November 30, 2023 • 45 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 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
My name is Robert Land, and I am Joe McCormick.
And we're back with part two in our series called
The Sunken Lands, about places where what was relatively recently
dry land has now vanished beneath the waters.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Now.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
In the last episode, we talked about the history of
fascination with the idea of lands, and especially human civilizations
occupied lands that were swallowed by the sea, the most
famous of these stories, of course, being Atlantis, a probably
originally fictional island civilization described by Plato in some of
(00:50):
his dialogues that was, according to the story, punished for
its hubris by being drowned in the ocean. And even
though most experts on the original sources think this story
he probably did not refer to a place existing in reality,
there are still people all the time who love to
hunt for remains of Atlantis and similar drowned empires, or
(01:11):
to interpret any strange underwater imagery or other phenomena or
artifacts as evidence of such. Here's a weird looking artifact
from under the water. Maybe it's from Atlantis.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Yeah, And it's in many cases it's harmless. But you know,
as we've been discussing, these kind of ideas can bleed
into pseudoscience, pseudo archaeology, and pseudo geology, and in some
of these areas are perhaps harmless as well, but they
can become increasingly less harmless depending on what form they
(01:45):
end up taking within a given culture. I guess I
would just drive home that there's kind of an amorphous
nature to a lot of the concepts that we've been
discussing with the idea of lost islands, and there's going
to continue to be this kind of amorphous quality to
it as we proceed.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Right, So, despite the fact that hunting for a literal
physical Atlantis is probably the wrong track to be on,
there are absolutely examples of real places on Earth where
land has relatively recently become covered in water. And the
main real world example we talked about in the last
episode was what has come to be known as dogger Land,
(02:24):
a vast plain stretching mostly east of Great Britain and
north of the coastlines of continental Europe, off the north
coastlines of what is today France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands,
occupying much of the area that is now filled in
with the North Sea. Now, last time we talked about
some of the fascinating early hints, early pieces of evidence
(02:47):
that pointed to the existence of a past Doggerland, such
as observations going back centuries. Actually that sometimes low tide
on the British coast would reveal the remains of apparently
ancient trees and trunks still rooted in their original soil,
but now underneath the ocean. How's that possible? As well
(03:07):
as the discovery of terrestrial animal remains and even human
artifacts like the Kolinda Harpoon, a Stone age spear tip
dragged up from the bottom in a fishing net about
twenty five miles off the coast of Great Britain in
the nineteen thirties. In nineteen thirty one. So today we're
back to talk more about the sunken lands. And I
(03:29):
wanted to kick off this episode by exploring Doggerland in
more depth. So Doggerland used to be land, now it's
covered in sea. What happened to it? Well, I'm going
to lay out a rough timeline here and I just
want to mention at the top here a couple of
really good articles about the archaeology of Doggerland that I
(03:49):
was reading. One was called Europe's Lost Frontier. This was
a feature published in the journal Science by Andrew Curry
in January twenty twenty. Another is called Mapping Vanished Landscape.
This was in Archaeology Magazine by Jason Urbanus in the
March April twenty twenty two edition. So the Doggerland timeline
goes like this. During the Late Pleistocene, the last part
(04:12):
of the most recent ice age, between about one hundred
and twenty five thousand and twelve thousand years ago, much
of the world's water was locked in glaciers and the
North Sea was much lower than it is today. It
was about four hundred and fifty feet lower than the
present average. So at this time during the Late Pleistocene,
(04:33):
Doggerland was a cold, dry place, a freezing grassland step
occupied mostly by megafauna like wooly mammoths or wooly rhinoceroses,
but other large large animals that can withstand cold environments,
like reindeer and the aurux, the ancestor of modern cattle. Then,
(04:57):
after the conclusion of the Pleistocene, we transition into the
geological epic known as the Holocene, which extends up until today.
This is the warming period after the most recent ice age.
So this period is characterized by a steady increase in
temperatures which caused glaciers to begin to melt. So for
(05:18):
thousands of years, you know, I think back roughly ten
thousand years ago or so, for thousands of years, Doggerland
was still above sea level, but the warming climate and
the melting glaciers transformed it from a cold arid step
a tundra like landscape into an increasingly lush land of
(05:40):
forests and then marshes, rivers and lakes, and many sources
described this post glacial landscape as a kind of hunter
gatherer paradise. So who were these hunter gatherers? While there
were multiple waves of them. In fact, there's some indication
that the human relative, the ancient human relative Homo antecessor,
(06:01):
had existed in Doggerland going way back during the cold
arid Step period. The Neanderthals occupied Doggerland. It would have
been a harsh existence. This would be a very cold
and dry place where people would have survived by hunting
large animals. But Neanderthals did occupy the Dogerland Step. We
(06:22):
know that through evidence of artifacts axeheads and other flint
artifacts that have in some cases been clearly subjected to
a type of birch barqu tar that the Neanderthals would
use that they manufactured, and then after the Neanderthals during
the Holocene, when the area was warming up, it was
(06:44):
clearly inhabited by Middle Stone Age Homo sapiens. And the
article in Archaeology Magazine that I mentioned a minute ago
quotes a curator of prehistoric collections at the National Museum
of Antiquities in Leyden named Luke Amkroutz, who says, quote,
during the Holocene, Doggerland was a wooded environment, but with
(07:05):
really extensive coastlines and enormous wetlands. These were the richest
areas to live in. There were forest resources, deer, wild boar,
and berries, but also fish, migrating birds, otters, and beavers.
It was a garden of Eden for them, a wetland wonderland.
So if you were a hunter gatherer in Mesolithic Europe,
(07:27):
especially after the glaciers began to melt and the climate
began to warm, Doggerland was awesome. Jason Urbanis, writing this
article says that it is quote by any estimation, the
most attractive landscape in northwestern Europe for Mesolithic hunter gatherers,
and perhaps the continent's most densely populated region at the time.
(07:50):
So sometimes when you think about a previously exposed piece
of land that is in many sources referred to as
quote a land bridge because it is bridged the mainland
continental Europe with Great Britain, you think of a kind
of transitional place, you know that people just walked across.
But no, it's not just a transitional place that allowed
(08:12):
people to get from one highland to another. This was
apparently about the best place you could be in this
area of Europe at the time. It was full of resources.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
This is also amazing that he directly compares it to
the Garden of Eden, that he compares it to not
only a land of plenty, but a utopia, which lines
up with so many of these ideas of a lost
and or sunken land, of a land from which people
came but can no longer return to or may one
(08:45):
day return to. But in this case it does seem
to line up with the idea of it actually being
a land of plenty, actually being a place where resources
were abundant, but.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Much like the Garden of Eden, it couldn't last forever,
though in this case it apparently has nothing to do
with a snake. It has to do with, in fact,
the exact same forces that made it a land of
plenty in abundance in the beginning ended up dooming it.
So a warming climate and melting glaciers first changed dogger
Land from an arid tundra into a lush paradise, and
(09:18):
then the same trends transformed it to the drowned Stone
Age graveyard it is today.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
So from the end of the Last Ice Age, the
level of the North Sea steadily rose. Ice is melting,
the world is warming, the sea levels are rising, and
Urbanis writes in the archaeology article that for a period
of roughly three thousand years, the sea rose six feet
every hundred years, and then, adding to the steady creep
(09:47):
up of the waterline, there was a sudden cataclysmic event
that would have horribly affected the Mesolithic populations living in
the remaining coastal areas of that region towards the en
end of that warming period, so more than eight thousand
years ago, around sixty two hundred BCE. Again, at this point,
(10:08):
much of Doggerland had already been submerged, but what was
left above the water line was hit with a catastrophic
tsunami caused by an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway.
It was actually one of a series of these underwater
land slide events known as the Storega slides STORGGA. And
(10:28):
I've seen different estimates for the exact height and power
of the tsunami wave. That article I mentioned in Science
by Andrew Curry cites an estimate of at least ten
meters high for the wave that hit Doggerland, but a
twenty twenty one study of its effects on the eastern
coast of Scotland. So this is looking at Scotland analyzed
(10:49):
soil deposits to estimate that the water might have come
as far as eighteen miles inland.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Wow, well, I mean even just looking at the like
the ten meter high, that would be almost thirty three
feet high.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
Right, So if you are in range of the tsunami,
catastrophic event also may have had some effect in like
moving around sediments and possibly washing out some existing areas
of land.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Right right, that again, we're already exposed due to the
rising the sea levels.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Right, and actually one of the last pieces of land
remaining above water from Doggerland was the now submerged Dogger
Bank from which Doggerland gets its name. It remained as
an island for a while, so Doggerland came to be
known as Doggerland when the name was given to it
(11:39):
by an archaeologist named Briany Coles, and it was named
after the sand bank in the North Sea known as
the Dogger Bank, which got its name because it was
a popular fishing spot used by these Dutch boats called doggers.
So the dogger boats go out, they fish around the
sand bank. There's good catch there and those doggers give
(11:59):
their name to the area. And apparently that that sandbank
was once an island, that was one of the last
parts of it left. Now there's an interesting contradiction, which
is that we know that it was probably one of
the most densely populated places in Stone Age Europe. It
was full of abundant resources. There were lots of humans
(12:19):
living there in the Middle Stone Age, but it's hard
to study archaeologically for obvious reasons. You can't just go
dig it's underwater, and also the water is deep and
cold and murky and stormy. It's just a difficult place
to explore, even with divers. So how can archaeologists learn
(12:41):
things about Doggerland other than just waiting for the occasional
artifact to get dredged up in a trawling net like
we talked about with the Kolinda harpoon. Well, actually, this
is one of the main subjects of that article in
Archaeology magazine Mapping a Vanished Landscape by Jason Arbanis, and
it talks about some interesting ways that scholars have come
(13:03):
up with or come across by accident to study Doggerland
and see what we can learn about it. So one
effort described in this article is associated with a University
of Bradford archaeologist and named Vince Gaffney and colleagues. Gaffney
is quoted extensively in this article and he talks about
how he and colleagues used data from seismic reflections surveys
(13:28):
originally done by offshore oil and gas companies to find
mineral deposits. So the way this works is that you
have a ship, it goes out in the water. It
emits sound waves into the water which bounce off of
the seafloor. And then are picked up by ship based
detectors and the physical features of the seafloor affect how
the sound is altered when it bounces back, and then
(13:50):
this information can be used to map shapes and contours
and anomalies deep under the water. Now they figured out
that that same seismic data, which was again proprietary, it
was owned by these energy companies, how that could be
used by archaeologists to assemble an approximate picture of what
Doggerland was like before it flooded, to study the hidden landscape.
(14:13):
And the archaeologists were actually able to get data from
I think multiple companies, at least one company called Petroleum
Geoservices or PGS, And they talk about how they used
data from this company to map a patch of CEA
roughly twenty three hundred square miles in size, and when
they assembled the map, they realized they were looking at
(14:35):
a place where a large river had once cut through
what is now the submerged dogg Or Bank. So imagine
that you're like looking at this seismic reflection data and
then you realize it's showing you a map of what
the land looked like before the water covered it, and
you can see the river bed and all that.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
And at the time of this article their maps had
expanded to cover more than seventeen square miles, so they
know a lot more about the landscape of Doggerland than
we did in the past. They have maps depicting a
lost landscape of lakes, rivers, hills and valleys. So that's
one way of understanding Doggerland is with this mapping project.
(15:16):
But there's another interesting thing this mentioned in both of
these articles, which is that, of course many more Mesolithic
artifacts from Doggerland have been found since the Colindo Harpoon.
There are lots of them now, especially a lot of
these these spear tips and sharp points, and a lot
of them have been found as an accidental byproduct of
(15:39):
beach fill efforts that are used to help, in one sense,
to protect the coastlines of places like the Netherlands from
rising sea levels, but also to counteract coastal erosion. So basically,
you have these big boats that go out and dredge
up gigantic amounts of sand from the sea bottom miles
(15:59):
off shore, and then they come back and they dump
it at the water's edge to expand the existing land footprint.
Maybe to build more harbor infrastructure or something, or to
fix a roding coastline, or to build up a sand
barrier to help protect the inland areas from rising seawater.
And it just so happens that when they do this,
(16:20):
when these boats dredge up the seafloor for Beachville, they
often end up depositing previously buried artifacts of Doggerland on
the beaches where they can be picked up by collectors.
And these articles describe archaeologists who are in contact with
these sort of beach walking artifact collectors and they're just
getting artifacts from Doggerland all the time. Now people are
(16:44):
writing them to say, oh, here, they've got arrowheads, axes,
barbed spear tips made from antler or bone, much like
the Kolinda harpoon. Remember that was made from the antler
of a red deer. And there's a lot we can
learn from this stuff. Because the low oxygen soiled posits
at the bottom of the North Sea tend to preserve
organic materials very well, so the researchers have been able
(17:06):
to do a lot of analysis on these organic remains,
including skeletal remains of the humans from these periods. And
this includes DNA analysis, so we know a lot more
than we used to. The downside, of course, is that
if you are just finding like artifacts or human remains
that have been scooped up in this haphazard process where
(17:28):
they're you know, dredged from the ocean floor and then
spit out on a beach somewhere, you know nothing about
the context really. I mean, you might have some rough
ideas about where it comes from, but you know, archaeologists
want not just an artifact, but they want to understand
the context of the artifact. What soil did it come from,
What where exactly was that located, what was the situation
(17:51):
in which this artifact would have originally been deposited.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
So we're kind of like robbing future archaeologists who might
have clearer maps and therefore a little better idea about
where to search for such artifacts in these sunken lands,
and also better means of actually investigating these sites and
exploring them in a way that retains some level of
(18:16):
context about the remains.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
That's right, And so the archaeologists described in these articles
have actually in some cases been able to identify artifacts
in their original context. So one question, it asks, is, okay,
so we know that Doggerland was probably a very desirable
location during this warming period, for the few thousand years
(18:39):
that it was warming and wet but not yet submerged.
So when people lived there, where did they live? Finding
the location of settlements as obviously difficult underwater, but they
say that generally the people of Mesolithic Europe were nomadic,
but if there was a sheet with you know, if
there was a great abundance of resources, they might create
(19:02):
semi permanent settlements. And the places you would look for
those semi permanent settlements might be things might be on
the like high ground close to wetland areas, so the
wetlands would have resources that you would want, but you
would want an elevated area above that. Now I'm going
to read a brief passage from this article in Archaeology
(19:23):
magazine describing efforts by Vince Gaffney and colleagues to identify
an underwater site with the help of this mapping and
then extract artifacts from the underwater site so you'd understand
more about the original context. One of these sites quote,
was a shallow, fifteen mile long seafloor ridge known as
Brown Bank, where a wealth of archaeological objects, including a
(19:46):
thirteen thousand year old engraved aurex bone had been snared
by fishing trawlers in the past. The other was an
area along a now submerged river channel and estuary off
the Norfolk Coast known as the South Although the weather
did not fully cooperate, cutting the team's time at sea short,
they were able to scoop up sediment deposits from the
(20:08):
Southern River estuary site. When they examined the material, they
were stunned to find it contained a fragment of a
stone tool known as a hammerstone. So I was pretty
amazed by that. The idea that they could use these
maps to find sites at the bottom of the North
Sea where they would expect humans to have lived because
(20:30):
of the value of those sites compared to the natural
resources around them, and then go scoop up sediment from
under the water and actually find human artifacts where they
expected to look for them. That is impressive, And so
the article goes on to say that while this individual
find of the hammerstone might not be incredibly significant, the
(20:50):
fact that this technique generally works for could or generally
could work for finding artifacts of this type could teach
us a lot more about the societies of ancient Doggerland.
Now another archaeological note that I wanted to mention this
(21:14):
is from that article in Science by Andrew Curry from
January twenty twenty, and just as a funny side note,
the dateline on this report is from a place in
the Netherlands called Monster. I don't know if I'm pronouncing
it right, but that is a town in South Holland, Monster,
which is near a beach that had been constructed via
the sand motor process that I was talking about. So
(21:36):
a lot of Doggerland artifacts and human remains could be
found on the beach there and are found by people
walking around looking for artifacts. So this article covers a
lot of the same ground as the other one I
was talking about. But one interesting question it asks is, okay,
we've got a good amount now of physical evidence available
from Doggerland, does it reveal anything about what ancient people
(21:59):
did in response to these steadily rising sea levels? And
there actually has been some research on this that they
of course know that the rising water gradually transformed Doggerland
from a land of rivers and forests into a wetland
with marshes and estuaries in the lower lying areas and
then scattered highlands which stayed drier, and analysis of human
(22:23):
bones recovered from across this transition period shows changes in
what people ate. So as the landscape changed, people apparently
shifted their diet from land based animals to freshwater fish.
And then one last little fact I wanted to mention
that I came across. This was in an article by
(22:44):
Johannis Decker at All published in the Journal of Archaeological
Science Reports in twenty twenty one called human and servid
osseous materials used for barbed point manufacture in Mesolithic Doggerland.
The fact was sort of contained in the title there.
We have already talked about how a lot of these
sharp spear points that have been recovered from the people
who lived here were made of antler and bone. These
(23:07):
are primarily animal bones, of course, you know, so they
might be using parts of a deer carcass or something
like that to make a lot of these weapons. But
apparently the authors of this study report at least two
barbed points like spear or harpoon tips that were made
out of human bone.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
That's fascinating and it makes one wonder, you know, what,
what could have been the context for that. Was it
a matter of some sort of a supply shortage with
you know, deer or elkbones. Was it maybe something that
was ritualistic? Was this, you know, the way to honor
ancestors or you know, or was it just hey, we
need more bone and we have some human bones on hand.
(23:48):
Were these enemies? Were these friends? So many questions.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Yeah, the mind always races when you get a detail
like that. You think like, is this was this a
question of efficiency or question of choice?
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah? Well, this whole discussion of Doggerland has been fascinating.
I really wasn't familiar with this topic at all.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Yeah, I was not really either. I mean reading about Doggerland,
including some of the articles I've talked about today, is
sort of what made me want to discuss it in
the context of this broader subject of submerged lands. And
of course it is not the only one, that's right.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
I want to come back to the topic of lost
islands that we touched on briefly in the last episode.
I was reading about the topic in a book titled
Lost Islands, The Story of Islands that have Vanished from
Nautical Charts by Henry Stomel. This is a really really
fun book. He spends a lot of time just talking
about like why people are just so fascinated with islands
(24:43):
in general. It talks about like just the idea of
an island is attractive to us. You know, it's kind
of like this miniature world that we can comprehend in
our head and so therefore real and you know, definitely
real islands, existing islands are of great interest to us.
And the idea of lost islands, well.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
This is only half formed, but I feel like we
are attracted to stories that are set in the location
with clear boundaries. Like we like stories that are set
in a particular house. You know, there's like a haunted mansion,
and we just know the stories about that mansion. It's there,
And the island is kind of the same way. You know,
It's like it's got a clear boundary. It's surrounded by water,
(25:21):
so we have an idea of the setting that is
fully contained.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Yeah, and they often do. You know, we've talked about
the island ecosystems before. You know, you'll you'll often encounter
a situation where an island feels like a continent made small.
You know, you'll have that diversity, you'll have you'll have
the dry arid lands, you'll have the rainforest that even
snow tipped mountains in some cases, and you'll have it
(25:47):
all in just such a tight and contained space relatively speaking. Now,
the author of this book, Stowmall, points out that nineteenth
century nautical charts feature a good two hundred islands that
we know now just don't exist, and he writes that
most of these were situations of poor location determination and
or reporting errors. So, in one example, nineteenth century cartographers
(26:10):
ended up including Gang's Island in the Pacific, apparently as
a concession to various reports of a reef or an
island at its sighted coordinates. So, you know, you'd imagine
a situation where the map makers are like, okay, well,
some people are saying there's something there. Some people were not,
Let's just go ahead and include it. You know, maybe
it's a situation we're just safer to say, okay, we'll
put it on there. But by nineteen thirty three it
(26:33):
was clear that there was nothing there.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
That raises an interesting question. If you have ambiguous evidence,
I'll say your evidence, you think it's like fifty to
fifty that an island is in a place or not
And you're a map maker, should you err on the
side of putting it there or not putting it there?
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Like which would do which would do the least harm
if you were wrong?
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Yeah? Yeah, I think it's that's a fair consideration. He
also points out that other matters were situations of fraud
or deception. May come back to that idea in the
next episode. Uh. He also mentions optical illusions as we've
we've noted already and you know and we discovered discussed
in our Fata Morgana episodes in the past. But he
also stresses quote that some volcanic islands do pop up
(27:18):
and down and this is this is the uh, this
is what I want to dive into for the remainder
of this episode.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
UH.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
He mentioned specifically the alleged islands of Los uh Tuanahi
or Tuanaki near the Cook Islands in the South Pacific.
This is one of several sites noted in the book
Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific by Patrick Nunn.
His website, by the way, is Patrick Nunn that's in
you in inn dot org. UH really good website with
(27:48):
links to all his books. He's a scientist and author
of multiple books dealing with sunken lands, and seems to
be one of the leading living authorities on this subject.
In Vanished Islands nonethlests twenty one Pacific islands that he
classifies as quote satisfactorily authenticated or partially authenticated islands and
(28:11):
in parentheses probably real islands, while also identifying a longer
list of islands that are likely mythical. And I have
to say, I really wasn't expecting that there to be
so many to be, you know, there to be a
list of twenty one Pacific islands that are you know,
retained at least within oral traditions of the peoples who
(28:33):
have lived in this area that have just vanished, that
were real at one point and are now gone. But
of course, as we'll discuss, it is a geologically active area.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Okay, so what would be some examples here?
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Well, he brings up the traditions of the people of
the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia, and apparently there are
multiple oral traditions of often catastrophic land sinkings. So really
ultimately exactactly the sort of catastrophic island sinks into the
ocean sort of events that may pop into your head
and that you might think, well, this is more like
(29:08):
the kind of thing that occurs just in fictions and
fantasy and so forth. But none stresses that you know,
these have likely occurred throughout human history in these given areas,
through throughout the history of human occupation of these areas,
with fresh incidents, fresh sinkings, fresh events, rejuvenating older traditions
(29:29):
and older ideas, as well as myths concerning lost islands
that align with our previously discussed tropes of utopias and
golden ages. None rights quote. Many such stories have been
believed in literally so that at various times, oftentimes of famine,
people have searched of these fabled islands of plenty, but
only one canoe has ever was ever heard from again.
(29:51):
So you know, you have these sorts of stories where
there was this place that we came from, this place
that was known, and it was rich and it was abundant,
and during times of famine it might be a place
that people seek for again but cannot find.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
So what you would get is the story of the
failed attempt to rediscover the lost land.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Yeah, yeah, so it would seem. And so this is
again getting into that area where myth and reality kind
of feed into each other and it gets very very complex.
There are so many ways to look at any given
belief system, but to be clear, there are numerous examples,
according to a nun of populated islands in this region
(30:35):
that sank beneath the waves. One example is tion Imanu,
previously located in a very seismically active part of the
Solomon Islands. In its current reduced state, it's known as
lark Shoal and the apparently the sinking of Tinemanu was
really rapid, with only a few individuals escaping via canoe,
(30:59):
but enough is to pass on their accounts into the
oral tradition. And this is interesting because some of the
details line up with what we were just talking about
with Doggerland, but none says that the island was apparently
affected by a large seafloor earthquake that destabilized the underwater
ridge that the island was situated on, causing it to
slide into deeper waters as tsunami waves washed over the land.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Oh okay, so this was not just continually increasing sea levels.
This was a rapid, sudden seismic event that caused a
sudden end to the land.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Yeah, I mean, this is a real cataclysm. This is
kind of ironically the sort of thing that the imagination
may summon when you bring up the idea of Atlantis
sinking into the ocean. But I do have to point
out that he stresses that nothing you could describe as
a sunken continent exists in the Pacific Ocean. The various
lost islands he references are not at all on the
(31:57):
scale of pseudoscientific lands like MoU and Limuria.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Right, So you really can't interpret any of the real
world examples as giving credence to any of these stories
of lost civilizations like Atlantis or Limoria or whatever, just
because like the details don't line up at all.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Right, So None explores various islands at length in a
couple of the books that I looked at, but one
I found really interesting it kind of lines up with
a lot of what we're talking about in these episodes.
And it's the land of Hawaiki. So in various Polynesian
mythologies and under some different specific names, this is the
homeland from which the people departed to populate the islands
(32:40):
of the Pacific. It takes on the character of not
only a place of origin, but especially with the Maori
spiritual underworld and or a land beneath the sea, a
place where the gods reside and the world where souls
return to. And none points out that Hawaki is generally
positioned in the west in these various traditions, which he
(33:02):
says certainly matches up with accepted migration patterns of humans,
you know, the last wave of true human exploration on
our planet. But he also says that as far as
mythology is concerned, it also could be more aligned with
ideas concerning death in the setting of the sun. So
(33:23):
just a reminder that there's so many factors to consider
in any given belief system and you ultimately, you know,
can't latch onto just like one explanation for why people
believe in something, right, And he also stresses that we
should be culturally respectful and scientifically cautious about jumping to
any conclusions about Hawaiki, which was you know, seems like
(33:46):
it was likely a real place or real places, not
the same island of origin for all peoples in this
region and all cultures. But we should be careful about
saying that it was an island that sank beneath the waves.
In this case, Non rights that while some pseudoscience writers
have kind of picked this up and run with it,
(34:06):
linking it to concepts like Lemuria, like mu, the idea
that Hawaukee sank is not a widespread detail in actual
Pacific island myths and was likely an invention of Western writers.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
Oh that's interesting. So maybe people reporting the stories told
by other cultures, but with their own gloss and the
sort of background of Atlantis knowledge and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, yeah, And I guess you could also approach like
you could also be reading about these other islands that
did sink, that are lost, and you know, you end
up looking at that evidence and then you take into
account this tradition as well. So Noun's work is really interesting.
(34:52):
He's been one of many voices stressing the threat that
climate change and rising sea levels pose to islands in
the West Pacific, where sea levels have risen at two
or three times the global average over the past few decades,
thus endangering not only the livelihoods and culture of modern inhabitants,
but endangering their histories as well. Pacific island reefs, which
(35:16):
only formed in the last four thousand years, according to Nune,
are particularly vulnerable to erosion via rising sea levels. He
stressed this in a twenty seventeen article for The Conversation. Now,
I may come back to more of Nun's work in
the next episode. Again, there's so much of it. If
you're fascinated by this topic, I definitely recommend checking out
his work. But he also points to some other natural
(35:37):
phenomena that have led to past mistakes in erroneous island identification.
So these errors and saying I think there's an island here,
and then it turns out there's nothing there.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Okay, So the picture I'm getting correct me if this
is wrong is there are a lot of stories of
vanished islands. There are a few cases where it seems like, yes,
this really did happen, but the majority of cases are
seemed to be a mistake or a legend of some kind.
And there are a lot of different explanations, correct explanations
for the mistakes. So yeah, what would those be.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Well, one of them that he brings up is, of course,
floating vegetation. We've discussed this before. You know, things like
like the sarcasm, a weed and so forth. You have
some sort of a big mat of vegetation out there,
and especially if you're unfamiliar with the area. If you've
never encountered this before and you're looking at it from
a distance, you might think, oh, well, there's some sort
(36:31):
of land out there. I'm not saying you'll mistake it
for like a huge, robust island, but you might mistake
it for something worth marking on a nautical map. The
other one, the other possibility that I was not prepared for,
that he mentions in passing, is that it could be
that what you're gazing out there is not a reef,
is not something you know, poking out of the water,
(36:53):
or even like a large expanse of some some sort
of land mass. It could just be the white scum
of the poe low low worm.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
I've never even heard of this. What is this?
Speaker 2 (37:03):
So these are marine anlid worms of the Pacific Islands
that engage in mass spawning. And it's it's a weird one.
So these creatures live in the seafloor substrate. And they
they look like when we say worms, I mean they're
not like earth worms. They have various appendages, you know,
and they have these kind of like tentaclely things on
(37:25):
their their heads. Uh, they're you know, they're they're not
I wouldn't say they're grotesque or anything. They're kind of
beautiful in their own way.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
To me, they kind of look like a cross between
an earthworm and a centipede.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Yeah, yeah, I imagine something like that living in the
seafloor substrate. So then they live down there, they live
in their their holes and so forth. But as breeding
season approaches, they begin to change. So first the tail
of the worm undergoes a great deal of alteration. Muscles
and organs degenerate, the appendages down there become more pass alike,
(38:01):
and the reproductive organs grow. They swell in size and
end up taking up more of the real estate and
that back half of the organism. And then, in line
with the phases of the moon, all of the plolo
worms stick their back halves out of their holes, and
then they rupture. They break in two, the tail section
(38:24):
full of reproductive cells and again augmented. Now for swimming.
It's broken off and it swims up to the surface,
while the rest of the worm stays down in the
seafloor muck and regenerates. So the part that stays down
there and regenerates is the atok. And then the epitopes
(38:44):
are the bits that go swimming up to the surface.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
Okay, so they're going up to the surface taking sex
cells with them, yes, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
So they go up to the surface and again all
at once. We're talking in the tens of thousands. This
is a mass spawning event. And then they just ride
around and release their gam meats. So it's uh, it's
it's It sounds like a site to behold now. As
with a lot of mass spawning incidents in the ocean,
this of course attracts the attention of a lot of predators.
(39:14):
If you're some sort of a predatory fish in the
vicinity and this is occurring, well you've got more than
an easy meal on your hands. You've got to go
there and get a bite. And this applies to human
beings as well. Plolo worms and their relatives are considered
quite a delicacy in various cultures. I love this now,
(39:35):
I was obviously, I was looking around for a little
more insight on this. I wanted to know, like, what
what are they cooking with these? So what are they preparing?
And I did find an article on gastro obscura by
Sam O'Brien pointing out that. Yeah, especially in Samoan traditions,
the pololos are often fried up with eggs. It's they're
baked into bread with coconut milk and onions, or they're
(39:55):
kind of like sprinkled or spread on toast. The author
here she describes it as a seaweed or caviar flavor,
but with a noodle texture. And I've seen it elsewhere
described as quote the caviar of the Pacific.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Ooh, yeah, so savory, seafoody kind of taste. That sounds wonderful. Actually,
I want to try it.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Yeah. I included a photo here for you, Joe, and
I recommend everyone look up that article or just look
up pictures in general. And the picture I have here
for you, Joe is I believe it's a piece of
toast with this pololo spread on top. And yeah, it
looks nice, reminiscent of like a cream spinach. I guess
just based on appearances. But again, the taste profile is
(40:37):
apparently more like caviar meets noodles.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
I don't know if it's just the lighting in this picture,
it almost looks kind of blue. It's a like a blue, yeah,
wilted wilted green kind of appearance spread across a piece
of toast.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Yeah, and yeah, I believe it's also a delicacy. A
related organism is a delicacy in Japan. So if we
have any listeners out there who've tried tried these dishes
or related dishes, please read it, write in and share.
We'd love to hear your take on it.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
Well, I did not expect things to go in this direction.
I am mighty intrigued. I do want to try this food.
But wait a minute, I'm we got to convict. How
could this be mistaken for an island?
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Okay, so after the breeding is finished, after the predators
have had their fill, after humans have come and harvested
their share of the of the spoils, the rest of it, again,
the breeding is carried out, but apparently the rest of
it then just kind of rots and disintegrates on the
surface of the water into this white oily scum. I
(41:40):
found multiple especially older like Western descriptions clearly describing it
as a scum, an oily scum, And apparently this is
what we could then potentially mistake for an island. I'm guessing,
especially by individuals who are not familiar with the organizm
(42:01):
because you know, obviously there would be locals who would
know about this, because they know what is left behind
after they've gone out and harvested their share of the
pololo worms. But if you didn't know what you're looking at,
you might see like a big sort of gleaming oily
white mass and you might think that it is some
sort of a land mass.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Well, so this reminds me of something we've actually talked
about on the show before, which is pummus rafting phenomenon.
Sometimes after a volcanic eruption in one of these islands,
there will be a great outflow of pummus low density
rocks that actually rocks that float on the surface of
the water and all kind of clump together. And if
you look up pictures of this, it looks extremely weird.
(42:44):
It's like a parking lot floating in the middle of
the ocean. So all of these floating phenomena, Yeah, you
can have a floating vegetation potentially mistaken for something that
you know you should mark as an island on a map.
I guess could imagine a pump us raft though that's
a fairly transient phenomenon related to these volcanic eruptions, and
(43:06):
now we've got to add a worm sex to the list.
Worm sex island.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
Worm sex island. Yeah, something that again would be it
would it would, it would occur every year, but it
wouldn't always be out there, and it seems entirely likely
that the foreigners to the to these seas mind encounter
it and make note of it, and you could end
up with an erroneous island identification. So yeah, I was
not expecting to talk about worm reproduction in this episode,
(43:35):
but that's where the research took us.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
Amazing. But hey, we are not done, are we. We've
got to talk about more sunken lands. So we will
be back next time to explore this topic further.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
That's right. In the meantime, will remind you that stuff.
To Goli Your Mind is primarily a science podcast with
core episodes. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we do lister mails
on Mondays. On Wednesdays we tend to do a short
form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to watch a weird movie
on Weird House Cinema. If you are on social media,
(44:10):
follow our accounts because they are there active once more.
If you use Instagram look us up specifically. Stbym podcast
is our handle. There's an old one that has sunken
beneath the waves of social media, but stbym podcast is
the active one, and I think there's some pretty fun
stuff going up there, so so it's one way to
(44:30):
keep up.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
With this 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 (44:53):
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're listening to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
My name is Robert Land, and I am Joe McCormick.
And we're back with part two in our series called
The Sunken Lands, about places where what was relatively recently
dry land has now vanished beneath the waters.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Now.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
In the last episode, we talked about the history of
fascination with the idea of lands, and especially human civilizations
occupied lands that were swallowed by the sea, the most
famous of these stories, of course, being Atlantis, a probably
originally fictional island civilization described by Plato in some of
(00:50):
his dialogues that was, according to the story, punished for
its hubris by being drowned in the ocean. And even
though most experts on the original sources think this story
he probably did not refer to a place existing in reality,
there are still people all the time who love to
hunt for remains of Atlantis and similar drowned empires, or
(01:11):
to interpret any strange underwater imagery or other phenomena or
artifacts as evidence of such. Here's a weird looking artifact
from under the water. Maybe it's from Atlantis.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Yeah, And it's in many cases it's harmless. But you know,
as we've been discussing, these kind of ideas can bleed
into pseudoscience, pseudo archaeology, and pseudo geology, and in some
of these areas are perhaps harmless as well, but they
can become increasingly less harmless depending on what form they
(01:45):
end up taking within a given culture. I guess I
would just drive home that there's kind of an amorphous
nature to a lot of the concepts that we've been
discussing with the idea of lost islands, and there's going
to continue to be this kind of amorphous quality to
it as we proceed.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Right, So, despite the fact that hunting for a literal
physical Atlantis is probably the wrong track to be on,
there are absolutely examples of real places on Earth where
land has relatively recently become covered in water. And the
main real world example we talked about in the last
episode was what has come to be known as dogger Land,
(02:24):
a vast plain stretching mostly east of Great Britain and
north of the coastlines of continental Europe, off the north
coastlines of what is today France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands,
occupying much of the area that is now filled in
with the North Sea. Now, last time we talked about
some of the fascinating early hints, early pieces of evidence
(02:47):
that pointed to the existence of a past Doggerland, such
as observations going back centuries. Actually that sometimes low tide
on the British coast would reveal the remains of apparently
ancient trees and trunks still rooted in their original soil,
but now underneath the ocean. How's that possible? As well
(03:07):
as the discovery of terrestrial animal remains and even human
artifacts like the Kolinda Harpoon, a Stone age spear tip
dragged up from the bottom in a fishing net about
twenty five miles off the coast of Great Britain in
the nineteen thirties. In nineteen thirty one. So today we're
back to talk more about the sunken lands. And I
(03:29):
wanted to kick off this episode by exploring Doggerland in
more depth. So Doggerland used to be land, now it's
covered in sea. What happened to it? Well, I'm going
to lay out a rough timeline here and I just
want to mention at the top here a couple of
really good articles about the archaeology of Doggerland that I
(03:49):
was reading. One was called Europe's Lost Frontier. This was
a feature published in the journal Science by Andrew Curry
in January twenty twenty. Another is called Mapping Vanished Landscape.
This was in Archaeology Magazine by Jason Urbanus in the
March April twenty twenty two edition. So the Doggerland timeline
goes like this. During the Late Pleistocene, the last part
(04:12):
of the most recent ice age, between about one hundred
and twenty five thousand and twelve thousand years ago, much
of the world's water was locked in glaciers and the
North Sea was much lower than it is today. It
was about four hundred and fifty feet lower than the
present average. So at this time during the Late Pleistocene,
(04:33):
Doggerland was a cold, dry place, a freezing grassland step
occupied mostly by megafauna like wooly mammoths or wooly rhinoceroses,
but other large large animals that can withstand cold environments,
like reindeer and the aurux, the ancestor of modern cattle. Then,
(04:57):
after the conclusion of the Pleistocene, we transition into the
geological epic known as the Holocene, which extends up until today.
This is the warming period after the most recent ice age.
So this period is characterized by a steady increase in
temperatures which caused glaciers to begin to melt. So for
(05:18):
thousands of years, you know, I think back roughly ten
thousand years ago or so, for thousands of years, Doggerland
was still above sea level, but the warming climate and
the melting glaciers transformed it from a cold arid step
a tundra like landscape into an increasingly lush land of
(05:40):
forests and then marshes, rivers and lakes, and many sources
described this post glacial landscape as a kind of hunter
gatherer paradise. So who were these hunter gatherers? While there
were multiple waves of them. In fact, there's some indication
that the human relative, the ancient human relative Homo antecessor,
(06:01):
had existed in Doggerland going way back during the cold
arid Step period. The Neanderthals occupied Doggerland. It would have
been a harsh existence. This would be a very cold
and dry place where people would have survived by hunting
large animals. But Neanderthals did occupy the Dogerland Step. We
(06:22):
know that through evidence of artifacts axeheads and other flint
artifacts that have in some cases been clearly subjected to
a type of birch barqu tar that the Neanderthals would
use that they manufactured, and then after the Neanderthals during
the Holocene, when the area was warming up, it was
(06:44):
clearly inhabited by Middle Stone Age Homo sapiens. And the
article in Archaeology Magazine that I mentioned a minute ago
quotes a curator of prehistoric collections at the National Museum
of Antiquities in Leyden named Luke Amkroutz, who says, quote,
during the Holocene, Doggerland was a wooded environment, but with
(07:05):
really extensive coastlines and enormous wetlands. These were the richest
areas to live in. There were forest resources, deer, wild boar,
and berries, but also fish, migrating birds, otters, and beavers.
It was a garden of Eden for them, a wetland wonderland.
So if you were a hunter gatherer in Mesolithic Europe,
(07:27):
especially after the glaciers began to melt and the climate
began to warm, Doggerland was awesome. Jason Urbanis, writing this
article says that it is quote by any estimation, the
most attractive landscape in northwestern Europe for Mesolithic hunter gatherers,
and perhaps the continent's most densely populated region at the time.
(07:50):
So sometimes when you think about a previously exposed piece
of land that is in many sources referred to as
quote a land bridge because it is bridged the mainland
continental Europe with Great Britain, you think of a kind
of transitional place, you know that people just walked across.
But no, it's not just a transitional place that allowed
(08:12):
people to get from one highland to another. This was
apparently about the best place you could be in this
area of Europe at the time. It was full of resources.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
This is also amazing that he directly compares it to
the Garden of Eden, that he compares it to not
only a land of plenty, but a utopia, which lines
up with so many of these ideas of a lost
and or sunken land, of a land from which people
came but can no longer return to or may one
(08:45):
day return to. But in this case it does seem
to line up with the idea of it actually being
a land of plenty, actually being a place where resources
were abundant, but.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Much like the Garden of Eden, it couldn't last forever,
though in this case it apparently has nothing to do
with a snake. It has to do with, in fact,
the exact same forces that made it a land of
plenty in abundance in the beginning ended up dooming it.
So a warming climate and melting glaciers first changed dogger
Land from an arid tundra into a lush paradise, and
(09:18):
then the same trends transformed it to the drowned Stone
Age graveyard it is today.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
So from the end of the Last Ice Age, the
level of the North Sea steadily rose. Ice is melting,
the world is warming, the sea levels are rising, and
Urbanis writes in the archaeology article that for a period
of roughly three thousand years, the sea rose six feet
every hundred years, and then, adding to the steady creep
(09:47):
up of the waterline, there was a sudden cataclysmic event
that would have horribly affected the Mesolithic populations living in
the remaining coastal areas of that region towards the en
end of that warming period, so more than eight thousand
years ago, around sixty two hundred BCE. Again, at this point,
(10:08):
much of Doggerland had already been submerged, but what was
left above the water line was hit with a catastrophic
tsunami caused by an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway.
It was actually one of a series of these underwater
land slide events known as the Storega slides STORGGA. And
(10:28):
I've seen different estimates for the exact height and power
of the tsunami wave. That article I mentioned in Science
by Andrew Curry cites an estimate of at least ten
meters high for the wave that hit Doggerland, but a
twenty twenty one study of its effects on the eastern
coast of Scotland. So this is looking at Scotland analyzed
(10:49):
soil deposits to estimate that the water might have come
as far as eighteen miles inland.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Wow, well, I mean even just looking at the like
the ten meter high, that would be almost thirty three
feet high.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
Right, So if you are in range of the tsunami,
catastrophic event also may have had some effect in like
moving around sediments and possibly washing out some existing areas
of land.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Right right, that again, we're already exposed due to the
rising the sea levels.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Right, and actually one of the last pieces of land
remaining above water from Doggerland was the now submerged Dogger
Bank from which Doggerland gets its name. It remained as
an island for a while, so Doggerland came to be
known as Doggerland when the name was given to it
(11:39):
by an archaeologist named Briany Coles, and it was named
after the sand bank in the North Sea known as
the Dogger Bank, which got its name because it was
a popular fishing spot used by these Dutch boats called doggers.
So the dogger boats go out, they fish around the
sand bank. There's good catch there and those doggers give
(11:59):
their name to the area. And apparently that that sandbank
was once an island, that was one of the last
parts of it left. Now there's an interesting contradiction, which
is that we know that it was probably one of
the most densely populated places in Stone Age Europe. It
was full of abundant resources. There were lots of humans
(12:19):
living there in the Middle Stone Age, but it's hard
to study archaeologically for obvious reasons. You can't just go
dig it's underwater, and also the water is deep and
cold and murky and stormy. It's just a difficult place
to explore, even with divers. So how can archaeologists learn
(12:41):
things about Doggerland other than just waiting for the occasional
artifact to get dredged up in a trawling net like
we talked about with the Kolinda harpoon. Well, actually, this
is one of the main subjects of that article in
Archaeology magazine Mapping a Vanished Landscape by Jason Arbanis, and
it talks about some interesting ways that scholars have come
(13:03):
up with or come across by accident to study Doggerland
and see what we can learn about it. So one
effort described in this article is associated with a University
of Bradford archaeologist and named Vince Gaffney and colleagues. Gaffney
is quoted extensively in this article and he talks about
how he and colleagues used data from seismic reflections surveys
(13:28):
originally done by offshore oil and gas companies to find
mineral deposits. So the way this works is that you
have a ship, it goes out in the water. It
emits sound waves into the water which bounce off of
the seafloor. And then are picked up by ship based
detectors and the physical features of the seafloor affect how
the sound is altered when it bounces back, and then
(13:50):
this information can be used to map shapes and contours
and anomalies deep under the water. Now they figured out
that that same seismic data, which was again proprietary, it
was owned by these energy companies, how that could be
used by archaeologists to assemble an approximate picture of what
Doggerland was like before it flooded, to study the hidden landscape.
(14:13):
And the archaeologists were actually able to get data from
I think multiple companies, at least one company called Petroleum
Geoservices or PGS, And they talk about how they used
data from this company to map a patch of CEA
roughly twenty three hundred square miles in size, and when
they assembled the map, they realized they were looking at
(14:35):
a place where a large river had once cut through
what is now the submerged dogg Or Bank. So imagine
that you're like looking at this seismic reflection data and
then you realize it's showing you a map of what
the land looked like before the water covered it, and
you can see the river bed and all that.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
And at the time of this article their maps had
expanded to cover more than seventeen square miles, so they
know a lot more about the landscape of Doggerland than
we did in the past. They have maps depicting a
lost landscape of lakes, rivers, hills and valleys. So that's
one way of understanding Doggerland is with this mapping project.
(15:16):
But there's another interesting thing this mentioned in both of
these articles, which is that, of course many more Mesolithic
artifacts from Doggerland have been found since the Colindo Harpoon.
There are lots of them now, especially a lot of
these these spear tips and sharp points, and a lot
of them have been found as an accidental byproduct of
(15:39):
beach fill efforts that are used to help, in one sense,
to protect the coastlines of places like the Netherlands from
rising sea levels, but also to counteract coastal erosion. So basically,
you have these big boats that go out and dredge
up gigantic amounts of sand from the sea bottom miles
(15:59):
off shore, and then they come back and they dump
it at the water's edge to expand the existing land footprint.
Maybe to build more harbor infrastructure or something, or to
fix a roding coastline, or to build up a sand
barrier to help protect the inland areas from rising seawater.
And it just so happens that when they do this,
(16:20):
when these boats dredge up the seafloor for Beachville, they
often end up depositing previously buried artifacts of Doggerland on
the beaches where they can be picked up by collectors.
And these articles describe archaeologists who are in contact with
these sort of beach walking artifact collectors and they're just
getting artifacts from Doggerland all the time. Now people are
(16:44):
writing them to say, oh, here, they've got arrowheads, axes,
barbed spear tips made from antler or bone, much like
the Kolinda harpoon. Remember that was made from the antler
of a red deer. And there's a lot we can
learn from this stuff. Because the low oxygen soiled posits
at the bottom of the North Sea tend to preserve
organic materials very well, so the researchers have been able
(17:06):
to do a lot of analysis on these organic remains,
including skeletal remains of the humans from these periods. And
this includes DNA analysis, so we know a lot more
than we used to. The downside, of course, is that
if you are just finding like artifacts or human remains
that have been scooped up in this haphazard process where
(17:28):
they're you know, dredged from the ocean floor and then
spit out on a beach somewhere, you know nothing about
the context really. I mean, you might have some rough
ideas about where it comes from, but you know, archaeologists
want not just an artifact, but they want to understand
the context of the artifact. What soil did it come from,
What where exactly was that located, what was the situation
(17:51):
in which this artifact would have originally been deposited.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
So we're kind of like robbing future archaeologists who might
have clearer maps and therefore a little better idea about
where to search for such artifacts in these sunken lands,
and also better means of actually investigating these sites and
exploring them in a way that retains some level of
(18:16):
context about the remains.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
That's right, And so the archaeologists described in these articles
have actually in some cases been able to identify artifacts
in their original context. So one question, it asks, is, okay,
so we know that Doggerland was probably a very desirable
location during this warming period, for the few thousand years
(18:39):
that it was warming and wet but not yet submerged.
So when people lived there, where did they live? Finding
the location of settlements as obviously difficult underwater, but they
say that generally the people of Mesolithic Europe were nomadic,
but if there was a sheet with you know, if
there was a great abundance of resources, they might create
(19:02):
semi permanent settlements. And the places you would look for
those semi permanent settlements might be things might be on
the like high ground close to wetland areas, so the
wetlands would have resources that you would want, but you
would want an elevated area above that. Now I'm going
to read a brief passage from this article in Archaeology
(19:23):
magazine describing efforts by Vince Gaffney and colleagues to identify
an underwater site with the help of this mapping and
then extract artifacts from the underwater site so you'd understand
more about the original context. One of these sites quote,
was a shallow, fifteen mile long seafloor ridge known as
Brown Bank, where a wealth of archaeological objects, including a
(19:46):
thirteen thousand year old engraved aurex bone had been snared
by fishing trawlers in the past. The other was an
area along a now submerged river channel and estuary off
the Norfolk Coast known as the South Although the weather
did not fully cooperate, cutting the team's time at sea short,
they were able to scoop up sediment deposits from the
(20:08):
Southern River estuary site. When they examined the material, they
were stunned to find it contained a fragment of a
stone tool known as a hammerstone. So I was pretty
amazed by that. The idea that they could use these
maps to find sites at the bottom of the North
Sea where they would expect humans to have lived because
(20:30):
of the value of those sites compared to the natural
resources around them, and then go scoop up sediment from
under the water and actually find human artifacts where they
expected to look for them. That is impressive, And so
the article goes on to say that while this individual
find of the hammerstone might not be incredibly significant, the
(20:50):
fact that this technique generally works for could or generally
could work for finding artifacts of this type could teach
us a lot more about the societies of ancient Doggerland.
Now another archaeological note that I wanted to mention this
(21:14):
is from that article in Science by Andrew Curry from
January twenty twenty, and just as a funny side note,
the dateline on this report is from a place in
the Netherlands called Monster. I don't know if I'm pronouncing
it right, but that is a town in South Holland, Monster,
which is near a beach that had been constructed via
the sand motor process that I was talking about. So
(21:36):
a lot of Doggerland artifacts and human remains could be
found on the beach there and are found by people
walking around looking for artifacts. So this article covers a
lot of the same ground as the other one I
was talking about. But one interesting question it asks is, okay,
we've got a good amount now of physical evidence available
from Doggerland, does it reveal anything about what ancient people
(21:59):
did in response to these steadily rising sea levels? And
there actually has been some research on this that they
of course know that the rising water gradually transformed Doggerland
from a land of rivers and forests into a wetland
with marshes and estuaries in the lower lying areas and
then scattered highlands which stayed drier, and analysis of human
(22:23):
bones recovered from across this transition period shows changes in
what people ate. So as the landscape changed, people apparently
shifted their diet from land based animals to freshwater fish.
And then one last little fact I wanted to mention
that I came across. This was in an article by
(22:44):
Johannis Decker at All published in the Journal of Archaeological
Science Reports in twenty twenty one called human and servid
osseous materials used for barbed point manufacture in Mesolithic Doggerland.
The fact was sort of contained in the title there.
We have already talked about how a lot of these
sharp spear points that have been recovered from the people
who lived here were made of antler and bone. These
(23:07):
are primarily animal bones, of course, you know, so they
might be using parts of a deer carcass or something
like that to make a lot of these weapons. But
apparently the authors of this study report at least two
barbed points like spear or harpoon tips that were made
out of human bone.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
That's fascinating and it makes one wonder, you know, what,
what could have been the context for that. Was it
a matter of some sort of a supply shortage with
you know, deer or elkbones. Was it maybe something that
was ritualistic? Was this, you know, the way to honor
ancestors or you know, or was it just hey, we
need more bone and we have some human bones on hand.
(23:48):
Were these enemies? Were these friends? So many questions.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Yeah, the mind always races when you get a detail
like that. You think like, is this was this a
question of efficiency or question of choice?
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah? Well, this whole discussion of Doggerland has been fascinating.
I really wasn't familiar with this topic at all.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Yeah, I was not really either. I mean reading about Doggerland,
including some of the articles I've talked about today, is
sort of what made me want to discuss it in
the context of this broader subject of submerged lands. And
of course it is not the only one, that's right.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
I want to come back to the topic of lost
islands that we touched on briefly in the last episode.
I was reading about the topic in a book titled
Lost Islands, The Story of Islands that have Vanished from
Nautical Charts by Henry Stomel. This is a really really
fun book. He spends a lot of time just talking
about like why people are just so fascinated with islands
(24:43):
in general. It talks about like just the idea of
an island is attractive to us. You know, it's kind
of like this miniature world that we can comprehend in
our head and so therefore real and you know, definitely
real islands, existing islands are of great interest to us.
And the idea of lost islands, well.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
This is only half formed, but I feel like we
are attracted to stories that are set in the location
with clear boundaries. Like we like stories that are set
in a particular house. You know, there's like a haunted mansion,
and we just know the stories about that mansion. It's there,
And the island is kind of the same way. You know,
It's like it's got a clear boundary. It's surrounded by water,
(25:21):
so we have an idea of the setting that is
fully contained.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Yeah, and they often do. You know, we've talked about
the island ecosystems before. You know, you'll you'll often encounter
a situation where an island feels like a continent made small.
You know, you'll have that diversity, you'll have you'll have
the dry arid lands, you'll have the rainforest that even
snow tipped mountains in some cases, and you'll have it
(25:47):
all in just such a tight and contained space relatively speaking. Now,
the author of this book, Stowmall, points out that nineteenth
century nautical charts feature a good two hundred islands that
we know now just don't exist, and he writes that
most of these were situations of poor location determination and
or reporting errors. So, in one example, nineteenth century cartographers
(26:10):
ended up including Gang's Island in the Pacific, apparently as
a concession to various reports of a reef or an
island at its sighted coordinates. So, you know, you'd imagine
a situation where the map makers are like, okay, well,
some people are saying there's something there. Some people were not,
Let's just go ahead and include it. You know, maybe
it's a situation we're just safer to say, okay, we'll
put it on there. But by nineteen thirty three it
(26:33):
was clear that there was nothing there.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
That raises an interesting question. If you have ambiguous evidence,
I'll say your evidence, you think it's like fifty to
fifty that an island is in a place or not
And you're a map maker, should you err on the
side of putting it there or not putting it there?
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Like which would do which would do the least harm
if you were wrong?
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Yeah? Yeah, I think it's that's a fair consideration. He
also points out that other matters were situations of fraud
or deception. May come back to that idea in the
next episode. Uh. He also mentions optical illusions as we've
we've noted already and you know and we discovered discussed
in our Fata Morgana episodes in the past. But he
also stresses quote that some volcanic islands do pop up
(27:18):
and down and this is this is the uh, this
is what I want to dive into for the remainder
of this episode.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
UH.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
He mentioned specifically the alleged islands of Los uh Tuanahi
or Tuanaki near the Cook Islands in the South Pacific.
This is one of several sites noted in the book
Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific by Patrick Nunn.
His website, by the way, is Patrick Nunn that's in
you in inn dot org. UH really good website with
(27:48):
links to all his books. He's a scientist and author
of multiple books dealing with sunken lands, and seems to
be one of the leading living authorities on this subject.
In Vanished Islands nonethlests twenty one Pacific islands that he
classifies as quote satisfactorily authenticated or partially authenticated islands and
(28:11):
in parentheses probably real islands, while also identifying a longer
list of islands that are likely mythical. And I have
to say, I really wasn't expecting that there to be
so many to be, you know, there to be a
list of twenty one Pacific islands that are you know,
retained at least within oral traditions of the peoples who
(28:33):
have lived in this area that have just vanished, that
were real at one point and are now gone. But
of course, as we'll discuss, it is a geologically active area.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Okay, so what would be some examples here?
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Well, he brings up the traditions of the people of
the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia, and apparently there are
multiple oral traditions of often catastrophic land sinkings. So really
ultimately exactactly the sort of catastrophic island sinks into the
ocean sort of events that may pop into your head
and that you might think, well, this is more like
(29:08):
the kind of thing that occurs just in fictions and
fantasy and so forth. But none stresses that you know,
these have likely occurred throughout human history in these given areas,
through throughout the history of human occupation of these areas,
with fresh incidents, fresh sinkings, fresh events, rejuvenating older traditions
(29:29):
and older ideas, as well as myths concerning lost islands
that align with our previously discussed tropes of utopias and
golden ages. None rights quote. Many such stories have been
believed in literally so that at various times, oftentimes of famine,
people have searched of these fabled islands of plenty, but
only one canoe has ever was ever heard from again.
(29:51):
So you know, you have these sorts of stories where
there was this place that we came from, this place
that was known, and it was rich and it was abundant,
and during times of famine it might be a place
that people seek for again but cannot find.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
So what you would get is the story of the
failed attempt to rediscover the lost land.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Yeah, yeah, so it would seem. And so this is
again getting into that area where myth and reality kind
of feed into each other and it gets very very complex.
There are so many ways to look at any given
belief system, but to be clear, there are numerous examples,
according to a nun of populated islands in this region
(30:35):
that sank beneath the waves. One example is tion Imanu,
previously located in a very seismically active part of the
Solomon Islands. In its current reduced state, it's known as
lark Shoal and the apparently the sinking of Tinemanu was
really rapid, with only a few individuals escaping via canoe,
(30:59):
but enough is to pass on their accounts into the
oral tradition. And this is interesting because some of the
details line up with what we were just talking about
with Doggerland, but none says that the island was apparently
affected by a large seafloor earthquake that destabilized the underwater
ridge that the island was situated on, causing it to
slide into deeper waters as tsunami waves washed over the land.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Oh okay, so this was not just continually increasing sea levels.
This was a rapid, sudden seismic event that caused a
sudden end to the land.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Yeah, I mean, this is a real cataclysm. This is
kind of ironically the sort of thing that the imagination
may summon when you bring up the idea of Atlantis
sinking into the ocean. But I do have to point
out that he stresses that nothing you could describe as
a sunken continent exists in the Pacific Ocean. The various
lost islands he references are not at all on the
(31:57):
scale of pseudoscientific lands like MoU and Limuria.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Right, So you really can't interpret any of the real
world examples as giving credence to any of these stories
of lost civilizations like Atlantis or Limoria or whatever, just
because like the details don't line up at all.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Right, So None explores various islands at length in a
couple of the books that I looked at, but one
I found really interesting it kind of lines up with
a lot of what we're talking about in these episodes.
And it's the land of Hawaiki. So in various Polynesian
mythologies and under some different specific names, this is the
homeland from which the people departed to populate the islands
(32:40):
of the Pacific. It takes on the character of not
only a place of origin, but especially with the Maori
spiritual underworld and or a land beneath the sea, a
place where the gods reside and the world where souls
return to. And none points out that Hawaki is generally
positioned in the west in these various traditions, which he
(33:02):
says certainly matches up with accepted migration patterns of humans,
you know, the last wave of true human exploration on
our planet. But he also says that as far as
mythology is concerned, it also could be more aligned with
ideas concerning death in the setting of the sun. So
(33:23):
just a reminder that there's so many factors to consider
in any given belief system and you ultimately, you know,
can't latch onto just like one explanation for why people
believe in something, right, And he also stresses that we
should be culturally respectful and scientifically cautious about jumping to
any conclusions about Hawaiki, which was you know, seems like
(33:46):
it was likely a real place or real places, not
the same island of origin for all peoples in this
region and all cultures. But we should be careful about
saying that it was an island that sank beneath the waves.
In this case, Non rights that while some pseudoscience writers
have kind of picked this up and run with it,
(34:06):
linking it to concepts like Lemuria, like mu, the idea
that Hawaukee sank is not a widespread detail in actual
Pacific island myths and was likely an invention of Western writers.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
Oh that's interesting. So maybe people reporting the stories told
by other cultures, but with their own gloss and the
sort of background of Atlantis knowledge and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, yeah, And I guess you could also approach like
you could also be reading about these other islands that
did sink, that are lost, and you know, you end
up looking at that evidence and then you take into
account this tradition as well. So Noun's work is really interesting.
(34:52):
He's been one of many voices stressing the threat that
climate change and rising sea levels pose to islands in
the West Pacific, where sea levels have risen at two
or three times the global average over the past few decades,
thus endangering not only the livelihoods and culture of modern inhabitants,
but endangering their histories as well. Pacific island reefs, which
(35:16):
only formed in the last four thousand years, according to Nune,
are particularly vulnerable to erosion via rising sea levels. He
stressed this in a twenty seventeen article for The Conversation. Now,
I may come back to more of Nun's work in
the next episode. Again, there's so much of it. If
you're fascinated by this topic, I definitely recommend checking out
his work. But he also points to some other natural
(35:37):
phenomena that have led to past mistakes in erroneous island identification.
So these errors and saying I think there's an island here,
and then it turns out there's nothing there.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Okay, So the picture I'm getting correct me if this
is wrong is there are a lot of stories of
vanished islands. There are a few cases where it seems like, yes,
this really did happen, but the majority of cases are
seemed to be a mistake or a legend of some kind.
And there are a lot of different explanations, correct explanations
for the mistakes. So yeah, what would those be.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Well, one of them that he brings up is, of course,
floating vegetation. We've discussed this before. You know, things like
like the sarcasm, a weed and so forth. You have
some sort of a big mat of vegetation out there,
and especially if you're unfamiliar with the area. If you've
never encountered this before and you're looking at it from
a distance, you might think, oh, well, there's some sort
(36:31):
of land out there. I'm not saying you'll mistake it
for like a huge, robust island, but you might mistake
it for something worth marking on a nautical map. The
other one, the other possibility that I was not prepared for,
that he mentions in passing, is that it could be
that what you're gazing out there is not a reef,
is not something you know, poking out of the water,
(36:53):
or even like a large expanse of some some sort
of land mass. It could just be the white scum
of the poe low low worm.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
I've never even heard of this. What is this?
Speaker 2 (37:03):
So these are marine anlid worms of the Pacific Islands
that engage in mass spawning. And it's it's a weird one.
So these creatures live in the seafloor substrate. And they
they look like when we say worms, I mean they're
not like earth worms. They have various appendages, you know,
and they have these kind of like tentaclely things on
(37:25):
their their heads. Uh, they're you know, they're they're not
I wouldn't say they're grotesque or anything. They're kind of
beautiful in their own way.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
To me, they kind of look like a cross between
an earthworm and a centipede.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Yeah, yeah, I imagine something like that living in the
seafloor substrate. So then they live down there, they live
in their their holes and so forth. But as breeding
season approaches, they begin to change. So first the tail
of the worm undergoes a great deal of alteration. Muscles
and organs degenerate, the appendages down there become more pass alike,
(38:01):
and the reproductive organs grow. They swell in size and
end up taking up more of the real estate and
that back half of the organism. And then, in line
with the phases of the moon, all of the plolo
worms stick their back halves out of their holes, and
then they rupture. They break in two, the tail section
(38:24):
full of reproductive cells and again augmented. Now for swimming.
It's broken off and it swims up to the surface,
while the rest of the worm stays down in the
seafloor muck and regenerates. So the part that stays down
there and regenerates is the atok. And then the epitopes
(38:44):
are the bits that go swimming up to the surface.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
Okay, so they're going up to the surface taking sex
cells with them, yes, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
So they go up to the surface and again all
at once. We're talking in the tens of thousands. This
is a mass spawning event. And then they just ride
around and release their gam meats. So it's uh, it's
it's It sounds like a site to behold now. As
with a lot of mass spawning incidents in the ocean,
this of course attracts the attention of a lot of predators.
(39:14):
If you're some sort of a predatory fish in the
vicinity and this is occurring, well you've got more than
an easy meal on your hands. You've got to go
there and get a bite. And this applies to human
beings as well. Plolo worms and their relatives are considered
quite a delicacy in various cultures. I love this now,
(39:35):
I was obviously, I was looking around for a little
more insight on this. I wanted to know, like, what
what are they cooking with these? So what are they preparing?
And I did find an article on gastro obscura by
Sam O'Brien pointing out that. Yeah, especially in Samoan traditions,
the pololos are often fried up with eggs. It's they're
baked into bread with coconut milk and onions, or they're
(39:55):
kind of like sprinkled or spread on toast. The author
here she describes it as a seaweed or caviar flavor,
but with a noodle texture. And I've seen it elsewhere
described as quote the caviar of the Pacific.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Ooh, yeah, so savory, seafoody kind of taste. That sounds wonderful. Actually,
I want to try it.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Yeah. I included a photo here for you, Joe, and
I recommend everyone look up that article or just look
up pictures in general. And the picture I have here
for you, Joe is I believe it's a piece of
toast with this pololo spread on top. And yeah, it
looks nice, reminiscent of like a cream spinach. I guess
just based on appearances. But again, the taste profile is
(40:37):
apparently more like caviar meets noodles.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
I don't know if it's just the lighting in this picture,
it almost looks kind of blue. It's a like a blue, yeah,
wilted wilted green kind of appearance spread across a piece
of toast.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Yeah, and yeah, I believe it's also a delicacy. A
related organism is a delicacy in Japan. So if we
have any listeners out there who've tried tried these dishes
or related dishes, please read it, write in and share.
We'd love to hear your take on it.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
Well, I did not expect things to go in this direction.
I am mighty intrigued. I do want to try this food.
But wait a minute, I'm we got to convict. How
could this be mistaken for an island?
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Okay, so after the breeding is finished, after the predators
have had their fill, after humans have come and harvested
their share of the of the spoils, the rest of it, again,
the breeding is carried out, but apparently the rest of
it then just kind of rots and disintegrates on the
surface of the water into this white oily scum. I
(41:40):
found multiple especially older like Western descriptions clearly describing it
as a scum, an oily scum, And apparently this is
what we could then potentially mistake for an island. I'm guessing,
especially by individuals who are not familiar with the organizm
(42:01):
because you know, obviously there would be locals who would
know about this, because they know what is left behind
after they've gone out and harvested their share of the
pololo worms. But if you didn't know what you're looking at,
you might see like a big sort of gleaming oily
white mass and you might think that it is some
sort of a land mass.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Well, so this reminds me of something we've actually talked
about on the show before, which is pummus rafting phenomenon.
Sometimes after a volcanic eruption in one of these islands,
there will be a great outflow of pummus low density
rocks that actually rocks that float on the surface of
the water and all kind of clump together. And if
you look up pictures of this, it looks extremely weird.
(42:44):
It's like a parking lot floating in the middle of
the ocean. So all of these floating phenomena, Yeah, you
can have a floating vegetation potentially mistaken for something that
you know you should mark as an island on a map.
I guess could imagine a pump us raft though that's
a fairly transient phenomenon related to these volcanic eruptions, and
(43:06):
now we've got to add a worm sex to the list.
Worm sex island.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
Worm sex island. Yeah, something that again would be it
would it would, it would occur every year, but it
wouldn't always be out there, and it seems entirely likely
that the foreigners to the to these seas mind encounter
it and make note of it, and you could end
up with an erroneous island identification. So yeah, I was
not expecting to talk about worm reproduction in this episode,
(43:35):
but that's where the research took us.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
Amazing. But hey, we are not done, are we. We've
got to talk about more sunken lands. So we will
be back next time to explore this topic further.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
That's right. In the meantime, will remind you that stuff.
To Goli Your Mind is primarily a science podcast with
core episodes. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we do lister mails
on Mondays. On Wednesdays we tend to do a short
form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to watch a weird movie
on Weird House Cinema. If you are on social media,
(44:10):
follow our accounts because they are there active once more.
If you use Instagram look us up specifically. Stbym podcast
is our handle. There's an old one that has sunken
beneath the waves of social media, but stbym podcast is
the active one, and I think there's some pretty fun
stuff going up there, so so it's one way to
(44:30):
keep up.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
With this 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 (44:53):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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