuaries in the lower lying areas and then scattered highlands which stayed drier, and analysis of human bones recovered from across this transition period shows changes in

what people ate. So as the landscape changed, people apparently shifted their diet from land based animals to freshwater fish. And then one last little fact I wanted to mention that I came across. This was in an article by Johannis Decker at All published in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports in twenty twenty one called human and servid osseous materials used for barbed point manufacture in Mesolithic Doggerland. The fact was sort of contained in the title there.

We have already talked about how a lot of these sharp spear points that have been recovered from the people who lived here were made of antler and bone. These are primarily animal bones, of course, you know, so they might be using parts of a deer carcass or something like that to make a lot of these weapons. But apparently the authors of this study report at least two barbed points like spear or harpoon tips that were made out of human bone.

an island is attractive to us. You know, it's kind of like this miniature world that we can comprehend in our head and so therefore real and you know, definitely real islands, existing islands are of great interest to us. And the idea of lost islands, well.

all in just such a tight and contained space relatively speaking. Now, the author of this book, Stowmall, points out that nineteenth century nautical charts feature a good two hundred islands that we know now just don't exist, and he writes that most of these were situations of poor location determination and or reporting errors. So, in one example, nineteenth century cartographers ended up including Gang's Island in the Pacific, apparently as a concession to various reports of a reef or an

island at its sighted coordinates. So, you know, you'd imagine a situation where the map makers are like, okay, well, some people are saying there's something there. Some people were not, Let's just go ahead and include it. You know, maybe it's a situation we're just safer to say, okay, we'll put it on there. But by nineteen thirty three it was clear that there was nothing there.

links to all his books. He's a scientist and author of multiple books dealing with sunken lands, and seems to be one of the leading living authorities on this subject. In Vanished Islands nonethlests twenty one Pacific islands that he classifies as quote satisfactorily authenticated or partially authenticated islands and in parentheses probably real islands, while also identifying a longer

list of islands that are likely mythical. And I have to say, I really wasn't expecting that there to be so many to be, you know, there to be a list of twenty one Pacific islands that are you know, retained at least within oral traditions of the peoples who have lived in this area that have just vanished, that were real at one point and are now gone. But of course, as we'll discuss, it is a geologically active area.

fantasy and so forth. But none stresses that you know, these have likely occurred throughout human history in these given areas, through throughout the history of human occupation of these areas, with fresh incidents, fresh sinkings, fresh events, rejuvenating older traditions and older ideas, as well as myths concerning lost islands that align with our previously discussed tropes of utopias and

golden ages. None rights quote. Many such stories have been believed in literally so that at various times, oftentimes of famine, people have searched of these fabled islands of plenty, but only one canoe has ever was ever heard from again. So you know, you have these sorts of stories where there was this place that we came from, this place that was known, and it was rich and it was abundant, and during times of famine it might be a place that people seek for again but cannot find.

Solomon Islands. In its current reduced state, it's known as lark Shoal and the apparently the sinking of Tinemanu was really rapid, with only a few individuals escaping via canoe, but enough is to pass on their accounts into the

oral tradition. And this is interesting because some of the details line up with what we were just talking about with Doggerland, but none says that the island was apparently affected by a large seafloor earthquake that destabilized the underwater ridge that the island was situated on, causing it to slide into deeper waters as tsunami waves washed over the land.

of the Pacific. It takes on the character of not only a place of origin, but especially with the Maori spiritual underworld and or a land beneath the sea, a place where the gods reside and the world where souls return to. And none points out that Hawaki is generally positioned in the west in these various traditions, which he says certainly matches up with accepted migration patterns of humans, you know, the last wave of true human exploration on

our planet. But he also says that as far as mythology is concerned, it also could be more aligned with

ideas concerning death in the setting of the sun. So just a reminder that there's so many factors to consider in any given belief system and you ultimately, you know, can't latch onto just like one explanation for why people believe in something, right, And he also stresses that we should be culturally respectful and scientifically cautious about jumping to any conclusions about Hawaiki, which was you know, seems like it was likely a real place or real places, not

the same island of origin for all peoples in this region and all cultures. But we should be careful about saying that it was an island that sank beneath the waves. In this case, Non rights that while some pseudoscience writers have kind of picked this up and run with it, linking it to concepts like Lemuria, like mu, the idea that Hawaukee sank is not a widespread detail in actual Pacific island myths and was likely an invention of Western writers.

He's been one of many voices stressing the threat that climate change and rising sea levels pose to islands in the West Pacific, where sea levels have risen at two or three times the global average over the past few decades, thus endangering not only the livelihoods and culture of modern inhabitants, but endangering their histories as well. Pacific island reefs, which only formed in the last four thousand years, according to Nune, are particularly vulnerable to erosion via rising sea levels. He

stressed this in a twenty seventeen article for The Conversation. Now, I may come back to more of Nun's work in the next episode. Again, there's so much of it. If you're fascinated by this topic, I definitely recommend checking out his work. But he also points to some other natural phenomena that have led to past mistakes in erroneous island identification. So these errors and saying I think there's an island here, and then it turns out there's nothing there.

of land out there. I'm not saying you'll mistake it for like a huge, robust island, but you might mistake it for something worth marking on a nautical map. The other one, the other possibility that I was not prepared for, that he mentions in passing, is that it could be that what you're gazing out there is not a reef, is not something you know, poking out of the water, or even like a large expanse of some some sort of land mass. It could just be the white scum of the poe low low worm.

that back half of the organism. And then, in line with the phases of the moon, all of the plolo worms stick their back halves out of their holes, and then they rupture. They break in two, the tail section full of reproductive cells and again augmented. Now for swimming. It's broken off and it swims up to the surface, while the rest of the worm stays down in the seafloor muck and regenerates. So the part that stays down

there and regenerates is the atok. And then the epitopes are the bits that go swimming up to the surface.

an easy meal on your hands. You've got to go there and get a bite. And this applies to human beings as well. Plolo worms and their relatives are considered quite a delicacy in various cultures. I love this now, I was obviously, I was looking around for a little more insight on this. I wanted to know, like, what what are they cooking with these? So what are they preparing? And I did find an article on gastro obscura by Sam O'Brien pointing out that. Yeah, especially in Samoan traditions,

the pololos are often fried up with eggs. It's they're baked into bread with coconut milk and onions, or they're kind of like sprinkled or spread on toast. The author here she describes it as a seaweed or caviar flavor, but with a noodle texture. And I've seen it elsewhere described as quote the caviar of the Pacific.

what we could then potentially mistake for an island. I'm guessing, especially by individuals who are not familiar with the organizm because you know, obviously there would be locals who would know about this, because they know what is left behind after they've gone out and harvested their share of the pololo worms. But if you didn't know what you're looking at, you might see like a big sort of gleaming oily white mass and you might think that it is some sort of a land mass.

the ocean. So all of these floating phenomena, Yeah, you can have a floating vegetation potentially mistaken for something that you know you should mark as an island on a map. I guess could imagine a pump us raft though that's a fairly transient phenomenon related to these volcanic eruptions, and now we've got to add a worm sex to the list. Worm sex island.

If you use Instagram look us up specifically. Stbym podcast is our handle. There's an old one that has sunken beneath the waves of social media, but stbym podcast is the active one, and I think there's some pretty fun stuff going up there, so so it's one way to keep up.