December 18, 2025 • 39 mins
The story of Doggerland is pretty fascinating. The idea is that mainland Europe and the UK were connected not only by a land bridge, but a place where plants, animals and even humans, thrived.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is a good
old fashioned episode of Stuff you Should Know. It's got
history as geology has lost lands, it has abbreviations like KYA,
all sorts of great stuff in it.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Oh boy, my friend. If I know Josh Clark loves
something it is submerged or lost.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Lands, it really is.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
I know this kind of thing really really float your boat.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
It does. It floats my submerged land. We're talking about
Dogger Land, by the way, everybody.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
That's right, we should probably just say kind of what
it is first, right before we get into the details.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah, and we've talked about it here there. I could not,
for the life of me remember what episode, but it's
come up once or twice, but I think it bears
repeating for sure.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Yeah, it's a you know, a lost land, a submerged
land mass off the coast of Europe. It's in the
North Sea, probably anywhere from fifty to sixty to one
hundred feet down and it used to be a you know,
it used to be land. It used to connect they
pretty much firmly believe now connect the UK and Europe.
(01:27):
And not only that, but was a land where that
kind of flourished depending on when you're talking about with
plants and animals and even people.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, they think that it's possible. So this was really
populated during the Mesolithic area or era and the area.
They think that this area during the Mesolithic era was
one of the most densely populated places in all of Europe.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
And by the way, did you ever see Taylor Swift
on her area's tour.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I didn't, but I can feel a Taylor Swift area
coming on.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Eventually she through the concert. She sort of walked the
audience through all of her different areas.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
This is my knee, the left one, knees and toes,
knees and toes.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
So yeah, I mean it sounds kind of like, wait,
that's it. There's like a land mass that once connected
the UK and Europe.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
That's enough.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Like you can see somebody making an absurd or obscene
hand motion talk thinking about that, right, but.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
No, listen exactly what you're saying.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Stick with us, because this is it's fantastically interesting. Even
though we know very very little about it. The stuff
we do know is so tantalizing that it's like the
archaeologists who are studying this are just they want to
just say, like, so bad, there's so much stuff down there,
we just know it. But they're they're being deliberate and methodical,
(02:55):
so they're not letting themselves say that. But we can
say it for them.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Yeah, and it's called Doggerland and that's just cool. It
sounds like a movie title or something.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
You know, it does starring Lily Tomlin, you know, the
younger one Alan, No.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Not that young von stup. No, why is her name
con Taylor?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Oh really, she was.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
In a movie called maybe dog Face or something like
that or.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Dog Oh yeah, dog Dogfight.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
No, it doesn't matter. We should probably edit this out.
If we were a different podcast, we would edit this.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Man, I came up with like four or five lilies.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
You got to leave that in, Okay, true, true dah.
But I don't even remember how I got on the
Lily thing.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Well, I said it would be a good movie, and
you reckon that Lily Taylor would be a good Oh
star yet that movie?
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Because you were talking about it's a cool name and
The name comes after the Dogger Bank, which is a
shallow fishing area, very productive fishing area in the North Sea.
And the Dogger Bank is named after a type of
Dutch cod fishing boats that were used for hundreds of
years in the area. So there you go, Doggerland.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
That's right. I hope we got all that right.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
But it's a pretty shallow sea as far as seas go,
about two hundred and twenty thousand square miles, and it
sits in between the UK and Europe, of course, and
because if there was a land bridge that connected those two,
that's where the North Sea would be. It has long
been a very crucial shipping route and trade route. And
as for this story, you know, it's pretty key that
(04:32):
in the nineteen fifties and then sixties gas and oil
reservoirs were found there and companies started licking their chops.
And they will come into play later, oil companies and
gas companies being as being actually in you know, finally
kind of key to helping out science, you know, and
scientists and their explorations.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
So yeah, that will come in later. It's also there's
a lot of shipping that goes on apparently that's a
very ancient thing. People have been shipping things over the
North Sea for a very long time, and then now
it's become a really attractive site for renewable energy, as
we'll see. So the North Sea is very important and
it's been used for a very long time, but its
(05:15):
depths were just unknown, like people hadn't explored it. They
didn't have the means to really.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yeah, even though it's fairly shallow, it's still deep for
back then.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, one hundred feet what are you going to do?
Hold your breath exactly. I mean the moment you get
down on the bottom of you if you come right
back up, it's terrible for exploration holding your breath this. Yeah,
but there were some tantalizing clues that came up over
the years that did strongly suggest that there was something
down there that had once been above the sea's surface.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
That's right. The first thing that happened late nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
They started, you know, better fishing technology came along and
you could fish a little bit deeper. So they started
fishing a little bit deeper, which is great because you
can get you know, a lot more fish down there.
But it was kind of a pain because they started
dragging up what they called moor log, which is, you know, pete,
this kind of nasty clump together pete. And in that
pete sometimes they would find animal bones, not fishbones, but
(06:16):
like mammal bones, and I guess it was a nineteenth
century so it just sort of hassled their fishing progress.
So they would just usually toss them overboard. Occasionally, if
they had some like really well preserved you know, skull
or deer femur or something like that, they might keep it.
But that's when the first sort of whisperings of like
(06:38):
something used to be down there started happening.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Exactly and then in usual fashion, it's worth mentioning H. G. Wells.
It was probably one of the best speculators in the
history of speculative fiction.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
This is pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
He heard about some of those fines and he wrote
a story called the Story of the Stone Age, which
is basically like, there's a continent under the North Sea
between the UK and Europe.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Don't forget right.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
This guy is the guy who in the late nineteenth
century wrote stories about humans sending rockets up into space. Yeah,
and placed the launches at Cape Canaverl. Like, that's how
smart this guy was. As far as seeing in the
future goes, I love it.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Yeah. He's pretty great writer too.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
Interesting, dude, man, we should do one on HG. Wells.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
He deserves his own show, I think. Okay, all right,
all right, moving on, as we crawl through Noah's Woods. Now,
before the nineteenth century and those bones and that morlog
Pete started coming up, there were whispers then, I said,
the first whispers came in the late nineteenth century. It's
not exactly true because during low tide, way back when
(07:53):
the water levels would drop, and some of these folks
living in the UK at the time would see these
tree stumps and this is like medieval times, and they
called it Noah's Woods, with the idea that this was,
you know, possibly the area where Noah from the Bible
lived before God decided to flood the earth because he
was grumpy.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, And here was plane right in your face evidence
of it. So that had stuck around since the medieval age,
and apparently, according to UK or early British low this
is where Robinson Caruso, who was the model for Robin Hood,
emerged from the water and gave Arthur the sword and
(08:34):
the stone.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
That's right, So Noah's Woods was.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Just kind of like a local thing. I'm sure the
churchy types really talked about it more than anybody else,
but scientists hadn't paid much attention to it until a
very forward thinking scientist and his wife, Clement and Eleanor Reid,
came forward and they started looking into it, and they
kind of were the first people to put together Noah's Woods,
(09:01):
the fact that there are tree stumps, weirdly ancient ones
in the sea. People are pulling up animal bones for
terrestrial animals.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Pulling up pretty obvious what's happening.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yeah, they're like, there is something submerge that used to
be above the water, and we think it's a land
bridge that connected the UK and Europe.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, they and I noticed there were a couple of scientists,
married couples that worked on this along the area.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
It's kind this is a golden age for that.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
In nineteen thirteen they published Submerged Forests, which was the
very first study on those woods, and yeah, that's when
they really kind of put it out there and it
was you know, it was the kind of thing where
they didn't have any hard evidence other than these peat samples.
But when they started finding like willow leaves and hazel
(09:57):
and birch and fern. They were like, hey, not only
do I think there was something down there, but it
seems to have existed at least partially at a time.
That was like maybe kind of nice. Yeah, they like, temperature.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Wise, sounds pretty nice. Actually, I'd like to live in
dogger Land, but it wasn't called Doggerland yet, as we'll see.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
So the Reeds had this pretty great theory. Apparently. I
read that they concluded that the only possible explanation for
this was that sea level rise had flooded and sunk
in this land. So they were really red on the money.
But this is a very obscure theory. People weren't paying
much attention to it, even in academic circles. It was
(10:39):
pretty obscure. But then there was a discovery in nineteen
thirty one that really grabbed the archaeologists in the area
by the throat, shook them to their tongues turned blue
and hung out of their mouths, and it said, look
at this, this is important.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Did you say nineteen thirty one, because that's when it
was That's when a trawler called the Kalinda was fishing
off the coast of Norfolk came along and again a
big old chunk of morlog was hauled in in the
net and they were digging through that. And this guy's
got a great name. The skipper of the Clinda's name
was Pilgrim Lockwood.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
So good. I would say that's a hotel check in name,
but it's just a little too eye catching.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
That's too suspicious.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, yeah, it is pretty suspicious.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Actually, yeah, hi, Pilgrim Lockwood checking in. Yeah, okay, buddy,
what's your real name? And who do you think you are?
Speaker 1 (11:34):
So Pilgrim Lockwood is busting up this peete with his shovel,
just like out of a movie. Hits something hard, reaches
in and finds and this is the kind of discovery
that all of a sudden, like you said, everyone's going
to be like, okay, there's really something happening here. Because
it was an eight and a half inch long harpoon head,
a harpoon point carved with hands out of an antler.
(11:59):
But here's the At first they were like, okay, I
mean this is kind of cool, and they even offered
it to the British Museum, but they said, nah, we've
got some harpoons.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
We're all set. We got a couple of them.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Yeah, And the idea was that everyone thought like, hey,
this is probably just was lost over the side of
a boat or something.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
What's the big deal.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah, they're like pretty cool. I mean, like, don't throw
it back on it. Yeah, because it was very clearly
fashioned by humans. I think in addition to just being
smoothed out to be fashioned into a harpoon, I think
it was decorated as well, so there's no arguing that
it was a human artifact. It had been found in
(12:40):
a moorlog so a chunk of pete, and then somebody
along the way, another married couple, Harry and Margaret Godwin, said,
let us see that pete. We have a little hypothesis
we want to test. And they looked at that pete
and they said, everybody, get this. That pete was formed
in a fresh water environment, meaning that it could only
(13:00):
have been formed above the sea's surface on land in
a wetland, but on land, and the harpoon being in
there means that a human was on land above the
sea's surface when they were using it, and it they
lost it in the peat.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Yeah, I mean I picture Margaret Godwin just storming in
the room and saying that didn't fall off of any boat.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
And then even better, the British Museum gets in touch
with Pilgrim Lockwood after this and he's like, well, well,
well look who's come crawling back.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Yeah, that would have been pretty great actually. Yeah. So
they used a pollen analysis to figure this out, and
later on they were able to date this thing in
this harpoon head they found was about fourteen thousand years
old neat, which would place it kind of squarely in
the Mesolithic.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Era, well about toward the beginning of it, I think.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Because this was this is in the area.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
It's a sweee, it's a squishy one. And the other
thing that's so exciting about Doggerland and finding stuff out
about it is we have very little information about Mesolithic
people of this area of the time.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
Okay, okay, everybody.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
In addition to all that chuck, there were some more
things that came up during the twentieth century that were
like this, this is there's something really interesting down there.
They were finding bits of textile. Yeah, they found a
Neanderthal skull fragment that they managed to It was between
seventy thousand and forty thousand years old. We'll talk about
it a little later, but there's a facial reconstruction, you
(14:36):
know they love to do like the three d oh. Yeah,
they have the guy smiling, just a huge, big, sweet
goofy smile. And I thought that was a nice touch.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Yeah, that's always nice. That's like when they recreated what
they thought Jesus would really look like, and he looked
like he was on the Simpsons or something.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Right, or he's doing the eyewink and the double guns.
I've seen that before too.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Oh yeah, that's classic.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
But despite all the fines, kind of throughout the twentieth century,
they still the scientific community still were like, okay, so
there were people there, but like this was just they
were just traveling along the road like nobody lived there.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
They were rambling on.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
They were rambling on through the area and the era.
And maybe we.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Should take a break. Yeah, all right, we'll be right
back with more on dogger Land. All right, So you
(15:44):
mentioned before the break at some point that Doggerland was
not named Doggerland. At this point, it would be I
think nineteen ninety eight before that name would finally be coined.
And again, this was still like just sort of the
scientific community that was pretty excited. Like even the broader
archaeological community was still not super pumped on this area yet.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
They were studying it in the seventies.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
But in the nineteen ninety eight a archaeologist name Brionny
Coles put out a paper called Doggerland colon a speculative
survey wherein And this is what made the scientific community
kind of say, like, ooh, what's she talking about. She
named it Doggerland after that sand bank, the Dogger Bank,
like you were talking about.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
And she's the first one that.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Said, you know what, everyone, I think people like lived here,
and I think it was kind of pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah, this was in a land bridge. This is essentially
like it was an extension of the European continent and
a lot of people lived there and a lot of
stuff happened there.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
And maybe she busted into the room and said that
was no land bridge.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Yeah. So yeah, and there's this this collection of archaeologists
and scholars and it's getting increasingly elbow to elbow in
there and hot because there's no ac for some reason
in this room. Okay, and it's July, and there's a
lot of rotting fish in the in the room too
for some reason.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Yeah, that's a weird edition. Everyone wondered about this fish.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Yeah. And then somebody is eating leftovers of Vietnamese food
and that's loaded with shrimp paste.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Oh man, that shrimp paste.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
And then there's one guy who's got leather patches on
his elbows and it's chafing the people on either side
of him. Oh God, be wearing short sleeves.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Yeah, Neil always wears that thing.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
So it's really difficult to get across how groundbreaking Briany
Cole's study was because she was working with really minimal information.
I saw that she went to the extent of like
collecting anecdotes from old fishermen who had brought up stuff
(17:59):
where they were trawling, like, and she took all this
and put it together, and not only like just wrote
a book like hey, get this, this is what's really
down there. She created maps of what Doggerland would have
looked like, not just once, but throughout different areas of
the time period that it was above water. So what
(18:22):
she did was an amazing triumph of intellect. Like it's
really tough to get across, Like, how big a deal
what she did was, and that's why people started to
get into Doggerlank because it was so convincing too.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Yeah, for sure, you know, these these different little pictures
of different points in time. She said, Hey, I think
during the Paleolithic it might have gone all the way
from the Shetland Islands of Scotland to the Netherlands. Maybe
I think during the Holocene period that sea began to
rise and it became an island for a while. And
(18:58):
then finally she put it at fifty five hundred BC.
She figured it disappeared entirely. We've seen anywhere between five
thousand and seven thousand years ago is what people speculate.
But she even despite all that, was like, hey, this
is just I'm speculating here, everybody. Much later, a archaeologist
(19:18):
named Vincent Gaffney, along with a graduate student named Simon
Fitch Fitch or Finch, yeah, Fitch in two thousand and
one got on the scene, and after about eight years
of work, Gaffney said, you know what, she was reasonably
correct with all this stuff.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Yeah, nice, nice work.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
And Gaffney was in a really good position to say
that because, like you said, he worked for years and
years and years on a project that he had come
up with with Simon Fitch. That was pretty clever. Yeah,
they were like, there are a lot of oil exploration
companies that have been like mapping the seafloor of the
North Sea for decades. Now, surely they have some amazing
(19:58):
data sets that they'll share with us. So they started
going around to oil companies and they finally found one, actually,
Petroleum Geo Services, and PGS said sure, we'll share, We'll
share a little bit of our undersea mapping with you,
and they gave them data for twenty three thousand square
kilometers of the North Sea and Vincent Gaffney feinted, but
(20:20):
luckily Simon Fitch was there to catch him. And that
was just that was what Simon Fitch is all about.
He's always there to catch you.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Yeah, And this was a situation where like to the
oil company, they were like, let's just give him a
little bit of our stuff and maybe they'll stop calling us.
Archaeology Magazine later called that the largest geophysical survey ever
made available to archaeologists.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
So that's sort of the.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Difference between the sort of the oil company sector and
the scientific community and what they consider a little bit
of data.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Yeah, and this was really groundbreaking for underwater archaeology because
this was underwater archaeology this point was like dive down
in scuba gear, hope you find something there. There were
some techniques where you can actually kind of excavate something
that's close to the surface. They have big vacuums that
they go through the silt that's taken up on board
(21:13):
the ship above. So it's not like it was just
completely just a concept at the time, but this really
opened it up, this underwater mapping. But Simon Fitch and
Vincent Gaffney found out these maps are the resolutions not
enough to be like there's a site, there's a site,
a look that skeletons waving at us, let's go investigate there,
(21:35):
but it was enough to give it give them a
big picture of Doggerland and it was very clear that
this was not just some land bridge. This was Yeah.
Again like it essentially a new country that they had
discovered under the sea, and they were able to match
that with existing finds. Yeah, like they're like, well, there's
this masted on skull found over here, and that makes
(21:59):
sense that it would be here, so let's kind of
look for humans over there. That's the kind of technique
that they managed to come up with.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
And in the end they basically said, we think this
was not only were there people here, but they think
it was quote a significant Mesolithic population. And you know,
it was, like you said, it was pretty groundbreaking. I
thought we did an episode on underwater.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Archaeology, but I think.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
It might have just been that I wrote that article
for HowStuffWorks dot Com back in the day.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Oh we should do that then, Eh, No, okay.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
I don't know if it was something I wrote. Not
sure it's.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Now are You've written tons of good stuff?
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Oh you're sweet in twenty twenty two, well, I guess
we should mention. In twenty fourteen, Gaffney started working at
the University of Bradford and he founded the Submerged Landscape
Research Group there because he was dogged about Doggerland. And
then eventually in twenty twenty two, I guess.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Seven this years later.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Eight years later he joined the Unpathed Waters Research Project
and that was a pretty cool initiative to make the
maritime history of the United Kingdom just kind of put
it out there for the public to digest.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Yeah, so did you check this map out.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Yeahs cool, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
It is. So the resolution is it's very like Pitfall.
It's that level of bit resolution. The reason why is
because if they took all the data that they actually
have and rendered it in some sort of way that
looked kind of whiz bang, it would crash your computer
the moment you started to try to load it, right. Yeah,
(23:38):
So they had to because there's so much information that
they have, they had to kind of narrow it back
down into that kind of lower resolution version. But the
stuff that it does is amazing. Like you can go
forward in time, backward in time, you can see the
sea level rise and fall. You can actually control people
by setting up a camp and then sitting back and
(23:59):
watching what they do. And if there's like a caribou
or a moose or something nearby, they'll go kill it
and then they process the carcass and that just does
all this different super cool stuff. It's definitely worth checking out.
The Unpathed Waters, undreamed sure Lines.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
I think, wow, that's a very pretty name.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
It is.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Uh should we take another break and talk about what
was there? Uh?
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Yeah, let's take let's take that break, all right, Chuck.
(24:47):
So ever since Briany Coles came up with the dogger
Land Speculative Maps, and Vincent Gaffney and Simon Finch and
all of the projects that they've worked on have have
you know, improved that information. In addition to all that,
more and more artifacts have been coming up, and apparently
there's a good working relationship between archaeologists who are studying
(25:10):
Doggerland and the trawling fishermen who bring in these fines.
Because before it was like, hey, check out this, this
uh what they call the moorlogs, this big chunk of
and look there's a probably what a mastet on tooth,
is that what that is? And they'd say, well, where'd
you get this? Andy'd be like, I don't know. I
was over somewhere in the East North Sea and that
(25:32):
didn't help very much. But now that they've kind of
formed this relationship with these fishermen, the fishermen are like, well,
here's the here's the GPS data for where we pulled
that up. And now that our underwater archaeologists can go
and look and say like, yep, this this seems like
a good site to explore the problem is this the
the this area is so covered in sediment that even
(25:55):
for underwater archaeology. This is a challenging place to find
artifacts because there's so many rivers that flow into the
North Sea, and unlike rivers that flow into the ocean,
that sediment doesn't just disperse. It gets trapped between the
UK and Europe, so it just settles and there's a
lot of sediment on top.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Yeah, very messy scene, but nevertheless they have persevered and
learned a lot about what was there through these spines.
In twenty seventeen, they were trying to you know, they're
trying to figure out what plants and animals were there,
and they figured Hey, during the Younger Dryas, which we
all know now because we did that episode very recently
(26:36):
on the Younger Dryas.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
That was a happy episode too.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
They said Doggerland was a tundra. It was just ferns
and shrubs and grasses. The climate started warming over the
course of thousands of years and during the preboreal period,
the Holocene, there were birch and pine trees and all
of a sudden it went from a tundra to a forest.
And then later during the actual boreal period, birds got
(27:00):
replaced by hazel and you got these freshwater lakes which
is you know, early on, remember when they found that
they did the pollen analysis and they found the freshwater evidence,
so that kind of explains that. And as far as
the animals living there, that is shifting along with the
climate basically over the period of you know, tens and
hundreds of thousands of years.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Yeah, because those animals were adapted to the ice age,
and so when the younger drives was like ice age
is back. Those animals hadn't died out yet, so they're like, awesome,
we got another thirteen hundred years. But after the younger
dryas ended and the ice age finally came to an
end about eleven six hundred years ago, the things like
the wooly rhinoceros and mammoths and reindeer had really nowhere
(27:45):
to go and largely died off or else migrated northward
and they were replaced by while boar birds came along,
which is always a good thing. Otters showed up if yeah,
if you've ever seen otter holding hands with another otter,
you're glad that those otters showed up. Beavers one of
our favorite animal episodes. It was just a huge change
(28:08):
in not only the vegetation but also the animal life,
and the animal life also included humans too.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
I mean we mentioned there were people there, and there
were the first hominids there. Well they weren't human actually,
so I sort of misspoke. But they were called Homo antecessor,
which was the predecessor to humans, and they were there
about eight hundred thousand years ago. And then finally, you know,
we mentioned that Neanderthal fragment skull fragment they moved in
(28:36):
when Doggerland was a tundra, and I guess it was
two thousand and one when they found that skull fragment.
This is off the coast of the Netherlands and they
named this one. I love it when they name these,
you know, ancient humans. But I'm not even going to
try and pronounce it. It's kr i j n. I'm
not sure how you would say that in Dutch.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
I saw that it was one syllable, so I'm not
sure either. But it's not krijan like I was saying
that Jay's got to be silent, right, it does something weird, Yeah, it.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Does something weird. But they reckon that fossil. They dated
it to about seventy thousand years old, and they said
this guy probably ate a lot of meat as his diet,
maybe some fish, but definitely was chouned down on some
pretty good food. And then you know, they found all
sorts of stuff over the years on the coast of
the Netherlands. Netherlands, just like a bone point or an
(29:29):
axe or any kind of carved pointed you know, arrowhead
or harpoon head would just wash up on shore.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Yeah, this is some of the evidence that we have
that Neanderthals were pretty smart and actually well adapted or
suited to cold climates. So they were still around during
the younger dryest humans had kind of come along before
the younger dryas the younger dryis came along, they beat
him back. And then finally after the younger dryas, Homo
(29:56):
sapiens really start to show up. Yeah, I think as
early as I fourteen thousand years ago. And again this
is the beginning of the Mesolithic in Europe, and they
were hunter gatherers. They just basically migrated westward from continental
Europe because they could get there by walking from Europe
(30:16):
to the UK. And they were like this Doggerland place
is pretty nice. We're gonna stick around here.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Yeah, So you know, for a while they were migrating around,
following the animals, going where the food was. But they said,
you know, they're basically like anyone else from that time
in that place, from that era and area. Man, this
is really just fitting together like a glove.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
You know, I love it.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
They were, you know, carving things from stone, carving things
from antlers we have direct evidence of both, and animal
bones that were wearing animal skins. But they said they
think eventually, like you said, they decided like, hey, this
place is nice, let's set up camp here and maybe
even farmed there.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yeah, so this is where the transition from the Mesolithic
to the Neolithic happens. It's pretty much what they consider
the change or the beginning of the Neolithic was when
people started farming, and that happened on dogger Land. This
is where they essentially found the place that they could
grow crops. It was warmer then around this time than
(31:16):
it was than it is now in that area, so
they were very easily raising crops, figuring it out as
they went along. So that because they were raising crops,
they were more sedentary, which means that their populations grew
a little larger. So some of the things they're starting
to find are like evidence of villages. There's a really
amazing underwater archaeological site called Boldener Cliff off the Isle
(31:40):
of Wight, and they've found what seems to be like
a dock that probably went out into an ancient river.
There was like burials there, houses and pits, like, there's
a lot of really cool stuff. And this is a
really tantalizing view of and I can't use that word
enough in this episode, tantalizing. This is a tantalizing view
of all the stuff that's probably probably underwater throughout Doggerland.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, and I guess we should talk about why it's
underwater this, you know, I think we already kind of
gave it away that it didn't happen all at once.
It happened over hundreds of thousands of years, little by
little glaciers of melting.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Sea levels are rising.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
And there's you know, like I said, estimates anywhere from
five thousand to eight thousand years ago or seven thousand
rather of when people think it finally like you know,
was completely submerged, and it may not, you know, it
may have become so uninhabitable, you know, long before that,
maybe even thousands of years before that.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Why well, I mean, there's a couple of theories.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
There's a tsunami theory that says about eight thousand years
ago there were a bunch of massive tsunamis that you know,
pummeled the coast of Britain and completely wiped out Doggerland,
and they were caused by these submarine landslides in the
Norwegian Sea called the Storrega slides. But Gaffney was like,
I don't think.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
It was that.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Actually, I think it was a climate change because I
think Doggerland itself, like he didn't doubt the tsunamis happened,
but he said, I think Doggerland itself was kind of
protected by the wooded, hilly terrain.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Yeah, but still a lot of people would have died
because they think that the tsunami swept twenty five miles inland,
which is yes, a lot of settlements that you can
take out twenty five miles in And I don't know
if you remember, but in our Younger Driest episode we
talked about isostatic rebound or adjustment, where the glaciers and
ice sheets were so heavy that they actually pushed the
(33:36):
earth downward and it took some areas of land down
with it, like Scotland, but it raised other areas up,
kind of like if you put a bowling ball on
a mattress, which you know you usually do, and one
of the areas that got raised up was Doggerland, right,
So when the glaciers melted, Doggerland started to sink. And
then in addition to that, the glaciers melting made the
(33:57):
sea levels rise, which is why this stuff was happening
so quickly. They think that possibly sea level rise was
happening as fast as a meter over a century, which
doesn't sound like much, but right now the sea level
rise we're worried about is happening like thirty centimeters a century,
so that is a really fast sea level rise. So
(34:18):
it's not like it would have caught people off guard,
but their way of life would have been disrupted pretty
significantly by the tsunamis and the sea level rise.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Yeah, I saw even you know, potentially up to two
meters per century. So that's you know, super fast.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Super that's like twice as fast at least. So as
the as the sea levels rose and Doggerland sank, Scotland,
by the way, is still rising. The land wasn't just
some flat mass there were highlands, there were hills and
all that. So little by little it was submerged, and
they think that the last bit was probably Dogger's Bank,
(34:52):
because so it's one of the most shallow parts of
the North Sea. And by the time it was completely submerged,
all the people who had moved upward in the British
Isles were now officially British. They were cut off from
Europe now for the first time. Like you said, that
was between five thousand and seven thousand years ago.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
These days there's sort of a new threat to the
idea of a lot more science happening there because of
those wind farms you mentioned early on. It's a pretty
great area for wind farming, but it's threatening, you know,
parts of the North Sea. Like we said, it's fairly
shallow as far as seas go, and there's lots of
great wind there. And the plan is by twenty thirty
(35:36):
that the southern part of the North Sea is just
going to be riddled with wind farms. The downside of that,
I mean, this great renewable energy, but the downside is
that this stuff is really disruptive to the ecology there
and certainly disruptive to all those dogger Land sites that
they're still hoping to explore.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Yeah, I was reading that because the North Sea is
so shallow, the kind of wind farms that they can
put in can actually be bolted to the bedrock, which
is way cheaper than like the floating version. So they're
salivating over putting wind farms there. But again, that means
that they're bolting wind turbines to Doggerland, which is nay
(36:15):
good for the archaeological aspect. It's naggd right, that's exactly right,
So they don't. I mean, it seems like these wind
farms are going on. Stupid wind farms, always ruining the
environment for everybody. Yeah, and I don't know that anybody's
going to be able to change it, because everybody thinks
Dogland's cool, but not necessarily disrupt progress as far as
(36:39):
renewable energy goes cool. Yeah, so I guess that's it
for Doggerlin.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
Chuck said, that's right, which means everybody, it's time for
listener mail.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
This is from Andy. Hey, guys, been listening since COVID
twenty twenty. I've heard your entire library, and I've almost
agreed with everything that Chuck says. I think it was
a title brother from another mother. We're close in age,
so we have similar childhood memories. And this morning, when
Chuck brought up the guitar solo from my Sharona, I
knew that we were made from the same cloth, because
(37:14):
for many years now I've touted that guitar solo as
my most favorite.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
Solo of all time. Wow, I'm glad here, though.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
I'm not alone. So thank you Chuck for being like
a brother to me. On another note, you failed to
mention the true father of AM radio guys, Nikola Tesla.
Tesla actually patented the technology before Marconi did, make him
the actual father of radio. Marconi quote bothered end quote
Tesla's technology and ran with it. And he was just
(37:41):
a much better businessman than Tesla, so he was able
to monetize the technology, earning him the notoriety that he
has today.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
Is the father of radio.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
So Jefferson's Starships should have said, Tesla plays the mambo.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Tesla played the mamba.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
It works.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
It would have worked. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Read many books on Nikola Tesla and his inventions and
find him one of the most fascinating men of all time.
Without him we might not have had such things as
the remote control of robotics and wireless transmission.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Thanks for everything, guys.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
You make my commute to work relaxing and educational three
days of the week.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
And that is Andy McDonald.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Thanks Andy, that was a good email. Surely then, if
you've listened to our back catalog you're aware of the
Electricity Wars we went over with Edison Tesla, but I
feel like Tesla could definitely stand his own episode two.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Maybe, Okay, Well, let's see if you want to get
in touch with this, like Andy, you can do that,
Send us an email and say whatever you want. Send
it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Yeah,
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is a good
old fashioned episode of Stuff you Should Know. It's got
history as geology has lost lands, it has abbreviations like KYA,
all sorts of great stuff in it.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Oh boy, my friend. If I know Josh Clark loves
something it is submerged or lost.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Lands, it really is.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
I know this kind of thing really really float your boat.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
It does. It floats my submerged land. We're talking about
Dogger Land, by the way, everybody.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
That's right, we should probably just say kind of what
it is first, right before we get into the details.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah, and we've talked about it here there. I could not,
for the life of me remember what episode, but it's
come up once or twice, but I think it bears
repeating for sure.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Yeah, it's a you know, a lost land, a submerged
land mass off the coast of Europe. It's in the
North Sea, probably anywhere from fifty to sixty to one
hundred feet down and it used to be a you know,
it used to be land. It used to connect they
pretty much firmly believe now connect the UK and Europe.
(01:27):
And not only that, but was a land where that
kind of flourished depending on when you're talking about with
plants and animals and even people.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, they think that it's possible. So this was really
populated during the Mesolithic area or era and the area.
They think that this area during the Mesolithic era was
one of the most densely populated places in all of Europe.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
And by the way, did you ever see Taylor Swift
on her area's tour.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I didn't, but I can feel a Taylor Swift area
coming on.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Eventually she through the concert. She sort of walked the
audience through all of her different areas.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
This is my knee, the left one, knees and toes,
knees and toes.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
So yeah, I mean it sounds kind of like, wait,
that's it. There's like a land mass that once connected
the UK and Europe.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
That's enough.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Like you can see somebody making an absurd or obscene
hand motion talk thinking about that, right, but.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
No, listen exactly what you're saying.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Stick with us, because this is it's fantastically interesting. Even
though we know very very little about it. The stuff
we do know is so tantalizing that it's like the
archaeologists who are studying this are just they want to
just say, like, so bad, there's so much stuff down there,
we just know it. But they're they're being deliberate and methodical,
(02:55):
so they're not letting themselves say that. But we can
say it for them.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Yeah, and it's called Doggerland and that's just cool. It
sounds like a movie title or something.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
You know, it does starring Lily Tomlin, you know, the
younger one Alan, No.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Not that young von stup. No, why is her name
con Taylor?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Oh really, she was.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
In a movie called maybe dog Face or something like
that or.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Dog Oh yeah, dog Dogfight.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
No, it doesn't matter. We should probably edit this out.
If we were a different podcast, we would edit this.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Man, I came up with like four or five lilies.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
You got to leave that in, Okay, true, true dah.
But I don't even remember how I got on the
Lily thing.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Well, I said it would be a good movie, and
you reckon that Lily Taylor would be a good Oh
star yet that movie?
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Because you were talking about it's a cool name and
The name comes after the Dogger Bank, which is a
shallow fishing area, very productive fishing area in the North Sea.
And the Dogger Bank is named after a type of
Dutch cod fishing boats that were used for hundreds of
years in the area. So there you go, Doggerland.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
That's right. I hope we got all that right.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
But it's a pretty shallow sea as far as seas go,
about two hundred and twenty thousand square miles, and it
sits in between the UK and Europe, of course, and
because if there was a land bridge that connected those two,
that's where the North Sea would be. It has long
been a very crucial shipping route and trade route. And
as for this story, you know, it's pretty key that
(04:32):
in the nineteen fifties and then sixties gas and oil
reservoirs were found there and companies started licking their chops.
And they will come into play later, oil companies and
gas companies being as being actually in you know, finally
kind of key to helping out science, you know, and
scientists and their explorations.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
So yeah, that will come in later. It's also there's
a lot of shipping that goes on apparently that's a
very ancient thing. People have been shipping things over the
North Sea for a very long time, and then now
it's become a really attractive site for renewable energy, as
we'll see. So the North Sea is very important and
it's been used for a very long time, but its
(05:15):
depths were just unknown, like people hadn't explored it. They
didn't have the means to really.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yeah, even though it's fairly shallow, it's still deep for
back then.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, one hundred feet what are you going to do?
Hold your breath exactly. I mean the moment you get
down on the bottom of you if you come right
back up, it's terrible for exploration holding your breath this. Yeah,
but there were some tantalizing clues that came up over
the years that did strongly suggest that there was something
down there that had once been above the sea's surface.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
That's right. The first thing that happened late nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
They started, you know, better fishing technology came along and
you could fish a little bit deeper. So they started
fishing a little bit deeper, which is great because you
can get you know, a lot more fish down there.
But it was kind of a pain because they started
dragging up what they called moor log, which is, you know, pete,
this kind of nasty clump together pete. And in that
pete sometimes they would find animal bones, not fishbones, but
(06:16):
like mammal bones, and I guess it was a nineteenth
century so it just sort of hassled their fishing progress.
So they would just usually toss them overboard. Occasionally, if
they had some like really well preserved you know, skull
or deer femur or something like that, they might keep it.
But that's when the first sort of whisperings of like
(06:38):
something used to be down there started happening.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Exactly and then in usual fashion, it's worth mentioning H. G. Wells.
It was probably one of the best speculators in the
history of speculative fiction.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
This is pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
He heard about some of those fines and he wrote
a story called the Story of the Stone Age, which
is basically like, there's a continent under the North Sea
between the UK and Europe.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Don't forget right.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
This guy is the guy who in the late nineteenth
century wrote stories about humans sending rockets up into space. Yeah,
and placed the launches at Cape Canaverl. Like, that's how
smart this guy was. As far as seeing in the
future goes, I love it.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Yeah. He's pretty great writer too.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
Interesting, dude, man, we should do one on HG. Wells.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
He deserves his own show, I think. Okay, all right,
all right, moving on, as we crawl through Noah's Woods. Now,
before the nineteenth century and those bones and that morlog
Pete started coming up, there were whispers then, I said,
the first whispers came in the late nineteenth century. It's
not exactly true because during low tide, way back when
(07:53):
the water levels would drop, and some of these folks
living in the UK at the time would see these
tree stumps and this is like medieval times, and they
called it Noah's Woods, with the idea that this was,
you know, possibly the area where Noah from the Bible
lived before God decided to flood the earth because he
was grumpy.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, And here was plane right in your face evidence
of it. So that had stuck around since the medieval age,
and apparently, according to UK or early British low this
is where Robinson Caruso, who was the model for Robin Hood,
emerged from the water and gave Arthur the sword and
(08:34):
the stone.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
That's right, So Noah's Woods was.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Just kind of like a local thing. I'm sure the
churchy types really talked about it more than anybody else,
but scientists hadn't paid much attention to it until a
very forward thinking scientist and his wife, Clement and Eleanor Reid,
came forward and they started looking into it, and they
kind of were the first people to put together Noah's Woods,
(09:01):
the fact that there are tree stumps, weirdly ancient ones
in the sea. People are pulling up animal bones for
terrestrial animals.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Pulling up pretty obvious what's happening.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yeah, they're like, there is something submerge that used to
be above the water, and we think it's a land
bridge that connected the UK and Europe.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, they and I noticed there were a couple of scientists,
married couples that worked on this along the area.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
It's kind this is a golden age for that.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
In nineteen thirteen they published Submerged Forests, which was the
very first study on those woods, and yeah, that's when
they really kind of put it out there and it
was you know, it was the kind of thing where
they didn't have any hard evidence other than these peat samples.
But when they started finding like willow leaves and hazel
(09:57):
and birch and fern. They were like, hey, not only
do I think there was something down there, but it
seems to have existed at least partially at a time.
That was like maybe kind of nice. Yeah, they like, temperature.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Wise, sounds pretty nice. Actually, I'd like to live in
dogger Land, but it wasn't called Doggerland yet, as we'll see.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
So the Reeds had this pretty great theory. Apparently. I
read that they concluded that the only possible explanation for
this was that sea level rise had flooded and sunk
in this land. So they were really red on the money.
But this is a very obscure theory. People weren't paying
much attention to it, even in academic circles. It was
(10:39):
pretty obscure. But then there was a discovery in nineteen
thirty one that really grabbed the archaeologists in the area
by the throat, shook them to their tongues turned blue
and hung out of their mouths, and it said, look
at this, this is important.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Did you say nineteen thirty one, because that's when it
was That's when a trawler called the Kalinda was fishing
off the coast of Norfolk came along and again a
big old chunk of morlog was hauled in in the
net and they were digging through that. And this guy's
got a great name. The skipper of the Clinda's name
was Pilgrim Lockwood.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
So good. I would say that's a hotel check in name,
but it's just a little too eye catching.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
That's too suspicious.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, yeah, it is pretty suspicious.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Actually, yeah, hi, Pilgrim Lockwood checking in. Yeah, okay, buddy,
what's your real name? And who do you think you are?
Speaker 1 (11:34):
So Pilgrim Lockwood is busting up this peete with his shovel,
just like out of a movie. Hits something hard, reaches
in and finds and this is the kind of discovery
that all of a sudden, like you said, everyone's going
to be like, okay, there's really something happening here. Because
it was an eight and a half inch long harpoon head,
a harpoon point carved with hands out of an antler.
(11:59):
But here's the At first they were like, okay, I
mean this is kind of cool, and they even offered
it to the British Museum, but they said, nah, we've
got some harpoons.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
We're all set. We got a couple of them.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Yeah, And the idea was that everyone thought like, hey,
this is probably just was lost over the side of
a boat or something.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
What's the big deal.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah, they're like pretty cool. I mean, like, don't throw
it back on it. Yeah, because it was very clearly
fashioned by humans. I think in addition to just being
smoothed out to be fashioned into a harpoon, I think
it was decorated as well, so there's no arguing that
it was a human artifact. It had been found in
(12:40):
a moorlog so a chunk of pete, and then somebody
along the way, another married couple, Harry and Margaret Godwin, said,
let us see that pete. We have a little hypothesis
we want to test. And they looked at that pete
and they said, everybody, get this. That pete was formed
in a fresh water environment, meaning that it could only
(13:00):
have been formed above the sea's surface on land in
a wetland, but on land, and the harpoon being in
there means that a human was on land above the
sea's surface when they were using it, and it they
lost it in the peat.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Yeah, I mean I picture Margaret Godwin just storming in
the room and saying that didn't fall off of any boat.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
And then even better, the British Museum gets in touch
with Pilgrim Lockwood after this and he's like, well, well,
well look who's come crawling back.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Yeah, that would have been pretty great actually. Yeah. So
they used a pollen analysis to figure this out, and
later on they were able to date this thing in
this harpoon head they found was about fourteen thousand years
old neat, which would place it kind of squarely in
the Mesolithic.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Era, well about toward the beginning of it, I think.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Because this was this is in the area.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
It's a sweee, it's a squishy one. And the other
thing that's so exciting about Doggerland and finding stuff out
about it is we have very little information about Mesolithic
people of this area of the time.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
Okay, okay, everybody.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
In addition to all that chuck, there were some more
things that came up during the twentieth century that were
like this, this is there's something really interesting down there.
They were finding bits of textile. Yeah, they found a
Neanderthal skull fragment that they managed to It was between
seventy thousand and forty thousand years old. We'll talk about
it a little later, but there's a facial reconstruction, you
(14:36):
know they love to do like the three d oh. Yeah,
they have the guy smiling, just a huge, big, sweet
goofy smile. And I thought that was a nice touch.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Yeah, that's always nice. That's like when they recreated what
they thought Jesus would really look like, and he looked
like he was on the Simpsons or something.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Right, or he's doing the eyewink and the double guns.
I've seen that before too.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Oh yeah, that's classic.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
But despite all the fines, kind of throughout the twentieth century,
they still the scientific community still were like, okay, so
there were people there, but like this was just they
were just traveling along the road like nobody lived there.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
They were rambling on.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
They were rambling on through the area and the era.
And maybe we.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Should take a break. Yeah, all right, we'll be right
back with more on dogger Land. All right, So you
(15:44):
mentioned before the break at some point that Doggerland was
not named Doggerland. At this point, it would be I
think nineteen ninety eight before that name would finally be coined.
And again, this was still like just sort of the
scientific community that was pretty excited. Like even the broader
archaeological community was still not super pumped on this area yet.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
They were studying it in the seventies.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
But in the nineteen ninety eight a archaeologist name Brionny
Coles put out a paper called Doggerland colon a speculative
survey wherein And this is what made the scientific community
kind of say, like, ooh, what's she talking about. She
named it Doggerland after that sand bank, the Dogger Bank,
like you were talking about.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
And she's the first one that.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Said, you know what, everyone, I think people like lived here,
and I think it was kind of pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah, this was in a land bridge. This is essentially
like it was an extension of the European continent and
a lot of people lived there and a lot of
stuff happened there.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
And maybe she busted into the room and said that
was no land bridge.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Yeah. So yeah, and there's this this collection of archaeologists
and scholars and it's getting increasingly elbow to elbow in
there and hot because there's no ac for some reason
in this room. Okay, and it's July, and there's a
lot of rotting fish in the in the room too
for some reason.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Yeah, that's a weird edition. Everyone wondered about this fish.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Yeah. And then somebody is eating leftovers of Vietnamese food
and that's loaded with shrimp paste.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Oh man, that shrimp paste.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
And then there's one guy who's got leather patches on
his elbows and it's chafing the people on either side
of him. Oh God, be wearing short sleeves.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Yeah, Neil always wears that thing.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
So it's really difficult to get across how groundbreaking Briany
Cole's study was because she was working with really minimal information.
I saw that she went to the extent of like
collecting anecdotes from old fishermen who had brought up stuff
(17:59):
where they were trawling, like, and she took all this
and put it together, and not only like just wrote
a book like hey, get this, this is what's really
down there. She created maps of what Doggerland would have
looked like, not just once, but throughout different areas of
the time period that it was above water. So what
(18:22):
she did was an amazing triumph of intellect. Like it's
really tough to get across, Like, how big a deal
what she did was, and that's why people started to
get into Doggerlank because it was so convincing too.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Yeah, for sure, you know, these these different little pictures
of different points in time. She said, Hey, I think
during the Paleolithic it might have gone all the way
from the Shetland Islands of Scotland to the Netherlands. Maybe
I think during the Holocene period that sea began to
rise and it became an island for a while. And
(18:58):
then finally she put it at fifty five hundred BC.
She figured it disappeared entirely. We've seen anywhere between five
thousand and seven thousand years ago is what people speculate.
But she even despite all that, was like, hey, this
is just I'm speculating here, everybody. Much later, a archaeologist
(19:18):
named Vincent Gaffney, along with a graduate student named Simon
Fitch Fitch or Finch, yeah, Fitch in two thousand and
one got on the scene, and after about eight years
of work, Gaffney said, you know what, she was reasonably
correct with all this stuff.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Yeah, nice, nice work.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
And Gaffney was in a really good position to say
that because, like you said, he worked for years and
years and years on a project that he had come
up with with Simon Fitch. That was pretty clever. Yeah,
they were like, there are a lot of oil exploration
companies that have been like mapping the seafloor of the
North Sea for decades. Now, surely they have some amazing
(19:58):
data sets that they'll share with us. So they started
going around to oil companies and they finally found one, actually,
Petroleum Geo Services, and PGS said sure, we'll share, We'll
share a little bit of our undersea mapping with you,
and they gave them data for twenty three thousand square
kilometers of the North Sea and Vincent Gaffney feinted, but
(20:20):
luckily Simon Fitch was there to catch him. And that
was just that was what Simon Fitch is all about.
He's always there to catch you.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Yeah, And this was a situation where like to the
oil company, they were like, let's just give him a
little bit of our stuff and maybe they'll stop calling us.
Archaeology Magazine later called that the largest geophysical survey ever
made available to archaeologists.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
So that's sort of the.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Difference between the sort of the oil company sector and
the scientific community and what they consider a little bit
of data.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Yeah, and this was really groundbreaking for underwater archaeology because
this was underwater archaeology this point was like dive down
in scuba gear, hope you find something there. There were
some techniques where you can actually kind of excavate something
that's close to the surface. They have big vacuums that
they go through the silt that's taken up on board
(21:13):
the ship above. So it's not like it was just
completely just a concept at the time, but this really
opened it up, this underwater mapping. But Simon Fitch and
Vincent Gaffney found out these maps are the resolutions not
enough to be like there's a site, there's a site,
a look that skeletons waving at us, let's go investigate there,
(21:35):
but it was enough to give it give them a
big picture of Doggerland and it was very clear that
this was not just some land bridge. This was Yeah.
Again like it essentially a new country that they had
discovered under the sea, and they were able to match
that with existing finds. Yeah, like they're like, well, there's
this masted on skull found over here, and that makes
(21:59):
sense that it would be here, so let's kind of
look for humans over there. That's the kind of technique
that they managed to come up with.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
And in the end they basically said, we think this
was not only were there people here, but they think
it was quote a significant Mesolithic population. And you know,
it was, like you said, it was pretty groundbreaking. I
thought we did an episode on underwater.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Archaeology, but I think.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
It might have just been that I wrote that article
for HowStuffWorks dot Com back in the day.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Oh we should do that then, Eh, No, okay.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
I don't know if it was something I wrote. Not
sure it's.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Now are You've written tons of good stuff?
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Oh you're sweet in twenty twenty two, well, I guess
we should mention. In twenty fourteen, Gaffney started working at
the University of Bradford and he founded the Submerged Landscape
Research Group there because he was dogged about Doggerland. And
then eventually in twenty twenty two, I guess.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Seven this years later.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Eight years later he joined the Unpathed Waters Research Project
and that was a pretty cool initiative to make the
maritime history of the United Kingdom just kind of put
it out there for the public to digest.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Yeah, so did you check this map out.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Yeahs cool, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
It is. So the resolution is it's very like Pitfall.
It's that level of bit resolution. The reason why is
because if they took all the data that they actually
have and rendered it in some sort of way that
looked kind of whiz bang, it would crash your computer
the moment you started to try to load it, right. Yeah,
(23:38):
So they had to because there's so much information that
they have, they had to kind of narrow it back
down into that kind of lower resolution version. But the
stuff that it does is amazing. Like you can go
forward in time, backward in time, you can see the
sea level rise and fall. You can actually control people
by setting up a camp and then sitting back and
(23:59):
watching what they do. And if there's like a caribou
or a moose or something nearby, they'll go kill it
and then they process the carcass and that just does
all this different super cool stuff. It's definitely worth checking out.
The Unpathed Waters, undreamed sure Lines.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
I think, wow, that's a very pretty name.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
It is.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Uh should we take another break and talk about what
was there? Uh?
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Yeah, let's take let's take that break, all right, Chuck.
(24:47):
So ever since Briany Coles came up with the dogger
Land Speculative Maps, and Vincent Gaffney and Simon Finch and
all of the projects that they've worked on have have
you know, improved that information. In addition to all that,
more and more artifacts have been coming up, and apparently
there's a good working relationship between archaeologists who are studying
(25:10):
Doggerland and the trawling fishermen who bring in these fines.
Because before it was like, hey, check out this, this
uh what they call the moorlogs, this big chunk of
and look there's a probably what a mastet on tooth,
is that what that is? And they'd say, well, where'd
you get this? Andy'd be like, I don't know. I
was over somewhere in the East North Sea and that
(25:32):
didn't help very much. But now that they've kind of
formed this relationship with these fishermen, the fishermen are like, well,
here's the here's the GPS data for where we pulled
that up. And now that our underwater archaeologists can go
and look and say like, yep, this this seems like
a good site to explore the problem is this the
the this area is so covered in sediment that even
(25:55):
for underwater archaeology. This is a challenging place to find
artifacts because there's so many rivers that flow into the
North Sea, and unlike rivers that flow into the ocean,
that sediment doesn't just disperse. It gets trapped between the
UK and Europe, so it just settles and there's a
lot of sediment on top.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Yeah, very messy scene, but nevertheless they have persevered and
learned a lot about what was there through these spines.
In twenty seventeen, they were trying to you know, they're
trying to figure out what plants and animals were there,
and they figured Hey, during the Younger Dryas, which we
all know now because we did that episode very recently
(26:36):
on the Younger Dryas.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
That was a happy episode too.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
They said Doggerland was a tundra. It was just ferns
and shrubs and grasses. The climate started warming over the
course of thousands of years and during the preboreal period,
the Holocene, there were birch and pine trees and all
of a sudden it went from a tundra to a forest.
And then later during the actual boreal period, birds got
(27:00):
replaced by hazel and you got these freshwater lakes which
is you know, early on, remember when they found that
they did the pollen analysis and they found the freshwater evidence,
so that kind of explains that. And as far as
the animals living there, that is shifting along with the
climate basically over the period of you know, tens and
hundreds of thousands of years.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Yeah, because those animals were adapted to the ice age,
and so when the younger drives was like ice age
is back. Those animals hadn't died out yet, so they're like, awesome,
we got another thirteen hundred years. But after the younger
dryas ended and the ice age finally came to an
end about eleven six hundred years ago, the things like
the wooly rhinoceros and mammoths and reindeer had really nowhere
(27:45):
to go and largely died off or else migrated northward
and they were replaced by while boar birds came along,
which is always a good thing. Otters showed up if yeah,
if you've ever seen otter holding hands with another otter,
you're glad that those otters showed up. Beavers one of
our favorite animal episodes. It was just a huge change
(28:08):
in not only the vegetation but also the animal life,
and the animal life also included humans too.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
I mean we mentioned there were people there, and there
were the first hominids there. Well they weren't human actually,
so I sort of misspoke. But they were called Homo antecessor,
which was the predecessor to humans, and they were there
about eight hundred thousand years ago. And then finally, you know,
we mentioned that Neanderthal fragment skull fragment they moved in
(28:36):
when Doggerland was a tundra, and I guess it was
two thousand and one when they found that skull fragment.
This is off the coast of the Netherlands and they
named this one. I love it when they name these,
you know, ancient humans. But I'm not even going to
try and pronounce it. It's kr i j n. I'm
not sure how you would say that in Dutch.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
I saw that it was one syllable, so I'm not
sure either. But it's not krijan like I was saying
that Jay's got to be silent, right, it does something weird, Yeah, it.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Does something weird. But they reckon that fossil. They dated
it to about seventy thousand years old, and they said
this guy probably ate a lot of meat as his diet,
maybe some fish, but definitely was chouned down on some
pretty good food. And then you know, they found all
sorts of stuff over the years on the coast of
the Netherlands. Netherlands, just like a bone point or an
(29:29):
axe or any kind of carved pointed you know, arrowhead
or harpoon head would just wash up on shore.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Yeah, this is some of the evidence that we have
that Neanderthals were pretty smart and actually well adapted or
suited to cold climates. So they were still around during
the younger dryest humans had kind of come along before
the younger dryas the younger dryis came along, they beat
him back. And then finally after the younger dryas, Homo
(29:56):
sapiens really start to show up. Yeah, I think as
early as I fourteen thousand years ago. And again this
is the beginning of the Mesolithic in Europe, and they
were hunter gatherers. They just basically migrated westward from continental
Europe because they could get there by walking from Europe
(30:16):
to the UK. And they were like this Doggerland place
is pretty nice. We're gonna stick around here.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Yeah, So you know, for a while they were migrating around,
following the animals, going where the food was. But they said,
you know, they're basically like anyone else from that time
in that place, from that era and area. Man, this
is really just fitting together like a glove.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
You know, I love it.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
They were, you know, carving things from stone, carving things
from antlers we have direct evidence of both, and animal
bones that were wearing animal skins. But they said they
think eventually, like you said, they decided like, hey, this
place is nice, let's set up camp here and maybe
even farmed there.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yeah, so this is where the transition from the Mesolithic
to the Neolithic happens. It's pretty much what they consider
the change or the beginning of the Neolithic was when
people started farming, and that happened on dogger Land. This
is where they essentially found the place that they could
grow crops. It was warmer then around this time than
(31:16):
it was than it is now in that area, so
they were very easily raising crops, figuring it out as
they went along. So that because they were raising crops,
they were more sedentary, which means that their populations grew
a little larger. So some of the things they're starting
to find are like evidence of villages. There's a really
amazing underwater archaeological site called Boldener Cliff off the Isle
(31:40):
of Wight, and they've found what seems to be like
a dock that probably went out into an ancient river.
There was like burials there, houses and pits, like, there's
a lot of really cool stuff. And this is a
really tantalizing view of and I can't use that word
enough in this episode, tantalizing. This is a tantalizing view
of all the stuff that's probably probably underwater throughout Doggerland.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, and I guess we should talk about why it's
underwater this, you know, I think we already kind of
gave it away that it didn't happen all at once.
It happened over hundreds of thousands of years, little by
little glaciers of melting.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Sea levels are rising.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
And there's you know, like I said, estimates anywhere from
five thousand to eight thousand years ago or seven thousand
rather of when people think it finally like you know,
was completely submerged, and it may not, you know, it
may have become so uninhabitable, you know, long before that,
maybe even thousands of years before that.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Why well, I mean, there's a couple of theories.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
There's a tsunami theory that says about eight thousand years
ago there were a bunch of massive tsunamis that you know,
pummeled the coast of Britain and completely wiped out Doggerland,
and they were caused by these submarine landslides in the
Norwegian Sea called the Storrega slides. But Gaffney was like,
I don't think.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
It was that.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Actually, I think it was a climate change because I
think Doggerland itself, like he didn't doubt the tsunamis happened,
but he said, I think Doggerland itself was kind of
protected by the wooded, hilly terrain.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Yeah, but still a lot of people would have died
because they think that the tsunami swept twenty five miles inland,
which is yes, a lot of settlements that you can
take out twenty five miles in And I don't know
if you remember, but in our Younger Driest episode we
talked about isostatic rebound or adjustment, where the glaciers and
ice sheets were so heavy that they actually pushed the
(33:36):
earth downward and it took some areas of land down
with it, like Scotland, but it raised other areas up,
kind of like if you put a bowling ball on
a mattress, which you know you usually do, and one
of the areas that got raised up was Doggerland, right,
So when the glaciers melted, Doggerland started to sink. And
then in addition to that, the glaciers melting made the
(33:57):
sea levels rise, which is why this stuff was happening
so quickly. They think that possibly sea level rise was
happening as fast as a meter over a century, which
doesn't sound like much, but right now the sea level
rise we're worried about is happening like thirty centimeters a century,
so that is a really fast sea level rise. So
(34:18):
it's not like it would have caught people off guard,
but their way of life would have been disrupted pretty
significantly by the tsunamis and the sea level rise.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Yeah, I saw even you know, potentially up to two
meters per century. So that's you know, super fast.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Super that's like twice as fast at least. So as
the as the sea levels rose and Doggerland sank, Scotland,
by the way, is still rising. The land wasn't just
some flat mass there were highlands, there were hills and
all that. So little by little it was submerged, and
they think that the last bit was probably Dogger's Bank,
(34:52):
because so it's one of the most shallow parts of
the North Sea. And by the time it was completely submerged,
all the people who had moved upward in the British
Isles were now officially British. They were cut off from
Europe now for the first time. Like you said, that
was between five thousand and seven thousand years ago.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
These days there's sort of a new threat to the
idea of a lot more science happening there because of
those wind farms you mentioned early on. It's a pretty
great area for wind farming, but it's threatening, you know,
parts of the North Sea. Like we said, it's fairly
shallow as far as seas go, and there's lots of
great wind there. And the plan is by twenty thirty
(35:36):
that the southern part of the North Sea is just
going to be riddled with wind farms. The downside of that,
I mean, this great renewable energy, but the downside is
that this stuff is really disruptive to the ecology there
and certainly disruptive to all those dogger Land sites that
they're still hoping to explore.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Yeah, I was reading that because the North Sea is
so shallow, the kind of wind farms that they can
put in can actually be bolted to the bedrock, which
is way cheaper than like the floating version. So they're
salivating over putting wind farms there. But again, that means
that they're bolting wind turbines to Doggerland, which is nay
(36:15):
good for the archaeological aspect. It's naggd right, that's exactly right,
So they don't. I mean, it seems like these wind
farms are going on. Stupid wind farms, always ruining the
environment for everybody. Yeah, and I don't know that anybody's
going to be able to change it, because everybody thinks
Dogland's cool, but not necessarily disrupt progress as far as
(36:39):
renewable energy goes cool. Yeah, so I guess that's it
for Doggerlin.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
Chuck said, that's right, which means everybody, it's time for
listener mail.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
This is from Andy. Hey, guys, been listening since COVID
twenty twenty. I've heard your entire library, and I've almost
agreed with everything that Chuck says. I think it was
a title brother from another mother. We're close in age,
so we have similar childhood memories. And this morning, when
Chuck brought up the guitar solo from my Sharona, I
knew that we were made from the same cloth, because
(37:14):
for many years now I've touted that guitar solo as
my most favorite.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
Solo of all time. Wow, I'm glad here, though.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
I'm not alone. So thank you Chuck for being like
a brother to me. On another note, you failed to
mention the true father of AM radio guys, Nikola Tesla.
Tesla actually patented the technology before Marconi did, make him
the actual father of radio. Marconi quote bothered end quote
Tesla's technology and ran with it. And he was just
(37:41):
a much better businessman than Tesla, so he was able
to monetize the technology, earning him the notoriety that he
has today.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
Is the father of radio.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
So Jefferson's Starships should have said, Tesla plays the mambo.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Tesla played the mamba.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
It works.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
It would have worked. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Read many books on Nikola Tesla and his inventions and
find him one of the most fascinating men of all time.
Without him we might not have had such things as
the remote control of robotics and wireless transmission.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Thanks for everything, guys.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
You make my commute to work relaxing and educational three
days of the week.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
And that is Andy McDonald.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Thanks Andy, that was a good email. Surely then, if
you've listened to our back catalog you're aware of the
Electricity Wars we went over with Edison Tesla, but I
feel like Tesla could definitely stand his own episode two.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Maybe, Okay, Well, let's see if you want to get
in touch with this, like Andy, you can do that,
Send us an email and say whatever you want. Send
it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Yeah,
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