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- [00:01]
Richard Karn
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- [02:03]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Hey all, I hope you're doing well. I'm currently at History Hit HQ and I've just finished recording this interview all about Doggerland, this lost prehistoric world beneath the North Sea with Our guest today, Dr. Rachel Bino, the marine archaeologist from the University of Southampton. What I found really interesting in this chat was learning more from Rachel about the whole nature of how you go about doing archaeological research on a submerged landscape like Doggerland. Looking at evidence left behind by Neanderthals, in some cases more than 200,000 years ago. I thought that was fascinating and I hope you guys do too. Let's go. Imagine a vast land, a place where Stone Age hunters roamed and mammoths grazed. A world lost beneath the cold, grey waters of the North Sea. This is Doggerland, sometimes called the North Sea. Atlantis, a landmass that once connected Britain to the continent, now hidden under the waves. So what has archaeology so far revealed about this lost world? What did it look like? Did humans settle it? And how did it end up drowned in the deep? This is the story of Doggerland with our guest, Dr. Rachel Byno. Rachel, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- [03:34]
Rachel
Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.
- [03:37]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Doggerland, first of all, what a name.
- [03:39]
Rachel
I know people have known the name.
- [03:41]
Dr. Rachel Byno
But may not know much about it. What exactly is Doggerland? Big question.
- [03:45]
Rachel
First of all, other than a ridiculous name. So the name comes from the Dogger bank and the Dogga 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, and it's a fishing ground. So people know of the name Dogger bank, and so it's probably one of the last places in the North Sea that was finally submerged. Right. So finally became sea. When we talk about Doggerland, we're talking about these submerged landscapes between Britain and Europe. So in the past, these areas were dry land. People would have been able to move through them, live in them. Animals, trees, landscapes like you see today were existing in those areas. This was cyclical, too. So we often talk about Doggerland and people either are referring to, or perhaps sometimes assuming that it's just this period from the last glacial maximum, which finished sometime around 18,000 years or so ago. So kind of from that period into the Holocene, so submerging sometime around 6,000 years ago, that we have the exposure of these landscapes and we have our ancestors, our human ancestors living in these areas. But actually, as people know, of course, the Ice Ages were a cyclical thing. And so, in fact, these areas have been exposed for most of the time that we've had humans in these landscapes in Britain. So they are really important for about millionaires. I mean, obviously, they're really important before that for humans at the moment in archaeology. They're important for this really, really long period of time.
- [05:16]
Dr. Rachel Byno
And that's such a good point to highlight straight away. Isn't it, Rachel? If people have heard of Dogland, they might think of those most recent archaeological discoveries from the end of the Ice Age or just before you mentioned after that last glacial maximum period. But the archeology, the stories of humans living in that now submerged landscape, it stretches so much further back.
- [05:36]
Rachel
It does, it does. And I mean, I think it's fair enough, right? Because we have these more recent landscapes, and to say that they're easy to engage with would be a massive mistake. They are horribly challenging to deal with, but they are perhaps more extensive, they've undergone less erosive episodes, they're less, potentially less buried. And so the further back you go in time, the more fragmented and the less easy to pinpoint the archaeology, the deposits that the archaeology is related to becomes. So it's. There's often been this idea that nothing's there anymore, so none of this stuff will preserve. It's undergone several glacial periods, several transgressions. So sea level rise and regressions would be sea level falls, as well as loads of other erosive processes, glacial, periglacial rivers, just so many different processes that are going to be affecting those landscapes. How on earth is anything still going to be there? Why would you bother to even look for those early answers? But we do know that they're there. And despite those challenges, the payoff, I suppose, in terms of our understanding of early humans in this part of the world and globally too, it should be pointed out as well that Doggerland is not unique. Now, these landscapes exist globally, and of course, Doggerland is quite extensive because we're on a shallow continental shelf. So it doesn't take much of a drop in sea levels to expose a massive swathe of landscape. If you had a sudden drop off into an ocean, you'd have less of a coastal plain exposed. But, you know, island, Southeast Asia, for example, again, you have huge exposure of these landscapes around Australia and to the north, huge exposure of landscapes. So these areas are poised to provide us with tons of information about human migrations, you know, behaviors, use of coastlines. Just incredible questions that we can start to try and answer.
- [07:22]
Dr. Rachel Byno
And I'm guessing also things like, like the fauna, like the climates, the environment. 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. And it's something that you highlighted earlier how in the Ice Age, you know, it's quite cyclical. You've got warm periods, then you've got cold periods. So you can kind of learn that information from a submerged landscape like Doggerland today.
- [07:44]
Rachel
Yes, of course. I mean, so. So I think that the landscape is one of the most important things we're dealing with, because we know that the people that are exploiting these landscapes, that are living within these landscapes are not sedentary, so they don't live like we do. They are moving through landscape. And the scale at which they move those landscapes is likely to change through time. But also, even within one stage, let's say of the Paleolithic, it's going to change within that, probably seasonally, you know, so understanding how they're living, the kind of affordances that those landscapes, those environments are giving those people, is really important, you know, because that's what makes them able to be in these areas. Because, I mean, okay, today it's 32 degrees and disgusting. Really disgusting and fine. You know, I could have slept outside last night and I would have been cooler. But there are points in the past, especially with some of the early occupation, that we've got people here when it's really harsh. You know, the winter temperatures were colder, the summer temperatures were colder. Snow cover would have been more significant during the winter months, seasonality would have been increased. So how on earth are these people here and why are they here? And so understanding the changing landscapes and the changing environments is really helpful for us to then say, or kind of begin to infer perhaps how those people were there and why they might have been there as well.
- [09:07]
Dr. Rachel Byno
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?
- [09:16]
Rachel
It's a little bit underwater, isn't it? It's a bit of a problem. Have you seen those? There was. Was it the 50s, where there's some plans that were drawn up for kind of for damming the North Sea. And there's this great old image where they've dammed it and they've built infrastructure on it and loads of archaeologists. So it's like, oh, if only they'd done that, and then we'd be able to have access to all these landscapes. Of course, if they'd done that, we'd have the same picture offshore to onshore, where we've got roads dug through all of our deposits and our archaeology, and it'd be far more truncated. But. So how do we go about it? Well, a variety of ways, I suppose, when I was talking about the earlier stuff being more difficult to predict where it is because it's highly fragmented and the processes that have made it Fragmented are really hard to know, I suppose, because we're talking about so many different periods in time. You can't really unpick it all. It's just a massive mess. Right. We're always looking for ways to try to. I'm just going to say again, to target those places that are almost impossible to target and I suppose work in two different ways that often connect. Though I work at Hasbro, which I would say is purely pretty much a research project. So that's kind of close to shore. Right. So when we're working close to shore, we're almost, at least at Haysborough, working from a known or a relative known onshore, to try to get into an unknown in the nearshore zone and to do that in particular at Hazburg, because it is completely different at different sites. Working with boreal deposits, working with finds that people are finding on the beaches, to try to then work out where they could be coming from offshore. And that includes using things like marine geophysics, so mapping the seabed, looking at the topography of the seabed, but also using things like seismics to look beneath the seabed, so seeing where you can see deposits that might be outcropping and then eroding the archaeological shore. But then when we want to go further offshore, because of course, those closer to whereas are really interesting, but we're also interested in the deeper water, the further away from what we already know, I suppose it becomes logistically very difficult. So diving at Hasbro. Diving is wonderful. It's within 20 meters of water. Most of it's in about 8 meters of water. But the further offshore you go, logistically, safety wise, everything becomes much more difficult. You need much bigger boats, you need all kinds of things. I won't go into. And it's very expensive.
- [11:34]
Dr. Rachel Byno
A lot of money.
- [11:35]
Rachel
Yes, exactly. A lot of money. So I was saying when we were chatting earlier that, you know, if I do a week at Haisburgh with a little rib and a few people and a house, it's going to cost ten grand, you know, per week. So, yeah, to go further offshore, I mean, we're just talking vastly more money so often without working with industry. So there's, as I'm sure you're aware, like a huge amount of exploitation of the seabed. So things like wind farms, things like aggregates, so these sands and gravels that we used on our driveways to remake beaches. And in order to do all of that stuff, these people are collecting data on the seabed. They're also taking cores because for engineering purposes or Even for sand and gravel purposes, they want to know what's where.
- [12:14]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Sorry, what do you mean by cores?
- [12:16]
Rachel
Oh sorry, yeah, of course. So cores like a sediment core, right. So they'll drop a kind of imagine a drain pipe. This is what we use at Hazebur at high tech. But I mean we would hammer it and then dig it out the seabed. But they put lots of these down, usually about six metres or so, and then recover them. So you've effectively got like a core, a little slice of the seabed and then you can take it up and open it and have a little look at the changing deposits and that tells you about what's there. Basically you can sample it for things like pollen, you can just look at the changing environments that are going on there. So you know, you might have marine stuff at the top, sands, gravels, and then you can look for things like old land surfaces, so those lovely low energy deposits. So it allows you to understand and to kind of read the landscape, I suppose, and read that landscape going back in time because the deeper you go through the core the earlier. Right. So it allows you to think about the changing landscape and the processes that have been acting on that landscape. And if you are then searching for archaeology, it also allows you to kind of do potentially think about the depths, you're thinking about where it could be coming from. So if we're looking for, you know, in situ archaeology, things that might be fresh because they haven't been rolled back in a river, then you know, we're looking for low energy kind of landscape development in those cause. But those are very expensive to take. And as you can imagine, if you're taking 6 meter of cores, they need a big boat. And so industry collect that kind of stuff for their purposes. And increasingly we work with them to use their data, to use their cores to and for a variety of reasons. Again, so commercial on the one side, so they need, with the environmental impact assessments and they need to engage marine biologists and archaeologists and people to think about the potential of the areas they're exploiting. But as researchers we're often also allowed to come in and work with the data they generate to try to understand what's there.
- [14:05]
Dr. Rachel Byno
So big commercial projects, like you say, offshore wind farms and the like, in the North Sea area off the coast of England or I guess the Netherlands, I mean the whole area, as you mentioned, it sounds so important. So from a core you can get a sense of what the environment was like when that area was not submerged hundreds of thousands of years ago. And how humid or whether it was tundra, like the environment. And, you know, you can almost pinpoint the date. So it sounds like, as you say, working hand in hand with those commercial projects today, archaeologists are able to learn so much more about Doggerland and the environment that people lived in there.
- [14:36]
Rachel
Yeah, absolutely. And you say about pinpointing dates, I mean, we can even date them, too. So depending on how far back you're going, there are methods for chronological control through those scores. So not super far back, usually it's quite difficult. But, yeah, I mean, we can get an idea of the chronology and how that relates to the changing landscapes and, yes, the dry land, but also, you know, submergence too. So sometimes these areas were submerged through that.
- [14:59]
Dr. Rachel Byno
That's another key thing to highlight, isn't it? That's, you know, with the cyclical nature, you get the warm periods and the cold periods. Yeah, that four periods of time over the last a million years, Doggerland would have been submerged again, and then it comes back up to the surface. Is that the idea we should.
- [15:12]
Rachel
Well, it is kind of the idea. And if we think about the current topography of Britain and the North Sea and we think about our average global sea level and we think about interglacials. I'm doing a curve with my hand, interglacial being warm and then glacials being cold, then, yes, you would imagine that we would effectively have an island and then a peninsula and then an island and then a peninsula. But the situation is quite unique up here. Well, I suppose it's unique everywhere, isn't it? But it's not quite that simple here. Before about half a million years ago, we were permanently connected to Europe, so there was just a different configuration of landscapes, lots of sedimentation from rivers and higher ground to the south. So no matter what the sea levels were doing, that would have changed coastlines, but we wouldn't have been disconnected. Also, sea level change earlier on was less dramatic anyway, but after about half a million years, we see a kind of a progressive erosion of that landscape. So we were probably not fully disconnected from Europe until about 125,000 years ago in what's called the last interglacial. And before that, there might have been points where there were areas that overtopped, but it looks like we had, generally speaking, some kind of landscape connection before that point, mostly.
- [16:35]
Richard Karn
Hi, I'm Richard Karn, and you may have seen me on TV talking about the world's number one expandable garden hose. Well, the brand new pocket hose Copperhead with pocket pivot is here. And it's a total game changer. Old fashioned hoses get kinks and creases at the spigot, but the Copperhead's pocket pivot swivels 360 degrees for full water flow and freedom to water with ease all around your home. When you're all done, this rust proof anti burst hose shrinks back down to pocket size for effortless handling and tidy storage. Plus your super light and ultra durable pocket hose. Copperhead is backed with a 10 year warranty. What could be better than that? I'll tell you what an exciting exclusive offer just for you for a limited time. You can get a free pocket pivot and their 10 pattern sprayer with the purchase of any size Copperhead hose. Just go to getcopperhead.com that's getcopperhead.com for your two free gifts with purchase. Get copperhead.com message and data richmond Apply See terms for details.
- [17:34]
Danica Patrick
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Richard Karn
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- [18:38]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Land a Viking longship on island shores, Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into Feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.
- [19:36]
Rachel
So.
- [19:36]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Let'S explore a couple of examples. Really interesting Examples from the archaeology of dogland that I know you've done a lot of work around. Shall we do the site of Hasbro? First of all, because this offshore site, is this the earliest evidence of human activity we have from Doggerland?
- [19:50]
Rachel
Well, so at the moment, Haisburgh is the earliest site we have in Northwest Europe. So the onshore archaeote. Okay. So there we've got evidence for humans here, let's say about 900,000 years ago.
- [20:00]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Those are those amazing footprints, aren't they?
- [20:02]
Rachel
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. How on earth were they here then? So if we step back just a little bit, Pakefield is a site further to the south and that was found. It was published in 2005 and it was. It's also coastal. It's also part of the same formation of deposits that are extensive along the coast of mostly Norfolk and into Suffolk. And when that happened, the site itself is associated with really warm, lovely periods. So it was also high sea level. There were hippos. It's just lovely. Right. So people called it Costa del Croma because the idea was that, like, how are people here? 700,000 years is so early. It's much earlier than we thought they'd be here. At the time it was about 500,000 was the idea. And so the idea was that they were here because they were tracking these lovely warm environments. So we had a lovely inscace. And so they were following environments further north than they normally would. Haisburg 3, when that was found, kind of blew that out the water a little bit, because Haisburgh 3 is dated to around 900,000. And it is not nice. It's cold. It's got environmental indicators that are at a high altitude, cool boreal type edge of boreal zone indicators. So it's snowy winters, it's cold winters, it's cooler summers, and it's seasonal. Right. So yes, so it's very early. It's very surprising. And it exists on the foreshore. So the cliffs are being eroded back and all of the archaeology is contained in that foreshore area. The underwater site is a site by proxy, I suppose. It's a lot of archaeology that's being found on the beaches. What happened was that for hundreds of years people have been collecting fauna, so animal bones on this coastline and tons of environmental remains. So the Chroma forest bed that it's contained within.
- [21:50]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Chroma's a town on the coast of Norfolk.
- [21:53]
Rachel
Yeah, exactly. Thank you. And this part of the Chroma forest bed is incredibly organic, or parts of it are incredibly organic and ridiculously rich in organics. So, you know, you could mistaken something from there for something that was modern. They're so well preserved. So people have been looking at these deposits for hundreds of years, publishing on them for hundreds of years. So we knew that there was a rich record of animal bones and we knew from antiquarian collectors that just offshore they were finding animal bones that relate to these really early periods. So pre half million years, animal bones had cut marks on them that were coming in from offshore as well. So we know there's archaeology out there, but it was difficult to pinpoint and it was all based upon fauna. Just after Hatesbury 3 was published about three years later, some wonderful collectors who are people who live relatively locally and they're I suppose avocational archaeologists who were walking the beaches started to find stone tools as well. And so this was incredible. Right. So the first thing they found was a hand axe. Well, one of the first things they showed us was a hand axe. And it looked just like that, the site, one hand axe. I'm going to go into lots of confusing things. Looked like a hand axe that had been found within some of these deposits previously younger deposits, about half a million deposits. But anyway, we started working with them and with others in the local area and they were finding thousands, and I mean over a thousand now stone tools from this area. And we know that some of them, through some spatial analyses are probably coming from the foreshore deposits that are being gradually eroded by the sea. They're kicking up archaeology. We know their archaeological kind of areas anyway, and this is being found by them on the beaches. But there are some patterns that can't easily be explained by those foreshore deposits being eroded. And they're further to the south, but also kind of scattered throughout. And they look like they're coming from the near shore zone. So we don't think they're coming from super far off because sediment transport wise it would be really hard to see them coming onto the beaches. But they're certainly not coming from anything 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 and we've taken mini cores through deposits. We have found archaeology, but it's not been within a deposit. We found bones, but for, well, various reasons. First of all, probably we just, maybe we're not going to anyway. But the visibility, sand cover, constant Changes in the conditions underwater and the seabed means that the really good high potential area that I want to get to has just been impossible to work in the past three field seasons or so. So we haven't actually found archaeology in a deposit underwater off Hasbro, but we know that the archaeology is coming from somewhere underwater off Hasbro.
- [24:38]
Dr. Rachel Byno
So it's the kind of quest to find it. And is it almost this idea that there was this rich. The rich sediments are beneath what is the sand layer today beneath the sea? And is that almost a microcosm for elsewhere in the North Sea, too? This idea of Doggerland is kind of beneath the sand cover at the bottom.
- [24:54]
Rachel
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I mean, there's generally speaking, a lot of sand waves. That's a very simplistic way of thinking about things. Sorry. But yes, absolutely. And those are really dynamic and they move a lot. And so some of the interesting patterns at Hasbro 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 nearshore zone, there was a collector, I want to say, a few years ago, it's probably about 20 years ago now, who was finding a load of animal bones. And they wanted to know archaeology at this point, or no stone tools. 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. And then the collectors that I was working with started to find stone tools, but also animal bones that were indicative of a warm period, but a cooler warm period. Right. And 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 is. Or the kind of. The theory, I suppose, is that we know we have really mobile sound waves underwater there. So when they're shifting and you get the exposure of deposits that's being eroded and it's coming up and being found on the beaches, but then it'll get covered up and another area is exposed. So there's multiple different areas of deposits which relate to different time periods. And I think that is a nice microcosm for the rest of the North Sea, because it's not like we're going to have younger to older throughout the North Sea because of those variable processes of erosion and burial and how they've changed through time. So sand cover might be covering something very young, but it could be covering something that's much older than we're interested in. So, yes, modern sand cover over something older and in areas, in pockets, we know that that means really interesting archaeology.
- [27:02]
Dr. Rachel Byno
And what types of archaeology are usually preserved beneath these sand covers, which is now underwater? Does it mean that. Is it anaerobic condition? So it allows more organic material to survive.
- [27:15]
Rachel
So that's really dependent on the taphonomy, what's, I suppose, the post depositional processes that have happened. 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. They're 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 sandbank and then that gets entrained in the river valley. So, you know, the river washes them into the main bit and they get caught up in gravels. You know, those gravels might then be preserved later on, but those gravels aren't going to be good for organic preservation. So it's very much dependent on the environment in which things are dropped and then how they're preserved. But yes, in some cases, and certainly at Hasbro, and certainly for some of the more recent archaeology. Yeah.
- [28:31]
Dr. Rachel Byno
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 is that. Was that the Old Stone Age, isn't it, kind of thing, or.
- [28:43]
Rachel
Yeah, yeah, Lower Palaeolic, Early Stone Age.
- [28:45]
Dr. Rachel Byno
I mean, alongside Hasbro, are there any key sites, are there any key time periods that archaeologists like yourself have found more evidence for? And we have more of a picture of a human population that was living in. In this area of the world maybe more than 100,000 years ago?
- [29:00]
Rachel
Yeah. So there's one other time. There should be lows, shouldn't that? But there's one other period at the moment that we're more aware of, I suppose, which is Neanderthals, which is great because everyone loves a Neanderthal. And these are all coming from that commercial, the industry, the kind of seaweed rotation that I referred to earlier, and mostly around kind of 250 to maybe 190 or so thousand years ago, which is a really interesting period of time because what we see is that we have Neanderthals and in Britain and Europe at this point, and at around 200, 190 or so, we're going into a glacial period, so it's cold and nasty. Of course, people are probably going to move, but we don't see Neanderthals after that point until, forgive me, there's some recent research that's been published on this, but it was traditionally until about 63, 65,000 years ago, and again now it's somewhere, I think around 100 or so, which isn't really surprising. I mean, this whole time we've thought about this whole period where we have this abandonment and I think really having a few sites is really significant, but actually it doesn't really change the picture of what we've got, which is a really, really low density of occupation, it seems. And so having sites in the southern North Sea at the point when Neanderthals are abandoning, for want of a catastrophic word, abandoning Britain for a really long period of time mostly at least, is really exciting and really significant. As British someone who works in submerged archaeology in the North Sea, we tend to, you know, do those things where we're like, oh, yes, well, you know, all the evidence is submerged. Sorry, you can't see it. We're going to make these claims. It's a shame that we can't disprove them because so on water, and that's being really flippant about it, 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 exposure of these landscapes and only a couple of sites. But actually, you know, those couple of sites are big sites full of Levalois stuff that Neanderthals making. So quite exciting.
- [30:57]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Luvoir is the type of toolkit.
- [30:59]
Rachel
Oh, I'm so sorry. Yes, of course, yeah. Luvoir is a Neanderthal toolkit. So when we see them moving into Britain somewhere around 300 or so thousand years, Neanderthals, well, they're here earlier, but around that time they start to use something called Levolois. It's a suburb of Paris where it was defined by the Levallois toolkit, which is this wonderful lithic toolkit, which the indications are that it allows them to be more mobile. So being able to kind of. They're effectively taking a raw material and creating something that's standardized so they know what they're going to come off with, effectively. And so it's allowing them to just be more mobile in their landscapes and potentially also helping us think more about them as planets, I suppose. And so, yes, we see these big Levalloisque sites in the North Sea at this point, which is really exciting because it's further offshore and maybe they're moving with these exposure of these landscapes into this glacial period. So, yeah, we have. So one of them is area 240, which is a site that was, I think it was 2007, 2008, found by complete chance. And this is the thing about these sites, right? So at the moment there's two, although there's a third that I can talk about as well, which is a bit farsier. And the facts of their discovery are so serendipitous that you think, clearly there's a lot more of this, we're just not seeing it. So the first one, Area 240, which has been published on extensively by people at Wessex Archaeology, this was found because they were taking sands and gravel from about 11km off Great Yarmouth. And normally, what usually happens is sands and gravels these days, or the gravels, if they're too big, they're crushed straight away because, you know, commercially, it's just that's what. They don't need a big gravel. But these gravels were taken to Different Wharf, which is in Holland, and they were put into reject heaps, so they weren't crushed immediately. And a guy who was interested in looking for things was off sick, so he used to visit and look at these heaps and he found loads of hand axes and he found loads of faunal remains. And so suddenly there was this incredible underwater site in the North Sea because it was active, and he found them while it was still being extracted. They put an exclusion zone around it, so they stopped dredging and they were able to look at the cause, collect more geophysical data to try to understand and kind of repatriate some of the archaeology to some of those levels. So when I was talking about having those causes and being able to think about where things might have come from and get some dates on those, that's what they were able to do. And because of that, they've now been kind of watching areas around it so occasionally when they bring sands and pebbles up, they are sampled and archaeologists are allowed to look through them to see if there's any archaeology in them. So they can characterise the kind of broader landscape around towards an architecture.
- [33:52]
Dr. Rachel Byno
So they are painting a picture of this Neanderthal landscape in this particular area of the North Sea, as they say they discovered by complete chance, which says that probably would have been more as well.
- [34:00]
Rachel
Absolutely. And so the other one, that's comparable time period, so this one was dated to somewhere between 250 and 200,000 or so. And the site that I've myself worked on, which was Area 447, they've all got these names because they're extraction zones is down kind of. So it's of Felixstowe. But it was the sands from this extraction zone were used to recreate the beach at Clacton, so turned it into this wonderful sandy beach, really nice. But the sands were taken from an area where we know river systems through the Pleistocene. So the period of time when we had people here were draining. Right. When sea levels were lower. So if we look onshore, we know that river systems are really high potential for archaeology. We find loads of Lower Palaeolithic archaeology in these river systems. So when they're underwater, it's probably exactly the same, but we don't normally see them because the stuff has taken out, took the sands, put them on the beach to recreate this beach, and people started to find beautiful lavalua archaeology almost instantly. 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 happen to sample something that was nice and low energy and had its archaeology in it, we're able to suddenly see loads of archaeology coming from this period and the industry. So the aggregates companies involved were really happy to share the data with us. So we were able to use their sediment cores to look at the changing landscapes, the changing environments, and to get an idea from the tracks of their vessels and the depths of the sediments they took. And the type of archaeology we had the kind of like a Venn diagram of things to work out where we thought this archaeology was coming from. Because it's beautiful, it's really fresh, it's lovely. Despite being spat out onto a beach, it's kind of. The edges are a bit broken, but they're fresh breaks. And the rest of it is like it's been dropped where it was made. And the dates for that are really quite well constrained to around 200,000. So right before we start to see no more Neanderthals in Britain for quite a period of time.
- [36:09]
Richard Karn
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- [37:37]
Dr. Rachel Byno
So you have those great sites which is revealing more about the Nean tools and, and how they very much occupied Doggerland at that time. And I'm guessing these sites, is it revealing more? I mean how do you think we should then picture it? Should we be picturing this as a very, as a rich landscape full of different Neanderthal communities who are taking advantage of the resources that Doggerland had?
- [37:57]
Rachel
Well, I think that's the interesting thing. It's, it's really, it's difficult to picture because we, we again have to think of these and it's so impossible. These huge timescales, right? And these huge fluctuating climates. So yes, I think that the thing is about Doggerland is that we know it's a lower lying area, right? We know it's lower lying area. We know that big rivers were draining into the southern North Sea at the time. We know that we have the coastlines in that area and we know that when you get these meeting of habitats, these kind of ecotones and mosaics of habitats, if you like, that we have lots of lovely Resources combine that with, of course, fresh water. These are areas that human populations in the past and even in the present. Right. That's where you'd be. That would be a really wonderful place to live and a wonderful place where animals live again. Kind of like just another feather in the bow, I suppose, because hunting grounds, I guess. And then if we think about where we are now onshore, these would have been the relative uplands to those relative lowlands at the time. So for periods of time throughout the past million years or so. Yes, absolutely. I think these would have been incredibly rich landscapes for these people to be. And in fact where we are today is more likely to be the kind of hinterlands, you know, associated with that. And we find archaeology generally associated with river valleys and it tends to be the lower reaches of the rivers where we find a lot of it. So it's likely that even more so in the North Sea. But then of course, when we were entering cooler periods, that would change. So not necessarily to be less productive, in fact probably still very productive, but the character, the nature of those landscapes would become more open. You'd see different energy to those rivers, different types of sediment flows. 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. Yeah.
- [39:56]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Still seems incredibly enigmatic for this period and that there's still so much more to learn about it. But in regards to bones there, do we not therefore have the sites, the Neanderthal sites that have been uncovered, do we know much about them and what types of bones have been discovered with them as well? Or is it just kind of almost like a few tools and getting a sense of how much human occupation there was in those places?
- [40:17]
Rachel
Yeah, so it's. Sorry, it's all tricky, isn't it? I start every answer with that was quite difficult. So if we look at 447. So the work that I was doing, there are thousands of stone tools. And when I talk about Levolois toolkits, there's also elements of different toolkits. So we find hand axes, Acheulean hand axes. So this is an earlier type of technology. There's smaller number of those and they're more abraded. So it's telling us that there's probably multiple deposits being sampled. The majority of stuff is very fresh and it's associated with the Levolois neanderthal.
- [40:49]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Elements, Shirley, could that then mean that there was Homo erectus there before Neanderthals, but we just don't have that direct evidence. Is that a thought?
- [40:54]
Rachel
Yes, definitely. So we know of course, if we think about Hasbro, Hasbro's the 900,000 year site, so that's the kind of earliest we have. And when we think about the species that would have been evolved throughout time, we think, well, based on who's around that that was possibly someone called Homo antecessor and that's based on footprint evidence looking at things like stature. But Homo antecessor has only been found fossil wise in Atapuerca in Spain. So it's an educated guess, right, Homo erectus also around at the same time. Then we get something called Homo heidelbergensis and the Neanderthals. So all of these species made hand axes at some point and caused them flakes, the whole thing. So we know they were here because we find sites on what is now Britain. And so in order to get to Britain we know that they would have been moving through these landscapes. So yeah, basically when we find the stuff offshore. Yes, we know, we know that they were occupying these areas and living within these areas. Pinpointing them is hard. We don't have any dots on a map. But we know of course by indirectly that they would have been there and the animal bones are associated with the sites. Because of that mixed sampling, it's quite difficult to associate them with the archaeology because they're also quite abraded. So my feeling is that most of them are from a deposit that's more time averaged. So they're not necessarily associated with these Lavalois deposits. They look like they're more beaten up. They could be in a effluvial gravel associated with the hand axes, for example, but elements of them probably are. So it's difficult because it's this mishmash. But what we know from the fauna over 200 years or so of trawling of the seabed is that it is coming from deposits that are intact Pleistocene deposits. So the bones aren't just. If I found a mammoth bone in the middle of the North Sea that hasn't been there kicking about the seabed for 20,000 years, that's much less than that 10,000 years. It's been probably relatively recently exposed because they do break down, even when they're quite heavily fossilised, they break up. So we know from that that there are patches of seabed from the fauna itself that you can assign to, very broadly speaking, much earlier deposits. And much more recent deposits.
- [43:13]
Dr. Rachel Byno
So then trying to figure out that, okay, when you have those Neanderthal sites, trying understand what types of animals they were feeding on, I mean, what they were hunting, what was also there in Doggerland at that time. Of course, sometimes it's more difficult than others. But do we get a sense, therefore, let's say with those Neanderthal sites, what types of Ice Age animals that they were hunting, what were going there in their herds at the same time?
- [43:34]
Rachel
So for this we use kind of proxy evidence, I suppose. So terrestrial sites where we have got that evidence, we've got archaeology associated with animals. So we know at those periods, you know, we're linking with things like woody mammoths. We know that we have various species of rhinoceros, woolly rhino at that point, deer species. So lots of deer species, lots of bovids, mostly we're talking about kind of herbivore, big groups of herbivore species. And that's. Yeah, I mean, that's effectively proxy evidence from other sites. But we also have an indication of what those landscapes would have been like from the sediments associated with the archaeology and so the pollen and things and the diatoms, because these can tell us about, you know, what it was like, how far was the sea, was it, what kind of energy are we thinking of in terms of the sea energy? Is it like a high energy coastline, is it something really gentle? What's nearby, Salt marshes, for example? And that can then help us to think, okay, what kinds of animal species would have been in those areas? What would you expect to see? So a lot of it is kind of using very detailed bits of paleoenvironmental evidence to then infer aspects of the landscape and of the lives of these species, of these human species.
- [44:42]
Dr. Rachel Byno
And do we have any Neanderthal bones at all or anything like that?
- [44:44]
Rachel
We do. There's. Well, we don't. We don't as a country. So on the Zeeland ridges, the Dutch have found a Neanderthal brow ridge. They've got tons of really cool stuff being washed up on their beaches, including this Neandal bridge, which they've kind of repatriated again using geology and cause to a deposit, I think it's about 50,000 years old. So that's really exciting. And there's probably lots more to come. They're building up their beaches a lot because obviously they're subsiding. So they're having to do a lot more of that. We're starting to do more of that for sea defence reasons. So we're likely to also start seeing more archaeology on beaches.
- [45:17]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Fingers crossed. Indeed. We mentioned 50,000 years ago there. So let's go on to more recent times. So what happens to Doggerland where we get to this, another kind of big spike, this big decrease in temperature, known as the last glacial maximum, because this also feels a big time in the story of Doggerland.
- [45:35]
Rachel
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. So 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.
- [45:53]
Dr. Rachel Byno
So not particularly nice to more exposed, but less inhabitable.
- [45:58]
Rachel
Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And then after the last glacial maximum, so it's a maximum because we have a kind of weird steady decrease into it. So we have really open landscapes for quite a long time when it would have been cool and we had people here. But really at the maxima, we're thinking about something pretty extreme. After that point, we start to see global sea levels, broadly speaking, start to rise.
- [46:20]
Dr. Rachel Byno
And this is so last glacial maximum is about 30,000 to 18,000.
- [46:24]
Rachel
About 25 to 18. Around 20, let's say around 20. And after that point, we start to see the ice cheeks melting and global sea levels rising and people moving back in, say about 15,000 or so. We have complex kind of climate going on where we have a warm peak and then a really cold peak into what we call the Holocene. That starts about 11,700. And so from that point onwards, the topography is really interesting. And we can see that it's really interesting because we have better control because it hasn't been glaciated since then. It's only had sea level rise. Right. So we can kind of understand most of the variables that are at play and working on that landscape to reconstruct kind of how 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.
- [47:18]
Dr. Rachel Byno
And the story of Dogland after the end of the last glacial maximum and as we get to the end of the Ice age. So we've done Homo antecessor, homo erectus, some 900,000 years ago. We've done the anthols as well. So this is the time of modern humans, of Homo sapiens. Do we know much then about this? Almost this Last hurrah of Doggerland where you have Homo sapiens flooding back into that area of the world. Do we know much about how they live there and what evidence we have?
- [47:42]
Rachel
Well, this is the period of time where we do actually have quite a bit of evidence. I mean starting 100 or so years ago, people finding things like harpoons that were being dredged up from peats in the North Sea, tons of evidence over towards the east as well. What we think we have, and you know they've used loads of models to reconstruct these lands landscapes is rather than having say this wonderful area of resource rich landscape that people are living in. And we know that people at this time are still nomadic but potentially becoming more sedentary. So we know that they were spending longer time in different parts of their landscapes. I suppose. I think it's a tendency to think about the sea level rise at this point as being something that went like whoosh, you know, sudden, like a really catastrophic. Oh no, because now of course sea level rise is awful for people. They lose their home, that 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. Population density was lower, people could move and people were flexible and could adapt to these things differently, I suppose. And what we see from those reconstructions of the rising seas is that rather than that sudden loss of sea, you get incursions into different areas, you get areas that were slightly higher, like the dog bank, you know, steep sided fluvial valleys with like the leftovers of glacial hill moraines and stuff making hills, you get backwaters, you get salt marsh, you get stuff that's actually really quite nice. So yes, it's a loss of land and yes, I'm sure you know, that would have been something that would be a challenge. But it also throws up affordances, these hominins for these humans, I should say. And we know at this point also that these aren't people who are struggling with the sea by this point we know that they are using watercraft. So this increase in, yes, open seas but also lower energy, nicer waterways probably wasn't that much of a challenge. And potentially in some areas it was something that was quite useful and quite nice. So I think it's less catastrophic and a much more gradual change that these populations were dealing with at the time.
- [49:53]
Dr. Rachel Byno
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 dogland is submerged in the blink of an eye in the Mesolithic in the last 8,000 years.
- [50:05]
Rachel
And there was that, there was the tsunami, of course, the storage slide. 8.2. There's 8.2 event, 8.2 thousand roughly. And yeah, you know, of course that.
- [50:15]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Would have been 8.2 thousand years ago.
- [50:16]
Rachel
Is that what you think? Right, during the Mesolithic? Early Mesolithic would have been pretty nasty if you stood in its way. But actually the archaeological evidence isn't great for it being something that was very broad in its impact. And that could be because it's been eroded since. So we missed those deposits. But it looked like that kind of post glacial landscape might have constrained it slightly. But also in the cause where we do recognize tsunami deposits, we see it moving back into terrestrial environment afterwards or back into a kind of lower energy freshwater type environment. So we know it wasn't what inundated it, it wasn't the end of Doggerland. It may have changed things, but it wasn't the catastrophic end that is sometimes thought to be.
- [50:55]
Dr. Rachel Byno
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?
- [51:02]
Rachel
Is that the thought? It's probably one of the last areas to be overtopped, yes. But actually, you know, there were remnants of around our coastline that were still dry land into the Neolithic that are now submerged. And that's because there's loads of different processes. You know, sedimentation changes things, uplift down, warping from the results of the ice sheets. All of these things make it really complex. So there are still areas now, or still areas now, There are areas that were exposed as late as the Neolithic that are now underwater. But yes, Dogger bank would have been one of the last things that was properly out in the southern North Sea.
- [51:33]
Dr. Rachel Byno
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 Dogabang goes, it's still enigmatic. And it's kind of chance discoveries, isn't it, to learn more, but is it revealing more about the abilities of these early human societies to adapt, to repopulate, to live in areas of the world that we don't think of today, because our modern geographic mind, we think it's now submerged, there mustn't be anything there. But is it expanding our horizons about the capabilities of these early human groups?
- [52:07]
Rachel
Yeah, I think, absolutely. I think there are some really big questions in human evolution that can be addressed in by these areas. And one of them is our responses to those kinds of big changes, the sea level change, how flexible, how adaptable we are as a species. It's really challenging to find that evidence onshore and offshore at the moment, but I think hopefully in the future, yes, absolutely. There's the potential for these areas to hold some of the answers to some of these big questions in human adaptability and flexibility.
- [52:33]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Rachel, it sounds very exciting for the future with more commercial work, with more archaeological work aligned with it to uncover more of this lost world beneath the North Sea today. Rachel, there's been a fascinating introduction to the story of Doggerland. It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast.
- [52:47]
Rachel
Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, it's been great.
- [52:52]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Well, there you go. There was the marine archaeologist Dr. Rachel Byno giving you an introduction to the still very enigmatic topic of Doggerland. And hopefully more information will be revealed by 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. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor if you also leave us a rating as well, where we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of Historyhit's podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe that's enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.
- [53:52]
Danica Patrick
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- [54:22]
Richard Karn
Hey Tinsley, why.
- [54:23]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Don'T we use Ezcator to order food for staff lunches?
- [54:25]
Danica Patrick
Because my 46 page acronym system is so easy. I just have to salad, stay alert to late arriving deliveries. Pie put in expenses and guga pie. Go out and get everyone's preferences and allergy information.
- [54:38]
Dr. Rachel Byno
That's supposed to be simple.
- [54:39]
Danica Patrick
No, simple is Stephen, Irma and Margie prefer lasagna and empanadas.
- [54:44]
Dr. Rachel Byno
Omg.
- [54:45]
Rachel
No need to make work life more complicated. Just use EasyCater. The easy way to get food for work.
- [54:54]
Richard Karn
Sam.