November 28, 2023 • 44 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the world of lost islands and forgotten continents, in both actual geologic history and the mists of the human imagination.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And in today's episode,
we're going to be kicking off a series that we're
calling The Sunken Lands, that is about the idea of
lands submerged underwaters. Now, not too long ago, we did
a series of episodes on the tendency people have to
(00:35):
quite readily interpret any weird looking, low resolution photograph as
evidence of our highly speculative theory of choice, whatever you like.
So here's a picture of a shape that maybe doesn't
look organic in origin, so it is evidence of an
alien spacecraft that crash landed on our planet five thousand
years ago. But then, as we discussed in that series,
(00:58):
often if you're able to get a higher resolution image
of the same object or just get more contextual information,
oh wait, it's actually a rock. But one very popular
genre of imagery for this exercise is underwater photography. It
happens with, you know, images of things in the sky
as well or things just obscured in various contexts, but
(01:22):
underwater photography is especially juicy here. I think because the
conditions of underwater photography naturally lend themselves to the kind
of tantalizing state of low information that sets our imagination
running wild. Unlets you fill in the gaps with whatever
(01:43):
you were excited about. And when the weird looking thing
is underwater, the highly speculative theory people use to explain
it might still be aliens, as we discussed in the
example of you know, one underwater object, probably a glacial
erratic boulder that people did in some cases interpret as
a crashed alien spacecraft. But another common explanation for weird
(02:07):
looking things underwater is the sunken civilization, most often Atlantis,
but there are other candidates as well, and the idea
of a lost civilization vanished under the sea is so
captivating to people it is hard to resist the urge
to see an underwater rock with sharp corners and say
(02:28):
that's not a rock, that's a building. This is one
of their ancient skyscrapers, and now it's hidden under the waves.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, it's basically the same energy, but in a different
temporal direction. Instead of looking to aliens from beyond, you're
looking for some sort of advance to civilization from the
past that may or may not match up with realistic
expectations of the past right now.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Of course, in some limited cases, there are examples of
human artifacts or human built at a faciity that can
be found underneath the water. Now we'll probably talk about
some of those examples. But in most cases we can
say with pretty high confidence that the things people are
looking at in these images are not even intelligently designed artifacts.
It's usually like a rock or some kind of undersea creature,
(03:17):
something like that. And for various reasons that we might
get into, even if what you find under the water
was designed by humans, there are strong reasons for doubting
anybody who says, aha, we have discovered Atlantis.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Rob.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
I don't know if you want to talk about this
now or later, but there are reasons for thinking Plato's
allegory of Atlantis was maybe not even meant to refer
to an actually existing place, or if there, or if
it was, there's no reason to think that it's anything
more than a legend, that it's like a thing we
should actually be looking for on Earth.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, let's get back to Atlantis in just a second.
That we could easily devote an entire podcaster more to
just chasing the idea of Atlanta. It's around, but we'll
try and keep it contained.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
But while all of that is true, while Atlantis hunting
is probably a misguided exercise, it's also true that there
actually are some places on planet Earth where what is
now the seafloor was relatively recently land land that could
have been, or in some cases was occupied by humans.
(04:25):
And so that's what we want to talk about in
the series, places on Earth that are now under the
waves but were once part of the world above.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
And while we're mostly I guess talking like that, we
talk about the waves, we think about atlant as we
think about the ocean, but we may also touch on
some examples that have been lost underneath rivers or lakes,
sometimes with man made lakes in play. But perhaps we'll
come back to that in another episode.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Oh that's a good variation. Yes. Now, one thing to
be clear about is that part of what makes these
sunken lands interesting is merely a question of time. Because
of course Earth is, you know, is geologically active. It
has a dynamic surface, and over millions of years, the
crust of the Earth undergoes changes. There's continental drift, there
(05:13):
are all kinds of changes that happen to the crust
of the earth. Areas that were formerly exposed are buried.
Areas that were formerly buried are exposed. Areas that used
to be ocean become land, Areas that used to be
land become ocean. So we know that happens on a
geological time scale. What we're talking about here are lands
that have become covered in water relatively recently, maybe on
(05:34):
the order of thousands of years or even less. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Yeah, So we have these basic geologic realities to keep
in mind, but then we see them reflected in different
ways in our folklore, our mythology, our religion. Like even
if you weren't, if you were, if you somehow avoided
any scientific inquiry, in any scientific understanding about these changes,
(05:59):
you would perhaps be exposed then to religious ideas about
these changes, the various religious and mythological ideas that go
way back in multiple different faiths, involving global or regional
flooding that is attributed to divine causation in many cases.
So given all of this, though, again it should come
(06:20):
as no shock that just the mere idea of sunken islands,
lost islands, phantom islands, lost continents, etc. This has long
stirred the human imagination, and a lot has been written
on this, but interestingly enough, one of the more well
regarded books on this, now it's a slightly older book,
came out, I believe, nineteen fifty four, so it doesn't reflect,
(06:42):
you know, decades upon decades of additional contemplation and discovery.
But El Sprague de Camp, who have nineteen oh seven
through two thousand wrote a book titled Lost Continents the
Atlantis theme in history, science, and literature. Now de Camp
is an interesting fellow because he was also an influential
sci fi author, whose works include nineteen thirty nine's Less
(07:05):
Darkness Fall. He was also a posthumous collaborator with Conan
creator Robert E. Howard, so he actually contributed quite a
bit to the literary world of Conan the Barbarian, and
interestingly enough, he served as an advisor on both nineteen
eighties Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer movies, as
well as nineteen ninety seven's Cole of a Conqueror, which
(07:29):
does not have Arnold in it, but is an adaptation
of a Conan novel.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
Idea is okay, So that's the one that's got Kevin
Sorbo in it, right, right, Kevin Sorbo But these hercules, Yeah, so.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
I think it was based on a Conan novel. But
then they just changed his name to coll the Conqueror,
who's another character in Robert E. Howard's world. But I'm
not super familiar with this movie or this other character.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
I've never seen that one. But my mind is aroused
at the thoughts of scripts that Schwarzenegger said no to.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Now, it is worth noting that Robert E. Howard was
one of numerous Pulp era authors to make use of
lost in sunken islands, and a lot of this, you know,
does have to do as sort of the timeline of
interest in these fantastic ideas. I'll touch on a few
other examples from the pulp era in just a minute,
but in this book, De Camp discusses at length this
idea of a human fascination, literary, pseudohistorical, pseudo geogological, various
(08:31):
interests in this idea of lost lands, lost continents, etc.
And he points out that a lot of it comes
back to this idea of a lost land that is
often situated as some sort of utopia. It's a utopian ideal,
or where it's an eden. It is a place where
where we got it right or things were right before
(08:51):
the fall. You know, this idea that Okay, things are
not great, but there must have been a point in
time where things were in balance. And of course, and
in summoning this idea, there is at least implied the
idea that we might be able to return to it,
either by our own efforts or by some sort of
divine intervention.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Yeah. I think that's interesting and that that's correct. A
lot of these stories about sunken lands and the civilizations
that inhabited them. I guess there are some exceptions, but
they don't usually seem to be well, this is just
another place like many others, you know, that was just
happened to be low lying and was swallowed by the waves,
or there was some kind of weather event. It almost
(09:33):
always is idealized in some way. It was a place
that was especially good or especially advanced, or especially bad
in some way.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, and yeah, in some manner or another, this place
ties it all together, Which comes back to so many
of these these threads that we've discussed in conspiracy thinking
and and so forth. The idea that like Okay, I
have found something, and if true, and of course I
believe it is true, it will explain all these other mysteries.
(10:02):
You know, you drop this in the middle of everything
and it all makes sense.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
It's the master key. Yes.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
So I don't really want to do an exhaustive list
of every mythical and fictional sunken land. I mean, there's
there's a lot there, and a lot of them are
also closely connected. I mean just in fantasy alone. It's
like who anybody engaging in some broad world building is
going to have perhaps in Atlantis or at least a
(10:28):
lost land. I mean, it's just it's too attractive a
trope to give up on, right, But I thought we
might hit some notable examples in the main three or
four categories you might consider mythology, fiction, pseudoscience. But I
do want to note that some entries will move between
these classifications because once once you introduce an idea and
other folks will come and and use it and maybe
(10:51):
drifted into another category. So in mythology, I thought I
might mention Avalon of course, the magical island where King
Arthur was taken after sustaining mortal wounds. It's also the
origin place of his sword EXCaliber, and in general just
a magical land of Authorian legend, possibly linked in origin
(11:13):
to Fladamorgana or Glastonbury tor Note that this isn't even
the only sunken island in Authurian legend, though there are
there are others. It's just like an irresistible magical idea,
though again one that may be rooted in strange observations.
Islands that seem to be there but are not that
are you know, Fata Morgana, that are due to an
(11:36):
illusion of one sort or another, or just a mistake
of cartography, of trying to figure out what's out there
and making mistakes.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Both direct perceptual illusions and knowledge illusions give rise to
the idea of islands that used to be there, but
now you can't find them.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Right And then of course in the background again the
geologic reality that things do change, and it is not
beyond the realm of possibility that a lost island could
truly be lost. It could have been a physical place
and is no more. Another one is Brazil or High Brazil.
This has generally nothing to do with Brazil, the South
(12:15):
American country. This is an Irish lost Isle of myth,
a phantom island that is covered by myst most of
the year, but then that mist opens up. Sometimes featured
on old maps and was sought after by cartographers, because
again you have anytime you have this idea of an
island that is thought to exist, and then it seems
like it doesn't exist. I mean, that's a mystery that
(12:36):
has to be explored. Now. It doesn't have to be
an island, of course, you can also have coastal areas
that are swallowed up. There's a mythical city in the
traditions of Brittany and France. And I may be pronouncing
this one wrong, yees, I believe it's y s. I
assume it's not wise, But anyway, it's allegedly consumed by
(12:59):
the ocean, and it's fatured into a number of creative works,
especially in French traditions. But of course the whole other
realm is fiction, of course, and once something has been
introduced in myth, given enough time, it may enter into fiction.
And this leads us to Atlantis, as we've already discussed. Yeah,
the lost continent of Atlantis, so called, has a prominent
(13:20):
place in pseudo science and conspiracy thinking and fiction. Among
the many entries here, I have to point out a
couple of things from nineteen eighty two. One I brought
up many times before, but if you have not seen
the commercial for Atari's Atlantis video game from nineteen eighty two,
look it up. It's marvelous. I think I saw this
when I was like four years old, and it's scared
(13:43):
and amazed me.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Rarely does a thirty second TV commercial have such a
bone chilling plot twist it does.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
They really packed a lot into this one. I have
no idea if the game was fun at the time
or is well remembered like a retro experience. But as
I was revisiting this, because anytime this comes up, I
have to go rewatch it. And then I discovered, weirdly
enough that the brothers Hildebrand did a wall calendar of
original art themed around Atlantis the same year, and I
(14:15):
kept thinking, well, these have to be connected. There must
have been some connective tissue here. If there is, I
couldn't find it. But I love the brother's Hildebrand. They did,
of course, a lot of great Tolkien work, and they
did Tolkien calendars back in the day, and yeah, they
have this one calendar of Atlantis art with all sorts
of like fantastic adventures going on, some sort of like
demon lord, a dragon, so forth. So many people don't
(14:38):
realize that their origins are of Atlantis are also based
in fiction. You go back to around three fifty five BCE.
That's when Greek philosopher Plato discusses the concept of Atlantis
and a pair of dialogues Tomaeus and Critias. Atlantis is
described as a naval empire that rules the western known world,
(14:59):
but they all sintly fail when they come up against
the Athenians. Then they fall out of favor with the
gods and their world is consumed by the Atlantic Ocean.
It's described along the lines as being like the you know,
the the ideal of Plato's Republic. But here's the thing.
There's no other surviving mention of Atlantis in the ancient
Mediterranean world, aside from commentaries and responses to Plato's work. So,
(15:24):
in other words, there's no indication that this was a
pre existing idea, that this was something that was considered
actual history, or even like a pre existing I guess
you would say literary.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Trope, right, So it's not even clear that it was
thought to actually be a place right now.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Among those various commentators over many years, it looks like
many took it as meta metaphor and or as myth,
though you do have some folks that pop up that
end up taking a more literal approach to it, or
so it seems, based again on surviving texts. As such,
you end up with a legacy of varying interpretations, which
(16:06):
DeCamp summarizes is either taking it on as a fiction,
finding actual societies that you can compare to Atlantis, the
investigation of land bridges and islands with Atlantis in mind,
and also just the wholesale acceptance of the concept as
historical truth. And of course this approach especially is widely
regarded as pseudohistory at the very least now. Again, though,
(16:28):
just because something is introduced in fiction doesn't mean it
stays in fiction like these. That's one of the interesting
things about this, and I guess in general about about
human imagination is once something has been imagined, it doesn't
have to stay in that realm of sort of safe
unreal in fiction. It can move into other categories of
the unreal, the mythological, the the pseudoscientific, the pseudohistorical, the
(16:54):
pseudo archaeological, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
I have to wonder if in thousands of years they're
going to be people being like you know, when Tolkien
talked about the elves going to valen or across the ocean,
was that referring to the island of Cuba.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Do you think, yeah, exactly, And you do end up
with that sort of inquiry. I mean in part of that,
of course, too, is you have someone like Plato who
has such high standing and sort of the intellectual world
for centuries and centuries. You know, people are going to
come back and and reanalyze everything that they wrote. Now
(17:39):
in terms of fiction, I will just mention in passing
like a few examples that I love the work of
Clark Ashton Smith, and a lot of his stories involved
lost continents. I think he has three different lost continents. Well,
the one of them is a continent from the future
that doesn't exist now. So it's sort of kind of again,
kind of the same concept but put in reverse, taking
(17:59):
in the future and saying in the future there will
be a new continent and these are the sort of
adventures that will take place there. And of course J R.
Tolkien got in on the action as well. We have
the lost Kingdom of Middle Earth, Numenor. This was corrupted
by Sauron in his fair form, and then it's destroyed
in a cataclysm as the kingdom turns against the Valor.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
Oh is Numanor swallowed by waters. I never understood that,
I guess I just thought of it as like an
empire that fell.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Yeah, it's like a star shaped island I believe, according
to the maps and the recent Amazon series, I believe
depicts the fall of Numenor. I'm having trouble remembering offhand.
I need to revisit it before they put out another season.
I guess.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
Oh, I haven't watched that yet, but been meaning to
check it out at some point.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
High production values.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Now, in the pseudoscientific world, and again there's a lot
of overlap with these, with these sort of loose categories,
you have the Island of MoU. This is both a
place of pseudoscience and fantasy, according to de Camp, proposed
in the nineteenth century by British American archaeologist and photographer
Augustus Lplogion, who used it to connect Mayan civilization to
(19:13):
ancient Egyptian civilization. Again, this is one of those classic
examples of like, if this exists, it explains everything, and
getting into this idea of like, well, look, we have
things in Mayan civilization, we have things in ancient Egyptian civilization.
They remind me of each other. There must be some
like missing link to connect them. Otherwise this doesn't make
(19:34):
sense to me.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
That they could. They both built pyramids sort of, so
that couldn't be explained by them both just figuring out
how to build pyramids right right.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
But then on top of this, British occultist James Churchward
would go on to write about MoU as well, associating
it with Lemuria, which we'll get to in a second.
In works of pseudoscience that argue that it was the
not only was it this kind of like single link
in terms of understanding global civilizations, but it was the
location of the Garden of Eden and a cultural connection
(20:07):
for various ancient civilizations. And then Atlantis also enters the
mix here, even though its origins I think most serious
scholars would agree is as a metaphor is as a
work of fiction. Various individuals have made arguments for the
discovery of a lost Atlantis or have gone all in
on the idea of Atlantis, and according to the komp,
(20:29):
a great deal of modern Atlantis mania stems from sixteenth
century enthusiasm for the concept, and a lot of this
enthusiasm coincided with excitement for the new world of the Americas.
So you know, again, you have a lot of energy,
like new lands are discovered, and then you have this
idea of Atlantis, and then people were proposing things like, well,
(20:51):
are the Americas Atlantis? Well no, but I guess you
can lean into that interpretation if you so desire.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
You know, I was just thinking about the the sort
of common strain of thinking that connects conspiracy thinking with
with highly speculative lost civilization thinking, and like why you
would typically find both beliefs in the same brain, Like
why people are drawn to one if they're often if
(21:18):
they're drawn to the other. The idea of a lost
civilization that was vanished beneath the waves is a is
a literal, physical manifestation of the type of hidden knowledge
or covered up knowledge that that you know, guides conspiracy thinking.
Like if you're a you're a conspiracy thinking person, you
think that there is a there is a mechanism somehow
(21:43):
that explains all these disparate phenomena. But the but the
nature of that mechanism is being covered up. It is
hidden from you somehow. Usually it's a social mechanism. It's like,
you know, an agreement of people, or it's a you know,
an extraterrestrial mechanism there are aliens doing things or something
like that. The Lost Civilization under the Waves is kind
(22:03):
of like that. It explains history in a similar way,
but it has been literally physically covered up.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, and again it goes back to this idea of
lo fi information to support an idea. Though interestingly enough,
like coming back to the idea of Mayan and Egyptian civilizations.
So obviously, like the Great Pyramids are are not lo
fi evidence. Likewise, you know, various megastructures in the Americas
(22:33):
are not lo fi evidence either. But if you're using
both of these as evidence for this third thing that
doesn't exist, then they do become kind of lo fi
because again, there is there is not a thing there
to prove there is not this lost civilization that connects
the two.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
You might also, though, be coming at them from a
position of low information, in that you don't have a
lot of contextual knowledge about these these civilisations, and thus,
you know, you just see like similarly shaped buildings and
think like has to be a common source between them.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Yeah. Now, now I don't want to make it seem like,
you know, just the idea of lost continents and lost
lands that aren't there, you know, are entirely rooted in
you know, conspiracy thinking and sort of non logical inquiry.
Because another example to touch on coming back to Lemuria
is this, this was an eighteenth century hypothesis to explain
(23:30):
similarities between species on distant continents. You know, we have
organisms that look like like this here, there are organisms
that look like this over here, and there's just too
much distance. How can we possibly explain this? And so
was this was one idea, Well, perhaps there is a
lost land mass, something is missing between these continents that
(23:50):
would explain these species being in both places. However, a
much better theory came around that of continental drift, but
once introduced to the idea of Lemuria ends up taking
on additional qualities to various interpreters. You know, it becomes
the cradle of human civilization in various occult world views
(24:11):
and in various fictions, and you often see this kind
of loop. I think with serious theories, feeding occult nonsense
and feeding fantasy, feeding you know, you know, things that
are you know, just purely enjoyable, and then that may
feedback into other things as well. So there are more examples,
to be sure, and we may come back to some
(24:32):
of these, but I think these examples nicely sum up
some of the associations and ideas here. It's kind of
a missing link concept, the lost place that could more
easily explain the world, and or a lost golden age.
And in this the concept is closely connected to the
con to various ideas of spiritual lands just beyond the
(24:52):
reach of mundane experience. So you know, there might be
like a like there's a shambala in Tibetan Buddhism. I
think there are various kingdoms and Russian folklore, you know,
almost like cities in the sky that are just beyond reach,
and you find these in various various form. I mean,
avalon is basically the idea, you know, this place that
(25:14):
is now beyond the reach of the mortal world.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
So across the whole spectrum of fiction, myth, legend, and
obsolete scientific hypotheses, there have been ideas of lands that
were covered over by the waves or vanish beneath the
waters somehow. But now I want to talk about a
real and firmly established, provable example of lands that were
(25:40):
in quite recently sunk beneath the waters within the span
of human history.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Is it Atlantis?
Speaker 3 (25:46):
It is not Atlantis, Okay. So I want to start
with an anecdote about a strange find, and a lot
of my details here are coming from an article published
in Archaeology Magazine by Jason Urbanas called Mapping a Vanished Landscape.
So in nineteen thirty one, one night in September, there
was a British fishing boat called the Kolinda which was
(26:10):
trawling in the North Sea off the eastern coast of England,
around the county of Norfolk. If you're not familiar with trawling,
it is a method of fishing where you drop a
large cup shaped net into the water and you pull
it behind the boat, and there's midwater trawling and bottom trawling.
With midwater trawling, you know, drag the net through the
(26:30):
middle of the water column. With bottom trawling you let
the net sink to the bottom, and the net has
weights that keep it stuck to the bottom and keep
the mouth of the net open, so the boat drags
the net along the seabed, sort of bulldozing the top
layer of sediment and scooping up whatever is in its
path large enough to get trapped in the net. The
Kolinda was trawling off the coast of Norfolk about twenty
(26:54):
five miles out at a place where the water was
roughly one hundred and twenty feet deep or about thirty
seven meters. After hauling up the net from a bottom troll,
a guy named Pilgrim Lockwood, who was the skipper of
the boat, noticed a big chunk of pete stuck in
the catch. And bottom trolling often creates a lot of
(27:15):
what's called bycatch. That term usually refers to unwonted animals
that you get in the net that are not part
of what you're fishing for. But also it just gets
a bunch of objects from the seafloor, because again it's
kind of like bulldozing the top layer of sediment as
it gets dragged along, So a lot of stuff ends
up in the net, and that stuff has to be discarded. Now,
this pete from the bottom, here's a really good word.
(27:36):
I came across I've seen sources that mentioned that these
chunks of pete pulled up from the ocean like this
were often referred to in England as moor logo r LG.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Nice.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
Is there a band I didn't check that'd be a
good bog metal band name.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Oh yeah, I can see the album cover right now
with like a bog money on it.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
So the skipper, Pilgrim Lockwood, he's got this chunk of
peat that's part of the you know, not what they're
fishing for. Obviously, he's stuck in the net, so he
gets it out. He starts to smash the pet up
with a shovel, but while he was doing that, he
found something rigid lodged inside and he actually said that
it sounded when his shovel hit this object. He said
it sounded like it was clanging against metal. It was
(28:22):
not a rock. He pulled it out and what he
found was a sharp instrument about eight and a half
inches or twenty two centimeters in length, with a pointed
tip at one end and barbs or teeth running most
of the way down its length, like some kind of weapon.
And it was a weapon. This is not a case
(28:42):
where you know it was actually some deep sea organism
that you know, was mistaken for a human artifact. This
was an artifact. This was technology. It was ancient technology,
and this artifact came to be known as the Klinda harpoon.
So experts from the British Museum studied the artifact and
they determined that it was the tip of a fishing
(29:05):
sphere from the Mesolithic period or the Middle stone Age,
which would have been somewhere between ten thousand and four
thousand BCE. It's an intriguing looking weapon. So it's got
the sharp end, it's got the saw teeth, but it's
also got these ridges sort of gashed in it along
the opposite end from the tip.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
You know, it does remind me a little bit of
the fabled weapon of coculon the oh oh, you know
that was supposed to be in some cases like barbed
like like the barb of a sting ray. Yeah. Though,
of course, to your point, clearly, this is this is
not a nature fact. This is an artifact. This is
something that that was carved and made through human craft
(29:46):
and ingenuity.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Yes, absolutely made by human hands. But that raises questions
how did this Stone Age weapon end up buried in
peat in the ocean more than twenty miles off the
coast of modern day Britain. Was it possible that ancient
hunter gatherers carried it out to sea that far on
a boat or a raft and then dropped it to
(30:08):
the bottom. At the time it was found, that seemed possible,
but not very likely. Today we know more about the
Klinda harpoon. According to the Norfolk Museums, the harpoon tip
was made from the antler of a red deer that's
the species service Elaphus, and it has been radiocarbon dated
to about eleven, seven hundred and ninety years ago, mentioned
(30:32):
in the Archaeology magazine article as another strange fact. A
year after the Klinda harpoon was discovered, scientists analyzed the
pollen contained in the peat or the moor log from
around where the spear tip was discovered, and they found
something bizarre. Even though the peat was more than one
hundred feet under the water, it had been formed in
(30:54):
a fresh water context lakes and rivers and top side bogs,
not floors. So the person carrying the Colinda harpoon al
those thousands of years ago had not been a sea goer,
but an earthwalker possibly fishing in a river. And this
isn't the only Stone Age human artifact recovered from the
(31:15):
bottom of the North Sea. We can come back to that,
but I want to move on to something else, because
the Colinda Harpoon was not the first indication that there
was something odd about the sea to the east of
Great Britain. I would now like to read a passage
from a book called Submerged Forests, published in nineteen thirteen
(31:36):
by the British geologist Clement Reid. Clement Reid writes, quote,
most of our seaside places of resort lie at the
mouths of small valleys, which originally gave the fishermen easy
access to the shore and later on provided fairly level
sites for building. At such places, the fishermen will tell
you of black, peaty earth with hazel nuts, and often
(31:59):
with tree stumps still rooted in the soil, seen between
tide marks when the overlying sea sand has been cleared
away by some storm or unusually persistent wind. If one
is fortunate enough to be on the spot when such
a patch is uncovered, this submerged forest is found to
(32:20):
extend right down to the level of the lowest tides.
The trees are often well grown oaks, though more commonly
they turn out to be merely brushwood of hazel, sallow
and alder, mingled with other swamp plants such as the
rhizomes of osmuda. These submerged forests, or quote Noah's woods
(32:41):
as they are called locally, have attracted attention from early times,
all the more so owing to the existence of an
uneasy feeling that though, like most other geological phenomena, they
were popularly explained by Noah's deluge, it was difficult thus
to account for trees rooted in their original soil and
yet now found well below the level of high tide.
(33:04):
And ooh, thinking about the submerged forests, it gives me
a spooky feeling. So at the lowest level of the tide,
when when the water goes back farthest, even all the
way down to that level, you will sometimes find, especially
if there has been maybe a violent storm that has
shifted the sediment around and pushed sand out of the way,
you will find uncovered tree stumps, still rooted apparently in
(33:26):
their original position. Trees can't grow in the salt water,
so what was happening there?
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Yeah, this is this is enticing. And it does remind
me though that something we've discussed in the past and
the show that you know, for most of human history,
we didn't have a high resolution understanding of the world
beneath the waves, and so a lot of it was
based on guesswork, and there were a lot of ideas
(33:53):
about cities and forests beneath the sea, and like this
general idea that anything that you sort we see in
Western discourse, that anything that exists in the surface world
would have an analog beneath the water. So you have
a lion up here, well, you have a sea lion
under there. You have a horse up here, you have
a sea horse beneath the way.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Oh yeah, you have people up here, you have maror
people down there.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Yeah yeah. So like there, you know, you have that
huge category. You have these you know, accounts of great
floods and so forth. So there's a lot of there's
a lot of like background mythology and observational data to
feed into any kind of discovery like this.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
So how do you explain these submerged forests? In this work?
Clement Read goes on to document and make all kinds
of observations about them, but he reached a strange but
unavoidable conclusion. Sea levels were not constant, and the sea
had to be higher now than it was in the past,
(35:00):
much higher now than it was in the past, meaning
that much of what was once the relatively shallow North
Sea had actually been not a sea but a vast
alluvial plain the hidden lowlands of ages past, and these
lands were most recently covered with trees. There are still
(35:21):
places today where when the tide is at its lowest
you can find indications that there used to be forests
on lands that are now covered by the North Sea,
and of course recently enough for remains of tree trunks
and stumps to still be preserved there. One commonly cited
example is a place called pet Level Pett pet Level
Beach in Sussex, where the remains of a forest can
(35:43):
still be seen at low tide with indications of oak trees.
Elm U and Beach Rob. I've got some pictures for
you to look at. Both these pictures here are from
pet But another example that I came across is from
the remains of a submerged forest that is still fully submerged.
So this appeared in the media within the last decade.
(36:04):
I was reading from an article in BBC News Norfolk
and its attached video segment. This was from twenty fifteen
and it was called Ancient underwater Forests discovered off Norfolk
Coast and the report says that it was documented by
a couple of research divers named Rob Spray and Dawn Watson.
This was after a major storm had shifted sediments in
(36:27):
an underwater region off the north Norfolk coast. So just
like Clement Reid was saying, you know, it's especially after
there's been some violent event, maybe a big storm moves
the sediment around and uncovers things. In an interview for
this news segment, Don Watson, one of the divers, describes
coming across this region by accident. She said she had
(36:48):
been swimming for a while, she was almost out of
her air supply towards the end of a dive when
she came across an enormous mass on the seafloor. She
says it was quote almost a standing wave of black
stuff in front of me. It took me a while
to work out what it was and it was just
wood shaped like a wave. So she says at first
(37:11):
she thought it was a shipwreck, maybe it looked like
the hull of a boat, but then she realized it
was actually a huge hunk of unprocessed solid wood, not
the planks of a wooden ship's hull, but the trunk
of a tree laying down horizontally. And the divers, after
examining this location, say that it seems to be the
(37:32):
remains of an ancient forest, probably primarily oak trees, lying horizontal.
So the trees appear to have been knocked flat by
some event, you know, long ago. They speculate, possibly outwashed
from a glacier, but we don't know for sure. And
when you see the footage in this video segment, it's
amazing how much in some ways it still looks like
(37:54):
a tree trunk. You can even see what looked like,
you know, knots in the wood, or maybe a trunk wound,
little holes in the trunk which have now charmingly been
inhabited by starfish and crabs. I attached to a screen
shop for you to look at, and you can see
crabs getting down in the little Heidi holes.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Oh nice, Yeah, there they are.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
And the divers in this interview emphasized that they almost
missed it. It is pure luck that the forest was
exposed by the violence of a recent storm and that
they just happened to come across it at the end
of a dive. But they also point out an interesting
thing about marine biology, just about under sea life. As
soon as this buried timber from thousands of years ago
(38:34):
was exposed, sea organisms flooded in, just like with In fact,
we've done episodes on this in the past, like with shipwrecks,
you know, that come to resemble in some ways the
habitat dynamics of coral reefs. A hard surface at the
bottom of the ocean quickly becomes a teeming habitat. Bottom
dwelling organisms can build a whole world around a solid floor.
(38:58):
So maybe smaller organism like the hard surface that they
can attach to, or they like little nooks and crannies
and pieces of shelter, they come in, they inhabit it.
Then bigger organisms come in to eat them, and it
creates this whole ecosystem. Oh and another thing I've got
for you to look at here, rob I took a
screenshot of part of this ancient submerged forest. It's just
(39:19):
got starfish all over it, which we know from our
recent headlessness episodes the starfish, they're not without a head,
they are all head. So we're just seeing like dozens
of heads all smushing into each other here on this
ancient tree trunk. So you put all this together, these
ancient human artifacts, miles and miles off the east coast
(39:41):
of Britain, oak forest preserved on the bottom of the sea,
so that we can still see the stumps and crabs
can make a home in the wood. What does all
of that point to. Well, today's scientists have firmly established
what explains it all. This is not a highly speculative theory.
This is clearly what's the case. It is all evidence
of an ancient land mass known as Doggerland. So what
(40:06):
was Doggerland? Doggerland was an area of what used to
be dry land during the peak of the last Ice Age,
when much of the world's water was locked up in
polar glaciers during the peak of the last Ice Age,
and this land is now submerged beneath the sea. It
was a large stretch of low lying earth, mostly flat
(40:29):
alluvial plains, extending north from the Netherlands in Germany, connecting
Great Britain to the rest of continental Europe and at
the eastern end, Doggerlands seem to have gone up against
what is today Jutland or you know, the Denmark peninsula.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Wow, this is impressive. You included an illustration here showing
like what this would have looked like when not an
illustration of map, and it is quite impressive, like essentially
like a thick land bridge connecting, like you said, to
mainland Europe.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
Right, So, at the time Great Britain was not an
island but a peninsula. It was connected to the rest
of Europe by land. So not all sunken lands are
misinterpretations of ancient writings or pseudoscience or pseudohistory. There are
actually sunken lands that played a significant role in ancient ecosystems,
(41:23):
in how life developed on ancient continents, and were in
some cases occupied by humans. And now, despite the difficulty
of trying to do things like archaeology in areas that
are now underneath the sea, there's a lot we can
know about them. So in the rest of this series
we're going to talk more about dogger Land, what happened
(41:44):
to it, what we know about it, and more of
the sunken lands of planet Earth.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Yeah, so who knows what we'll get into and who
knows what will emerge from the deep darkness of the
ocean or various lakes and rivers in the episode or
episode ahead. All right, We're gonna ahead and close this
episode out, though we'll be back on Thursday. Just a
reminder once more, that's stuff to blow your mind. Is
primarily a science podcast with new episodes new core episodes
(42:12):
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do listener mail. On Mondays,
we do we tend to do a short form artifact
or monster fact episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird movie on Weird House Cinema. If you follow us
on social media, check out those feeds because we've our
social media team has been putting out a little bits
(42:35):
of content to let you know what the latest episode is,
and that includes some neat little video stuff in there.
If you if you are on Instagram and you don't
follow us, we are stb ym podcast there, so give
us a follow. We're trying to build up our followers
after we lost access to our old account, and yeah,
what else do you have?
Speaker 3 (42:57):
Joe, I can't think of anything else we lost access to.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
It's like a lost civilization. It's an Atlantis that's sunk
beneath the waves. I think it has like an episode
on airships, or maybe it's the Herzog interview are right
up there at the top, and then it's at some
point after that that accounts sunk beneath the waves whoopsie,
never to be reclaimed.
Speaker 3 (43:17):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And in today's episode,
we're going to be kicking off a series that we're
calling The Sunken Lands, that is about the idea of
lands submerged underwaters. Now, not too long ago, we did
a series of episodes on the tendency people have to
(00:35):
quite readily interpret any weird looking, low resolution photograph as
evidence of our highly speculative theory of choice, whatever you like.
So here's a picture of a shape that maybe doesn't
look organic in origin, so it is evidence of an
alien spacecraft that crash landed on our planet five thousand
years ago. But then, as we discussed in that series,
(00:58):
often if you're able to get a higher resolution image
of the same object or just get more contextual information,
oh wait, it's actually a rock. But one very popular
genre of imagery for this exercise is underwater photography. It
happens with, you know, images of things in the sky
as well or things just obscured in various contexts, but
(01:22):
underwater photography is especially juicy here. I think because the
conditions of underwater photography naturally lend themselves to the kind
of tantalizing state of low information that sets our imagination
running wild. Unlets you fill in the gaps with whatever
(01:43):
you were excited about. And when the weird looking thing
is underwater, the highly speculative theory people use to explain
it might still be aliens, as we discussed in the
example of you know, one underwater object, probably a glacial
erratic boulder that people did in some cases interpret as
a crashed alien spacecraft. But another common explanation for weird
(02:07):
looking things underwater is the sunken civilization, most often Atlantis,
but there are other candidates as well, and the idea
of a lost civilization vanished under the sea is so
captivating to people it is hard to resist the urge
to see an underwater rock with sharp corners and say
(02:28):
that's not a rock, that's a building. This is one
of their ancient skyscrapers, and now it's hidden under the waves.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, it's basically the same energy, but in a different
temporal direction. Instead of looking to aliens from beyond, you're
looking for some sort of advance to civilization from the
past that may or may not match up with realistic
expectations of the past right now.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Of course, in some limited cases, there are examples of
human artifacts or human built at a faciity that can
be found underneath the water. Now we'll probably talk about
some of those examples. But in most cases we can
say with pretty high confidence that the things people are
looking at in these images are not even intelligently designed artifacts.
It's usually like a rock or some kind of undersea creature,
(03:17):
something like that. And for various reasons that we might
get into, even if what you find under the water
was designed by humans, there are strong reasons for doubting
anybody who says, aha, we have discovered Atlantis.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Rob.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
I don't know if you want to talk about this
now or later, but there are reasons for thinking Plato's
allegory of Atlantis was maybe not even meant to refer
to an actually existing place, or if there, or if
it was, there's no reason to think that it's anything
more than a legend, that it's like a thing we
should actually be looking for on Earth.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, let's get back to Atlantis in just a second.
That we could easily devote an entire podcaster more to
just chasing the idea of Atlanta. It's around, but we'll
try and keep it contained.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
But while all of that is true, while Atlantis hunting
is probably a misguided exercise, it's also true that there
actually are some places on planet Earth where what is
now the seafloor was relatively recently land land that could
have been, or in some cases was occupied by humans.
(04:25):
And so that's what we want to talk about in
the series, places on Earth that are now under the
waves but were once part of the world above.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
And while we're mostly I guess talking like that, we
talk about the waves, we think about atlant as we
think about the ocean, but we may also touch on
some examples that have been lost underneath rivers or lakes,
sometimes with man made lakes in play. But perhaps we'll
come back to that in another episode.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Oh that's a good variation. Yes. Now, one thing to
be clear about is that part of what makes these
sunken lands interesting is merely a question of time. Because
of course Earth is, you know, is geologically active. It
has a dynamic surface, and over millions of years, the
crust of the Earth undergoes changes. There's continental drift, there
(05:13):
are all kinds of changes that happen to the crust
of the earth. Areas that were formerly exposed are buried.
Areas that were formerly buried are exposed. Areas that used
to be ocean become land, Areas that used to be
land become ocean. So we know that happens on a
geological time scale. What we're talking about here are lands
that have become covered in water relatively recently, maybe on
(05:34):
the order of thousands of years or even less. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Yeah, So we have these basic geologic realities to keep
in mind, but then we see them reflected in different
ways in our folklore, our mythology, our religion. Like even
if you weren't, if you were, if you somehow avoided
any scientific inquiry, in any scientific understanding about these changes,
(05:59):
you would perhaps be exposed then to religious ideas about
these changes, the various religious and mythological ideas that go
way back in multiple different faiths, involving global or regional
flooding that is attributed to divine causation in many cases.
So given all of this, though, again it should come
(06:20):
as no shock that just the mere idea of sunken islands,
lost islands, phantom islands, lost continents, etc. This has long
stirred the human imagination, and a lot has been written
on this, but interestingly enough, one of the more well
regarded books on this, now it's a slightly older book,
came out, I believe, nineteen fifty four, so it doesn't reflect,
(06:42):
you know, decades upon decades of additional contemplation and discovery.
But El Sprague de Camp, who have nineteen oh seven
through two thousand wrote a book titled Lost Continents the
Atlantis theme in history, science, and literature. Now de Camp
is an interesting fellow because he was also an influential
sci fi author, whose works include nineteen thirty nine's Less
(07:05):
Darkness Fall. He was also a posthumous collaborator with Conan
creator Robert E. Howard, so he actually contributed quite a
bit to the literary world of Conan the Barbarian, and
interestingly enough, he served as an advisor on both nineteen
eighties Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer movies, as
well as nineteen ninety seven's Cole of a Conqueror, which
(07:29):
does not have Arnold in it, but is an adaptation
of a Conan novel.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
Idea is okay, So that's the one that's got Kevin
Sorbo in it, right, right, Kevin Sorbo But these hercules, Yeah, so.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
I think it was based on a Conan novel. But
then they just changed his name to coll the Conqueror,
who's another character in Robert E. Howard's world. But I'm
not super familiar with this movie or this other character.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
I've never seen that one. But my mind is aroused
at the thoughts of scripts that Schwarzenegger said no to.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Now, it is worth noting that Robert E. Howard was
one of numerous Pulp era authors to make use of
lost in sunken islands, and a lot of this, you know,
does have to do as sort of the timeline of
interest in these fantastic ideas. I'll touch on a few
other examples from the pulp era in just a minute,
but in this book, De Camp discusses at length this
idea of a human fascination, literary, pseudohistorical, pseudo geogological, various
(08:31):
interests in this idea of lost lands, lost continents, etc.
And he points out that a lot of it comes
back to this idea of a lost land that is
often situated as some sort of utopia. It's a utopian ideal,
or where it's an eden. It is a place where
where we got it right or things were right before
(08:51):
the fall. You know, this idea that Okay, things are
not great, but there must have been a point in
time where things were in balance. And of course, and
in summoning this idea, there is at least implied the
idea that we might be able to return to it,
either by our own efforts or by some sort of
divine intervention.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Yeah. I think that's interesting and that that's correct. A
lot of these stories about sunken lands and the civilizations
that inhabited them. I guess there are some exceptions, but
they don't usually seem to be well, this is just
another place like many others, you know, that was just
happened to be low lying and was swallowed by the waves,
or there was some kind of weather event. It almost
(09:33):
always is idealized in some way. It was a place
that was especially good or especially advanced, or especially bad
in some way.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, and yeah, in some manner or another, this place
ties it all together, Which comes back to so many
of these these threads that we've discussed in conspiracy thinking
and and so forth. The idea that like Okay, I
have found something, and if true, and of course I
believe it is true, it will explain all these other mysteries.
(10:02):
You know, you drop this in the middle of everything
and it all makes sense.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
It's the master key. Yes.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
So I don't really want to do an exhaustive list
of every mythical and fictional sunken land. I mean, there's
there's a lot there, and a lot of them are
also closely connected. I mean just in fantasy alone. It's
like who anybody engaging in some broad world building is
going to have perhaps in Atlantis or at least a
(10:28):
lost land. I mean, it's just it's too attractive a
trope to give up on, right, But I thought we
might hit some notable examples in the main three or
four categories you might consider mythology, fiction, pseudoscience. But I
do want to note that some entries will move between
these classifications because once once you introduce an idea and
other folks will come and and use it and maybe
(10:51):
drifted into another category. So in mythology, I thought I
might mention Avalon of course, the magical island where King
Arthur was taken after sustaining mortal wounds. It's also the
origin place of his sword EXCaliber, and in general just
a magical land of Authorian legend, possibly linked in origin
(11:13):
to Fladamorgana or Glastonbury tor Note that this isn't even
the only sunken island in Authurian legend, though there are
there are others. It's just like an irresistible magical idea,
though again one that may be rooted in strange observations.
Islands that seem to be there but are not that
are you know, Fata Morgana, that are due to an
(11:36):
illusion of one sort or another, or just a mistake
of cartography, of trying to figure out what's out there
and making mistakes.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Both direct perceptual illusions and knowledge illusions give rise to
the idea of islands that used to be there, but
now you can't find them.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Right And then of course in the background again the
geologic reality that things do change, and it is not
beyond the realm of possibility that a lost island could
truly be lost. It could have been a physical place
and is no more. Another one is Brazil or High Brazil.
This has generally nothing to do with Brazil, the South
(12:15):
American country. This is an Irish lost Isle of myth,
a phantom island that is covered by myst most of
the year, but then that mist opens up. Sometimes featured
on old maps and was sought after by cartographers, because
again you have anytime you have this idea of an
island that is thought to exist, and then it seems
like it doesn't exist. I mean, that's a mystery that
(12:36):
has to be explored. Now. It doesn't have to be
an island, of course, you can also have coastal areas
that are swallowed up. There's a mythical city in the
traditions of Brittany and France. And I may be pronouncing
this one wrong, yees, I believe it's y s. I
assume it's not wise, But anyway, it's allegedly consumed by
(12:59):
the ocean, and it's fatured into a number of creative works,
especially in French traditions. But of course the whole other
realm is fiction, of course, and once something has been
introduced in myth, given enough time, it may enter into fiction.
And this leads us to Atlantis, as we've already discussed. Yeah,
the lost continent of Atlantis, so called, has a prominent
(13:20):
place in pseudo science and conspiracy thinking and fiction. Among
the many entries here, I have to point out a
couple of things from nineteen eighty two. One I brought
up many times before, but if you have not seen
the commercial for Atari's Atlantis video game from nineteen eighty two,
look it up. It's marvelous. I think I saw this
when I was like four years old, and it's scared
(13:43):
and amazed me.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Rarely does a thirty second TV commercial have such a
bone chilling plot twist it does.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
They really packed a lot into this one. I have
no idea if the game was fun at the time
or is well remembered like a retro experience. But as
I was revisiting this, because anytime this comes up, I
have to go rewatch it. And then I discovered, weirdly
enough that the brothers Hildebrand did a wall calendar of
original art themed around Atlantis the same year, and I
(14:15):
kept thinking, well, these have to be connected. There must
have been some connective tissue here. If there is, I
couldn't find it. But I love the brother's Hildebrand. They did,
of course, a lot of great Tolkien work, and they
did Tolkien calendars back in the day, and yeah, they
have this one calendar of Atlantis art with all sorts
of like fantastic adventures going on, some sort of like
demon lord, a dragon, so forth. So many people don't
(14:38):
realize that their origins are of Atlantis are also based
in fiction. You go back to around three fifty five BCE.
That's when Greek philosopher Plato discusses the concept of Atlantis
and a pair of dialogues Tomaeus and Critias. Atlantis is
described as a naval empire that rules the western known world,
(14:59):
but they all sintly fail when they come up against
the Athenians. Then they fall out of favor with the
gods and their world is consumed by the Atlantic Ocean.
It's described along the lines as being like the you know,
the the ideal of Plato's Republic. But here's the thing.
There's no other surviving mention of Atlantis in the ancient
Mediterranean world, aside from commentaries and responses to Plato's work. So,
(15:24):
in other words, there's no indication that this was a
pre existing idea, that this was something that was considered
actual history, or even like a pre existing I guess
you would say literary.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Trope, right, So it's not even clear that it was
thought to actually be a place right now.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Among those various commentators over many years, it looks like
many took it as meta metaphor and or as myth,
though you do have some folks that pop up that
end up taking a more literal approach to it, or
so it seems, based again on surviving texts. As such,
you end up with a legacy of varying interpretations, which
(16:06):
DeCamp summarizes is either taking it on as a fiction,
finding actual societies that you can compare to Atlantis, the
investigation of land bridges and islands with Atlantis in mind,
and also just the wholesale acceptance of the concept as
historical truth. And of course this approach especially is widely
regarded as pseudohistory at the very least now. Again, though,
(16:28):
just because something is introduced in fiction doesn't mean it
stays in fiction like these. That's one of the interesting
things about this, and I guess in general about about
human imagination is once something has been imagined, it doesn't
have to stay in that realm of sort of safe
unreal in fiction. It can move into other categories of
the unreal, the mythological, the the pseudoscientific, the pseudohistorical, the
(16:54):
pseudo archaeological, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
I have to wonder if in thousands of years they're
going to be people being like you know, when Tolkien
talked about the elves going to valen or across the ocean,
was that referring to the island of Cuba.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Do you think, yeah, exactly, And you do end up
with that sort of inquiry. I mean in part of that,
of course, too, is you have someone like Plato who
has such high standing and sort of the intellectual world
for centuries and centuries. You know, people are going to
come back and and reanalyze everything that they wrote. Now
(17:39):
in terms of fiction, I will just mention in passing
like a few examples that I love the work of
Clark Ashton Smith, and a lot of his stories involved
lost continents. I think he has three different lost continents. Well,
the one of them is a continent from the future
that doesn't exist now. So it's sort of kind of again,
kind of the same concept but put in reverse, taking
(17:59):
in the future and saying in the future there will
be a new continent and these are the sort of
adventures that will take place there. And of course J R.
Tolkien got in on the action as well. We have
the lost Kingdom of Middle Earth, Numenor. This was corrupted
by Sauron in his fair form, and then it's destroyed
in a cataclysm as the kingdom turns against the Valor.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
Oh is Numanor swallowed by waters. I never understood that,
I guess I just thought of it as like an
empire that fell.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Yeah, it's like a star shaped island I believe, according
to the maps and the recent Amazon series, I believe
depicts the fall of Numenor. I'm having trouble remembering offhand.
I need to revisit it before they put out another season.
I guess.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
Oh, I haven't watched that yet, but been meaning to
check it out at some point.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
High production values.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Now, in the pseudoscientific world, and again there's a lot
of overlap with these, with these sort of loose categories,
you have the Island of MoU. This is both a
place of pseudoscience and fantasy, according to de Camp, proposed
in the nineteenth century by British American archaeologist and photographer
Augustus Lplogion, who used it to connect Mayan civilization to
(19:13):
ancient Egyptian civilization. Again, this is one of those classic
examples of like, if this exists, it explains everything, and
getting into this idea of like, well, look, we have
things in Mayan civilization, we have things in ancient Egyptian civilization.
They remind me of each other. There must be some
like missing link to connect them. Otherwise this doesn't make
(19:34):
sense to me.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
That they could. They both built pyramids sort of, so
that couldn't be explained by them both just figuring out
how to build pyramids right right.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
But then on top of this, British occultist James Churchward
would go on to write about MoU as well, associating
it with Lemuria, which we'll get to in a second.
In works of pseudoscience that argue that it was the
not only was it this kind of like single link
in terms of understanding global civilizations, but it was the
location of the Garden of Eden and a cultural connection
(20:07):
for various ancient civilizations. And then Atlantis also enters the
mix here, even though its origins I think most serious
scholars would agree is as a metaphor is as a
work of fiction. Various individuals have made arguments for the
discovery of a lost Atlantis or have gone all in
on the idea of Atlantis, and according to the komp,
(20:29):
a great deal of modern Atlantis mania stems from sixteenth
century enthusiasm for the concept, and a lot of this
enthusiasm coincided with excitement for the new world of the Americas.
So you know, again, you have a lot of energy,
like new lands are discovered, and then you have this
idea of Atlantis, and then people were proposing things like, well,
(20:51):
are the Americas Atlantis? Well no, but I guess you
can lean into that interpretation if you so desire.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
You know, I was just thinking about the the sort
of common strain of thinking that connects conspiracy thinking with
with highly speculative lost civilization thinking, and like why you
would typically find both beliefs in the same brain, Like
why people are drawn to one if they're often if
(21:18):
they're drawn to the other. The idea of a lost
civilization that was vanished beneath the waves is a is
a literal, physical manifestation of the type of hidden knowledge
or covered up knowledge that that you know, guides conspiracy thinking.
Like if you're a you're a conspiracy thinking person, you
think that there is a there is a mechanism somehow
(21:43):
that explains all these disparate phenomena. But the but the
nature of that mechanism is being covered up. It is
hidden from you somehow. Usually it's a social mechanism. It's like,
you know, an agreement of people, or it's a you know,
an extraterrestrial mechanism there are aliens doing things or something
like that. The Lost Civilization under the Waves is kind
(22:03):
of like that. It explains history in a similar way,
but it has been literally physically covered up.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, and again it goes back to this idea of
lo fi information to support an idea. Though interestingly enough,
like coming back to the idea of Mayan and Egyptian civilizations.
So obviously, like the Great Pyramids are are not lo
fi evidence. Likewise, you know, various megastructures in the Americas
(22:33):
are not lo fi evidence either. But if you're using
both of these as evidence for this third thing that
doesn't exist, then they do become kind of lo fi
because again, there is there is not a thing there
to prove there is not this lost civilization that connects
the two.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
You might also, though, be coming at them from a
position of low information, in that you don't have a
lot of contextual knowledge about these these civilisations, and thus,
you know, you just see like similarly shaped buildings and
think like has to be a common source between them.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Yeah. Now, now I don't want to make it seem like,
you know, just the idea of lost continents and lost
lands that aren't there, you know, are entirely rooted in
you know, conspiracy thinking and sort of non logical inquiry.
Because another example to touch on coming back to Lemuria
is this, this was an eighteenth century hypothesis to explain
(23:30):
similarities between species on distant continents. You know, we have
organisms that look like like this here, there are organisms
that look like this over here, and there's just too
much distance. How can we possibly explain this? And so
was this was one idea, Well, perhaps there is a
lost land mass, something is missing between these continents that
(23:50):
would explain these species being in both places. However, a
much better theory came around that of continental drift, but
once introduced to the idea of Lemuria ends up taking
on additional qualities to various interpreters. You know, it becomes
the cradle of human civilization in various occult world views
(24:11):
and in various fictions, and you often see this kind
of loop. I think with serious theories, feeding occult nonsense
and feeding fantasy, feeding you know, you know, things that
are you know, just purely enjoyable, and then that may
feedback into other things as well. So there are more examples,
to be sure, and we may come back to some
(24:32):
of these, but I think these examples nicely sum up
some of the associations and ideas here. It's kind of
a missing link concept, the lost place that could more
easily explain the world, and or a lost golden age.
And in this the concept is closely connected to the
con to various ideas of spiritual lands just beyond the
(24:52):
reach of mundane experience. So you know, there might be
like a like there's a shambala in Tibetan Buddhism. I
think there are various kingdoms and Russian folklore, you know,
almost like cities in the sky that are just beyond reach,
and you find these in various various form. I mean,
avalon is basically the idea, you know, this place that
(25:14):
is now beyond the reach of the mortal world.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
So across the whole spectrum of fiction, myth, legend, and
obsolete scientific hypotheses, there have been ideas of lands that
were covered over by the waves or vanish beneath the
waters somehow. But now I want to talk about a
real and firmly established, provable example of lands that were
(25:40):
in quite recently sunk beneath the waters within the span
of human history.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Is it Atlantis?
Speaker 3 (25:46):
It is not Atlantis, Okay. So I want to start
with an anecdote about a strange find, and a lot
of my details here are coming from an article published
in Archaeology Magazine by Jason Urbanas called Mapping a Vanished Landscape.
So in nineteen thirty one, one night in September, there
was a British fishing boat called the Kolinda which was
(26:10):
trawling in the North Sea off the eastern coast of England,
around the county of Norfolk. If you're not familiar with trawling,
it is a method of fishing where you drop a
large cup shaped net into the water and you pull
it behind the boat, and there's midwater trawling and bottom trawling.
With midwater trawling, you know, drag the net through the
(26:30):
middle of the water column. With bottom trawling you let
the net sink to the bottom, and the net has
weights that keep it stuck to the bottom and keep
the mouth of the net open, so the boat drags
the net along the seabed, sort of bulldozing the top
layer of sediment and scooping up whatever is in its
path large enough to get trapped in the net. The
Kolinda was trawling off the coast of Norfolk about twenty
(26:54):
five miles out at a place where the water was
roughly one hundred and twenty feet deep or about thirty
seven meters. After hauling up the net from a bottom troll,
a guy named Pilgrim Lockwood, who was the skipper of
the boat, noticed a big chunk of pete stuck in
the catch. And bottom trolling often creates a lot of
(27:15):
what's called bycatch. That term usually refers to unwonted animals
that you get in the net that are not part
of what you're fishing for. But also it just gets
a bunch of objects from the seafloor, because again it's
kind of like bulldozing the top layer of sediment as
it gets dragged along, So a lot of stuff ends
up in the net, and that stuff has to be discarded. Now,
this pete from the bottom, here's a really good word.
(27:36):
I came across I've seen sources that mentioned that these
chunks of pete pulled up from the ocean like this
were often referred to in England as moor logo r LG.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Nice.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
Is there a band I didn't check that'd be a
good bog metal band name.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Oh yeah, I can see the album cover right now
with like a bog money on it.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
So the skipper, Pilgrim Lockwood, he's got this chunk of
peat that's part of the you know, not what they're
fishing for. Obviously, he's stuck in the net, so he
gets it out. He starts to smash the pet up
with a shovel, but while he was doing that, he
found something rigid lodged inside and he actually said that
it sounded when his shovel hit this object. He said
it sounded like it was clanging against metal. It was
(28:22):
not a rock. He pulled it out and what he
found was a sharp instrument about eight and a half
inches or twenty two centimeters in length, with a pointed
tip at one end and barbs or teeth running most
of the way down its length, like some kind of weapon.
And it was a weapon. This is not a case
(28:42):
where you know it was actually some deep sea organism
that you know, was mistaken for a human artifact. This
was an artifact. This was technology. It was ancient technology,
and this artifact came to be known as the Klinda harpoon.
So experts from the British Museum studied the artifact and
they determined that it was the tip of a fishing
(29:05):
sphere from the Mesolithic period or the Middle stone Age,
which would have been somewhere between ten thousand and four
thousand BCE. It's an intriguing looking weapon. So it's got
the sharp end, it's got the saw teeth, but it's
also got these ridges sort of gashed in it along
the opposite end from the tip.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
You know, it does remind me a little bit of
the fabled weapon of coculon the oh oh, you know
that was supposed to be in some cases like barbed
like like the barb of a sting ray. Yeah. Though,
of course, to your point, clearly, this is this is
not a nature fact. This is an artifact. This is
something that that was carved and made through human craft
(29:46):
and ingenuity.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Yes, absolutely made by human hands. But that raises questions
how did this Stone Age weapon end up buried in
peat in the ocean more than twenty miles off the
coast of modern day Britain. Was it possible that ancient
hunter gatherers carried it out to sea that far on
a boat or a raft and then dropped it to
(30:08):
the bottom. At the time it was found, that seemed possible,
but not very likely. Today we know more about the
Klinda harpoon. According to the Norfolk Museums, the harpoon tip
was made from the antler of a red deer that's
the species service Elaphus, and it has been radiocarbon dated
to about eleven, seven hundred and ninety years ago, mentioned
(30:32):
in the Archaeology magazine article as another strange fact. A
year after the Klinda harpoon was discovered, scientists analyzed the
pollen contained in the peat or the moor log from
around where the spear tip was discovered, and they found
something bizarre. Even though the peat was more than one
hundred feet under the water, it had been formed in
(30:54):
a fresh water context lakes and rivers and top side bogs,
not floors. So the person carrying the Colinda harpoon al
those thousands of years ago had not been a sea goer,
but an earthwalker possibly fishing in a river. And this
isn't the only Stone Age human artifact recovered from the
(31:15):
bottom of the North Sea. We can come back to that,
but I want to move on to something else, because
the Colinda Harpoon was not the first indication that there
was something odd about the sea to the east of
Great Britain. I would now like to read a passage
from a book called Submerged Forests, published in nineteen thirteen
(31:36):
by the British geologist Clement Reid. Clement Reid writes, quote,
most of our seaside places of resort lie at the
mouths of small valleys, which originally gave the fishermen easy
access to the shore and later on provided fairly level
sites for building. At such places, the fishermen will tell
you of black, peaty earth with hazel nuts, and often
(31:59):
with tree stumps still rooted in the soil, seen between
tide marks when the overlying sea sand has been cleared
away by some storm or unusually persistent wind. If one
is fortunate enough to be on the spot when such
a patch is uncovered, this submerged forest is found to
(32:20):
extend right down to the level of the lowest tides.
The trees are often well grown oaks, though more commonly
they turn out to be merely brushwood of hazel, sallow
and alder, mingled with other swamp plants such as the
rhizomes of osmuda. These submerged forests, or quote Noah's woods
(32:41):
as they are called locally, have attracted attention from early times,
all the more so owing to the existence of an
uneasy feeling that though, like most other geological phenomena, they
were popularly explained by Noah's deluge, it was difficult thus
to account for trees rooted in their original soil and
yet now found well below the level of high tide.
(33:04):
And ooh, thinking about the submerged forests, it gives me
a spooky feeling. So at the lowest level of the tide,
when when the water goes back farthest, even all the
way down to that level, you will sometimes find, especially
if there has been maybe a violent storm that has
shifted the sediment around and pushed sand out of the way,
you will find uncovered tree stumps, still rooted apparently in
(33:26):
their original position. Trees can't grow in the salt water,
so what was happening there?
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Yeah, this is this is enticing. And it does remind
me though that something we've discussed in the past and
the show that you know, for most of human history,
we didn't have a high resolution understanding of the world
beneath the waves, and so a lot of it was
based on guesswork, and there were a lot of ideas
(33:53):
about cities and forests beneath the sea, and like this
general idea that anything that you sort we see in
Western discourse, that anything that exists in the surface world
would have an analog beneath the water. So you have
a lion up here, well, you have a sea lion
under there. You have a horse up here, you have
a sea horse beneath the way.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Oh yeah, you have people up here, you have maror
people down there.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Yeah yeah. So like there, you know, you have that
huge category. You have these you know, accounts of great
floods and so forth. So there's a lot of there's
a lot of like background mythology and observational data to
feed into any kind of discovery like this.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
So how do you explain these submerged forests? In this work?
Clement Read goes on to document and make all kinds
of observations about them, but he reached a strange but
unavoidable conclusion. Sea levels were not constant, and the sea
had to be higher now than it was in the past,
(35:00):
much higher now than it was in the past, meaning
that much of what was once the relatively shallow North
Sea had actually been not a sea but a vast
alluvial plain the hidden lowlands of ages past, and these
lands were most recently covered with trees. There are still
(35:21):
places today where when the tide is at its lowest
you can find indications that there used to be forests
on lands that are now covered by the North Sea,
and of course recently enough for remains of tree trunks
and stumps to still be preserved there. One commonly cited
example is a place called pet Level Pett pet Level
Beach in Sussex, where the remains of a forest can
(35:43):
still be seen at low tide with indications of oak trees.
Elm U and Beach Rob. I've got some pictures for
you to look at. Both these pictures here are from
pet But another example that I came across is from
the remains of a submerged forest that is still fully submerged.
So this appeared in the media within the last decade.
(36:04):
I was reading from an article in BBC News Norfolk
and its attached video segment. This was from twenty fifteen
and it was called Ancient underwater Forests discovered off Norfolk
Coast and the report says that it was documented by
a couple of research divers named Rob Spray and Dawn Watson.
This was after a major storm had shifted sediments in
(36:27):
an underwater region off the north Norfolk coast. So just
like Clement Reid was saying, you know, it's especially after
there's been some violent event, maybe a big storm moves
the sediment around and uncovers things. In an interview for
this news segment, Don Watson, one of the divers, describes
coming across this region by accident. She said she had
(36:48):
been swimming for a while, she was almost out of
her air supply towards the end of a dive when
she came across an enormous mass on the seafloor. She
says it was quote almost a standing wave of black
stuff in front of me. It took me a while
to work out what it was and it was just
wood shaped like a wave. So she says at first
(37:11):
she thought it was a shipwreck, maybe it looked like
the hull of a boat, but then she realized it
was actually a huge hunk of unprocessed solid wood, not
the planks of a wooden ship's hull, but the trunk
of a tree laying down horizontally. And the divers, after
examining this location, say that it seems to be the
(37:32):
remains of an ancient forest, probably primarily oak trees, lying horizontal.
So the trees appear to have been knocked flat by
some event, you know, long ago. They speculate, possibly outwashed
from a glacier, but we don't know for sure. And
when you see the footage in this video segment, it's
amazing how much in some ways it still looks like
(37:54):
a tree trunk. You can even see what looked like,
you know, knots in the wood, or maybe a trunk wound,
little holes in the trunk which have now charmingly been
inhabited by starfish and crabs. I attached to a screen
shop for you to look at, and you can see
crabs getting down in the little Heidi holes.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Oh nice, Yeah, there they are.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
And the divers in this interview emphasized that they almost
missed it. It is pure luck that the forest was
exposed by the violence of a recent storm and that
they just happened to come across it at the end
of a dive. But they also point out an interesting
thing about marine biology, just about under sea life. As
soon as this buried timber from thousands of years ago
(38:34):
was exposed, sea organisms flooded in, just like with In fact,
we've done episodes on this in the past, like with shipwrecks,
you know, that come to resemble in some ways the
habitat dynamics of coral reefs. A hard surface at the
bottom of the ocean quickly becomes a teeming habitat. Bottom
dwelling organisms can build a whole world around a solid floor.
(38:58):
So maybe smaller organism like the hard surface that they
can attach to, or they like little nooks and crannies
and pieces of shelter, they come in, they inhabit it.
Then bigger organisms come in to eat them, and it
creates this whole ecosystem. Oh and another thing I've got
for you to look at here, rob I took a
screenshot of part of this ancient submerged forest. It's just
(39:19):
got starfish all over it, which we know from our
recent headlessness episodes the starfish, they're not without a head,
they are all head. So we're just seeing like dozens
of heads all smushing into each other here on this
ancient tree trunk. So you put all this together, these
ancient human artifacts, miles and miles off the east coast
(39:41):
of Britain, oak forest preserved on the bottom of the sea,
so that we can still see the stumps and crabs
can make a home in the wood. What does all
of that point to. Well, today's scientists have firmly established
what explains it all. This is not a highly speculative theory.
This is clearly what's the case. It is all evidence
of an ancient land mass known as Doggerland. So what
(40:06):
was Doggerland? Doggerland was an area of what used to
be dry land during the peak of the last Ice Age,
when much of the world's water was locked up in
polar glaciers during the peak of the last Ice Age,
and this land is now submerged beneath the sea. It
was a large stretch of low lying earth, mostly flat
(40:29):
alluvial plains, extending north from the Netherlands in Germany, connecting
Great Britain to the rest of continental Europe and at
the eastern end, Doggerlands seem to have gone up against
what is today Jutland or you know, the Denmark peninsula.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Wow, this is impressive. You included an illustration here showing
like what this would have looked like when not an
illustration of map, and it is quite impressive, like essentially
like a thick land bridge connecting, like you said, to
mainland Europe.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
Right, So, at the time Great Britain was not an
island but a peninsula. It was connected to the rest
of Europe by land. So not all sunken lands are
misinterpretations of ancient writings or pseudoscience or pseudohistory. There are
actually sunken lands that played a significant role in ancient ecosystems,
(41:23):
in how life developed on ancient continents, and were in
some cases occupied by humans. And now, despite the difficulty
of trying to do things like archaeology in areas that
are now underneath the sea, there's a lot we can
know about them. So in the rest of this series
we're going to talk more about dogger Land, what happened
(41:44):
to it, what we know about it, and more of
the sunken lands of planet Earth.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Yeah, so who knows what we'll get into and who
knows what will emerge from the deep darkness of the
ocean or various lakes and rivers in the episode or
episode ahead. All right, We're gonna ahead and close this
episode out, though we'll be back on Thursday. Just a
reminder once more, that's stuff to blow your mind. Is
primarily a science podcast with new episodes new core episodes
(42:12):
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do listener mail. On Mondays,
we do we tend to do a short form artifact
or monster fact episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird movie on Weird House Cinema. If you follow us
on social media, check out those feeds because we've our
social media team has been putting out a little bits
(42:35):
of content to let you know what the latest episode is,
and that includes some neat little video stuff in there.
If you if you are on Instagram and you don't
follow us, we are stb ym podcast there, so give
us a follow. We're trying to build up our followers
after we lost access to our old account, and yeah,
what else do you have?
Speaker 3 (42:57):
Joe, I can't think of anything else we lost access to.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
It's like a lost civilization. It's an Atlantis that's sunk
beneath the waves. I think it has like an episode
on airships, or maybe it's the Herzog interview are right
up there at the top, and then it's at some
point after that that accounts sunk beneath the waves whoopsie,
never to be reclaimed.
Speaker 3 (43:17):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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