Stuff You Should Know - Doggerland: Lost at Sea

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

The story of Doggerland is pretty fascinating. The idea is that mainland Europe and the UK were connected not only by a land bridge, but a place where plants, animals and even humans, thrived. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History, about the best ideas and people and businesses in history.

And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. First episode, How Southwest Airlines Use Cheap Seats and Free Whiskey to fight its way into the airline. The most Texas story ever. Listen to business history on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is a good old-fashioned episode of Stuff You Should Know. It's got history. It has geology.

lands. It has abbreviations like K-Y-A, all sorts of great stuff in it. Oh, boy, my friend, if I know Josh Clark loves something, it is submerged or lost

lands. It really is. I love it. I know this kind of thing really float your boat? It does. It floats my submerged land. We're talking about Doggerland, by the way, everybody.

That's right. We should probably just say kind of what it is first, right, before we get into the details. Yeah, and we've talked about it here or there. I could not, for life of me, remember what episode, but it's come up once or twice, but I think it bears repeating for sure. Yeah, it's a, you know, a lost land, a submerged landmass

off the coast of Europe. It's in the North Sea, probably anywhere from 50 to 60 to 100 feet down. And it used to be a, you know, it used to be land. It used to connect, they pretty much firmly believe now connect the UK and Europe. And not only that, but was a land that kind of flourished, depending on when you're talking about, with plants

and animals and even people. Yeah, they think that it's possible. So this was really populated during the Mesolithic era. Or area. They think that this area during the Mesolithic era was one of the most densely populated places in all of Europe. That's right. And by the way, did you ever see Taylor Swift on her area's tour? I didn't. But I can feel a Taylor Swift

area coming on eventually in my life. Through the concert, she sort of walked the audience through all of her different areas. This is my knee. The left one. Knees and toes, knees and toes. So, yeah, I mean, it sounds kind of

like, wait, that's it. There's like a landmass that once connected the U.K. and Europe. That's enough. Like, you can see somebody making an absurd or obscene hand motion talking about that, right? But no, listen. I know exactly what you're thinking. Stick with us because this is, it's fantastically interesting, even though we know very, very little about it.

The stuff we do know is so tantalizing that it's like the archaeologists who are studying this They wanted to just say like so bad There's so much stuff down there We just know it But they're being deliberate and methodical So they're not letting themselves say that But we can say it for them Yeah, and it's called Doggerland

And that's just cool It sounds like a movie title or something, you know It's starring a Lily Tomlin You know The younger one Alan? No, not that young

Von Stubb No, why is her name? Come on. Taylor? Yes. Oh, really? She was in a movie called maybe dog face or something like that or dog. Oh, yeah, dog fight?

No. It doesn't matter. We should probably edit this out. If we were a different podcast, we would edit this out. No, man. I came up with like four or five lilies. You've got to leave that in. Okay, true.

True that. But I don't even remember how I got on the lily thing. Well, I said it would be a good movie, and you reckon that Lily Taylor would be a, a good star at that movie. Yeah, because you were talking about it's a cool name. And the name comes after the doger bank, which is a shallow fishing area, very productive fishing area in the North Sea.

And the Dogger Bank is named after a type of Dutch cod fishing boats that were used for hundreds of years in the area. So there you go, Doggerland. That's right. I hope we got all that right. But it's a pretty shallow sea as far as seas go, about 220,000 square miles. and it sits in between the U.K. and Europe, of course, because if there was a land bridge that connected those two,

that's where the North Sea would be. It has long been a very crucial shipping route and trade route. And as for this story, you know, it's pretty key that in the 1950s and then 60s, gas and oil reservoirs were found there, and companies started licking their chops, and they will come into play later, oil companies and gas companies being actually and, you know, finally kind of key to helping out science, you know, and scientists in their explorations.

So, yeah, that will come in later. It's also, there's a lot of shipping that goes on. Apparently, that's a very ancient thing. People have been shipping things over the North Sea for a very long time. And then now it's become a really attractive site for renewable energy, as we'll see. So the North Sea, it's very important. and it's been used for a very long time, but its depths were just unknown.

Like people hadn't explored it. They didn't have the means to, really. Yeah, even though it's fairly shallow, it's still deep for back then. Yeah, 100 feet, what are you going to do? Hold your breath? Exactly. I mean, the moment you get down on the bottom,

you have to come right back up. It's terrible for exploration, holding your breath is. Yeah. But there were some panelizing clues that came up over the years that did strongly suggest that there was something

down there that had once been above the sea's surface. That's right. The first thing that happened, late 19th century, they started, you know, better fishing technology came along and you can fish a little bit deeper. So they started fishing a little bit deeper, which is great because you can get, you know, a lot more fish down there. But it was kind of a pain because they started dragging up what they called Moore Log, which is, you know, Pete, this kind of nasty clumped together Pete.

And in that peat sometimes, they would find animal bones, not fish bones, but like mammal bones. And I guess it was a 19th century, so it just sort of hassled their fishing progress. So they would just usually toss them overboard. Occasionally, if they had some, like, really well-preserved, you know, skull or deer femur or something like that, they might keep it. But that's when the first sort of whisperings of, like, something used to be down there started happening. Exactly. And then in usual fashion, it's worth mentioning H.G. Wells, who's probably one of the best speculators in the history of speculative fiction. This is pretty cool. He heard about some of those finds, and he wrote a story called The Story of the Stone Age, which is basically like there's a continent under the North Sea between the UK and Europe. Don't forget, this guy is the guy who in the late 19th century wrote stories about humans sending rockets up. into space, and placed the launches at Cape Canaveral.

Like, that's how, that's how smart this guy was as far as seeing in the future goes. I love it. Yeah. He's pretty great writer, too. Yeah. Interesting, dude. Man, we should do one on H.G. Wells. He deserves his own show, I think.

Okay. All right. All right. Moving on. As we crawl through Noah's Woods now, before the 19th century, and those bones, and that Morlaug Pete started coming up, there were whispers then. I said the first whispers came in the late 19th century.

It's not exactly true. Because during low tide, way back when the water levels would drop, and some of these folks living in the UK at the time would see these tree stumps. And this is like medieval times, and they called it Noah's Woods with the idea that this was possibly the area where Noah from the Bible lived before God decided to flood.

the earth because he was grumpy. Yeah, and here was plain, bright in your face, evidence of it. So that had stuck around since the medieval age. And apparently, according to UK or early British lore, this is where Robinson Caruso, who is the model for Robin Hood, emerged from the water and gave Arthur the sword in the stone. That's right. So, Noah's Woods was just kind of like a local.

thing. I'm sure the churchy types really talked about it more than anybody else, but scientists hadn't paid much attention to it until a very forward-thinking scientist and his wife, Clement and Eleanor Reed came forward, and they started looking into it. And they kind of were the first people to put together Noah's woods, the fact that there are tree stumps, weirdly ancient ones, in the sea. People are pulling up animal bones for terrestrial animals pulling up pete. It seems pretty obvious what's happened. Yeah, they're like, there is

something submerged that used to be above the water, and we think it's a land bridge that connected the UK in Europe. Yeah, they, and I noticed there were a couple of scientists married couples that worked on this along the years. It's kind of cool. This was a golden age for that.

Yeah. In 1913, they published submerged forests, which was the very first study on those was And yeah, that's when they really kind of put it out there. And it was, you know, it was the kind of thing where they didn't have any hard evidence other than these peat samples. But when they started finding, like, willow leaves and hazel and birch and fern, they were like, hey, not only do I think there was something down there, but it seems to have existed at least partially at a time that was like maybe kind of nice, temperature-wise. Sounds pretty nice, actually.

I'd like to live in Doggerland. But it wasn't called Doggerland yet, as we'll see. Yeah, that's right. So the reeds had this pretty great theory. Apparently, I read that they concluded that the only possible explanation for this was that sea level rise had flooded and sunk in this land. So they were really right on the money. But this is a very obscure theory. People weren't paying much attention to it.

Even in academic circles, it was pretty. obscure. But then there was a discovery in 1931 that really grabbed the archaeologists in the area by the throat, shook them until their tongues turned blue and hung out of their mouths. And it said, look at this. This is important. That's right. Did you say 1931? Because that's when it was. That's when a trawler called the Kalinda was fishing off the coast of Norfolk came along. and again a big old chunk of morlogue was hauled in in the net and they were digging through that and this guy's got a great name

the skipper of the clinda's name was pilgrim lockwood so good I would say that's a hotel check-in name but it's just a little too eye-catching too suspicious yeah yeah it is pretty suspicious actually yeah hi pilgrim lockwood checking in yeah okay buddy what's your real name and who do you think you are right

So Pilgrim Lockwood is busting up this pete with a shovel, just like out of a movie, hits something hard, reaches in and finds, and this is the kind of discovery that all of a sudden, like you said, everyone's going to be like, okay, there's really something happening here because it was an eight and a half inch long harpoon head, a harpoon point, carved with hands out of an antler. But here's the deal. At first they were like, okay, I mean, this is kind of cool. and they even offered it to the British Museum, but they said, nah, we've got some harpoons. We're all set. We got a couple of them.

And the idea was that everyone thought, hey, this is probably just was lost over the side of a boat or something. What's the big deal? Yeah, they're like pretty cool. I mean, like, don't throw it back. Hang on to it.

Yeah. Because it was very clearly fashioned by humans. I think in addition to just being smoothed out to be fashioned into a harpoon. I think it was decorated as well. well. So there's no arguing that it was a human artifact. It had been found in a moorlog, so a chunk of peat. And then somebody along the way, another married couple, Harry and Margaret Godwin, said, let us see that peat. We have a little hypothesis we want to test. And they looked

at that peat and they said, everybody, get this. That peat was formed in a freshwater environment, meaning that it could only have been formed above the sea's surface on land, in a wetland, but on land. And the harpoon being in there means that a human was on land above the sea's surface when they were using it and they lost it in the peat. Yeah, I mean, I picture Margaret Godwin just storming in the room and saying, that didn't fall off of any boat! And then even better, the British Museum gets into,

touch with Pilgrim Lockwood after this, and he's like, well, well, well, look who's come crawling back? Yeah, that would have been pretty great, actually. Yeah. So they used a pollen analysis to figure this out, and later on they were able to date this thing, and this harpoon head they found was about 14,000 years old, which would place it kind of squarely in the Mesolithic era. Well, about toward the beginning of it, I think, because this is in the area.

It's a squishy one. And the other thing that's so exciting about Doggerland and finding stuff out about it is we have very little information about mezzolithic people of this area of the time. Okay? Okay, everybody? In addition to all that, Chuck,

there were some more things that came up during the 20th century that were like, this is, there's something really interesting down there. They were finding bits of textile. Yeah. They found a Neanderthal skull fragment that they managed to, it was between 70,000 and 40,000 years old. Okay.

We'll talk about it a little later, but there's a facial reconstruction. You know, they love to do like the 3D. Oh, yeah. They have the guy smiling, just a huge, big, sweet, goofy smile. And I thought that was a nice touch. Yeah, that's always nice. That's when they recreated what they thought Jesus would really look like, and he looked like he was on the Simpsons or something.

Right. Or he's doing the eye wink and the double guns. I've seen that before. Oh, yeah, that's classic. But despite all these finds, kind of throughout the 20th century, they still, the scientific community still were like, okay, so there were people there, but like this was just, they were just traveling along the road. Right. Like, nobody lived there. They were rambling on.

They were rambling on through the area and the era, and maybe we should take a break. Yeah, let's. All right. We'll be right back with more on Doggerland. Hi, Kyle, could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc, and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link.

But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this, from Open AI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game.

This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium and businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Kelly, and some of you may know me as Laura Winslow. And I'm Telma, also known as Aunt Rachel.

If those names ring a bell, then you probably are familiar with the show that we were both on back in the 90s called Family Matters. Kelly and I have done a lot of things and played a lot of roles over the years. But both of us are just so proud to have been part of Family Matters. Did you know that we were one of the longest running sitcoms with the black cast? When we were making the show, there were so many moments filled the joy and laughter and cut up that I will never forget. Oh, girl, you got that right. The look that you all give me is so black. All black people know about the look.

On each episode of Welcome to the Family, we'll share personal reflections about making the show. Yeah, we'll even bring in part of the cast and some other special guests to join in the fun and spill some tea. Listen to Welcome to the Family with Telma and Kelly on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyank Wally. And I'm Hurricane DeBolu. On our new podcast Health Stuff, we demystify your burning health questions. You'll hear us being completely honest about her own health. I'm talking about very serious stuff right now, and you're laughing at me.

And you'll hear candid advice and personal stories from experts who want to make health care. more human. Sometimes you're there to listen, to understand, to empathize, maybe to give them an understanding or a name for what's going on. That helps people a lot, understanding that it's not just in their head. We are breaking down the science, talking with experts, and sharing practical health tips you can actually use in your day-to-day life. From when to utilize and avoid artificial light to how to sleep better. Everything you need to know about fiber and how to poop better. How to minimize the effects of jet lag and how to stay hopeful in times. of distress. We human beings, all we want is connection. We just want to connect with each other.

We want to make health less confusing and maybe even a little fun. Find health stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So you mentioned before the break at some point that Doggerland, was not named Doggerland at this point. It would be, I think, 1998 before that name would finally be coined. And again, this was still like just sort of the scientific community

that was getting pretty excited. Like even the broader archaeological community was still not super pumped on this area yet. They were studying it in the 70s, but in 1998, a archaeologist named Breannie Coles put out a... paper called Doggerland, colon, a speculative survey, wherein, and this is what made the scientific community kind of say like, ooh, what's she talking about? She named it Doggerland

off to that sandbank, the Dogger Bank like you were talking about, and she's the first one that said, you know what, everyone? I think people, like, lived here, and I think it was kind of pretty awesome. Yeah, this was in the land bridge. This is essentially like, it was an extension of the European continent, and a lot of people lived there, and a lot of stuff happened. Yeah. Maybe she busted into the room and said, that was no land bridge. Yeah. So, yeah, and there's just this collection of archaeologists and scholars, and it's getting increasingly elbow to elbow in there. And hot, because there's no AC for some reason in this room, okay? Yeah. And it's July. And there's a lot of rotting fish in the room, too, for some reason. Yeah, that's a weird edition. Everyone wondered about this fish. Yeah, and then somebody is eating leftovers of Vietnamese food and that's loaded with shrimp paste.

Oh, man, that's shrimp paste. And then there's one guy who's got leather patches on his elbows and it's chafing the people on either side of them's arms. Oh, God. Because they happen to be wearing short sleeves. Yeah, Neil always wears that thing. So it's really difficult to get across how groundbreaking Brian E. Cole's study was. because she was working with really minimal information.

I saw that she went to the extent of, like, collecting, like, anecdotes from old fishermen who had brought up stuff where they were trawling. Like, and she took all this and put it together. And not only, like, just wrote a book, like, hey, get this. This is what's really down there. She created maps of what Doggerland would have looked like, not just. just once, but throughout different areas of the time period that it was above water. So what she did was an amazing triumph of intellect. Like, it's really tough to get across, like, how big a deal what she did was.

And that's why people started to get into Doggerland, because it was so convincing, too. Yeah, for sure. You know, these different little pictures of different points in time, she said, hey, I think during the Paleolithic, It might have gone all the way from the Shetland Islands of Scotland to the Netherlands. Maybe, I think, during the Holocene period, that sea began to rise, and it became an island for a while. And then finally, she put it at 5,500 BC. She figured it disappeared entirely. We've seen anywhere between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago is what people speculate.

But she even, despite all that, was like, hey, this is just, I'm speculating here. everybody. Much later, a archaeologist named Vincent Gaffney, along with a graduate student named Simon Fitch, Fitch, or Fitch, yeah, Fitch. In 2001, got on the scene, and after about eight years of work, Gaffney said, you know what? She was reasonably correct

with all this stuff. Yeah. Nice work. And Gaffney was in a really good position to say that because, like you said, he worked for years and years and years on a project that he had come up with with Simon Fitch, that was pretty clever. Yeah.

They were like, there are a lot of oil exploration companies that have been, like, mapping the seafloor of the North Sea for decades now. Surely they have some amazing data sets that they'll share with us. So they started going around to oil companies, and they finally found one, actually, Petroleum Geo Services. And PGS said, sure, we'll share a little bit of our undersea mapping with you. And they gave them data for 23,000 square kilometers of the North Sea.

And Vincent Gaffney fainted. But luckily, Simon Fitch was there to catch him. And that was just, that was what Simon Fitch is all about. He's always there to catch you. Yeah. And this was a situation where, like, to the oil company, they were like, let's just give them a little bit of our stuff. And maybe they'll stop calling us.

Archaeology magazine later called that the largest geophysical survey ever made available to archaeologists. Pretty cool. So that's sort of the difference between the sort of the oil company sector and the scientific community and what they consider a little bit of data. Yeah, and this was really groundbreaking for underwater archaeology because this was, our underwater archaeology at this point was like dive down in scuba gear, hope you find something. There were some techniques where you can actually kind of excavate something that's close to the surface. They have big vacuums that they go through the silt that's taken up. on board the ship above. So it's not like it was just completely just a concept at the time,

but this really opened it up, this underwater mapping. But Simon Fitch and Vincent Gaffney found out these maps are, the resolution's not enough to be like, there's a site, there's a site, a look that skeletons waving at us, let's go investigate there. But it was enough to give them a big picture of Doggerland. And it was very clear that this was not just some, land bridge. This was, yeah, again, like it essentially a new country that they had discovered under the sea. And they were able to match that with existing finds. Yeah. Like, they're like,

well, there's this mastodon skull found over here. And that makes sense that it would be here. So let's kind of look for humans over there. That's the kind of technique that they managed to come up with. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And in the end, they basically said we think this was not only were their people here, but they think it was a, quote, a significant mezolythic population. And, you know, it was, like you said, it was pretty groundbreaking. I thought we did an episode on underwater archaeology, but I think it might have just been that I wrote that article for How StuffWorks.com back in the day. Oh, we should do that then.

Yeah. No? Okay. I don't know. If it was something I wrote, I'm not sure it's not great. No, you've written tons of good stuff. Oh, you're sweet. Uh, in 2022, well, I guess we should mention in 2014, Gaffney started working at the

University of Bradford, and he founded the submerged landscape research group there because he was dogged about doggarland. And then eventually in 2022, I guess seven ish years later, eight years later, he joined the unpathed Waters Research Project. And that was a pretty cool initiative to make the maritime history. of the United Kingdom, just kind of put it out there for the public to digest. Yeah. So did you check this map out? Yeah, it's cool.

Yeah, it is. So the resolution is, it's very like pitfall. It's that level of bit resolution. The reason why is because if they took all the data that they actually have and rendered it in some sort of way that looked kind of whizbang, it would crash your computer the moment you started to try to load it, right? Yeah. So they had to, because there's so much information.

that they have, they had to kind of narrow it back down into that kind of lower resolution version. But the stuff that it does is amazing. Like you can go forward in time, backward in time. You can see the sea level rise and fall. You can actually control people by setting up a camp and then sitting back and watching what they do. And if there's like a caribou or a moose or something nearby, they'll go kill it. And then they process the carcass. And it just does all this different, super cool stuff. It's definitely worth checking out. The unpathed waters, undreamed shore lines, I think.

Wow, that's a very pretty name. It is. Should we take another break and talk about what was there? Yeah, let's take that break. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? just one page as a Google Doc, and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you.

Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO, Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person, a billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI. know, will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some

really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyalk Wally. on our new podcast Health Stuff, we demystify your burning health questions. You'll hear us being completely honest about her own health. I'm talking about very serious stuff right now, and you're laughing at me. And you'll hear candid advice and personal stories from experts who want to make health care more human. Sometimes you're there to listen, to understand, to empathize, maybe to give them an understanding or a name for what's going on. That helps people a lot, understanding that

It's not just in their head? We are breaking down the science, talking with experts, and sharing practical health tips you can actually use in your day-to-day life. From when to utilize and avoid artificial light to how to sleep better. Everything you need to know about fiber and how to poop better. How to minimize the effects of jet lag and how to stay hopeful in times of distress. We human beings, all we want is connection. We just want to connect with each other.

We want to make health less confusing and maybe even a little fun. Find health stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Radhdi Dvlukaya, and I am the host of a really good cry podcast. This week, I am joined by Anna Runkle, also known as the crappy childhood fairy, a creator, teacher, and guide helping people heal from the lasting emotional wounds of unsafe or chaotic childhoods. We talk about how the things we went through when we were younger can still show up in our adult lives, in our relationships, our reactions, even in the way we feel in our own bodies. And Anna opens up about her own story, what helped her notice the patterns she was stuck in,

and how she slowly started teaching her body that it is safe now. So when I got attacked, it was very random. Four guys jumped out of a car and just started beating me and my friend. And they broke my jaw on my teeth. I was unconscious. Then I woke up and I screamed. And I screamed because even though I didn't know who I was or where I was, something in me was just like, hold on, wait, they could kill me and I'm not going to let that happen.

I'm not going to let that happen. and I'm going to get through this, and I did. Listen to a really good cry on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. you know, improve that information. In addition to all that, more and more artifacts have been coming up. And apparently there's a good working relationship between archaeologists who are studying Doggerland and the trawling fishermen who bring in these finds. Because before it was like, hey, check out this, what, what they call them, moorlogs?

This big chunk of tooth. And look, there's probably, what, a mastodon tooth? Is that what that is? And they'd say, well, where did you get this? and be like, I don't know, I was over, I don't know, somewhere in the east, north sea. And that didn't help very much. But now that they've kind of formed this relationship with these fishermen, the fishermen are like, well, here's the GPS data for where we pulled that up. And now our underwater archaeologists can go and look and say, like, yep, this seems like a good site to explore.

The problem is this. This area is so covered in sediment that even for underwater archaeology, this is a, challenging place to find artifacts because there's so many rivers that flow into the north sea and unlike rivers that flow into the ocean that sediment doesn't just disperse it gets trapped between the UK and Europe so it just settles and there's a lot of sediment on top yeah very messy scene but nevertheless they have persevered and learned a lot about what was there through these spines. In 2017, they were trying to, you know, they were trying to figure out what plants and animals were there. And they figured, hey, during the Younger Dryas, which we all know now, because

we did that episode very recently on the Younger Dryas. That was a happy episode, too. They said Doggerland was a tundra. It was just ferns and shrubs and grasses. The climate started warming over, you know, the course of thousands of years. And during the pre-boreal period, the Holocene, there were birch and pine trees. And all of a sudden, sudden, it went from a tundra to a forest. And then later, during the actual Boreal period, birch got replaced by Hazel, and you got these freshwater lakes, which is, you know, early on, remember when they found that, they did the pollen analysis, and they found the freshwater evidence.

So that kind of explains that. And as far as the animals living there, that is shifting along with the climate, basically, over the period of, you know, tens and hundreds of thousands of years. Yeah, because those animals. were adapted to the Ice Age. And so when the Younger Darius was like, Ice Age is back, those animals hadn't died out yet, so they're like, awesome. We've got another 1,300 years.

But after the Younger Darius ended and the Ice Age finally came to an end about 11,600 years ago, the things like the woolly rhinoceros and mammoths and reindeer had really nowhere to go and largely died off or else migrated northward. And they were replaced by wild boar birds came along, which is always a good thing. Otters showed up. Cute. Yeah, if you've ever seen an otter holding hands with another otter,

you're glad that those otters showed up. Beavers, one of our favorite animal episodes. It was just a huge change in not only the vegetation, but also the animal life. And the animal life also included humans, too. Yeah, I mean, we mentioned there were people there, and there were. The first hominids there, well, they weren't human, actually.

So I sort of misspoke. But they were called homo antecessor, which was the predecessor to humans, and they were there about 800,000 years ago. And then finally, you know, we mentioned that Neanderthal fragment, skull fragment. They moved in when Doggerland was a tundra. And I guess it was 2001 when they found that skull fragment. This is off the coast of the Netherlands. And they named this one. I love it when they name these, you know, ancient humans.

but I'm not even going to try and pronounce it. It's K-R-I-J-N. I'm not sure how you would say that in Dutch. I saw that it was one syllable, so I'm not sure either, but it's not Krigin. Like I was saying, G-J-J-N? Jay's got to be silent, right? It does something weird. Yeah, it does something weird.

But they reckoned that fossil. They dated it to about 70,000 years old, and they said this guy probably ate a lot of meat as his diet, maybe some fish, but definitely was chowing down on some pretty good food. And then, you know, they found all sorts of stuff over the years on the coast of the Netherlands, just like a bone point or an axe or any kind of carved, pointed, you know, arrowhead or harpoon head would just wash up on shore. Yeah, this is some of the evidence that we have that Neanderthals were pretty smart and actually well adapted or suited to cold climate. So they were still around during the younger dryest.

humans had kind of come along before the Younger Dryus the Younger Dryus came along, they beat them back and then finally after the Younger Dryus Homo sapiens really start to show up. I think as early as like 14,000 years ago and again this is the beginning of the

Mesolithic in Europe and they were hunter-gatherers. They had just basically migrated westward from continental Europe because they could get there by walking from Europe to the UK and they were like, this doggardland place is pretty nice. We're going to stick around here.

Yeah. So, you know, for a while, they were migrating around, following the animals, going where the food was. But they said, you know, they're basically like anyone else from that time in that place, from that era and area. Man, this is really just fitting together like a glove, you know. I love it. They were, you know, carving things from stone, carving things from antlers. We have direct evidence of both in animal bones. They were wearing animal skins.

But they said they think eventually, like you said, they decided like, hey, this place is nice. Let's set up camp here and maybe even farmed there. Yeah. So this is where the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic happens. It's pretty much what they consider the change or the beginning of the Neolithic was when people started farming. And that happened on Doggerland. This is where they essentially found the place that they could grow crops. It was warmer then around this time than it was, than it is now in that area.

So they were very easily raising crops, figuring it out as they went along. So that, because they were raising crops, they were more sedentary, which means that their populations grew a little larger. So some of the things they're starting to find are, like, evidence of villages. There's a really amazing underwater archaeological site called Boldner Cliff off the Isle of White, and they've found what seems to be like a dock that probably went out into an ancient river. There's like burials there, houses and pits.

Like there's a lot of really cool stuff. And this is a really tantalizing view of, and I can't use that word enough in this episode, tantalizing. This is a tantalizing view of all the stuff that's probably underwater throughout Doggerland. Yeah. And I guess we should talk about why it's underwater. You know, I think we already kind of gave it away

that it didn't happen all at once. it happened over hundreds of thousands of years, little by little. Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising. And there's, you know, like I said, estimates anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 years ago, or 7,000, rather, of when people think it finally, like, you know,

was completely submerged. And it may not, you know, it may have become so uninhabitable, you know, long before that, maybe even thousands of years before that. Why? Well, I mean, there's a couple of theories. There's a tsunami theory that says about 8,000 years ago,

there were a bunch of massive tsunamis that, you know, pummeled the coast of Britain and completely wiped out doggarland. And they were caused by these submarine landslides in the Norwegian sea called the Starega slides. But Gaffney was like, I don't think it was that, actually. I think it was climate change because I think Doggerland itself, like he didn't doubt the tsunamis happen, But he said, I think Doggerland itself was kind of protected by the wooded hilly terrain. Yeah, but still a lot of people would have died because they think that the tsunami swept 25 miles inland, which is a lot of settlements that you can take out 25 miles in.

And I don't know if you remember, but in our Younger Dryas episode, we talked about isostatic rebound or adjustment where the glaciers and ice sheets were so heavy that they actually pushed the earth downward. and it took some areas of laying down with it like Scotland, but it raised other areas up, kind of like if you put a bowling ball on a mattress, which you usually do. And one of the areas that got raised up was Doggerland, right? So when the glaciers melted, Dargherland started to sink,

and then in addition to that, the glaciers melting made the sea levels rise, which is why this stuff was happening so quickly. They think that possibly sea level rise was happening as fast as a meter over a century, which doesn't sound like much, but right now the sea level rise we're worried about is happening like 30 centimeters a century.

So that is a really fast sea level rise. So it's not like it would have caught people off guard, but their way of life would have been disrupted pretty significantly by the tsunamis and the sea level rise. Yeah, I saw even, you know, potentially up to two meters per century. So that's, you know, super fast. Super. That's like twice as fast at least.

So as the sea levels rose and Doggerland sank, Scotland, by the way, is still rising, the land wasn't just some flat mass. There were highlands, there were hills and all that. So little by little it was submerged. And they think that the last bit was probably Dogger's Bank because it's one of the most shallow parts of the North Sea. And by the time it was completely submerged, all the people who had moved upward in the British Isles were now officially British. They were cut off from Europe now for the first time. And like you said, that was between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago. These days, there's sort of a new threat to the idea of a lot more science happening there because of those wind farms you mentioned early on. It's a pretty great area for wind farming, but it's threatening, you know, parts of the North Sea. Like we said, it's fairly shallow as far as seas go, and there's lots of great wind there. And the plan is by 2030 that the southern part of the North Sea is just going to be riddled with wind farms. The downside of that, I mean, this great renewable energy, but the downside is that this stuff is really disruptive to the ecology there

and certainly disruptive to all those doggarland sites that they're still hoping to explore. Yeah, I was reading that because the North Sea is so shallow, the kind of wind farms that they can put in can actually be bolted to the bedrock, which is way cheaper than like the floating version. So they're salivating over putting wind farms there. But again, that means that they're bolting wind turbines to Doggerland, which is negid for the archaeological aspect. It's negid. Right.

That's exactly right. So they don't, I mean, it seems like these wind farms are going on. Stupid wind farms always ruining the environment for everybody. Yeah. And I don't know that anybody's going to be able to change it. because everybody thinks Doggerland's cool, but not necessarily disrupt progress as far as renewable energy goes, cool.

Yeah. So I guess that's it for Doggerland. That's right. Chuck said that's right, which means everybody. It's time for listener mail. This is from Andy. Hey, guys.

Been listening since COVID-2020. I've heard your entire library, and I've almost agreed with everything that Chuck says. I think it was titled brother from another mother. We're close in age, so we have similar childhood memories. And this morning, when Chuck brought up the guitar solo from my Sharona, I knew that we were made from the same cloth, because for many years now, I've touted that guitar solo as my most favorite solo of all time.

Wow. I'm glad to hear that I'm not alone, so thank you, Chuck, for being like a brother to me. On another note, you failed to mention the true father of AM radio guys, Nikola Tesla. Tesla actually patented the technology before Marconi did making him the actual father of radio Marconi, quote, bothered end quote, Tesla's technology

and ran with it, and he was just a much better businessman than Tesla, so he was able to monetize the technology, earning him the notoriety that he has today as a father of radio. So Jefferson Starship should have said Tesla plays the Mamba? Yeah, I guess so.

Tesla played the Mamba. It works. It would have worked, yeah. I read many books on Nikola Tesla in his inventions and find him one of the most fascinating men of all time. Without him, we might not have had such things as the remote control, robotics, and wireless transmission. Thanks for everything, guys. You make my commute to work relaxing and educational three days of the week, and that is Andy McDonald. Thanks, Andy. That was a good email.

Surely then, if you've listened to our back catalog, you're aware of the electricity wars we went over with Edison and Tesla. But I feel like Tesla could definitely stand his own episode, too. Yeah, maybe. Well, let's see. If you want to get in touch with us like Andy, you can do that. Send us an email. You can say whatever you want. Send it off to Stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast.

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