Lost world revealed by human, Neanderthal relics washed up on North Sea beaches
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
Sundaland is now sea between Indonesian islands, reaching up along Vietnam and out to Taiwan (thus not an island), all the way up to Korea (thus not a peninsula). Sahul filled the gap between Australia and New Guinea.
They also leave unmentioned the Persian Gulf and the sea southeast of Pakistan, more thousands of square miles of recent land. The first cities (that we know of) were built immediately upstream from those parcels. Buildings were exposed in the latter parcel before the big recent tsunami, where fishermen's nets have long got snagged.
Knowing that so much of what we think of as prehistory happened in places that are now flooded makes what we call "Atlantis" and "Noah's flood" legends into legitimate oral history. The old question of where the water came from, and went afterward, is answered: from the glaciers, and it's all still there. Australian oral histories record negotiated resolution of conflicts from people obliged to move uphill and crowd into where other people had lived for tens of thousands of years.
There were places the shore moved inland another meter each year, for centuries. Your grandparents' seaside village was always just offshore. It is easy to imagine how stories would have turned that into a dramatic deluge, over subsequent millennia.
We have no reason whatever to link the Atlantis story and the Noah's Flood story the way you do. Not all stories about floods have to be about the same flood. Individual flood myths may well be legitimate oral history, but therefore Atlantis is a non sequitur.
As it happens we do have evidence that oral history can persist stories about events across tens of thousands of years. However we also know that floods are a very common phenomenon for unrelated reasons all over the world even now.
It was identically the the same flood event that sank Doggerland. Whether and which legends may be proven to trace to it are of overwhelmingly less moment than the global and indisputable fact of its occurrence, and its impact on ancestors of every person alive today.
Fear of being accused of promoting Atlantis historicity blocks progress in archaeology rather as much as the inaccessibility of the inundated sites.
Do you have sourcing for this, or somewhere I can follow up on the idea? I'm familiar with the idea of there being a single event for many of the flood stories of Mediterranean area, but not so much the world, or the evidence of it, and it's and interesting idea.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1d/Po...
Of course this doesn't necessarily discount the possibility of some earlier flooding event which may have had global impact — but it does rather imply that it wasn't a- or the- global flooding event that caused the final demise of the low lying lands that made up Doggerland.
On the topic of the end of the Youger Dryas period, these links may also be of interest to a neophyte scholar of that topic: YD overview [1], YD impact hypothesis [2].
The YD impact hypothesis has historically been somewhat contentious — as [2] notes in its criticism section — but there is some interesting modern research into the topic, which seems to support the hypothesis. Although it is the subject of ongoing dispute, claims and counterclaims.
Antonio Zamora [3] has been producing original research, some papers, a book (which I've not read), and a whole set of ongoing videos on the topic [4] — many of which focus upon the origin of the Carolina Bays (and similarly: the Nebraska Bays), which he claims are likely caused by debris from a comet impact on the Laurentide Ice Sheet, ~12.9kya.
See also the work of Richard Firestone — search for 'Richard Firestone comet' to find his paper, criticisms of it, and some responses from him.
Being British, and somewhat interested in Neolithic archaeology, I find the history of Doggerland to be quite fascinating — it has also been the topic of a Time Team episode, which is worth a watch ("Britain's Stone Age Tsunami" and/or "Britain's Drowned World" - can likely be found online somewhere?).
But I also find the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis to be quite a fascinating topic also — in part because it is somewhat on the fringe of our current understanding and knowledge, whilst perhaps not being fringe science per se. YMMV, obvs ;) — But clearly that period was kinda the start of our 'modern' known history, being roughly the start of agriculture (see the Fertile Crescent, Gobekli Tepe, etc.), the Neolithic ('new stone') age, etc., and also approximately coincides with the die-off of the megafauna and the Clovis culture. It was clearly a period of some truly great changes, across the globe.
On that topic — YD, and the YD impact hypothesis — one may or may not find the work of Randall Carlson [5] to be of interest. He has much to say on this matter, but oftentimes some of his timelines and dating may be questionable (e.g. some of his flood hypothesis tales don't tally with work of geologists such as Nick Zentner — who has some truly excellent geology lecture videos on YouTube [6], if that's your bag — he is truly engaging, informative and funny).
Carlson also discusses various other esoteric topics, including mythology, symbolism and ancient mysteries, which some might claim otherwise weaken the views he expresses. But personally I quite like the guy, and all of his subject matters.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Zamora
[4] https://www.youtube.com/c/AntonioZamora-Carolina-Bays
[5] https://www.youtube.com/c/TheRandallCarlson/videos
[6] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nick+zentner
The Younger Dryas was a period in the middle of the process. The timeline of the Impact Hypothesis places the strike at its beginning, resulting in a huge meltwater pulse that disrupted the Atlantic Ocean current system. The first Gobekli Tepe was built precisely at its end, but no coinciding geophysical event has been identified.
Current work suggests the impact causing the Carolina and Nebraska bays occurred much less recently, maybe 600kya.
Specifically, there are very strong parallels between it and the Gilgamesh flood myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth
Altogether, it does not surprise me that tales of great floods appear in cultures across the world. It could well be that they relate to different geological events around the world.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
You can clearly see in some areas where the smaller hills and mountains kinda look like "islands" and we have a very nice aquifer due to it.
And yes...supposedly the native tribes which were in the path all the way down the Columbia have stories about it.
https://www.spokaneaquifer.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Aq...
The Columbia River Gorge was carved out in two weeks.
This seemed interesting, so I looked into it, and I'm seeing multiple sources saying it was many floods over a few millennia (with one large initial one from Lake Missoula).
About 1800 years ago, the Columbia Basin became flooded when an ice dam broke at Lake MIssoula in Western Montana. This lake help approximately 600 cubic miles of water. Boulders were tossed around the outlet of the break. Others were carried in icebergs as far as Western Oregon towards the Pacific Ocean. The water flowed at appoximately 60mph. It is believed that it took 2-3 days for this water to drain.
During a period of 2500 years, there were believed to be as many as 100 floods that scoured the Gorge area. These were some of the largest documented floods occuring on the planet and in geological history.[1]
The 1800 is likely supposed to be 18,000 years ago, as this other link says essentially the same thing but at the time brame of 18,000 - 15,000 years ago.[2]
That said, neither source their facts well, so it's not out of the question that one is using the other or they are using some other source, and they are wrong and referencing wrong information in a chain, so I would consider a reputable source one way or the other as more definitive.
1: http://www.gorgeconnection.com/how-the-gorge-was-formed.php
2: https://www.pdxmonthly.com/travel-and-outdoors/2012/05/gorge...
Recent evidence suggests a meteor or comet strike in the Canadian ice sheet, at start of the 1200-year Younger Dryas cold spell, that could have melted enough water, and appears responsible also for the simultaneous extinction of 32+ genera of large North American mammals (including camels, horses, dire wolves, saber-tooth cats, cheetahs, giant sloths, mastodons and mammoths), as well as the Clovis culture, at the same instant, and the Younger Dryas itself.
That evidence includes shocked minerals and a platinum abundance spike found in the correct layer of the Greenland ice sheet, and in earth at sites throughout North America and as far afield as Syria and South Africa.
The Flood was a worldwide series of events throughout that time. The Fertile Crescent has been important for barely the last 13,000.
The modern humans that went to Asia largely stuck to the cost, and started on that route some millennia earlier than the modern humans that settled the Levant. Pre modern humans took that route far earlier, and there's growing evidence our ancestor and cousin species preceded them on it.
It's "extremely odd" that an article about actual scientific findings in Doggerland doesn't talk about the rest of the world and then devolve into a stream of consciousness about Atlantis, Noah and oral Aboriginal history?
This is the science of archaeology and the people who do it don't nearly care as much about Atlantis as you.
Science is an integrative activity. It matters that the same phenomenon describes an apple's fall and the moon's orbit. It matters that the Morning Star and the Evening Star are both Venus. It matters that light, radio, x-rays and radiated heat are all electromagnetic waves that propagate at a fixed rate. It matters that electromagnetics, the nuclear strong force, and the nuclear weak force trace to the same root. It matters that polar and rectangular coordinate systems, and wave propagation and exponential growth and decay, are all concisely related via exponentiation of the base of the natural logarithm.
It probably matters that Mesopotamian and Indus river valley civilizations arose at the same time.
"Atlantis" is just a name for a wholly plausible phenomenon that, if something like it existed, could be found with enough investigation. Fear of a name is not science. Excoriating people for wanting to see evidence sought for is the antithesis of science.
As it was presented that has it's own problems, which I think were adequately pointed out by others (namely that many ancient myths about floods do not necessarily point towards the same event), but it's not nearly as bad as I think your (apparently?) knee-jerk reaction to Atlantis may have led you to assume.
Contrast it to the present. A random city has millions of inhabitants and your entire life often changes overnight.
Err, no. Sundaland only refers to the area south of Indochina. The northern limit is at approximately 9'N according to Wikipedia.
Northern Vietnam, Taiwan, Korea, and even Japan were connected to mainland China during the last ice age, but none of them except the southern tip of Vietnam had anything to do with Sundaland.
But the archaeology is fascinating, too, of course. It is both sad and exciting to think about how much human culture and history has been lost to time, and how there still is out there, waiting to be discovered.
There is an episode of Star Trek TNG where Captain Picard gets neurally linked to an alien probe and gets to experience the life of a person in a civilization that has long since ceased to exist. It is frustrating sometimes how Sci-fi can implant such appealing ideas in our minds that are - AFAIK - scientifically impossible. But how amazing would it be to live for just one day among the mammoth hunters of Doggerland.
Also, this makes me think about what we leave behind for some future explorer to unearth. Maybe we should start creating time capsules, so future archaeologists won't have such a hard time figuring out what life was like back in the 21st century.
I think the best time capsules are the things that are stored somewhere and then simply forgotten. My wife and i we are converting an old barn at the moment to become our new home and just yesterday we discovered in a far off corner of the barn some interesting things: A few prayer books with comments from ancestors of our neighbours (some dates suggest they are from around 1820), a field box of some soldier from WW 1 with some personal belongings... just things you store on your attic and forget about. These are not things somebody thought could be interesting for future generations... but they give a unique glimpse into the lives of people long gone.
Then again, I suppose if it is destroyed by an AI from a neighboring region/galaxy, that too might be lost.
I wonder how many civilizations have been obliterated and forgotten by the AIs they created.
That said, I'm not sure the optimal solution arrived at would be to wipe out humanity in that case. Possibly a "wait and see and keep them from getting too big for their britches" strategy might be more rational for an AI, as long as it secures its superiority first.
As for why there's an assumption that AI will be hostile, I think the argument is more along the lines of that we can't know how a super-intelligent AI will think, so there's a chance it will be hostile, and if there's a chance something is world or species ending, it's best to tread carefully. I.e. the safest way to not have problems with the outcome of summoning a demon is to not summon the demon. Or for a more contemporary take, even if you're unsure about whether global climate change is real, the fact that it could be real means the sane thing to do is try to prevent it, because the consequences of being wrong are dire.
Assuming a time horizon of hundreds of millions of years, efficient fusion, bandwidth limited sub FTL communication, and optimum computing substrate being extremely cryogenic then …
Space near stars starts to look toxic. Rather than seeding the universe the goal is to construct an ever larger mega structure in the void as there is no efficient way to transfer the truly enormous amounts of data between structures at least assuming no AI wants to effectively be alone.
Granted start looking hundreds of billions of years into the future and stars look wasteful so destroying them to conserve hydrogen starts to be relevant.
How paranoid would an AI be, and what risk calculations would that lead to? Is it important to seed the universe with versions of itself just to lock down resources to protect from worst case scenarios where other AIs that have a different thought process are more aggressive? Is loneliness an attribute of intelligence, or an aspect of our evolution as tribal/pack animals? Will an SAI we develop have attributes similar to humans, or be completely alien, or in-between?
There's a lot of open questions about SAI and not a single one to study, and for all we know that could be a good thing.
wouldn't these AIs begin to contact and perhaps battle with each other? certainly it seems to me, there would be some tell-tale sign left over from the expected millions of AIs, right?
now of course, it's impossible to tell what super intelligent AIs would choose to do... but I do feel that an extension of Fermi's paradox would be needed with your comment.
What exactly about this do you find to be "scientifically impossible"?
We find these tiny fragments, and they tell us something about the past, but every artefact invites a lot more questions than it provides answers.
My late father spent some time researching tattoos and body marks in antiquity. A common pattern that appeared often were 4 dots arranged like the vertices of a rhombus. The pattern appears eg. on terracotta figurines and must have had some significance. But we have no idea what it meant, and all we can do is make wild guesses.
John Archibald Wheeler
Here’s an author theorizing on why people go to festivals TODAY, instead of the obvious answer that they’re a fun social game he creates this entire abstract theory about worship and religion.
https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/girard-series-part-1-th...
“They sat around playing banal number games, trying to manipulate each other’s agency, pointing at some other typical human called “Jeff Bezos”, seeking to get rich like him not realizing he’s actually protected by their consent to then contemporary political arrangements. They played along with all of it!”
The only difference is they’ll probably have a perfect digital record of our acquiescence to laugh at over.
A lot of the amazing archaeological sights are in countries that struggle/struggled economically and security wise. (E.g. Iraq, Ethiopia, Turkey, Syria, etc.)
Many sites are destroyed or we simply can't invest the proper time and money. Very frustrating.
Some Neanderthal was fucking around with some rocks one day and we look for some meaning in the remains. Was it a tool? Religious artifact? Nope, just Bobby Neander being bored and hitting rocks together into a shape with no meaning.
To be clear, that doesn't mean it's not worth trying to find the meaning if there is one.
And then it turns out (or rather, we never fully figure out) that it just meant that the owner paid that time's equivalent of sales tax on the figurine. And that the "unknown site probably used for ritual purposes" was more akin to that society's DMV, and people spent a lot of time there sitting around being bored until it's their turn at the clerk's station.
I should add that I don't really think that my "sales tax" explanation is in any way more likely in that specific case, but I do wonder if we (as layman, not necessarily archeologists) tend to discard mundane theories a lot. And yet I somehow find how the mundane stuff was handled in ancient times much more interesting then any regal or religious ceremony stuff...
EG "Neanderthal flake with birch tar grip - 50kya"
AKAIK, birch tar production has already been attributed to neanderthals, but hafting hasn't yet been. I wonder what kind of tool that is. It doesn't look like a spear point or axehead.
I get the impression that modern archaeology tends to emphasize viewing a site holistically and painstakingly recording as many details as possible, to the extent that some sites are just left alone rather than risk an imperfect or destructive excavation, so I'm curious whether anyone in the field is upset that these artifacts are surfacing as a byproduct of an unrelated civic project that isn't even trying to adhere to those standards.
So yes, dredging up the ground destroys all context, and you get finds that are very hard to date (carbon dating and other scientific methods have limited precision if you don't have any reference points)
On the other hand, I guess you take what you can get, and archaeologists often work with finds like that. A farmer might accidentally have dug up some roman coins on their field, or people with metal detectors may find some clothing pins (not sure of the correct english word) or something. These people may also not be eager to tell you where they found it (farmers really don't want excavations on their fields)
I should have read the article before commenting.
And often just sell it straight on black market.
In the UK, a lot of archeologists are employed by building companies in order to ensure a new development isn’t on archeologically significant land and that if something is encountered that it is cataloged. There are definitely standards that can be implemented to allow archeology and development to coexist.
I wonder if places like Ireland or more of the Scandanavian Islands would've been accessible as well? This doesn't even account for all the other places in the globe that humans may have moved around differently, like in China or India there may be other ancient differences too.
But everything is different when you go to prehistory, it seems hard for us laymen to imagine correctly. A given band of hunter-gatherers would not have travelled far in one generation. And I don't really see why the Stonehenge couldn't have been erected by a culture that had not even met another culture for a hundred generations. Look at the statues of Easter Island (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_island).
Hardly a coincidence, I'd say.
As far as we know, land bridges were crucial to major migrations during the time periods this article discuses.
I think you are generally confusing quite different pre-historical periods.
I do think it is quite reasonable to suspect that the ability to cross the english channel predates stonehenge.
Can I just say how cool it would be to say that I live in a town called Monster?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todenhausen_(Wetter)
. . . .
But as the wikipedia article states: The creepy name derives from an entiry different origin ;-)
In this case, the name of the village probably comes from the same word as the English "Monastry". Other places have the same etymology, e.g. the city Münster in Germany.
https://www.dw.com/en/austrian-village-of-fucking-decides-to...
Pardon your French? ;)
Ah, another explanation for one of the many "Great Flood" myths.
Can someone explain how to easily know if what you are looking at is important or not.
A rock with just one chip generally needs evidence of a habitation or other activity to identify it.
There is a site in southern England where somebody found a whole pile of chips, and fitted them all together showing the missing space left over had been a spear point.