In 1931, a fisherman named Pilgrim Lockwood was sailing 40 km off the eastern coast of England
when he noticed a strange object in the nets that his crew had been dragging across the sea floor.
It was a harpoon carved from the antler of a deer, measuring over
20 cm long with a sharp, barbed edge. Lockwood’s discovery confirmed that this
area of the North Sea, which for years had been hypothesized to be a lost submerged land, was once
a place that ancient people had called home. And other discoveries since then have revealed
that those people weren't just Homo sapiens… At various points in deep time, Neanderthals,
and maybe even older human relatives, roamed this long-lost world.
And for a pretty good reason, too. This area - which connected Britain to the
rest of Europe - was once one of the continent's richest hunting grounds…
A dynamic and, at times, lush environment that supported a
wealth of species and natural resources.
To ancient humans, it was something of an ecological paradise.
So what happened to this piece of prime prehistoric real estate? How did it
end up beneath the waves, leading to a great British break off from the European mainland?
While a massive megatsunami might have drowned it for good, the underlying reason that it now
lies under the sea may have actually been the same thing that made it so great in the first place.
Tales of mysterious, sunken worlds are a popular trope in stories about our past,
but in most cases, they’re myths with problematic histories,
and they have no actual archeological basis. But in the area that’s now the North Sea,
between Britain and the rest of Europe, one sunken world really did exist!
Scientists call it Doggerland, after a type of Dutch fishing boat called
a dogger that sailed across parts of the area in the 17th century.
I myself would prefer "Doggoland" and it's just like a land full of puppies, and you
take a vacation there and just boop the snoots. The first clues suggesting that this region was a
former landmass came in the early 20th century. Locals had long noticed that when tides were
especially low, some coastal areas of the North Sea revealed evidence of
sunken forests that were clearly extremely old. But it took Lockwood’s discovery of that antler
harpoon to prove that Doggerland wasn't just a submerged piece of land, but also a place that
had once been occupied by ancient people. And this has been confirmed over and over
again in the years since, thanks to a variety of tools, pottery fragments, and even human
remains that have been dredged up from the sea floor or found washed up on the coasts.
The oldest of these remains is a skull fragment of a young male Neanderthal,
referred to by researchers as Krijn, which dates to somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago.
And we’ve even found Neanderthal-type artifacts left behind by Krijn’s people,
including a sophisticated flint tool bound together using tar from a birch tree.
Back when Neanderthals roamed this area, in the depths of the ice ages,
Doggerland was mostly frigid tundra. It was part of what's called the ‘mammoth
steppe’ that stretched the length of the continent.
And in fact, as far as we can tell, Doggerland seems to be right at the northernmost edge of
the Neanderthals’ range during their heyday, in the Pleistocene Epoch.
They lived alongside many cold-adapted species characteristic of this time period. We’ve
found the remains of mammoths, woolly rhinos, cave lions, and hyenas, just to name a few.
But sediment cores collected from the seafloor have shown that, as the ice
ages came to an end around 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, Doggerland changed dramatically.
The cores contain deposits of peat – organic material that can only form in swampy marshland.
This revealed that, as the northern glaciers retreated and the region warmed,
the tundra was replaced by woodlands, swamps, mudflats, and plentiful fresh
water in the form of lakes and river systems. And while the Neanderthals were long gone by this
time, by about 13,000 years ago, a wave of Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers migrated into the area.
They were probably following herds of elk, deer, wild boar, aurochs, and bison into
the emerging greener and wetter landscape. Doggerland is now considered to have been one
of the most resource-rich and human-friendly spots on the entire European continent during this time,
thanks to its concentration of prey and freshwater resources.
But understanding the complex lives and cultures of the people
who lived in Doggerland is a real challenge. It’s a difficult task at any archaeological site,
let alone one that is now almost entirely submerged.
Still, researchers, beach-combers, and lucky people fishing have found over 1000 artifacts so
far that date to this period of human occupation, known as the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age.
Many of them are hunting weapons, often carved from the bones of prey animals - primarily deer,
like Lockwood’s harpoon. But some have even been
fashioned from the bones of other humans. And isotopic data has been gathered from the
remains of these Mesolithic people, which helps us figure out what kinds of food they were eating.
See, different foods contain different chemical markers, and seeing as you are literally what
you eat, those markers persist in the remains of people even thousands of years after their death.
And the data suggests that they had a mixed surf n’ turf diet,
including mostly freshwater fish and some terrestrial animals.
Mmm! Good eatin'...
While there’s a lot that we’ll never know about how they lived,
they were clearly adept at making the most of the resources that Doggerland had to offer.
But - spoiler alert - it would not last. By about 8000 years ago, Doggerland was
gone. An entire land mass with an area comparable in size to Britain was lost beneath the waves.
But how, and why? Well, what had made this low-lying area so
idyllic was its abundance of water in the form of rivers and lakes that supported a lush ecosystem.
But, as temperatures continued to rise and ice-sheets continued to melt,
water became too abundant. And this happened gradually
at first, then all at once. See, it wasn't just a simple
case of rising sea levels and widening river systems that eventually swallowed Doggerland
whole - that was only part of the story. Because in the 1980s, scientists discovered
evidence of a massive megatsunami that hit the North Sea about 8000 years ago.
This huge wave was generated by an undersea landslide off the coast of Norway called the
Storegga Event that dumped an enormous amount of debris into the ocean, causing a huge wave
to ripple across the North Sea. But did this catastrophe drown
Doggerland and its people in a sudden, practically overnight apocalypse?
Well, to answer that question, it’s critical to know how much
of the landmass was still above sea level when the tsunami hit.
And that has been a subject of much debate over the last few decades.
I mean I can't go to a cocktail party where people aren't talking
about Doggerland's sea level orientation.
Those are the friends I hang out with, though... But recent studies have suggested that Doggerland
had already changed quite a bit in the time leading up to the tsunami.
Being an especially low-lying area, rising sea levels triggered by glacial
melt had already inundated much of the region. By the time the tsunami hit, it’s now thought
that only a few parts of Doggerland were left. One of them was an island called Dogger Island,
which would have still been high and dry at the time of the Storegga landslide,
and part of it may have survived the event for a few centuries afterwards, too.
So, as powerful as the tsunami no doubt was, it was probably an additional,
dramatic hit to a place already doomed by larger-scale, gradual planetary
changes that eventually sealed its fate. Now, while all this scientific exploration
of Doggerland makes it the best known sunken landmass occupied by humans, it isn’t the only
prehistoric real estate we’ve lost to the ocean. During the ice ages, there were many areas
of the continental shelves that were exposed around the world.
Some of those areas would have been important sites for humans. Take,
for example, Atlit Yam off the coast of Israel, or even areas off the coast of Southern California,
which have been the subject of underwater surveying over the last couple of years.
And regardless of the way Doggerland finally sank under the waves, it shows
us that some undersea worlds really do exist. It reminds us that the history of life on this
planet has always been shaped by constant environmental change – change that can even
create and destroy the places we call home. While human civilization has changed a lot
since Doggerland’s demise, we are entering a new period of sea-level rise - this time caused by us.
And Doggerland’s story is a reminder that we are still
vulnerable to the same forces as our Mesolithic counterparts.
In a few thousand years, who knows which now-familiar locations will
be considered mysterious long lost worlds, too.
Before you go we are excited to tell you that PBS
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What do you get when you cross a hopping mammal and a flying reptile?
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H-A-R-E...
If you have to spell it...
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But some have even been fashioned from the bones of other humans...
Is that how I wanna go? Is that how I wanna be used after I'm gone?
Just turn me into a hunting tool...
Just carve me up and...
Yes, useful, right!
Finally, once in my life, after my life, I'll be useful!
[laughs through the pain]
Just carve my name on it so people will remember me.
Boy, this has really taken a turn!
[laughs]
Man!