Combing through sand on the beach, you can discover
rich clues to the natural world.
Likely, your findings won't be monumental—
maybe a few shark teeth or shells.
That's unless you're in a region known as the Zandmotor
or sand engine on the coast of the Netherlands.
One particularly prolific beachcomber Willy Van Windgerden
has uncovered more than 500 relics from the area,
that tell the story of ancient humans and how they lived in
a vanished landscape.
Van Wingerden recently brought one of her finds to researchers.
They concluded that the birch tar smeared at the end
of the tool was evidence that Neanderthals could produce complex tools
that took several days to make.
These discoveries all became possible in 2012 when
material dredged from the bottom of the North Sea was
dumped on the beach to create a buffer against sea-level rise.
But the dredged area hasn't always been
covered by water.
Until the end of the last ice age sea-level was 70 meters
lower, exposing a hundred eighty thousand square kilometers of land—
an area known as Doggerland.
Ancient humans likely traversed Doggerland for
hundreds of thousands of years.
Researchers have long suspected this underwater area
to berife with clues to the past.
In the past few decades, fishermen of the North Sea
have netted fascinating finds like the tusks and skulls of
woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceros.
And as dredging and excavation have ramped up,
more artifacts have seen the light of day.
These artifacts on the beach or found from other
dredge piles are usually well-preserved enough to date,
and researchers can confine their origin to the few
square kilometer area where they were dredged from.
Researchers have started a systematic survey
to unearth the history of Doggerland using clues from
dredging sites and technological advances in mapping submerged landscapes.
Using seismic surveys, researchers can understand the
underwater topography of the North Sea.
This helps pinpoint likely areas in the landscape
that ancient people traversed.
The first site discovered using this technique was by
Europe's Lost Frontier— the mouth of a prehistoric river
found near the Brown Banks, an area 50 kilometers off the UK coast.
A large, flint core axe was recovered from this
location and there could be other finds to come.
Sediment cores extracted from these promising areas
can yield artifacts—and fossils and millions of DNA fragments.
By comparing the DNA fragments extracted from cores
around the prehistoric Rhine River to
already known genomes, researchers have identified
traces of a variety of animals—bears, birds, boars,
and plants like hazel and meadow grasses
that lived in Doggerland in years past.
These fauna and flora show that parts of
Doggerland were lush and fertile—conditions ideal for humans.
While the DNA of seagrasses and fish in the core
show the transition to an estuarine and marine environment.
These transitions can give greater detail about the
history of sea-level rise in the area.
It could even tell us how modern civilizations have
responded to similar changes.
Beachcombers have discovered many well-preserved
human skeletal fragments.
And of the teeth and bones tested, several have shown
evidence of DNA.
These new samples can help provide a more complete
history of Europeans' genetic past.
As surveys and cores increase in number,
researchers hope to not only better understand
Doggerland, but use these same techniques to
understand other submerged landscapes around the world.
For example, researchers think that traces of the very
first Americans lie beneath the ocean off their western
shores of North America.
Doggerland is just one underwater site teeming with ancient history.
And with these new methods in hand, we may just know
where to look for more.