Doggerland: The North Sea Atlantis?

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Speaker 1 I'm currently at History HID HQ and I've just finished recording this interview all about Doggaland, this lost prehistoric world beneath the North Sea with our guest today, Dr.

Speaker 1 Rachel Labino, the marine archaeologist from the University of Southampton.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I thought that was fascinating, and I hope you guys do too. Let's go.

Speaker 1 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 Sea.
This is Doggaland, sometimes called the North Sea Atlantis.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And how did it end up drowned in the deep? This is the story of Doggerland with our guest, Dr. Rachel Bino.

Speaker 1 Rachel, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Speaker 15 Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 15 Other than a ridiculous name.

Speaker 15 So the name comes from the Dogger Bank, and the Dogger Bank, if anyone listens to the fishing broadcast, is an area of high ground that's out in the Southern North Sea, kind of to the top of the southern North Sea.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 When we talk about Doggerland, we're talking about these submerged landscapes between Britain and Europe. So in the past, these areas were dryland.

Speaker 15 People would have been able to move through them, live in them, animals, trees, landscapes like you see today were existing in those areas.

Speaker 15 This was cyclical too, so we often talk about Doggaland 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So they are really important for about a million years.

Speaker 15 I mean, obviously, they're really important before that, but for humans at the moment, for archaeology, they're important for this really, really long period of time.

Speaker 1 And that's such a good point to highlight straight away, isn't it, Rachel?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But the archaeology, the stories of humans living in that now submerged landscape, it stretches so much further back.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 there's often been this idea that, you know, nothing's there anymore, you know, so none of this stuff will preserve.

Speaker 15 It's undergone several glacial periods, several transgressions, so sea level rise and regressions would be sea level falls.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 How on earth is anything still going to be there? Why would you bother to even look for those early answers? But we do know that they're there.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Now, these landscapes exist globally. And of course, you know, Doggerland is quite extensive because we're on a shallow continental shelf.

Speaker 15 So it doesn't take much of a drop in sea levels to expose a massive swathe of landscape. If you had a sudden drop-off into an ocean, you'd have less of a coastal plain exposed.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 1 And I'm guessing also things like the fauna, like the climates, the environment.

Speaker 1 So learning not just about the early people and like the tools or the bones they left behind, but also the environments that they were living in.

Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 So you can kind of learn that information from a submerged landscape like Doggaland today.

Speaker 15 Yes, of course.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So they don't live like we do.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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 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 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 15 It's a little bit underwater, isn't it? It's a bit of a problem.

Speaker 15 Have you seen those?

Speaker 15 There was, I was it the 50s where they 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.

Speaker 15 And loads of archaeologists are always like, oh, if only they'd done that, and then we'd be able to have access to all these landscapes.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 But so how do we go about it? Well, a variety of ways, I suppose.

Speaker 15 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 know, I suppose, you know, because we're talking about so many different periods in time, you can't really unpick it all.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And to do that in particular at Haysborough, because it is completely different at different sites.

Speaker 15 Working with foreshore deposits, working with finds that people are finding on the beaches to try to then work out where they could be coming from offshore.

Speaker 15 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 archaeology onshore.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So diving at Haysborough, diving is wonderful. It's within 20 meters of water, most of it's in about eight meters of water.

Speaker 15 But the further offshore you go, logistically, safety-wise, everything becomes much more difficult.

Speaker 15 You know, you need much bigger boats, you need all kinds of things that I won't go into, and it's very expensive.

Speaker 1 A lot of money.

Speaker 15 Yes, exactly, a lot of money.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So yeah, to go further offshore, I mean, we're just talking vastly more money. So often we're working with industry.

Speaker 15 So there's, as I'm sure you're aware, like a huge amount of exploitation of the seabed.

Speaker 15 So things like wind farms, things like aggregates, so these sands and gravels that we used on our driveways to remake beaches.

Speaker 15 And in order to do all of that stuff, these people are collecting data on the seabed.

Speaker 15 They're also taking cores because for engineering purposes or even for sand and gravel purposes, they want to know what's where.

Speaker 1 Sorry, what do you mean by cores?

Speaker 15 Oh, sorry, yes, of course.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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...

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So So those lovely low energy deposits.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 So it allows you to think about

Speaker 15 the changing landscape and the processes that have been acting on that landscape. And

Speaker 15 if you are then searching for archaeology, it also allows you to kind of to potentially think about the depths you're thinking about, where it could be coming from.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 But those are very expensive to take. And as you can imagine, if you're taking six meter of cores, they need a big boat.
And so industry collect that kind of stuff for their purposes.

Speaker 15 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 you know 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 as you mentioned, it sounds so important.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And, you know, you can almost pinpoint the dates.

Speaker 1 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 Doggerland and the environment that people lived in there.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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 yeah 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 which 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 averaged global sea level and we think about interglacials i'm doing a curve with my hand interglacial 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 But after about half a million years, we see a kind of a progressive erosion of that landscape.

Speaker 15 So, we were probably not fully disconnected from Europe until about 125,000 years ago in what's called the last interglacial.

Speaker 15 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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Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Because this offshore site, is this the earliest evidence of human activity we have from Doggerland?

Speaker 15 Well, so at the moment, Haysborough is the earliest site we have in Northwest Europe. So

Speaker 15 the onshore archaeology. Okay, so there we've got evidence for humans here, let's say about 900,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 Those are those amazing footprints, aren't they?

Speaker 15 Yeah, the footprints, oh my god, the footprints are incredible, right? It's a complete connection to these people that were here a completely unprecedented period of time.

Speaker 15 How on earth were they here then?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And when that 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?

Speaker 15 So people called it Costa del Croma, okay? Because the idea was that, like, how are people here? 700,000 years. It's so early.
It's much earlier than we thought they'd be here.

Speaker 15 at the time it was about 500 000 was the idea and so the idea was that they were here because they were tracking tracking these lovely warm environments.

Speaker 15 So we had a lovely interglacial and so they were they were following environments further north than they normally would.

Speaker 15 Hazeborough III, when that was found, kind of blew that out of the water a little bit because Hazebra III is dated to around 900,000 and it is not nice. It's cold.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 The underwater site is a site by proxy, I suppose. It's a lot of archaeology that's being found on the beaches.

Speaker 15 What happened was that for hundreds of years, people have been collecting fauna, so animal bones on this coastline, and tons of environmental remains.

Speaker 15 So the chroma forest bed that is contained within.

Speaker 1 Chroma is a town on the northwest coast of Northwood.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So, you know, you could mistaken something from there for something that was more, they're so well preserved.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Just after Haysbroth 3 was published, about three years later, some wonderful collectors who are people who live really too locally and they're, I suppose, avocational archaeologists who were walking the beaches, started to find stone tools as well.

Speaker 15 And so this was incredible, right? So the first thing they found was a hand axe. axe, or one of the first things they showed us was a hand axe, and it looked just like that the Site 1 hand axe.

Speaker 15 So I'm going to go into lots of confusing things. Looked like a hand axe that had been found within some of these deposits previously, younger deposits, about half a million year deposits.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 We know they're archaeological kind of areas anyway. And this is being found by them on the beaches.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And they look like they're coming from the near shore zone.

Speaker 15 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 found deposits we've taken mini cores through deposits we've we have found archaeology but it's not been within a deposit we found bones um

Speaker 15 but for

Speaker 15 well various reasons first of all probably we've just maybe we're not going to any but the visibility sand cover, constant changes in the

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 1 So it's the kind of quest to find it and is it almost this idea that there was this rich...

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 15 i mean that's very simplistic way of thinking about things sorry but but yes absolutely and those 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.

Speaker 15 There was a collector,

Speaker 15 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 was no archaeology at this point or no stone tools.

Speaker 15 And those were similar to Pakefield, they were kind of like warm interglacial species, so warm period species, but like a nice, fully warm period species, right? That then stopped.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 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 recognized those channels onshore we've never seen any foreshore deposits there so the question for me it's 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.

Speaker 15 So there's multiple different areas of deposits which relate to different time periods. And I think that is a nice microcosm for the rest of the North Sea because

Speaker 15 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 change through time. So

Speaker 15 sand cover might be covering something very young, but it could be covering something that's much older than we're interested in.

Speaker 15 So yes, modern sand cover over something older and in areas, in pockets, we know that that means really interesting archaeology.

Speaker 1 And what types of archaeology are usually preserved beneath these sand covers

Speaker 1 which is now underwater? Does it mean that, is it anaerobic conditions so it allows more organic material to survive?

Speaker 15 So that's really dependent on the taphonomy.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 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 a sandbank and then that gets entrained in the river valley.

Speaker 15 So, you know, the river washes them into the main bit and they get caught up in gravels.

Speaker 15 You know, those gravels might then be preserved later on, but those gravels aren't going to be good for organic preservation.

Speaker 15 So it's very much dependent on the environment in which things are dropped and then how they're preserved.

Speaker 15 But yes, in some cases, and certainly at Haysborough, and certainly for some of the more recent archaeology.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 15 Yeah, yeah, lower Paleolithic, Early Stone Age.

Speaker 1 I mean, alongside Haysborough, are there any key sites, are there any key time periods that archaeologists like like yourself have found more evidence for?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 15 Yeah, so there's one other time. There should be loads, shouldn't there?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And these are all coming from that commercial, the industry, the kind of seaweed exploitation that I referred to earlier.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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...

Speaker 15 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,

Speaker 15 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 significant.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And so, having sites in the southern North Sea at the point when Neanderthals are abandoning, for want of a catastrophic word, abandoning Britain for a really long period of time, mostly at least, is really exciting and really significant.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 We're going to make these claims.

Speaker 15 It's a shame that we can't disprove them because it's all in water. I'm just being really flippant about it.

Speaker 15 But, you know, there's these ideas that these are really resource-rich, wonderful landscapes, and that probably, you know, you'd see people moving that way with the exposure of these landscapes and only a couple of sites.

Speaker 15 But actually, you know, those those couple of sites are big sites full of le Valois stuff that Nyanstal is making so quite exciting Le Valois the type of truth oh I'm so sorry yeah of course yeah Lavalois is um a Nyanstoll toolkit so when we see them moving into Britain somewhere around 300 or so thousand years

Speaker 15 Nyanstal's, well, they're here earlier, but around that time they start to use something called Le Valois.

Speaker 15 It's a suburb of Paris where it was defined by Lavalois toolkit, which is this wonderful lithic toolkit, which

Speaker 15 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 standardised.
So

Speaker 15 they know what they're going to come off with effectively.

Speaker 15 And so it's allowing them to just be more mobile in their landscapes and potentially also helping us think more about them as planners, I suppose.

Speaker 15 And so, yes, we see these big Lavalois-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.

Speaker 15 So,

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 So at the moment, there's two, although there's a third that I can talk about as well, which is a bit fuzzier.

Speaker 15 And the facts of their discovery are so serendipitous that you think, clearly, there's a lot more of this.

Speaker 15 We're just not seeing it. So the first one, Area 240, which has been published on extensively by people at Wessex Archaeology,

Speaker 15 this was found because they were taking sands and gravel from about 11 kilometres off Great Yarmouth.

Speaker 15 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 a big gravel.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So when I was talking about having those cores 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.

Speaker 15 And because of that, they've now been kind of watching areas around it.

Speaker 15 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 characterize the kind of broader landscape around towards an.

Speaker 1 So, they are painting a picture of this Neanderthal landscape in this particular area of the North Sea. They discovered by complete chance, which suggests that probably would have been more as well.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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 Dough, but it was the sands from this extraction zone were used to recreate the beach at Clacton.

Speaker 15 So it turned it into this wonderful sandy beach, really nice.

Speaker 15 But the sands were taken from an area where we know river systems through the Pleistocene, so the period of time when we had people here, were draining, right, when sea levels were lower.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So when they're underwater, it's probably exactly the same, but we don't normally see them because the stuff is taken out.

Speaker 15 Took the sands, put them on the beach to recreate this beach, and people started to find beautiful Lavalwa archaeology almost instantly.

Speaker 15 So again, 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.

Speaker 15 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 this archaeology was coming from because it's beautiful it's really fresh it's lovely despite being spat out onto the 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.

Speaker 15 And the dates for that are really quite well constrained to around 200,000. So right before we start to see no more Neon Stars in Britain for quite a period of time.

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Speaker 1 So you have those great sites, which is revealing more about the Neanderthals and how they very much occupied Doggerland at that time. And I'm guessing these sites, is it revealing more?

Speaker 1 I mean, how do you think we should then picture it?

Speaker 1 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 Doggerland had?

Speaker 15 Well, I think that's the interesting thing.

Speaker 15 It's really difficult to picture because we, again, have to think of these, and it's so impossible, these huge time scales, right? And these huge fluctuating climates.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 into the southern North Sea at the time. We know that we have the coastlines in that area.

Speaker 15 And we know that when you get these meetings of habitats, these kind of ecotones, that, or mosaics of habitats, if you like, that we have lots of lovely resources.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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,

Speaker 15 yes, absolutely. I think these would have been incredibly rich landscapes for these people to be in.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 But then, of course, when we were entering cooler periods, that will change.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 different energy to those rivers, different types of sediment flow.

Speaker 15 So, yes, lovely, beautiful, resource-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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It still seems incredibly enigmatic for this period and that there's still so much more to learn about it.

Speaker 1 But in regards to bones there, do we not therefore have the sites, the Neandersto sites that have been uncovered, do we know much about them and what types of bones have been discovered with them as well?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 15 Yeah, so it's sorry, it's all tricky, isn't it? I start every answer, but that was quite difficult. So if we look at 447, so the work that I was doing, there are thousands of stone tools.

Speaker 15 And when I talk about Lavalois toolkits, there's also elements of different toolkits. So we find hand axes, Achulean hand axes.
So this is an earlier type of technology.

Speaker 15 There's a smaller number of those and they're more abraded. So it's telling us that there's probably

Speaker 15 multiple deposits being sampled. The majority of stuff is very fresh and it's.
associated with the Lavalois Neanderthal elements.

Speaker 1 Shulian, could that then be that there was homo erectus there before Neanderthals, but we just don't have that direct evidence? Is that a thought?

Speaker 15 Yes, definitely. So we know, of course, so if we think about Haysborough, Haysborough is the 900,000 year site.
So that's the kind of earliest we have.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 an educated guess, right? Homo erectus also around at the same time. Then we get someone called Homo hydrobogensis and the Neanderthals.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And so in order to get to Britain, we know that they would have been moving through these landscapes.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 We don't have any dots on a map, but we know, of course, by

Speaker 15 indirectly that they would have been there.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So 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.

Speaker 15 They could be in a effluvial gravel associated with the Hanzaxes, for example. But elements of them probably are.
So it's difficult because it's this mishmash.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So the bones aren't just If I found a mammoth bone in the middle of the North Sea, that hasn't been there kicking about the seabed for 20,000 years. That's or sorry, much less than that 10,000 years.

Speaker 15 It's been probably relatively recently exposed because they do break down, you know, even when they're quite heavily fossilized, they break up.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 1 So then trying to figure out that, okay, when you have those Neanderthal 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.

Speaker 1 Of course, sometimes it's more difficult than others, but do we get a sense there for, let's say, with those Neanderstore sites, what types of Ice Age animals that they were hunting, what were going there in their herds at the same time?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So we know at those periods, you know, we're linking of things like woolly mammoths. We know that we have various species of Perfhinoceros, Woolly Rhino, at that point.

Speaker 15 Deer species, so lots of deer species, lots of bovids. mostly we're talking about kind of herbivore, big groups of herbivore species.

Speaker 15 And that's, yeah, I mean that's effectively proxy evidence from other sites.

Speaker 15 But we also have an indication of what those landscapes would have been like from the sediments associated with the archaeology.

Speaker 15 And so the pollen and things and the diatoms, of course, these can tell us about,

Speaker 15 you know,

Speaker 15 what it was like, how far was the sea, was it? What kind of energy are we thinking of? in terms of, you know, the sea energy. Is it like a high energy coastline? Is it something really gentle?

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 using very detailed bits of paleoenvironmental evidence to then infer aspects of the landscape and of the lives of these of these species of these human species and do we have any neandstal bones at all or anything like that we do there's well we don't we don't as a country So on the Zealand ridges,

Speaker 15 the Dutch have found a Neanderthal Brow Ridge.

Speaker 15 They've got tons of really cool stuff being washed up on their beaches, including this Neantel Brow Ridge, which they've kind of repatriated again using geology and cores to a deposit they think is about 50,000 years old.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 We're starting to do more of that. for sea defense reasons.
So we're likely to also start seeing more archaeology on beaches.

Speaker 1 Fingers crossed indeed. Well, you mentioned 50,000 years ago there.
So let's go on to more recent times.

Speaker 1 So what what happens to Doggaland where we get to this another kind of big spike, this big decrease in temperature known as the last glacial maximum?

Speaker 1 Because this also feels a big time in the story of Doggerland.

Speaker 15 Yeah, so 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 present.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 not particularly nice.

Speaker 1 So, more exposed, but less inhabitable.

Speaker 15 Yes, absolutely, yeah.

Speaker 15 And then, after the last glacial maximum, so it's a maximum because we had it, we have a kind of weird, steady decrease into it.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 After that point, we start to see global sea levels, broadly speaking, start to rise.

Speaker 1 And this is so so last glacial maximum is about 30,000 to 18,000?

Speaker 15 About 25 to 18, 20, around 20, say around 20.

Speaker 15 And after that point, we start to see the ice peaks melting and global sea levels rising. And people moving back in, say about 15,000 or so.

Speaker 15 We have complex kind of climate going on where we have a warm peak and then a really cold peak into what we call the Holocene that starts about 11,700.

Speaker 15 And so from that point onwards, the topography is really interesting.

Speaker 15 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 doggerland 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.

Speaker 1 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 antecessor or homo erectus some 900,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 We've done the answers as well. So this is the time of modern humans of Homo sapiens.

Speaker 1 Do we know much then about this almost this last hurrah of dogger land where you have homo sapiens flooding back into that area of the world?

Speaker 1 Do we know much about how they live there and what evidence we have?

Speaker 15 Well, this is the period of time where we do actually have quite a bit of evidence.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 What we think we have, and you know, 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

Speaker 15 still nomadic, but potentially becoming more sedentary. So we know that they were spending longer time in different parts of their landscapes, I suppose.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 You know, population density was lower, people could move. And people were flexible and could adapt to these things differently, I suppose.

Speaker 15 And what we see from those reconstructions of

Speaker 15 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 pluvial 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.

Speaker 15 So, yes, it's a loss of land.

Speaker 15 And yes, I'm sure, you know, that would have been something that would be would be a challenge, but it also throws up affordances for these hominins, for these humans, I should say.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So this increase in, yes, open seas, but also lower energy, nicer waterways

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 and a much more gradual change that these populations were dealing with at the time.

Speaker 1 Because sometimes you get the label the North Sea Atlantis for Doggerland, and so immediately you get this idea of a tsunami or something surging through and all of Doggerland is submerged in the blink of an eye in the Mesolithic in the last 8,000 years or so.

Speaker 15 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...

Speaker 1 8.2,000 years ago, is that what you think, right?

Speaker 15 During the Mesolithic, early Mesolithic, would have been pretty nasty if you stood in its way.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 But it looked like that kind of post-glacial landscape might have constrained it slightly.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And that's because there's loads of different processes. You know, sedimentation changes things, uplift, downwarping from the results of the ice sheets, all of these things make it really complex.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 But yes, Dogger Bank would have been one of the last things that was properly out in the southern North Sea.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But is it expanding our horizons about the capabilities of these early human groups?

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think absolutely. I think there are some really big questions in human evolution that can be addressed by these areas.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Rachel, there's been a fascinating introduction to the story of Doggerland. It just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast.

Speaker 15 Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, it's been great.

Speaker 1 Well, you go there was the marine archaeologist dr rachel bino 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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Speaker 2 Hi, folks, it's Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman.

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