Episode Transcript
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2Hey, 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 1Oh boy, my friend.
If I know Josh Clark loves something it is submerged or lost.
Speaker 3Lands, it really is.
Speaker 2I love it.
Speaker 3I know this kind of thing really really float your boat.
Speaker 2It does.
It floats my submerged land.
We're talking about Dogger Land, by the way, everybody.
Speaker 1That's right, we should probably just say kind of what it is first, right before we get into the details.
Speaker 2Yeah, 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 1Yeah, 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.
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 2Yeah, 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 3That's right.
Speaker 1And by the way, did you ever see Taylor Swift on her area's tour.
Speaker 2I didn't, but I can feel a Taylor Swift area coming on.
Speaker 1Eventually she through the concert.
She sort of walked the audience through all of her different areas.
Speaker 3This is my knee, the left one, knees and toes, knees and toes.
Speaker 2So 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 3That's enough.
Speaker 2Like you can see somebody making an absurd or obscene hand motion talk thinking about that, right, but.
Speaker 3No, listen exactly what you're saying.
Speaker 2Stick 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, so they're not letting themselves say that.
But we can say it for them.
Speaker 1Yeah, and it's called Doggerland and that's just cool.
It sounds like a movie title or something.
Speaker 2You know, it does starring Lily Tomlin, you know, the younger one Alan, No.
Speaker 3Not that young von stup.
No, why is her name con Taylor?
Speaker 2Yes?
Speaker 3Oh really, she was.
Speaker 2In a movie called maybe dog Face or something like that or.
Speaker 3Dog Oh yeah, dog Dogfight.
Speaker 2No, it doesn't matter.
We should probably edit this out.
If we were a different podcast, we would edit this.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3Man, I came up with like four or five lilies.
Speaker 2You got to leave that in, Okay, true, true dah.
But I don't even remember how I got on the Lily thing.
Speaker 1Well, I said it would be a good movie, and you reckon that Lily Taylor would be a good Oh star yet that movie?
Speaker 2Because 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 3That's right.
I hope we got all that right.
Speaker 1But 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 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 2So 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 depths were just unknown, like people hadn't explored it.
They didn't have the means to really.
Speaker 1Yeah, even though it's fairly shallow, it's still deep for back then.
Speaker 2Yeah, 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 3That's right.
The first thing that happened late nineteenth century.
Speaker 1They 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 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 something used to be down there started happening.
Speaker 2Exactly 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 3This is pretty cool.
Speaker 2He 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 3Don't forget right.
Speaker 2This 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 3Yeah.
He's pretty great writer too.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 3Interesting, dude, man, we should do one on HG.
Wells.
Speaker 1He 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 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 2Yeah, 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 the stone.
Speaker 3That's right, So Noah's Woods was.
Speaker 2Just 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, the fact that there are tree stumps, weirdly ancient ones in the sea.
People are pulling up animal bones for terrestrial animals.
Speaker 3Pulling up pretty obvious what's happening.
Speaker 2Yeah, 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 1Yeah, they and I noticed there were a couple of scientists, married couples that worked on this along the area.
Speaker 2It's kind this is a golden age for that.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 1In 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 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 2Wise, sounds pretty nice.
Actually, I'd like to live in dogger Land, but it wasn't called Doggerland yet, as we'll see.
Speaker 3Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2So 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 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 3That's right.
Speaker 1Did 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 2So good.
I would say that's a hotel check in name, but it's just a little too eye catching.
Speaker 3That's too suspicious.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, it is pretty suspicious.
Speaker 3Actually, yeah, hi, Pilgrim Lockwood checking in.
Yeah, okay, buddy, what's your real name?
And who do you think you are?
Speaker 1So 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.
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 3We're all set.
We got a couple of them.
Speaker 1Yeah, And the idea was that everyone thought like, hey, this is probably just was lost over the side of a boat or something.
Speaker 3What's the big deal.
Speaker 2Yeah, 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 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 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 1Yeah, I mean I picture Margaret Godwin just storming in the room and saying that didn't fall off of any boat.
Speaker 2And 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 1Yeah, 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 2Era, well about toward the beginning of it, I think.
Speaker 3Because this was this is in the area.
Speaker 2It'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 3Okay, okay, everybody.
Speaker 2In 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 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 1Yeah, 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 2Right, or he's doing the eyewink and the double guns.
I've seen that before too.
Speaker 3Oh yeah, that's classic.
Speaker 1But 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 2They were rambling on.
Speaker 3They were rambling on through the area and the era.
And maybe we.
Speaker 1Should take a break.
Yeah, all right, we'll be right back with more on dogger Land.
All right, So you 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 3They were studying it in the seventies.
Speaker 1But 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 3And she's the first one that.
Speaker 1Said, you know what, everyone, I think people like lived here, and I think it was kind of pretty awesome.
Speaker 2Yeah, 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 3And maybe she busted into the room and said that was no land bridge.
Speaker 2Yeah.
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 1Yeah, that's a weird edition.
Everyone wondered about this fish.
Speaker 2Yeah.
And then somebody is eating leftovers of Vietnamese food and that's loaded with shrimp paste.
Speaker 3Oh man, that shrimp paste.
Speaker 2And 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 3Yeah, Neil always wears that thing.
Speaker 2So 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 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 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 1Yeah, 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 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 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 3Yeah, nice, nice work.
Speaker 2And 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 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 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 1Yeah, 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 2Pretty cool.
Speaker 3So that's sort of the.
Speaker 1Difference between the sort of the oil company sector and the scientific community and what they consider a little bit of data.
Speaker 2Yeah, 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 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, 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 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 3Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1And 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 3Archaeology, but I think.
Speaker 1It might have just been that I wrote that article for HowStuffWorks dot Com back in the day.
Speaker 2Oh we should do that then, Eh, No, okay.
Speaker 3I don't know if it was something I wrote.
Not sure it's.
Speaker 2Now are You've written tons of good stuff?
Speaker 1Oh 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 3Seven this years later.
Speaker 1Eight 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 2Yeah, so did you check this map out.
Speaker 3Yeahs cool, Yeah.
Speaker 2It 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, 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 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 3I think, wow, that's a very pretty name.
Speaker 2It is.
Speaker 1Uh should we take another break and talk about what was there?
Uh?
Speaker 2Yeah, let's take let's take that break, all right, Chuck.
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 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 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 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 1Yeah, 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 on the Younger Dryas.
Speaker 2That was a happy episode too.
Speaker 1They 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 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 2Yeah, 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 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 in not only the vegetation but also the animal life, and the animal life also included humans too.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 1I 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 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 2I 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 1Does 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 axe or any kind of carved pointed you know, arrowhead or harpoon head would just wash up on shore.
Speaker 2Yeah, 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 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 to the UK.
And they were like this Doggerland place is pretty nice.
We're gonna stick around here.
Speaker 1Yeah, 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 3You know, I love it.
Speaker 1They 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 2Yeah, 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 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 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 1Yeah, 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 3Sea levels are rising.
Speaker 1And 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 3Why well, I mean, there's a couple of theories.
Speaker 1There'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 3It was that.
Speaker 1Actually, 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 2Yeah, 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 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 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 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 1Yeah, I saw even you know, potentially up to two meters per century.
So that's you know, super fast.
Speaker 2Super 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, 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 1These 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 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 2Yeah, 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 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 renewable energy goes cool.
Yeah, so I guess that's it for Doggerlin.
Speaker 3That's right.
Speaker 2Chuck said, that's right, which means everybody, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1This 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 for many years now I've touted that guitar solo as my most favorite.
Speaker 3Solo of all time.
Wow, I'm glad here, though.
Speaker 1I'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 a much better businessman than Tesla, so he was able to monetize the technology, earning him the notoriety that he has today.
Speaker 3Is the father of radio.
Speaker 2So Jefferson's Starships should have said, Tesla plays the mambo.
Speaker 3Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 2Tesla played the mamba.
Speaker 1It works.
Speaker 3It would have worked.
Yeah.
Speaker 1Read 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 3Thanks for everything, guys.
Speaker 1You make my commute to work relaxing and educational three days of the week.
Speaker 3And that is Andy McDonald.
Speaker 2Thanks 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 3Yeah.
Speaker 2Maybe, 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 3Stuff 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 2Yeah,
