How Doggerland Sank Beneath The Waves (500,000-4000 BC) // Prehistoric Europe Documentary

[Music] the North Sea stretches for some 750,000 square kilometers from France to Norway encompassing all of the wind slashed waters between rich in oil fish Commerce a highway and hunting ground for millennia Viking sea Kings once crossed over the waves here to raid continental Europe later still ambitious merchants of the Hanseatic League made it their base of operations for bears of the age of capitalism to come most recently during the 1800s this great expanse of salt water became the domain of the latest lucrative business to rear its head in Northern Europe whaling countless sea Giants were speared and gutted on these shores their bones and flesh discarded oily innards used to light the streets of London of course through all these long millennia fishermen made their living atop the waves [Music] Cod strollers from Norway heading up to the White Sea and Svalbard Englishmen Breton's and Basques heading all the way to Iceland and Greenland beyond by the early 20th century for many Dutch fishermen their livelihood lay much closer to home on a relatively shallow plateau just off of East Anglia that became known as dogger Bank named for the Dutch word for fishermen and the slightly higher elevation of the place compared to the seas further around in 1931 one of those boats the colander working the waters just 25 miles east of Norfolk made an astonishing discovery one which wouldn't be satisfactorily explained for decades to come at the time the fishing technique employed by trawlers such as the colander was to drag their nets along the seafloor pulling up not just prey but everything else besides amongst fish hook and silt water something else was dredged up there [Music] a large piece of peat named a Morlock formed by decomposing vegetable matter in wet acidic conditions thousands of years before vital in uncovering evidence of the past from Ireland to Alaska peat is a renowned preserver of archaeological evidence its Laius tracking the passage of time and this Morlock was no different within the peat though those Dutch fishermen didn't realize just how important it was at the time who was a barbed spear point carved from antler bone untold millennia before [Music] the spearpoints was one of a recognizable type found all over Britain and continental Europe during the Mesolithic era or middle Stone Age but how had it gotten all the way out to the North Sea the experts of the day wandered had it fallen off a sea roving fishing vessel or being carried out that far by some other unknown means no the peat had formed in fresh water meaning only one conclusion dogger Bank an area with an average depth of only around 93 meters with other areas to the south of it being even shallower at 50 meters and others still around 25 or 35 had once been dry land a prehistoric landscape of roving hills and fast rivers as early as the 12th century medieval writers such as gerald of wales had entertained the idea of a submerged landscape under the sea when he noted forests of petrified wood laying off the shore though this idea had always been associated with the Biblical Flood as early as 1913 paleobotanist Clement Reid had put forward the scientific idea of a submerged world under the North Sea the colander spare point further supported this idea and finally by the 1950s the advent of radiocarbon dating allowed for a precise dating of the find it had been made an astonishing 11,500 years before during the final years of the last ice age long before the traditional dating of the Biblical Flood an even earlier age still was found in the following years mammoth bones being accompanied by rhinoceros lions and saber-toothed cats denizens of the region many hundreds of thousands of years before during a time when northern Europe resembled the African savannah in the years to come yet more hunting weapons and animal remains were sifted up from the seafloor and in recent years even structures and boats have been found all revealed by cutting-edge scientific technology at the time when the Kalinda spear point was made the North Sea region called doggerland by researchers once stretched for some 260,000 square kilometers and once upon a time long before anglo-saxons romans celts beaker people and even before the Neolithic farmers who built Stonehenge first arrived in Britain this may have been not just dry land but one of Europe's most prosperous regions attracting game and hunters from thousands of miles away ultimately becoming their home for millennia this isn't just the story of Northern Europe's prehistoric past it's the story of a lost world which sank beneath the waves some 8,000 years ago [Music] this video is sponsored by a longtime supporter of the channel and a personal favorite of mine the great courses plus here you can find more than 11000 lectures on practically any subject you can think of in both audio and video format by the leading experts in the world you can access all of it seamlessly on your phone your 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amounts of evidence was ultimately destroyed by the acts of these individuals lacking any sort of modern scientific methodology some of them motivated by creationist views of the world others by 19th century whimsy the great advances in science and our understanding of the past assured in by these men could not have happened without them in 1823 one of those individuals captivated by the story of humankind a theologian named William Buckland traveled to the Gower Peninsula in South Wales at the time searching for evidence of the Biblical Flood Buckland had heard stories of elephant bones laid to rest in a remote sea swept cave [Music] arriving on the sheer cliffs rocks and the rough Celtic sea hundreds of feet below with nothing more than a rope and his sheer determination he went over the edge slowly but surely traversing down to the cave below what he found there would change his life forever at first berkland thought he'd found the remains of a Roman prostitute part of a local legend announcing the discovery as the red lady of Pavel and only later after new techniques revolutionized our understanding of the past would it be realized that these weren't Roman leftovers at all but the remains of a much earlier age the red lady who may have in fact been a male lived an astonishing 33 thousand years ago though Buckland didn't realize it at the time it wasn't elephant in the cave but mammoth bones next to a modern human skeleton coated in red ochre and laid to rest next to the bones of the Great Beast [Music] this is arguably the earliest ceremonial burial ever found in Europe the landscape these Homo sapiens lived in was very different to the one we know today [Music] in northern Europe over hundreds of thousands of years sea levels have regularly been going up and down by as much as one hundred to a hundred and fifty meters as glacial ice recedes and forms again over successive millennia it had been this way since at least the time of the Anglian era close to 500,000 years before a colossal influx of icy conditions that held Northern Europe in its grip for untold eons helping to shape the landscape into the one we know today by 31,000 BC when the red lady had been alive Britain wasn't yet an island but a vast peninsula encompassing all of the British Channel the Irish Sea and much of the North Sea including of course doggerland home to Hill ranges and river valleys this was the paleolithic the old Stone Age perhaps the red lady ever wandering in search of mammoths and reindeer once trekked across that vast expanse over the North Sea tens of thousands of Hardy nomadic hunter-gatherers shared the whole of ancient Europe during those years a landscape for the most part of open Tundra a blanket of white pin pricked by their prey of reindeer wild horse and of course mammoths for the red lady himself had been interred with one of those great beasts perhaps his killer locked together in a perpetual slumber though Buckland at the time a staunch creationist didn't realize it in life the path Irland man had been one of the first modern humans to live in Britain any real dating was a long way off but many other finds were made over the succeeding years some such as the Piltdown man would later be exposed as frauds an all too common issue which along with religious dogma and all manner of other pseudoscience plagued the scientific community for decades [Music] other finds of exceptional importance searches an entire cave full of prehistoric skeletons found at a Villines hole in 1797 was simply lost over the years due to neglect leaving behind only a few fragments of the initial find though Darwin published his great theory of evolution in the mid 1800s effectively kick-starting modern genetic science it wasn't until at least a century later that things would change for good in 1954 when British professor Stuart Piggott released his landmark work the Neolithic cultures of the British Isles he set the end of Britain's hunter-gatherer period at 2,000 BC the advent of radiocarbon dating almost immediately made the book obsolete when it set this figure hold 2,000 years earlier to 4000 BC the single greatest paradigm shift in our understanding of the past had arrived revolutionising archeology all over the world it was finally possible to date earlier skeletons such as the Pavel and man and other finds such as Swan scam man found in 1935 dating to 400,000 years ago a time when the landscape of Britain was very different home to Lions hyena and even saber-toothed cats [Music] human skeletons from this time were not modern Homo sapiens but a different sort evidence of early Neanderthals continuing for hundreds of thousands of years to come living in a world where there were many human species Boxgrove man was even earlier at five hundred thousand years old modern humans as we know them didn't arrive in Britain until around thirty thousand years ago the time of the red lady by that time they were probably the only human species left between twenty and thirty thousand years ago the Ice Age kicked in big time this was weather on a different scale - before turning Britain into a frozen wilderness reaching its peak 18,000 years ago and all but wiping out the population in Britain forcing them south as the ice came in just a few people clung on in Europe in the southern regions of modern day Spain Italy and Greece finally around 15,000 years ago there was a period of relative warming it was still cold but a few Hardy hunters could return to Britain and doggerland low-lying tundra coated the peninsula these were the last of the mammoth hunters for soon this landscape would change forever [Music] today Europe is home to some 750 million people 15,000 years ago no more than a few thousand hardy individuals made a living in this tough environment late Paleolithic hunter-gatherers inhabited a very different Britain - the one we know today great ice sheets stretched over much of the north of the island then a much larger peninsula linking Britain and Ireland to France over land bridges and encompassing much of the North Sea an impassable ice sheets coated Scotland yet people did live in doggerland hunters following their prey north and then south again as the season dictated this exquisite item named the swimming reindeer found in southern France dates to around 13,000 years ago it was found near the edge of the habitable zone at the time fashioned out of a mammoth tusk it gives a hint at the life of these people now focusing on reindeer as much as mammoths during this tumultuous time of change when glacial mountains of ice scoured valleys and hilltops into the landscape just a handful of Hardy hunter-gatherers attempted to eke out a living tracking herds of mammoths and reindeer across the vast open tundra life was extremely tough for these people living at the very extremes of human endurance and at Goff's cave in southern Britain when times were hard at least some of those present resorted to consuming human flesh bones found here show signs of meat and brain being scraped out by primitive tools when times were hard at least some of the mammoth hunters became cannibals in the milder interglacial spell they'd made their homes in caves in the Peak District the men dips Southwest Wales and Devon from where we find the first pieces of artwork ever discovered in Britain such as the Creswell horse head made around 13,000 years ago and the Creswell cave art those living here at Creswell crags might have seen this horse in doggerland the vast expanse of plains that stretched out to the east the horse head is reminiscent of other cave art found in Spain and France [Music] search was the nomadic life of these people that they too may have once thrived in doggerland 12,000 years ago Britain was gripped in the last cold period of the last ice age once again becoming a desolate land this was the Younger Dryas the harsh period glaciers scoured the land forging it into the landscape we recognize today except it wasn't quite the same because of post-glacial rebound also called isostatic lifting the land masses actually rose at this time doggerland then the size of Great Britain was just as densely populated as the rest of Europe and perhaps even more so bruised blades sites found mostly on the east of the island giving a hint of the people who lived here though little remains of Britain at this time brief fragments are found elsewhere made by similar people the shigera Idol found in the Ural Mountains dates to around 9500 BC the oldest wooden statue in the world it is remarkable that this survives to the present perhaps such carvings once existed in early Britain and doggerland before being lost down the ages finally around eleven thousand years ago the ice began to melt and the landscape would change to allowing life to flourish once more first came the prix boreal period a cold dry climate gradually warming up into the boreal a warm dry period animals came first carrying seeds within them but they were closely followed by people the ice had to go somewhere however every new summer being ushered in with colossal torrents of water further sculpting and crafting the hills we know today leaving goliath stones everywhere in their wake as a reminder of the power of nature for a time the temps ran into the Rhine and the Seine rivers becoming a super river running along the English Channel this was the time when Britain itself was sculpted and made into itself and doggerland would become a land of plenty revealed by seismic surveys lake beds river valleys even rolling hills can be found here in this increasingly habitable landscape tools bones even man-made structures have been located here under the waves the Holocene the age of man had begun though it would take many generations for real change to be perceivable if at all to those Paleolithic hunter-gatherers at threeways Wharf in the valley of cold the bones of reindeer and horse have been found dating to around 8000 BC evidence of these early groups of people who repopulated Britain [Music] also around 30 other sites in East Anglia and the Thames Valley near to doggerland have been found as reindeer became more scarce people here became expert horse hunters though they too would soon disappear the domesticated variety we know today having their origins in the far-off steppes of inner Asia by 8,000 BC much of Britain had taken on the shape we know today by 7500 BC Ireland had broken off entirely and most of the north and Wales were mostly as they are today the South was still connected to mainland Europe via a land bridge and of course doggerland [Music] as permanent as any of its neighbors to the human inhabitants who lived there [Music] for thousands of years to come people could still walk at will across this vast increasingly forested plane with its rivers lakes and ever-expanding inlets providing a welcome variety of habitats for animals and humans to make the most of a broad similarity of culture existed at this time all the way from Britain to Poland though as time goes on and the area's they lived in changed regional distinctions can be spotted harpoon heads being the major give away of course the landscape was changing by this time tundra giving way to the first forests of birch and alder different animals and plants too before and a completely new way of life for the people who lived there a new range of animals for the adaptable hunters and new predators to Red Deer Road ear elk or ox horse wild pig and brown bear wolf Badger Wildcat Lynx beaver otter and hare estuaries and coasts attracted wild fowl and fish rather than just reindeer and mammoths as before life was now much more complex requiring many different specialisms in various different ecological zones teeming with life and opportunities this period encapsulate s-- so much change that archeologists were inspired to give it a new name to distinguish it from that which came before the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age [Music] during the later Mesolithic a thick layer of forest coated all of Britain Ireland the North Sea and Denmark even places that later became devoid of trees like Dartmoor the Lake District and Orkney were then coated in the Wildwood comprised of elm alder hazel and of course oak archeologists have recorded peat beds and submerged forests all over doggerland from this time a land rife with symbolism and spirituality far from a peripheral area the North Sea then a world of alluvial Plains marshland forest and even Hills was a heartland [Music] though the coasts of this sinking continent may seem the very limits of the world in fact it was a place of Plenty being favoured by these people due to its proximity to both land and sea enjoying the spoils of both evidence of Mesolithic communities has been found all over the baltic coasts northern germany denmark and britain particularly in areas with access to water the evidence suggests that Mesolithic hunters lived a highly seasonal lifestyle traveling back and forth between various resource rich areas as the seasons dictated [Music] perhaps having a temporary camp at each one along with a more sensual less temporary main residence though very little evidence remains of these people certain artifacts searches discarded shells from seafood are occasionally found in abundance illustrating a little of these people's diets where they lived and even hinting of their everyday lives at oranjee in the Hebrides for example a huge midden of shellfish discarded by Mesolithic hunters 9,000 years ago was uncovered by archaeologists at the time the Hebrides bordered by both land and sea was a micro world each Island holding a different resource for local hunters who would pass between them as necessity dictated one island providing deer another shellfish and another a particular type of rock a similar series of sites at the river Kenneth further suggests this more settled lifestyle rather than their far ranging mammoth hunter ancestors at the very least having semi-permanent summer and winter camps and perhaps many more settlements by various resources throughout the landscape this also hammers home another important fact these people were boat builders moving around at good speed on skin and log vessels with its multiple coastlines and varying landscapes and resources this would have been a hub of human activity perhaps one of the richest hunting areas in all of Europe in relative terms attracting large numbers of people people who would then stay there settling down to make a new life the people of doggerland would have known their region intimately just like in britain the best real estate would have been the regions with the most opportunities probably the lowest and more coastal areas which were also the best for transport and communication in the interior forests colossal or rocks and wild boar lumbered through dense groves stalked by mighty bears and fierce wolves red and roe deer made their way through tall grass along with all manner of smaller creatures like hare and Beaver huge are modest of migrating birds made these lowlands their home during certain times of the year along with more permanent waterfowl wood pigeons and all manner of Geils and crustaceans inhabiting lowland swamps and Shores all sorts of fish could have been hunted to migrating salmon from river valleys saltwater cod and haddock and perhaps one of the most important food sources during this era could have been seals lounging on the shore in great abundance making kills easy archaeologist Jim Leary even suggests that whales and porpoises could have been hunted even becoming a part of the symbolism of this North Sea world much like with the Arctic Inuit today in the Hebrides primarily these people were fisher folk just like in earlier epochs some of the only evidence of human activity for thousands of years comes in the form of any items found usually spear points made of animal antlers and flint blades actual settlements of Mesolithic people are few and far between though when they are discovered searches at the island of coal they provide a great deal of information about this time yet tantalizingly few actual Mesolithic hunters have been found finds like cheddar man the earliest near complete skeleton ever found in Britain dating to around 7,000 100 BC remain extremely rare [Music] rather than burying their dead per say it's possible that a form of ex carnation was practiced that is leaving their dead in a sacred open place to be picked apart by wild animals thus potentially explaining why we find so few of the dead [Music] though evidence suggests a variety of possible lifestyles in Mesolithic doggerland of course it had its fair share of difficulties to living at the extremes of environmental pressures the people of doggerland often found themselves at the mercy of the environment and the natural world unlike Paleolithic hunters before them these people don't seem to have usually traveled around for hundreds of miles to seasonally track hurts for better or for worse they probably for the most part stayed within their own local environment life was hard for these people not to mention steadily rising sea levels and having very few methods of preserving food or stowing away anything for leaner times sudden and unpredictable drops in temperature happened every so often to search is in 6200 BC probably caused by melting ice caps in North America no wonder then that's during this time of uncertainty accompanied by a far milder climate than ever before some of the first evidence for religion and a defined worldview can be found of course firmly imbedded within nature these ceremonial headdresses found at Starke are in yorkshire give but a small hint of the spirituality of this world perhaps they were used in animalistic rituals perhaps as hunting aids though for archaeologist Francis Pryor their uses were probably multiple this was an unpredictable world though one filled with opportunity between 8,000 and 6200 BC just about the only permanent fixture of doggerland was its gradual retreat into the North Sea during this roughly 2000 year period it's thought that through a combination of glacial melt and isostatic rebound sea levels rose by as much as a hundred and twenty meters by 7500 BC Ireland was an island by 7,000 BC travel from Britain to the continents would have been difficult without a boat much of the lowland areas by then being made up of marshland no doubt mass displacement of people occurred over long periods as populations came under pressure forcing clans back into more of a migratory existence than their western and southern neighbors yet even by 6200 BC a fair amount of land still survived for this was the dogger hills an area of relatively high elevation yet all this was to change [Music] I'm a terrible day around 6100 BC the Sun rose over britain's eastern seaboard for one final time all along the coasts and river valleys thousands of people went about their business in the dogger hills some meandered out on their coracles or dugout canoes making their way along the coastline in search of fish and seafood others hunted game in the low rolling hills their clan members gathering berries or making Hut's of wood and Bracken meanwhile hundreds of miles away beyond the horizon a huge calamity was about to seal their doom the dagger hills were the last part of Britain's Peninsula to sink beneath the waves and astonishingly recent geological evidence suggests it may have been a single day that sealed its fate it was an Oxford University geologist who first made the discovery in 1988 at the Montrose basin at angus north east Scotland David Smith found layers of sand where clay should be only one thing could have been responsible a huge wave that struck Britain just over 8,000 years ago the experts have another name for it one which remains controversial mega tsunami evidence of the greatest natural calamity to ever reflect Britain and more severely doggerland this was a tragic disaster which tore through Mesolithic northern Europe known today as the stir a gas light caused by a great landslide off the coast of Norway one of the greatest tsunamis ever recorded on earth continuing 40 kilometers inland killing all in its path the stereo slide was so powerful that it would literally tear people apart with waves 10 meters high no Mesolithic hunters could hope to survive in a single day the landscape altered forever taking on a new shape doggerland went down and Britain became an island severed from Europe for good by the forces of nature but not everyone lost their lives some may have even profited from the disaster with new lands and opportunities opening up nature abhors a vacuum after all Mesolithic hunters had no trouble getting themselves across open seas they'd already done so from the Scilly Isles to the Hebrides from Sicily to Malta so any who survived the Cataclysm could have always up sticks and moved there is even evidence that some of the dagger Hills survived the calamity for another few centuries perhaps only finally disappearing in the 5th millennium BC well into Britain's late Mesolithic era as the rest of Europe begins to embark on the most significant societal Revolution in history the adoption of Agriculture during this tumultuous time as people either bailed out of the North Sea or went down with it we have evidence of a particularly interesting Mesolithic site most of which now lies under the water just off the Isle of Wight on England's south coast here underwater archaeologists have found significant evidence of boat building dating to around 6,000 BC this is the oldest boat workshop found anywhere in the world perhaps the last people of doggerland didn't all go down under the waves may be simply hugging the coast as they always had and moving on to better climes once Britain became an island however all this was to change as the population began to rise the wildwood would well and truly be populated especially as we enter a new warmer wetter climatic period known as the Atlantic by 5,000 BC doggerland was gone for good and just across the channel in what is now France a new way of life was taking hold a way of life that would change everything definitively launching humanity out of the natural world becoming forever more a separate unique species next time I'll be looking at Britain's last hunter-gatherers in the world that came after the very beginnings of our world don't forget to Like and subscribe and I'll see you on the next one [Music] and thank you for watching history time is a one-man team run by me Pete Kelly if you want to see me visiting ancient cities medieval Citadel's megalithic monuments Iron Age hill forts and so much more and subscribe to my other channel by that same name I'll also be making book reviews video essays and anything else that doesn't quite fit in to history time thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next one [Music] you

Channel: History Time

Views: 1,127,042

Rating: 4.8337274 out of 5

Keywords: doggerland, prehistoric, prehistory, prehistoric europe, ancient Europe, hoxnian, anglian, history, documentary, history documentary, ancient history documentary, neolithic, mesolithic, stone age, Stone Age europe, stone circles, Neolithic transition, hunter gatherers, huntergatherer, hunter-gatherers, europe's lost world, north sea, under the waves, under the North Sea, ancient britain

Id: DECwfQQqRzo

Length: 49min 58sec (2998 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 26 2020