Doggerland: The North Sea Atlantis?

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Hey all, I hope you're doing well.

I'm currently at History Hit HQ and I've just finished recording this interview all about Doggerland, this lost prehistoric world beneath the North Sea with our guest today, Dr.

Rachel Labino, the marine archaeologist from the University of Southampton.

What I found really interesting in this chat was learning more from Rachel about the whole nature of how you go about doing archaeological research on a submerged landscape like Doggaland, looking at evidence left behind by Neanderthals in some cases more than 200,000 years ago.

I thought that was fascinating and I hope you guys do too.

Let's go.

Imagine a vast land, a place where Stone Age hunters roamed and mammoths grazed.

A world lost beneath the cold grey waters of the North North Sea.

This is Doggaland, sometimes called the North Sea Atlantis.

A landmass that once connected Britain to the continent, now hidden under the waves.

So what has archaeology so far revealed about this lost world?

What did it look like?

Did humans settle it?

And how did it end up drowned in the deep?

This is the story of Doggaland with our guest, Dr.

Rachel Bino.

Rachel, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.

Doggerland, first of all,

what a name.

I know.

People have known the name but may not know much about it.

What exactly is Doggerland?

Big question, first of all.

Other than a ridiculous name.

So the name comes from the Dogger Bank.

And the Dogger Bank, if anyone listens to the fishing podcast, is an area of high ground that's out in the Southern North Sea, kind of to the top of the Southern North Sea.

And it's a fishing ground, so people know of the name Dogger Bank.

And so it's probably one of the last places in the North Sea that was finally submerged, right?

So finally became sea.

When we talk about Doggerland, we're talking about these submerged landscapes between Britain and Europe.

So in the past, these areas were dryland.

People would have been able to move through them, live in them, animals, trees, landscapes like you see today were existing in those areas.

This was cyclical too.

So we often talk about doggerland and people either are referring to or perhaps sometimes assuming that it's just this period from the last glacial maximum, which finished sometime around 18,000 years or so ago.

So kind of from that period into the Holocene, so submerging sometime around 6,000 years ago, that we have the exposure of these landscapes and we have our ancestors, our human ancestors living in these areas.

But actually, as people know, of course, the ice ages were a cyclical thing.

And so, in fact, these areas have been exposed for most of the time that we've had humans in these landscapes in Britain.

So they are really important

for about a million years.

I mean, obviously, they're really important before that, but for humans at the moment, and for archaeology, they're important for this really, really long period of time.

And that's such a good point to highlight straight away, isn't it, Rachel?

If people have heard of Dogland, they might think of those most recent archaeological discoveries from...

the end of the Ice Age or just before you mentioned after that last glacial maximum period.

But the archaeology, the stories of of humans living in that now submerged landscape, it stretches so much further back.

It does, it does.

And I mean, I think it's fair enough, right?

Because we have these more recent landscapes and to say that they're easy to engage with would be a massive mistake.

They are horribly challenging to deal with, but they are perhaps more extensive.

They've undergone less erosive episodes.

They're less potentially less buried.

And so the further back you go in time, the more fragmented and the less easy to pinpoint the archaeology, the deposits that the archaeology is related to, becomes.

So

there's often been this idea that, you know, nothing's there anymore, you know, so none of this stuff will preserve.

It's undergone several glacial periods, several transgressions, so sea level rise and regressions would be sea level falls, as well as loads of other erosive processes, glacial, periglacial,

you know, rivers, just so many different processes that are going to be affecting those landscapes.

How on earth is anything still going to be there?

Why would you bother to even look for those early landscapes?

But we do know that they're there.

And despite those challenges, the payoff, I suppose, in terms of our understanding of early humans in this part of the world and globally too, it should be pointed out as well, that Doggerland is not unique.

Now, these landscapes exist globally.

And of course, you know, Doggerland is quite extensive because we're on a shallow continental shelf.

So it doesn't take much of a drop in sea levels to expose a massive swath of landscape.

If you had a sudden drop-off into an ocean, you'd have less of a coastal plain exposed.

But you know, island Southeast Asia, for example, again, you have huge exposure of these landscapes around Australia and to the north, huge exposure of landscapes.

So these areas are poised to provide us with tons of information about human migrations, you know, behaviours, use of coastlines, just incredible questions that we can start to try and answer.

And I'm guessing also things like the fauna, like the climates, the environment.

So learning not just about the early people and the tools or the bones they left behind, but also the environments environments that they were living in.

And it's something that you highlighted earlier, how in the ice age, you know, it's quite cyclical.

You've got warm periods, then you've got cold periods.

So you can kind of learn that information from a submerged landscape like Doggerland today.

Yes, of course.

I mean, so I think that the landscape is one of the most important things that we're dealing with, because we know that the people that are exploiting these landscapes, that are living within these landscapes, are not sedentary.

Okay, so they don't live like we do.

They are moving through landscape and the scale at which they move those landscapes is likely to change through time, but also even within one stage, let's say, of the Paleolithic, it's going to change within that, probably seasonally, you know.

So understanding how they're living, the kind of affordances that those landscapes, those environments are giving those people is really important, you know, because that's what makes them able to be in these areas.

Because I mean, okay, today it's 32 degrees and disgusting really disgusting and fine you know I could have slept outside last night and I would have been cooler but there are points in the past especially with some of the early occupation that we've got people here when it's really harsh you know the winter temperatures were colder the summer temperatures were colder snow cover would have been more significant during the winter months seasonality would have been increased so how on earth are these people here and why are they here and so understanding the changing landscapes and the changing environments is really helpful for us to then say or kind of begin to infer perhaps how those people were there and why they might have been there as well.

How do marine archaeologists like yourself go about doing research on dogger land when so much of it is a bit deeper in the North Sea today?

It's a little bit underwater, isn't it?

It's a bit of a problem.

Have you seen those?

There was it the 50s where there's some plans that were drawn up for kind of for damming the North Sea and there's this great old image where they've dammed it and they've like built infrastructure on it and loads of archaeologists like oh if only they'd done that and then we'd be able to have access to all these landscapes of course if they'd done that we'd have the same picture offshore to onshore where we've got roads dug through all of our deposits and our archaeology and it'd be far more truncated but so how do we go about it well a variety of ways i suppose when i was talking about the earlier stuff being more difficult to predict where it is because it's highly fragmented and the processes that have made it fragmented are really hard to to know i suppose you know because we're talking about so many different periods in time you can't really unpick it all.

It's just a massive mess, right?

We're always looking for ways to try to, I'm just going to say again, to target those places that are almost impossible to target.

And we, I suppose, work in two different ways that often connect.

So I work at Haysborough, which I would say is purely pretty much a research project.

So that's kind of close to shore, right?

So when we're working close to shore, we're almost at least at Haysborough, working from a known or a relative known onshore to try to get into an unknown in the near shore zone and to do that in particular at Haysborough because it is completely different at different sites.

Working with boreshore deposits, working with finds that people are finding on the beaches to try to then work out where they could be coming from offshore and that includes using things like marine geophysics so mapping the seabed looking at the topography of the seabed but also using things like seismics to look beneath the seabed so seeing where you can see deposits that might be outcropping and then eroding the archaeological shore but then when we want to go further offshore because of course those closer to areas are really interesting but we're also interested in the deeper water the further away from what we already know i suppose it becomes logistically very difficult so diving at haysborough diving is wonderful it's within 20 meters of water most of it's in about eight meters of water but the further offshore you go logistically safety wise everything becomes much more difficult you know you need much bigger boats you need all kinds of of things that I won't go into, and it's very expensive.

A lot of money, yes, exactly, a lot of money.

So, I was saying when we were chatting earlier, that you know, if I do a week at Haysborough with a little rib and a few people and a house, it's going to cost 10 grand, you know, per week.

So, yeah, to go further offshore, I mean, we're just talking vastly more money.

So, often without working with industry, so there's, as I'm sure you're aware, like a huge amount of exploitation of the seabed.

So, things like wind farms, things like aggregates, so the sands and gravels that we used on our driveways to remake beaches.

And in order to do all of that stuff, these people are collecting data on the seabed.

They're also taking cores because for engineering purposes or even for sand and gravel purposes, they want to know what's where.

Sorry, what do you mean by cores?

Oh, sorry, yeah, of course.

So cores, like a sediment core.

Right.

So they'll drop a kind of, imagine a drain pipe.

This is what we use at Haysbritz, high-tech.

But I mean, we would hammer it and then dig it out from the seabed.

But they, you know, they put lots of these down, usually about six meters or so, and then recover them so you've effectively got like a core a little slice of the seabed and then you can take it up and open it and have a little look at the changing deposits and that tells you about what's there basically you can sample it for things like pollen you can just look at the changing environments that are going on there so you know you might have marine stuff at the top sands gravels and then you can look for things like old land surfaces so there's lovely low energy deposits so it allows you to understand and to kind of read the landscape I suppose and read that landscape going back in time because the deeper you go through the core the earlier right so it allows you to think about the changing landscape and the processes that have been acting on that landscape and

if you are then searching for archaeology it also allows you to kind of to potentially think about the the depths you're thinking about where it could be coming from so if we're looking for you know in situ archaeology things that might be fresh because they haven't been rolled about in a river then you know we're looking for low energy kind of landscape development in those cores.

But those are very expensive to take.

And as you can imagine, if you're taking six metre of cores, they need a big boat.

And so industry collects that kind of stuff for their purposes.

And increasingly, we work with them to use their data, to use their cores.

And for a variety of reasons, again, so commercial on the one side, so they need with the environmental impact assessments and they need to engage marine biologists and archaeologists and people to think about the potential of the areas they're exploiting.

But as researchers, we're often also allowed to come in and work with the data they generate to try to understand what's there.

So big commercial projects, like you say, offshore wind farms and the like in the North Sea area or off the coast of England or I guess the Netherlands, I mean, the whole area, as you mentioned, it sounds so important.

So from a core, you can get a sense of what the environment was like when that area was not submerged hundreds of thousands of years ago and how humid or whether it was tundra-like the environment.

And, you know, you can almost pinpoint the date.

So it sounds like, as you say, working hand in hand with those commercial projects, today archaeologists are able to learn so much more about dogger land and the environment that people lived in there.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you say about pinpointing dates, I mean, we can even date them too.

So depending on how far back you're going, there are methods for chronological control through those scores.

So not super far back, usually.

It's quite difficult.

But yeah, I mean, we can get an idea of the chronology and how that relates to the changing landscapes.

And yes, the dry land, but also.

you know, submergence too.

So sometimes these areas were submerged through that.

That's another key thing to highlight, isn't it?

It's that, you know, with the cyclical nature, you get the harm, the warm periods and the cold periods, that for periods of time over the last a million years, Doggaland would have been submerged again.

And then it comes back up to the surface.

Is that the idea?

Well, it is kind of the idea.

And if we think about the current topography of Britain and the North Sea, and we think about our average global sea level, and we think about interglacials, I'm doing a curve with my hand, interglacial being warm and then glacials being cold, then yes, you would imagine that we would effectively have an island and then a peninsula and then an island and then a peninsula.

But the situation is quite unique up here.

Well, I suppose it's unique everywhere, isn't it?

But it's not quite that simple here.

Before about half a million years ago, we were permanently connected to Europe.

So there was just a different configuration of landscapes.

Lots of sedimentation from rivers and higher ground to the south.

So no matter what the sea levels were doing, that would have changed coastlines.

but we wouldn't have been disconnected.

Also, sea level change earlier on was less dramatic, anyway.

But after about half a million years, we see a kind of a progressive erosion of that landscape.

So we were probably not fully disconnected from Europe until about 125,000 years ago in what's called the last interglacial.

And before that, there might have been points where there were areas that overtopped, but it looks like we had, generally speaking, some kind of landscape connection before that point, mostly.

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So let's explore a couple of examples, really interesting examples from the archaeology of Doggerland that I know you've done a lot of work around.

Shall we do the site of Haysborough first of all?

Because this offshore site, is this the earliest evidence of human activity we have from Doggerland?

Well, so at the moment, Haysborough is the earliest site we have in Northwest Europe.

So

the onshore archaeology.

Okay, so there we've got evidence for humans here, let's say about 900,000 years ago.

Those are those amazing footprints, aren't they?

Yeah, the footprints.

Oh my God, the footprints are incredible.

It's a complete connection to these people that were here, a completely unprecedented period of time.

How on earth were they here then?

So if we step back just a little bit, Pakefield is a site further to the south, and that was found, it was published in 2005.

And it was, it's also coastal.

It's also part of the same formation of deposits that are extensive along the coast of mostly Norfolk and into Suffolk.

And when that happened, happened, the site itself is associated with really warm, lovely periods.

So it was also high sea level.

There were hippos.

It's just lovely, right?

So people called it Costa del Croma, okay, because the idea was that, like, how are people here at 700,000 years?

It's so early.

It's much earlier than we thought they'd be here.

At the time, it was about 500,000 was the idea.

And so the idea was that they were here because they were tracking these lovely, warm environments.

So we had a lovely inscription.

So they were following environments further north than they normally would.

Haysborough III, when that was found, kind of blew that out of the water a little bit because Haysborough III is dated to around 900,000 and it is not nice.

It's cold.

It's got environmental indicators that are at a high altitude cool boreal type, edge of boreal zone indicators.

So it's snowy winters, it's cold winters, it's cooler summers and it's seasonal, right?

So, yes, so it's very early.

It's very surprising.

And it exists on the foreshore.

So the cliffs are being eroded back and all of the archaeology is contained in that foreshore area.

The underwater site is a site by proxy, I suppose.

It's a lot of archaeology that's being found on the beaches.

What happened was that for hundreds of years, people have been collecting fauna, so animal bones on this coastline, and tons of environmental remains.

So the chroma forest bed that is contained within Chrome is a town on the

coast of Northwood.

Yeah, exactly.

Thank you.

And this part of the chroma forest bed is incredibly organic, or parts of it are incredibly organic and ridiculously rich in organics so you know you could mistaken something from there for something that was modern they're so well preserved so people have been looking at these deposits for hundreds of years publishing on them for hundreds of years so we knew that there was a rich record of animal bones and we knew from antiquarian collectors that just offshore they were finding animal bones that relate to these really early periods, so pre-half a million years.

Animal bones had cut marks on them that were coming in from offshore as well.

So we know there's archaeology out there, but it was difficult to pinpoint and it was all based upon fauna.

Just after Hastebridge 3 was published, about three years later, some wonderful collectors who are people who live relatively locally and they're, I suppose, avocational archaeologists who were walking the beaches, started to find stone tools as well.

And so this was incredible, right?

So the first thing they found was a hand axe.

Well, one of the first things they showed us was a hand axe and it looked just like that the site one hand axe.

I'm going to go into lots of confusing things.

Looked like a hand axe axe that had been found within some of these deposits previously, younger deposits, about half a million deposits.

But anyway, we started working with them and with others in the local area and they were finding thousands.

And I mean, thousands, like over a thousand now stone tools from this area.

And we know that some of them, through some spatial analyses, are probably coming from the foreshore deposits that are being gradually eroded by the sea.

They're kicking up archaeology.

We know they're archaeological.

kind of areas anyway.

And this is being found by them on the beaches.

But there are some patterns that can't easily be explained by those foreshore deposits being eroded.

And they're further to the south, but also kind of scattered throughout.

And they look like they're coming from the near shore zone.

So we don't think they're coming from super far off because sediment transport wise, it would be really hard to see them coming onto the beaches.

But they're certainly not coming from anything that we recognize on the beach.

And so we know that there's a site out there.

And we've been diving and we've found deposits.

We've taken mini cores through deposits.

We have found archaeology but it's not been within a deposit.

We found bones

but for

well various reasons.

First of all probably we've just maybe we're not going to anyway but the visibility, sand cover, constant changes in the conditions underwater and the seabed means that The really good high potential area that I want to get to has just been impossible to work in for the past three field seasons or so.

So we haven't actually found archaeology in a deposit underwater off Haysborough, but we know that the archaeology is coming from somewhere underwater off Haysborough.

So it's the kind of quest to find it and is it almost this idea that there is this rich,

the rich sediments are beneath what is the sand layer today beneath the sea and is that almost a microcosm for elsewhere in the North Sea too, this idea of doggerland is kind of beneath the sand cover at the bottom?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, I mean, there's generally speaking a lot of sand weights for that one.

I mean, that's a very simplistic way of thinking about things, sorry.

But yes, absolutely.

And those are really dynamic and they move a lot.

And so some of the interesting patterns at Haysborough that I really love, just to the south of the sites where we're finding all this archaeology that we are pretty sure is coming from the near shore zone, there was a collector,

I want to say a few years ago, it's probably about 20 years ago now, who was finding a load of animal bones and there wasn't no archaeology at this point or no stone tools.

And those were similar to patefield they were kind of like warm interglacial species so warm period species but like a nice fully warm period species right that then stopped and then the collectors that i was working with started to find stone tools but also animal bones that were indicative of a warm period but a cooler warm period right

and and in that area when we've gone off and we've collected seismic data, the stuff that shows us under the sand waves, there are channels there, right?

But we've never recognised those channels onshore.

We've never seen any foreshore deposits there.

So the question for me is all the kind of the theory, I suppose, is that we know we have really mobile sand waves underwater there.

So when they're shifting and you get the exposure of deposits, that's being eroded and it's coming up and being found on the beaches.

But then it'll get covered up and another area is exposed.

So there's multiple different areas of deposits which relate to different time periods.

And I think that is a nice microcosm for the the rest of the North Sea because

it's not like we're going to have younger to older throughout the North Sea because of those variable processes of erosion and burial and how they've changed through time.

So

sand cover might be covering something very young, but it could be covering something that's much older than we're interested in.

So yes, modern sand cover over something older and in areas, in pockets, we know that that means really interesting archaeology.

And what types of archaeology are usually preserved beneath these sand covers in now which is now underwater?

Does it mean that is it anaerobic conditions so it allows more organic material to survive?

So that's really dependent on the taphonomy.

What's I suppose the post-depositional processes that have happened how so I suppose let me explain it better the environment in which things are dropped in the first place how they're then preserved and how they're then, I suppose, preserved still underwater.

So, we often talk about submerged landscapes as having those organic archives.

And that's certainly true for some sites, and particularly for those potentially more recent sites.

So, if you've got peat deposits, for example, yes, lovely anaerobic conditions.

Also, kind of just organic silts and clays and stuff as well, lovely anaerobic conditions and organic preservation.

But if you think about a period in time where we have hominins on a sandbank next to a river who are, and I say hominins, I just mean our kind of ancestors who are potentially not Homo sapiens or potentially Homo sapiens, are napping tools.

They're napping on the sandbank and then that gets entrained in the river valley.

So, you know, the river washes them into the main bit and they get caught up in gravels.

You know, those gravels might then be preserved later on, but those gravels aren't going to be good for organic preservation.

So it's very much dependent on the environment in which things are dropped and then how they're preserved.

But yes, in some cases and certainly at Haysborough and certainly for some of the more recent archaeology.

Apart from the later story of Doggerland, which we will get to as time goes on, are there any particular time periods deep in the Paleolithic?

So was that the Old Stone Age, isn't it, kind of thing?

Yeah, yeah, lower Paleolithic, Early Stone Age.

I mean, alongside Haysborough, are there any key sites, are there any key time periods that...

archaeologists like yourself have found more evidence for and we have more of a picture of a human population that was living in this area of the world maybe more than 100,000 years ago.

Yeah, so there's one other time.

There should be low, shouldn't there?

But there's one other period at the moment that we're more aware of, I suppose, which is Neanderthals, which is great because everyone loves a Neanderthal.

And these are all coming from that commercial, the industry, the kind of seaweed exploitation that I referred to earlier.

And mostly around kind of 250 to maybe 190 or so thousand years ago, which is a really interesting period of time because what we see is that we have Neanderthals in Britain and Europe at this point.

And around 200, 190 or so, we're going into a glacial period.

So it's cold and nasty.

Of course, people are probably going to move.

But we don't see Neanderthals after that point until, forgive me, there's some recent research that's just been published on this, but it was traditionally until about 63,000, 65,000 years ago.

And again, now it's somewhere, I think, around 100 or so.

Which isn't really surprising.

I mean, this whole time we've thought about this whole period where we have this abandonment.

And I think really, having a few sites is really really significant, but actually it doesn't really change the picture of what we've got, which is a really, really low density of occupation, it seems.

And so having sites in the southern North Sea at the point when Neanderthals are abandoning, for want of a sort of catastrophic word, abandoning Britain for a really long period of time, mostly at least, is really exciting and really significant.

As someone who works in submerged archaeology in the North Sea, we tend to, you know, do those things where we're like, oh, yes, well, you know, all the evidence is submerged.

Sorry, you can't see it.

We're going to make these claims.

It's a shame that we can't disprove them because it's soil and water.

I'm just being really flippant about it.

But there's these ideas that these are really resource-rich, wonderful landscapes, and that probably you'd see people moving that way with the exposure of these landscapes.

And only a couple of sites.

But actually, those couple of sites are big sites.

full of Lavalois stuff that Nyanstoll's making.

So it's quite exciting.

Lavalois is the type of children.

Oh, I'm so so sorry.

Yeah, of course.

Le Valois is a Nyan's toll toolkit.

So when we see them moving into Britain somewhere around 300 or so, 1,000 years,

Nyan's Toles, well, they're here earlier, but around that time, they start to use something called Le Valois.

It's a suburb of Paris where it was defined by, but Le Valois toolkit, which is this wonderful lithic toolkit, which

the indications are that it allows them to be more mobile.

So being able to kind of, they're effectively taking a raw material and creating something that's standardized so

creating they know what they're going to come up with effectively and so it's allowing them to just be more mobile in their landscapes and potentially also helping us think more about them as as planners i suppose

and so yes we see these big lavala-esque sites in the north sea at this point which is really exciting because it's further offshore and maybe they're moving with this exposure of these landscapes into this glacial period so yeah we have so one of them is Area 240, which is a site that was, I think it was 2007, 2008, found by complete chance.

And this is the thing about these sites, right?

So at the moment, there's two, although there's a third that I can talk about as well, which is a bit fuzzier.

And the facts of their discovery are so serendipitous that you think, clearly, there's a lot more of this.

you know we're just not seeing it so the first one area 240 which has been published on extensively by people at Wessex Archaeology,

this was found because they were taking sands and gravel from about 11 kilometers off Great Yarmouth and normally

what usually happens is sands and gravels these days or the gravels, if they're too big, they're crushed straight away because commercially it's just that's what they don't need big gravel.

But these gravels were taken to different wharf, which is in Holland, and they were put into reject heaps.

So they weren't crushed immediately.

And a guy who was interested in looking for things was off sick.

So he used to visit and look at these heaps and he found loads of hand axes and he found loads of faunal remains.

And so suddenly there was this incredible underwater site in the North Sea.

Because it was active and he found them while it was still being extracted, they put an exclusion zone around it.

So they stopped judging.

And they were able to look at the cause, collect more geophysical data to try to understand and kind of repatriate some of the archaeology to some of those levels.

So when I was talking about having those calls and being able to think about where things might have come from and get some dates on those, that's what they were able to do.

And because of that, they've now been kind of watching areas around it.

So occasionally when they bring sands and pebbles up, they are sampled and archaeologists are allowed to look through them to see if there's any archaeology in them.

So they can characterise the kind of broader landscape.

around what's an archaeological.

So they are painting a picture of this Neanderthal landscape in this particular area of the North Sea as they discovered by complete chance, which suggests that probably would have been more as well.

Absolutely.

And so, the other one that's a comparable time period, so this one was dated to somewhere between 250 and 200,000 or so.

And the site that I've myself worked on, which was Area 447, they've all got these names because they're extraction zones, is down kind of, so it's off Felix, though, but it was the sands from this extraction zone were used to recreate the beach at Clacton.

So it turned it into this wonderful sandy beach, really nice.

But the sands were taken from an area where we know river systems through the Pleistocene, so the period of time when we have people here, were draining, right, when sea levels were lower.

So if we look onshore, we know that river systems are really high potential for archaeology.

We find loads of lower paleothic archaeology in these river systems.

So when they're underwater, it's probably exactly the same, but we don't normally see them because the stuff is taken out, okay?

Took the sands, put them on the beach to recreate this beach, and people started to find beautiful Lavalois archaeology almost instantly.

So again, you know, other bits of the extraction zone here and other extraction zones might be immediately crushed or taken away somewhere, but because these sands happened to sample something that was nice and low energy and had loads of archaeology in it, we're able to suddenly see loads of archaeology coming from this period.

And the industry, so the aggregates companies involved, were really happy to share the data with us.

So we were able to use their sediment cores to look at the changing landscapes, the changing environments, and to get an idea from the tracks of their vessels and the depths of the sediments they took and the type of archaeology we had, the kind of like a Venn diagram of things to work out where we thought archaeology was coming from.

Because it's beautiful, it's really fresh, it's lovely, despite being spat out onto a beach.

It's kind of the edges are a bit broken, but they're fresh breaks.

And the rest of it is like it's been dropped where it was made.

And the dates for that are really quite well constrained to around 200,000.

So right before we start to see no more Nyan stars in Britain for quite a period of time.

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So you have those great sites, which is revealing more about the Neanders and how they very much occupied Doggaland at that time and I'm guessing these sites is it revealing more I mean how do you think we should then picture it should we be picturing this as a very as a rich landscape full of different Neanderthal communities who are taking advantage of the resources that Dogger Land had well I think that's the interesting thing is it's um it's really it's difficult to picture because we we again have to think of these and it's so impossible these huge time scales right and these huge fluctuating climates.

So yes, I think that the thing is about Doggerland is that we know it's a lower-lying area, right?

We know it's low-lying area.

We know that big rivers were draining into the southern North Sea at the time.

We know that we have the coastlines in the area.

And we know that when you get these meeting of habitats, these kind of ecotones, that, and mosaics of habitats, if you like, that we have lots of lovely resources.

Combine that with, of course, fresh water.

These are areas that human populations in the past and even in the present, right?

That's where you'd be.

That would be a really wonderful place to live.

And a wonderful place for animals to live again kind of like just another feather in the bow i suppose because hunting grounds i guess and then if we think about where we are now onshore these would have been the relative uplands to those relative lowlands at the time so for periods of time throughout the past million years or so Yes, absolutely.

I think these would have been incredibly rich landscapes for these people to be in.

And in fact, where we are today is more likely to be the kind of hinterlands, you know, associated with that.

And we find archaeology generally associated with river valleys.

And it tends to be the lower reaches of the rivers where we find a lot of it.

So it's likely, but even more so, you know, in the North Sea.

But then, of course, when we were entering cooler periods, that would change.

So not necessarily to be less productive, in fact, probably still very productive.

but the character, the nature of those landscapes would become more open.

You know, you'd see

different energy to those rivers, different types of sediment flows.

So yes, lovely, beautiful, research-rich areas, but of course changing with kind of cool to warm periods in terms of what that looked like in terms of whether it was open or closed, the kinds of animals that people would have been exploiting, how easy those landscapes would be to move through, I guess.

Yeah.

It still seems incredibly enigmatic for this period and that there's still so much more to learn about it.

But in regards to bones there, do we not therefore have the sites, the Neanderthal sites that have been uncovered, do we know much about them and what types of bones have been discovered with them as well?

Or is it just kind of almost like a few tools and getting a sense of how much human occupation there was in those places?

Yeah, so it's sorry, it's all tricky, isn't it?

I start every answer with that.

What's quite difficult?

So if we look at 447, so the work that I was doing, there are thousands of stone tools.

And when I talk about Lavalois toolkits, there's also elements of different toolkits.

So we find hand axes, a Shuiley and hand axis.

So this is an earlier type of technology.

There's smaller number of those and they're more abraded.

So it's telling us that there's probably

multiple deposits being sampled.

The majority of stuff is very fresh, and it's associated with the Lavalois Neanderthal elements.

Shulian, could that then mean that there was Homo erectus there before Neanderthals, but we just don't have that direct evidence?

Is that a thought?

Yes, definitely.

So, we know, of course, so if we think about Haysborough, Hayesborough is the 900,000 geocytes, so that's the kind of earliest we have.

And when we think about the species that would have been involved throughout time, we think, well, based on kind of who's around, that that was possibly someone called Homo antecessor.

Right, yeah, And that's based on footprint evidence, looking at things like stature.

But Homo antecessor has only been found, fossil-wise, in Atapuaca in Spain.

So it's, you know, it's an educated guess, right?

Homo erectus also around at the same time.

Then we get someone called Homo hydrobogensis, and then Neanderthals.

So all of these species made hand axes at some point, and causing flakes, the whole thing.

So we know they were here because we find sites on what is now Britain.

And so in order to get to Britain, we know that they would have been moving through these landscapes.

So, yeah, basically, when we find the stuff offshore, yes, we know we know that they were occupying these areas and living within these areas.

Pinpointing them is hard.

We don't have any dots on a map, but we know, of course, by

indirectly that they would have been there.

And the animal bones that are associated with the sites, because of that mixed sampling, it's quite difficult to associate them with the archaeology because they're also quite abraded.

So, it's it's my feeling is that most of them are from a deposit that's more time averaged.

So they're not necessarily associated with these Lavalois deposits.

They look like they're more beaten up.

They could be in a fluvial gravel associated with the hand axis, for example.

But elements of them probably are.

So it's difficult because it's a smish mesh.

But what we know from the fauna over 200 years or so of trawling of the seabed is that it is coming from deposits that are intact Pleistocene deposits.

So the bones aren't just, if I found a mammoth bird in the middle of the North Sea that hasn't been there kicking about the seabed for 20,000 years, right?

That's very much less than that 10,000 years.

It's been probably relatively recently exposed because they do break down, even when they're quite heavily fossilized, they break up.

So we know from that that there are patches of seabed from the fauna itself that you can assign to, very broadly speaking, much earlier deposits and much more recent deposits.

So then trying to figure out that, okay, when you have those Neanderstal sites, trying to understand what types of animals they were feeding on, I mean what they were hunting, what was also there in Doggerland at that time.

Of course, sometimes it's more difficult than others, but do we get a sense there for, let's say, with those Neanderstal sites, what types of Ice Age animals that they were hunting, what were going there in their herds at the same time?

So for this, we use kind of proxy evidence, I suppose.

So terrestrial sites where we have got that evidence.

So we've got archaeology-associated animals.

So we know at those periods, you know, know, we're linking things like woolly mammoths.

We know that we have various species of Pefrinoceros, Woolly Rhino, at that point, deer species, so lots of deer species, lots of bovids.

Mostly, we're talking about kind of herbivore, big groups of herbivore species.

And that's, yeah, I mean, that's effectively proxy evidence from other sites.

But we also have an indication of what those landscapes would have been like from the sediments associated with the archaeology.

And so, the pollen and things and the diatoms, of course, these can tell us about,

you know,

what it was like, how far was the sea?

Was it what kind of energy were we thinking of in terms of, you know, the sea energy?

Is it like a high energy coastline?

Is it something really gentle?

What's nearby?

Salt marshes, for example.

And that can then help us to think, okay, what kinds of animal species would have been in those areas?

What would you expect to see?

So a lot of it is kind of

using very detailed bits of paleoenvironmental evidence to then infer aspects of the landscape and of the lives of these species, of these human species.

And do we have any Neanderthal bones at all or anything like that?

We do.

Well, we don't, we don't as a country.

So on the Zeeland ridges, the Dutch have found Ernie's Tel Brow Ridge.

They've got tons of really cool stuff being washed up on their beaches, including this Neanderthal Brow Ridge, which they've kind of repatriated again using geology and cores to a deposit they think is about 50,000 years old.

So that's really exciting.

And there's probably lots more to come.

They're building up their beaches a lot because obviously they're subsiding.

So they're having to do a lot more of that.

We're starting to do more of that for sea defense reasons so we're likely to also start seeing more archaeology on beaches.

Fingers crossed indeed.

Well you mentioned 50,000 years ago there so let's go on to more recent times.

So what happens to Doggerland where we get to this another kind of big spike, this big decrease in temperature known as the last glacial maximum because this also feels a big time in the story of Doggerland.

Yeah so that is that's the kind of maximum exposure of Doggerland if you like.

So we have global sea levels that are kind of around let's say 130 meters below low present.

So, you know, we are completely different in terms of the amount of land exposed, but we've also got a great big ice sheet sat on top of us.

So

not particularly nice.

So more exposed, but less inhabitable.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah.

And then after the last glacial maximum, so it's a maximum because we have a kind of weird steady decrease into it.

So we have really open landscapes for quite a long time when it would have been cool and we had people here.

But really at the maxima, we're thinking about something pretty extreme after that point we start to see global sea levels broadly speaking start to rise and this is so so so last glacial maximum is about 30 000 to 18 000 about uh 25 to 18 20 around 20 say around 20

and after that point we start to see the ice streaks melting and global sea levels rising and people moving back in say about 15 000 or so we have complex kind of climate going on where we have warm peak and then a really cold peak into what we call the Holocene that starts about 11,700.

And so from that point onwards, the topography is really interesting.

And we can see that it's really interesting because we have better control because it hasn't been glaciated since then.

It's only had sea level rise, right?

So we can kind of understand most of the variables that are at play and working on that landscape to reconstruct kind of how Doggaland was inundated and how the coastlines finally came to be as they are today, which is really interesting because we can kind of use it as a proxy to think about how things might have changed in the past, if you like.

And the story of doggerland after the end of the last glacial maximum as we get to the end of the ice age.

So we've done Homo anticipa or Homo erectus some 900,000 years ago.

We've done the Anstools as well.

So this is the time of modern humans of Homo sapiens.

Do we know much then about this almost this last hurrah of doggerland where you have Homo sapiens flooding back into that area of the world?

Do we know much about how they live there and what evidence we have?

Well,

this is the period of time where we do actually have quite a bit of evidence.

I mean, starting 100 or so years ago, people finding things like harpoons that were being dredged up from peats in the North Sea, tons of evidence over towards the east as well.

What we think we have, and they've used loads of models to reconstruct these landscapes, is rather than having, say, this wonderful area of resource-rich landscape that people are living in, and we know that people at this time are

still nomadic, but potentially becoming more sedentary.

so we know that they were spending longer time in different parts of their landscapes I suppose I think it's a tendency to think about the sea level rise at this point as being something that went like whoosh you know suddenly like a really catastrophic oh no because now of course sea level rise is awful for people they lose their homes they lose their you know and you can't move anywhere because you can't afford it your insurance doesn't work in the past it wasn't that way you know the population density was lower people could move and people were flexible and could adapt to these things differently i suppose And what we see from those reconstructions of the rising seas is that rather than that sudden loss of sea, you get incursions into different areas.

You get, you know, areas that were slightly high, like the dog bank, you know, steep-sided fluvial valleys with like the leftovers of glacial till moraines and stuff.

making hills, you get backwaters, you get salt marsh, you get stuff that's actually really quite nice.

So, yes, it's a loss of land.

And yes, I'm sure, you know, that would have been something that

would be a challenge, but it also throws up affordances for these hominins, for these humans, I should say.

And we know at this point also that these aren't people who are struggling with the sea.

By this point, we know that they are using watercraft.

So this increase in, yes, open seas, but also lower energy, nicer waterways,

probably wasn't that much of a challenge.

And potentially, in some areas, it was, you know, something that was quite useful and quite nice.

So it's I think it's less catastrophic and a much more gradual change that these populations were dealing with at the time.

Because sometimes you get the label the North Sea Atlantis for Doggaland and so immediately you get this idea of a tsunami or something surging through and all of Doggaland is submerged in the blink of an eye in the Mesolithic in the last 8,000 years.

And there was the tsunami, of course, the Sturgislide at 8.2, the 8.2 event, 8.2,000, roughly.

And yeah, you know, of course, that would have been...

8.2,000 years ago is everything, right?

During the Mesolithic, early Mesolithic, would have been pretty nasty if you have stood in its way.

But actually, the archaeological evidence isn't great for it being something that was very broad in its impact.

And that could be because it's been eroded since, so we missed those deposits.

But it looked like that kind of post-glacial landscape might have constrained it slightly.

But also, in the cause where we do recognise tsunami deposits, we see it moving back into terrestrial environment after, or back into a kind of lower energy, freshwater type environment.

So we know it wasn't what inundated it.

It wasn't the end of Doggerland.

It may have changed things, but it wasn't the catastrophic end that it's sometimes thought to be.

And it's the last bit, is Dogger Bank the highest bit?

And is that the last bit, which ultimately does become submerged in about the last 6,000 years or so?

Is that the thought?

It's probably one of the last areas to be overtopped, yes.

But actually, you know, there were remnants of...

around our coastline that were still dry land into the Neolithic that are now submerged.

And that's because there's loads of different processes, you know, sedimentation changes things, uplift, down warping from the results of the ice sheets, all of these things make it really complex.

So there are still areas now, or still areas now, there are areas that were exposed as late as the Neolithic that are now underwater.

But yes, Dogger Bank would have been one of the last things that was properly out in the southern North Sea.

Rachel, this has been absolutely fascinating, but I think this conversation has highlighted that even with the archaeological work of yourself today and highlighting how much further back in time the story of Dogger Bank goes.

It's still enigmatic and it's kind of chance discoveries, isn't it, to learn more?

But is it revealing more about the abilities of these early human societies to adapt, to repopulate, to live in areas of the world that we don't think of today because our modern geographic mind, we think it's now submerged, there mustn't be anything there.

But is it expanding our horizons about the capabilities of these early human groups?

Yeah, I think absolutely.

I think there are some really big questions in human evolution that can be addressed by these areas.

And one of them is our responses to those kinds of big changes, the sea level change, how flexible, how adaptable we are as a species.

It's really challenging to find that evidence onshore and offshore at the moment.

But I think hopefully in the future, yes, absolutely, there's the potential for these areas to hold some of the answers to some of these big questions in human adaptability and flexibility.

Rachel, it sounds very exciting for the future with more commercial work, with more archaeological work aligned with it to uncover more of this lost world beneath the North Sea today.

Rachel, there's been a fascinating introduction to the story of Doggerland.

It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast.

Thank you for inviting me.

Yeah, it's been great.

Well there you go.

There was the marine archaeologist Dr.

Rachel Labino giving you an introduction to the still very enigmatic topic of Doggerland and hopefully more information will be revealed about this prehistoric landmass in the years ahead with more commercial projects, more archaeological work and so on.

So stay tuned for more interesting information, no doubt, coming to the fore with Doggerland in the years ahead.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ancients.

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