Doggerland: Lost at Sea

The story of Doggerland is pretty fascinating. The idea is that mainland Europe and the UK were connected not only by a land bridge, but a place where plants, animals and even humans, thrived. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:33Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:43Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is a good old fashioned episode of Stuff You Should Know. It's got history, it has geology, it has lost lands, it has abbreviations like KYA, all sorts of great stuff in it.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  Oh, boy, my friend. If I know Josh Clark loves something, it is submerged or lost lands.

• 2:10Josh Clark?

  It really is. I love it.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  I know this kind of thing really, uh, floats your boat?

• 2:18Josh Clark?

  It does. It floats my submerged land.

• 2:23Josh Clark?

  We're talking about Doggerland, by the way, everybody.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  That's right. We should probably just say kind of what it is first, right? Before we get into the details.

• 2:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and we've talked about it here or there. I could not for the life of me remember what episode, but it's come up once or twice, but I think it bears repeating for sure.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a, you know, a lost land, a submerged landmass off the coast of Europe. It's in the North Sea, probably anywhere from 50 to 60 to 100 feet down. And it used to be a, you know, it used to be land. It used to connect, they pretty much firmly believe now, connect the UK and Europe. And not only that, but was a land where, that kind of flourished, depending on when you're talking about, with plants and animals and even people.

• 3:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they think that it's possible. So this was really populated during the Mesolithic area or era.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  Or area.

• 3:18Josh Clark?

  They think that this area during the Mesolithic era was one of the most densely populated places in all of Europe.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  That's right. And by the way, did you ever see Taylor Swift on her areas tour?

• 3:30Josh Clark?

  I didn't, but I can feel a Taylor Swift area coming on eventually in my life.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  Through the concert, she sort of walked the audience through all of her different areas.

• 3:43Josh Clark?

  This is my knee, the left one.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Knees and toes, knees and toes.

• 3:48Josh Clark?

  So, yeah, I mean, and it sounds kind of like, wait, that's it. There's like a landmass that once connected the UK and Europe.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  That's enough.

• 3:56Josh Clark?

  Like you can see somebody making an absurd or obscene hand motion, talking, thinking about that, right? But no, listen.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  I know exactly what you're thinking.

• 4:06Josh Clark?

  Stick with us because this is, it's fantastically interesting, even though we know very, very little about it. The stuff we do know is so tantalizing that it's like the archaeologists who are studying this are just, they want to just say like, so bad. There's so much stuff down there. We just know it, but they're, they're being deliberate and methodical. So they're not letting themselves say that, but we can say it for them.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's called Doggerland and that's just cool. It sounds like a movie title or something, you know?

• 4:35Josh Clark?

  It does, starring Lily.

• 4:38Speaker 03

  Tomlin?

• 4:38Josh Clark?

  No, the younger one.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Alan?

• 4:43Josh Clark?

  No, not that young.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Von Stup?

• 4:46Josh Clark?

  No, why is her name, Con?

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Taylor?

• 4:49Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 4:52Josh Clark?

  She was in a movie called, maybe Dog Face or something like that, or Dog?

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Oh, uh, yeah, Dog, uh, Dogfight?

• 5:00Josh Clark?

  No, it doesn't matter. We should probably edit this out. If we were a different podcast, we would edit this out.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  No, man. I came up with like four or five lilies. You gotta leave that in.

• 5:09Josh Clark?

  Okay, true, true doubt. Um, but I don't even remember how I got on the Lily thing.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Well, it said it would be a good movie and you reckon that Lily Taylor would be a good, uh, star of that movie.

• 5:20Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because you were talking about it's a cool name and the name comes after the Dogger Bank, which is a shallow fishing area, very productive fishing area in the North Sea. And the Dogger Bank is named after a type of Dutch cod fishing boats that were used for hundreds of years in the area. So there you go, Doggerland.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  That's right. Uh, I hope we got all that right, but it's a pretty shallow sea as far as seas go. About 220,000 square miles and it sits in between the UK and Europe, of course. And because if there was a land bridge that connected those two, that's where the North Sea would be. Um, it's a, has long been a very crucial shipping route and trade route. And as for this story, uh, you know, it's pretty key that in the 1950s and then 60s, uh, gas and oil reservoirs were found there and companies started licking their chops. And they will come into play, uh, later, oil companies and gas companies being, is being actually in, you know, finally, kind of key to helping out science, uh, you know, and scientists in their explorations.

• 6:25Josh Clark?

  So, um, yeah, that will come in later. Uh, it's also, there's a lot of shipping that goes on. Apparently that's a very ancient thing. People have been shipping things over the North Sea for a very long time. Um, and then now it's become a really attractive site for renewable energy, as we'll see. So the North Sea is very important and it's been used for a very long time, but its depths were just unknown. Like, like people hadn't explored it. They didn't have the means to really.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, even though it's fairly shallow, it's still deep for back then.

• 6:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, 100 feet, what are you gonna do? Hold your breath?

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 6:59Josh Clark?

  I mean, the moment you get down on the bottom, you have to come right back up. It's terrible for exploration, holding your breath is.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:05Josh Clark?

  But there were some tantalizing clues that came up over the years that did strongly suggest that there was something down there that had once been above the sea's surface.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  That's right. The first thing that happened late 19th century, they started, you know, better fishing technology came along and you could fish a little bit deeper. So they started fishing a little bit deeper, which is great because you can get, you know, a lot more fish down there. But it was kind of a pain because they started dragging up what they called moor log, which is, you know, peat, this kind of nasty clumped together peat. And in that peat, sometimes they would find animal bones, not fish bones, but like mammal bones. And I guess it was the 19th century. So it just sort of hassled their fishing progress. So they would just usually toss them overboard. Occasionally, if they had some like really

• 8:01Speaker 03

  well-preserved, you know, skull or deer femur or something like that, they might keep it. But that's when the first sort of whisperings of like, something used to be down there, started happening.

• 8:13Josh Clark?

  Exactly. And then in usual fashion, it's worth mentioning H.G. Wells, who's probably one of the best speculators in the history of speculative fiction.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  This is pretty cool.

• 8:24Josh Clark?

  He heard about some of those finds and he wrote a story called The Story of the Stone Age, which is basically like there's a continent under the North Sea between the UK and Europe.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:36Josh Clark?

  This guy is the guy who in the late 19th century, wrote stories about humans sending rockets up into space.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:44Josh Clark?

  And placed the launches at Cape Canaveral. Like that's how, that's how smart this guy was as far as seeing in the future goes. I'd love it.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. He's, he's a pretty great writer, too.

• 8:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Interesting dude.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  Man, we should do one on H.G. Wells. He deserves his own show, I think.

• 9:03Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  All right.

• 9:05Josh Clark?

  All right.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Moving on, as we crawl through Noah's Woods now, before the 19th century, and those bones and that morlog peat started coming up, there were whispers then, I said the first whispers came in the late 19th century. That's not exactly true. Because during low tide, way back when, the water levels would drop and some of these folks living in the UK at the time would see these tree stumps. And this is like medieval times, and they called it Noah's Woods, with the idea that this was, you know, possibly the area where Noah from the Bible lived before God decided to flood the earth because he was grumpy.

• 9:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and here was plain, bright in your face evidence of it. So that had stuck around since the medieval age. And apparently, according to UK or early British lore,

• 9:57Josh Clark?

  this is where Robinson Crusoe, who was the model for Robin Hood, emerged from the water and gave Arthur the sword and the stone.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 10:10Josh Clark?

  So Noah's Woods was just kind of like a local thing. I'm sure the churchy types really talked about it more than anybody else, but scientists hadn't paid much attention to it until a very forward-thinking scientist and his wife, Clement and Eleanor Reed, came forward and they started looking into it. And they kind of were the first people to put together Noah's Woods, the fact that there are tree stumps, weirdly ancient ones, in the sea. People are pulling up animal bones for terrestrial animals, pulling up peat.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Pretty obvious what's happening.

• 10:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they're like, there is something submerged that used to be above the water, and we think it's a land bridge that connected the UK and Europe.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, they, and I noticed there were a couple of scientists, married couples that worked on this along the years.

• 11:02Josh Clark?

  I did too. This is a golden age for that.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. In 1913, they published Submerged Forests, which was the very first study on those woods. And yeah, that's when, that's when they really kind of put it out there. And it was, you know, it was the kind of thing where they didn't have any hard evidence other than these peat samples. But when they started finding like willow leaves and hazel and birch and fern, they were like, hey, not only do I think there was something down there, but it seems to have existed, at least partially at a time that was like, maybe kind of nice.

• 11:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  Temperature wise.

• 11:42Josh Clark?

  Sounds pretty nice, actually. I'd like to live in Doggerland, but it wasn't called Doggerland yet, as we'll see.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 11:48Josh Clark?

  So the Reeds had this pretty great theory. Apparently I read that they concluded that the only possible explanation for this was that sea level rise had flooded and sunk in this land. So they were really right on the money, but this is a very obscure theory. People weren't paying much attention to it. Even in academic circles, it was pretty obscure. But then there was a discovery in 1931 that really grabbed the archaeologists in the area by the throat and shook them till their tongues turned blue and hung out of their mouths. And it said, look at this. This is important.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  That's right. Did you say 1931? Cause that's when it was.

• 12:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  That's when a trawler called the Kalinda was fishing off the coast of Norfolk came along. And again, a big old chunk of moor log was hauled in in the net and they were digging through that. And this guy's got a great name. The skipper of the Kalinda's name was Pilgrim Lockwood.

• 12:48Josh Clark?

  So good. I would say that's a hotel check-in name, but it's just a little too eye catching.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Too suspicious?

• 12:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Yeah, it is pretty suspicious, actually.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Hi, Pilgrim Lockwood checking in.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, buddy. What's your real name? And who do you think you are?

• 13:05Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  So Pilgrim Lockwood is busting up this peat with a shovel. Just like out of a movie, hits something hard, reaches in and finds, and this is the kind of discovery that all of a sudden, like you said, everyone's gonna be like, okay, there's really something happening here. Because it was an eight and a half inch long harpoon head, a harpoon point carved with hands out of an antler. But here's the deal. At first, they were like, okay, I mean, this is kind of cool. And they even offered it to the British Museum. But they said, nah, we've got some harpoons. We're all set. We got a couple of them.

• 13:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  And the idea was that everyone thought like, hey, this is probably just was lost over the side of a boat or something. What's the big deal?

• 13:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they're like, pretty cool. I mean, like, don't throw it back. Hang on to it.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:54Josh Clark?

  Because it was very clearly fashioned by humans. I think in addition to just being smoothed out to be fashioned into a harpoon, I think it was decorated as well. So there's no arguing that it was a human artifact. It had been found in a moor log, so a chunk of peat. And then somebody along the way, another married couple, Harry and Margaret Godwin, said, let us see that peat. We have a little hypothesis we want to test. And they looked at that peat and they said, everybody, get this. That peat was formed in a freshwater environment, meaning that it could only have been formed above the sea's surface, on land, in a wetland, but on land.

• 14:39Josh Clark?

  And the harpoon being in there means that a human was on land above the sea's surface when they were using it and they lost it in the peat.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I picture Margaret Godwin just storming in the room and saying, that didn't fall off of any boat?

• 14:57Josh Clark?

  And then even better, the British Museum gets in touch with Pilgrim Lockwood after this. And he's like, well, well, well, look who's come crawling back.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, that would have been pretty great, actually.

• 15:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  So they used pollen analysis to figure this out. And later on, they were able to date this thing. And this harpoon head they found was about 14,000 years old.

• 15:21Josh Clark?

  Neat.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Which would place it kind of squarely in the Mesolithic era.

• 15:25Josh Clark?

  Well, about toward the beginning of it, I think. Because this is-

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Well, it's in the area.

• 15:29Josh Clark?

  It's a squishy one. And the other thing that's so exciting about Doggerland and finding stuff out about it is we have very little information about Mesolithic people of this area of the time. Okay?

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Okay, everybody?

• 15:45Josh Clark?

  In addition to all that, Chuck, there were some more things that came up during the 20th century that were like, this is, there's something really interesting down there. They were finding bits of textile.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:56Josh Clark?

  They found a Neanderthal skull fragment that they managed to, it was between 70,000 and 40,000 years old.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 16:04Josh Clark?

  We'll talk about it a little later, but there's a facial reconstruction. You know, they love to do like the 3D.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:10Josh Clark?

  They have the guy smiling, just a huge, big, sweet goofy smile. And I thought that was a nice touch.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's always nice. That's when like when they recreated what they thought Jesus would really look like. And he looked like he was on The Simpsons or something.

• 16:25Josh Clark?

  Right, or he's doing the eye wink and the double guns. I've seen that before, too.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that's classic. But despite all these finds, kind of throughout the 20th century, they still, the scientific community still were like, okay, so there were people there, but like, this was just, they were just traveling along the road.

• 16:43Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Like, nobody lived there.

• 16:45Josh Clark?

  They were rambling on.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  They were rambling on through the area and the era. And maybe we should take a break.

• 16:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah, let's.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  All right, we'll be right back with more on Doggerland.

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• 19:28Speaker 03

  All right. So you mentioned before the break at some point that Doggerland was not named Doggerland at this point. It would be, I think, 1998 before that name would finally be coined. And again, this was still like, just sort of the scientific community that was getting pretty excited. Like, even the broader archaeological community was still not super pumped on this area yet. They were studying it in the 70s, but in 1998, a archaeologist named Bryony Coles put out a paper called Doggerland: A Speculative Survey, wherein, and this is what made the scientific community kind of say like, ooh, what's she

• 20:09Speaker 03

  talking about? She named it Doggerland off of that sandbank, the Doggerbank, like you were talking about. And she's the first one that said, you know what, everyone? I think people, like, lived here, and I think it was kind of pretty awesome.

• 20:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah. This wasn't a land bridge. This is essentially like, it was an extension of the European continent, and a lot of people lived there, and a lot of stuff happened there.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. Maybe she busted into the room and said, that was no land bridge?

• 20:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So, yeah, and there's just this collection of archaeologists and scholars, and it's getting increasingly elbow to elbow in there. And hot, because there's no AC for some reason in this room, okay?

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:50Josh Clark?

  And it's July. And there's a lot of rotting fish in the, in the room, too, for some reason.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a weird addition. Everyone wondered about this fish.

• 20:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and then somebody is eating leftovers of Vietnamese food, and it's loaded with shrimp paste.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Oh, man, that's shrimp paste.

• 21:09Josh Clark?

  And then there's one guy who's got leather patches on his elbows, and it's chafing the people on either side of his arms.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 21:18Josh Clark?

  Because they happen to be wearing short sleeves.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, Neil always wears that thing.

• 21:21Josh Clark?

  So, it's really difficult to get across how groundbreaking Bryony Coles' study was, because she was working with Really minimal information. I saw that she went to the extent of like collecting anecdotes from old fishermen who had brought up stuff where they were trawling. And she took all this and put it together. And not only like just wrote a book like, hey, get this, this is what's really down there. She created maps of what Doggerland would have looked like, not just once, but throughout different areas of the time period that it was above water. So what

• 22:06Josh Clark?

  she did was an amazing triumph of intellect. Like, it's really tough to get across like, how big a deal what she did was. And that's why people started to get into Doggerland, because it was so convincing, too.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. You know, these different little pictures of different points in time, she said, hey, I think during the Paleolithic, it might have gone all the way from the Shetland Islands of Scotland to the Netherlands. Maybe, I think, during the Holocene period, that sea began to rise, and it became an island for a while. And then finally, she put it at 5500 B.C., she figured it disappeared entirely. We've seen anywhere between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago is what people speculate. But she even, despite all that, was like, hey, this is just, I'm speculating here, everybody. Much later, an archaeologist named Vincent

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Gaffney, along with a graduate student named Simon Fitch, Fitch or Finch, yeah, Fitch, in 2001, got on the scene. And after about eight years of work, Gaffney said, you know what? She was reasonably correct with all this stuff. Nice, nice work.

• 23:19Josh Clark?

  And Gaffney was in a really good position to say that, because like you said, he worked for years and years and years on a project that he had come up with, with Simon Fitch, that was pretty clever. They were like, There are a lot of oil exploration companies that have been like mapping the seafloor of the North Sea for decades now. Surely they have some amazing data sets that they'll share with us. So they started going around to oil companies and they finally found one, actually Petroleum Geo Services. And PGS said, sure, we'll share, we'll share a little bit of our undersea mapping with you. And they gave them data for 23,000 square kilometers

• 24:02Josh Clark?

  of the North Sea. And Vincent Gaffney fainted, but luckily Simon Fitch was there to catch him. And that was just, that was what Simon Fitch is all about. He's always there to catch you.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. And this was a situation where like to the oil company, they were like, let's just give them a little bit of our stuff and maybe they'll stop calling us. Archaeology Magazine later called that the largest geophysical survey ever made available to archaeologists.

• 24:26Josh Clark?

  Pretty cool.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  So that's sort of the difference between the sort of the oil company sector and the scientific community and what they consider a little bit of data.

• 24:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And this was really groundbreaking for underwater archaeology because this was our underwater archaeology at this point was like dive down in scuba gear, hope you find something. There were, there were some techniques where you can actually kind of excavate something that's close to the surface. They have big vacuums that they go through the silt that's taken up onboard the ship above. So it's not like it was just completely just a concept at the time, but this really opened it up, this underwater mapping. But Simon Fitch and Vincent Gaffney found out these maps are, the resolution's not enough to be like, there's a site, there's a site, a look that skeleton's waving at us, let's

• 25:18Josh Clark?

  go investigate there. But it was enough to give it, give them a big picture of Doggerland. And it was very clear that this was not just some land bridge. This was, yeah, again, like it essentially a new country that they had discovered under the sea. And they were able to match that with existing finds.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:38Josh Clark?

  Like they're like, well, there's this mastodon skull found over here. And that makes sense that it would be here. So let's kind of look for humans over there. That's, that's the kind of technique that they managed to come up with.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's pretty cool. And in the end, they basically said, we think this was not only were there people here, but they think it was a quote, a significant mesolithic population. And, you know, it was like you said, it was pretty groundbreaking. I thought we did an episode on underwater archaeology, but I think it might have just been that I wrote that article for howstuffworks.com back in the day.

• 26:14Josh Clark?

  Oh, we should do that, then.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:17Josh Clark?

  No? Okay.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  I don't know. If it was something I wrote, I'm not sure it's that great.

• 26:22Josh Clark?

  No, you've written tons of good stuff.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Oh, you're sweet. In 2022, well, I guess we should mention in 2014, Gaffney started working at the University of Bradford, and he founded the Submerged Landscape Research Group there because he was dogged about Doggerland. And then eventually in 2022, I guess seven-ish years later, eight years later, he joined the Unpathed Waters Research Project. And that was a pretty cool initiative to make the maritime history of the United Kingdom just kind of put it out there for the public to digest.

• 26:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So, did you check this map out?

• 27:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 27:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it is. So, the resolution is, it's very like, like pitfall. It's that level of bit resolution. The reason why is because if they took all the data that they actually have and rendered it in some sort of way that looked kind of whiz bang, it would crash your computer the moment you started to try to load it, right?

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:23Josh Clark?

  So, they had to, because there's so much information that they have, they had to kind of narrow it back down into that kind of a lower resolution version. But the stuff that it does is amazing. Like, you can go forward in time, backward in time, you can see the sea level rise and fall. The, you can actually control people by setting up a camp and then sitting back and watching what they do. And if there's like a caribou or a moose or something nearby, they'll go kill it, and then they process the carcass, and it just does all this different, super cool stuff. It's definitely worth checking out. The Unpathed Waters, Undreamed Shorelines, I think.

• 28:01Speaker 03

  Wow, that's a very pretty name.

• 28:03Josh Clark?

  It is.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  Should we take another break and talk about what was there?

• 28:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, let's take, let's take that break.

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• 29:54Josh Clark?

  All right, Chuck. So ever since Brian E. Coles came up with the Doggerland speculative maps, and Vincent Gaffney and Simon Finch and all of the projects that they've worked on have, you know, improved that information. In addition to all that, more and more artifacts have been coming up. And apparently, there's a good working relationship between archaeologists who are studying Doggerland and the trawling fishermen who bring in these finds.

• 30:24Josh Clark?

  Because before it was like, hey, check out this, this, uh, what, what'd they call them? Morlogs? This big chunk of?

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, morlogs.

• 30:30Josh Clark?

  And look, there's a probably, what, a mastodon tooth? Is that what that is? And they'd say, well, where'd you get this? And be like, I don't know. I was over, I don't know, somewhere in the East North Sea. And that didn't help very much, but now that they've kind of formed this relationship with these fishermen, the fishermen are like, well, here's the, here's the GPS data for where we pulled that up. And now the underwater archaeologists can go and look and say like, yep, this, this seems like a good site to explore. The problem is this, the, the, this area is so covered in sediment that even for underwater archaeology, this is a challenging place to find artifacts. Because there's so many rivers that flow into the North Sea. And unlike rivers that flow into the ocean, that sediment doesn't just disperse.

• 31:15Josh Clark?

  It gets trapped between the UK and Europe. So it just settles and there's a lot of sediment on top.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, very messy scene. But nevertheless, they have persevered and learned a lot about what was there through these finds. In 2017, uh, they were trying to, you know, they were trying to figure out what plants and animals were there. And they figured, hey, during the Younger Dryas, which we all know now because, uh, we did that episode very recently on the Younger Dryas.

• 31:45Josh Clark?

  That was a happy episode, too.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  They said Doggerland was a, was a tundra. It was just ferns and shrubs and grasses. The climate started warming over, you know, the course of thousands of years. And during the, uh, pre-boreal period, the Holocene, uh, there were birch and pine trees. And all of a sudden it went from a tundra to a forest. And then later during the actual boreal period, um, birch got replaced by hazel. And you got these freshwater lakes, uh, which is, you know, early on, remember when they found that, uh, they did the pollen analysis and they found the freshwater evidence. So that kind of explains that. And As far as the animals living there, that is shifting along with the climate, basically, over the period of, you know, tens and hundreds of thousands of years.

• 32:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because those, those animals were adapted to the Ice Age. And so when the Younger Dryas was like, Ice Age is back, those animals hadn't died out yet. So they're like, awesome, we've got another 1,300 years. But after the Younger Dryas ended and the Ice Age finally came to an end about 11,600 years ago, the things like the woolly rhinoceros and mammoths and reindeer had really nowhere to go and largely died off or else migrated northward. And they were replaced by wild boar, birds came along, which is always a good thing. Otters showed up.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Cute.

• 33:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, if you've ever seen an otter holding hands with another otter, you're glad that those otters showed up. Beavers, one of our favorite animal episodes. It was just a huge change in not only the vegetation, but also the animal life. And the animal life also included humans, too.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we mentioned there were people there and there were. The first hominids there, well, they weren't human, actually, so I sort of misspoke, but they were called Homo antecessor, which was the predecessor to humans. And they were there about 800,000 years ago. And then finally, you know, we mentioned that Neanderthal fragment, skull fragment. They moved in when Doggerland was a tundra. And I guess it was 2001 when they found that skull fragment. This is off the coast of the Netherlands. And they named this one, I love it when they name these, you know, ancient humans, but I'm not even going to try and pronounce it. It's K R I J N. Not sure how you would say that in Dutch.

• 34:03Josh Clark?

  I saw that it was one syllable, so I'm not sure either, but it's not Krijn, like I was saying.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. The J's gotta be silent, right?

• 34:12Josh Clark?

  It does something weird.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it does something weird. But they reckoned that fossil, they dated it to about 70,000 years old.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  And they said this guy probably ate a lot of meat as his diet, maybe some fish, but definitely was chowing down on some pretty good food. And then, you know, they found all sorts of stuff over the years on the coast of the Netherlands, Netherlands, just like, like a bone point or an axe or any kind of carved, pointed, you know, arrowhead or harpoon head would just wash up on shore.

• 34:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah, this is some of the evidence that we have that, that Neanderthals were pretty smart and actually well adapted or suited to cold climates. So they were still around during the Younger Dryas. Humans had kind of come along before the Younger Dryas. The Younger Dryas came along, they beat them back. And then finally, after the Younger Dryas, Homo sapiens really started to show up.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:06Josh Clark?

  I think as early as like 14,000 years ago, and again, this is the, the beginning of the Mesolithic in Europe. And they were hunter gatherers. They had just basically migrated westward from continental Europe because they could get there by walking from Europe to the UK. And they were like, this Doggerland place is pretty nice. We're going to stick around here.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, you know, for a while they were migrating around, following the animals, going where the food was. But they said, you know, they're basically like anyone else from that time, in that place, from that era and area. Man, this is really just fitting together like a glove, you know?

• 35:43Josh Clark?

  I love it.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  They were, you know, carving things from stone, carving things from antlers. We have direct evidence of both in animal bones. They were wearing animal skins. But they said, they think eventually, like you said, they decided like, hey, this place is nice. Let's, let's set up camp here and maybe even farmed there.

• 36:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So this is where the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic happens. It's pretty much what they consider the, the change or the beginning of the Neolithic was when people started farming. And that happened on Doggerland. This is where they essentially found the place that they could grow crops. It was warmer then around this time than it was than it is now in that area. So they were very easily raising crops, figuring it out as they went along. So that because they were raising crops, they were more sedentary, which means that their populations grew a little larger. So some of the things they're starting to find are like evidence of villages. There's a really amazing underwater archaeological site called Boldner Cliff off the Isle of Wight.

• 36:48Josh Clark?

  And they've found what seems to be like a dock that probably went out into an ancient river. There is like burials there, houses and pits, like there's a lot of really cool stuff. And this is a really tantalizing view of, and I can't use that word enough in this episode, tantalizing. This is a tantalizing view of all the stuff that's probably underwater throughout Doggerland.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I guess we should talk about why it's underwater. Uh, this, you know, I think we already kind of gave it away that it didn't happen all at once. It happened over hundreds of thousands of years, little by little. Uh, glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising. Um, and there's, you know, like I said, estimates anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 years ago, uh, or 7,000 rather, of when people think it finally like, you know, was completely submerged. Um, and it may not, you know, it may have become so uninhabitable, you know, long before that, maybe even thousands of years before that.

• 37:44Josh Clark?

  Why?

• 37:45Speaker 03

  Uh, well, I mean, there's a couple of theories. Uh, there's a tsunami theory, um, that says about 8,000 years ago, there were a bunch of massive tsunamis that, you know, pummeled the coast of Britain and completely wiped out Doggerland. Uh, and they were caused by these submarine landslides in the Norwegian Sea called the Storrega Slides. But Gaffney was like, I don't think it was that, actually. I think it was climate change, because I think Doggerland itself, like, he didn't doubt the tsunamis happened, but he said, I think Doggerland itself was kind of protected by the wooded, hilly terrain.

• 38:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but still, a lot of people would have died because they think that the tsunami swept 25 miles inland, which is, it's a lot of settlements that you can take out 25 miles in. And I don't know if you remember, but in our younger Dries episode, we talked about isostatic rebound or adjustment where the glaciers and ice sheets were so heavy that they actually pushed the earth downward. And it took some areas of land down with it, like Scotland, but it raised other areas up, kind of like if you put a bowling ball on a mattress, which, you know, you usually do. And one of the areas that got raised up was Doggerland, right? So when the glaciers melted, Doggerland started to sink. And then in addition to that,

• 39:03Josh Clark?

  the glaciers melting made the sea levels rise, which is why this stuff was happening so quickly. They think that possibly sea level rise was happening as fast as a meter over a century, which doesn't sound like much. But right now, the sea level rise we're worried about is happening like 30 centimeters a century. So that is a really fast sea level rise. So it's not like it would have caught people off guard, but their way of life would have been disrupted pretty significantly by the tsunamis and the sea level rise.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I saw even, you know, potentially up to two meters per century. So that's, you know, super fast.

• 39:39Josh Clark?

  Super. That's like twice as fast at least. So as the, as the sea levels rose and Doggerland sank, Scotland, by the way, is still rising. The land wasn't just some flat mass. There were highlands, there were hills and all that. So little by little, it was submerged. And they think that the last bit was probably Dogger's Bank, because it's so, it's one of the most shallow parts of the North Sea. And by the time it was completely submerged, all the people who had moved upward in the British Isles were now officially British. They were cut off from Europe now for the first time. And like you said, that was between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Uh, these days, uh, there's sort of a new threat to the idea of a lot more science happening there, uh, because of those wind farms you mentioned early on. It's, it's a pretty great area for wind farming, um, but it's threatening, uh, you know, parts of the North Sea. Uh, like we said, it's, it's fairly shallow as far as seas go, and there's lots of great wind there. Uh, and the plan is by 2030, uh, that the southern part of the North Sea is just going to be riddled with wind farms. Uh, the downside of that, I mean, this great renewable energy, but the downside is that this stuff is really disruptive to, um, the, the ecology there and certainly disruptive to all those Doggerland sites that they're still hoping to explore.

• 41:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I was reading that because this North Sea is so shallow, um, the, the kind of wind farms that they can put in can actually be bolted to the bedrock, which is way cheaper than like the floating version. So they're salivating over putting wind farms there. But again, that means that they're bolting wind turbines to Doggerland, which is nay good for the archaeological aspect.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  It's nay good.

• 41:27Josh Clark?

  Right. That's exactly right. So they don't, I mean, it seems like these wind farms are going on, stupid wind farms, always ruining the environment for everybody.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:37Josh Clark?

  Uh, and I don't know that anybody's going to be able to change it because everybody thinks Doggerland's cool, but not necessarily disrupt progress as far as renewable energy goes, cool.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:50Josh Clark?

  So I guess that's it for Doggerland.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 41:54Josh Clark?

  Uh, Chuck said, that's right, which means everybody, it's time for listener mail.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  Uh, this is from Andy. Hey guys, been listening since COVID 2020. Uh, I've heard your entire library and I've almost agreed with everything that Chuck says.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  I think it was titled Brother From Another Mother. We're close in age, so we have similar childhood memories. And this morning, when Chuck brought up the guitar solo from My Sharona, I knew that we were made from the same cloth, because for many years now, I've touted that guitar solo as my most favorite solo of all time.

• 42:26Josh Clark?

  Wow.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  Glad to hear that I'm not alone. So, thank you Chuck for being like a brother to me. On another note, you failed to mention the true father of AM radio, guys, Nikola Tesla. Tesla actually patented the technology before Marconi did, making him the actual father of radio. Marconi, quote, bothered, end quote, Tesla's technology and ran with it. And he was just a much better businessman than Tesla. So, he was able to monetize the technology, earning him the notoriety that he has today, see, father of radio.

• 42:56Josh Clark?

  So, Jefferson Starship should have said Tesla plays the Mambo?

• 43:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess so.

• 43:03Josh Clark?

  Tesla played the Mambo. It works.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  It would have worked, yeah. Read many books on Nikola Tesla and his inventions and find him one of the most fascinating men of all time. Without him, we might not have had such things as the remote control, robotics, and wireless transmission. Thanks for everything, guys. You make my commute to work relaxing and educational three days of the week, and that is Andy McDonald.

• 43:23Josh Clark?

  Thanks, Andy. That was a good email. Surely then, if you've listened to our back catalog, you're aware of the electricity wars we went over with Edison and Tesla. But I feel like Tesla could definitely stand his own episode, too.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe.

• 43:37Josh Clark?

  Okay. Well, so, let's see. If you want to get in touch with us like Andy, you can do that. Send us an email and say whatever you want. Send it off to [email protected].

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 44:08Josh Clark?

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