Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off
everythingisamazing.substack.com
everythingisamazing.substack.com
Also, thank you to those who left comments saying you didn't like that former piece's introduction. I agree with you! It was rambling and a bit self-indulgent and I should have just got on with the story. This one does that (I think). Cheers.
So Atlantis might be much the same - the story of a city lost to flooding (maybe even the same root story as the biblical one) repurposed and embellished to express a philosophical point.
1. https://www.awe.gov.au/parks-heritage/heritage/places/nation...
2. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-26/study-dates-victorian...
and pretty much universally abhorred by anyone but SEO types
> websites having a lot of above the fold advertisements
I wouldn't know about these. I have an adblocker. seems like a cheap price to pay to prevent unnecessary wear&tear on your mouse wheel.
That doesn’t mean these mythical floods had no basis in fact, and weren’t inspired by real floods. It just depends how literally you take the specifics of how they are described in the sources.
Protip: the Bible can still be the literal word of God, because omnipotence implies the ability to use simile, metaphor, analogy, symbolism, and storytelling tropes.
A nicely topical example, given we've just had Easter, would be around the time of the crucifixion -- was it at 9am on the morning of Passover, or midday the day after passover?
The gospels provide conflicting timelines - Mathew, Mark, & Luke say 9am on passover, John says the afternoon the day after passover. There are myriad other contradictions around the descriptions of the crucifixion mythology: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Contradictions_in_Jesus%27_cru...
This may be a useful jumping-off point for other inconsistencies:
Still being as honest as possible, I'll attempt to respond constructively to the details you provided:
Instead of myriads, I counted 7 alleged contradictions, of which only 3 are related to the timeline and (again, imho) easily disregarded by answering "while" to the question of "before or after?".
The other 4 alleged contradictions are not necessarily incompatible facts, but rather incomplete, related accounts of a whole situation. What I mean by that is that there are plausible explanations on why those examples are written in different ways.
For example, the criminals mocking Jesus at the cross. Of three accounts, two say the criminals were hating. Only one of the accounts goes on to say that one of the thieves repents. You've got two possibilities here: either you examine the three accounts as a whole and arrive at the conclusion that they both started hating and eventually one repented (do let me know if you honestly don't consider this to be a possibility), or you decide that there's no explanation as to why there are no four identical accounts of that situation, and therefore the whole Bible doesn't make sense.
Another example, when the soldiers compel Simon of Cirene to carry the cross. One of the accounts does not include that, but rather says that He, bearing His cross, went forth into (towards, in the direction, with the intention of getting to...) the place of the skull. Again, the options. Could it be that the one writing the fourth account was not present when Simon started carrying the cross? Is it absolutely so impossible that there's some explanation to that?
We could go on with the rest of contradictions, but that's not the point. I acknowledge that minor details as the colour of a robe might be messed up during in history across 2000 years and multiple transcriptions and translations, because after all, there is human intervention in the Bible. One says the robe was scarlet, one says the robe was purple. Does that really compromise the Truth exposed in the Bible? Does it invalidate His sacrifice at the cross?
I am still to find or be shown a relevant inconsistency, just one point that really contradicts a fundamental truth on the Bible with itself. Something that compromises the fact that God himself gave His Son who died as a person in the world to clean us from our sinful nature and give us eternal life in His presence.
I'll offer a couple of things. A small one first - consider that myriad is an adjective, not a collective noun.
For rational readers, being told that a work is inerrant, and then finding myriad inconsistencies within that work, or claims of historical actions that make no sense within the context of the times & places described, along with the conflicting contemporary historical record (in the case of the bible, basically no contemporary corroboration whatsoever) -- but then having those contradictions or inconsistencies hand-waved away by trying to claim a 'while' addresses them (it does not), or trying to bundle them all up in a dismissive 'does it matter what colour the robe was?' -- can be frustrating.
Obviously an inerrant work shouldn't contain even weirdly specific wardrobe inconsistencies, but that's not the point, as we can agree that one is a relatively trivial error (but an error nonetheless).
So, the moneylenders story - one of the most famous in the book - is a favourite for me.
Few people, including the strong believers, can answer the question of whether this happened early on in the story, or just before the end (ie. did it kick-start the character's main story arc for the next 3-5 years, or was it a key event in motivating the Jewish leaders to orchestrate his death some weeks before he was killed).
And, just like the robe's colour, it depends on which gospel you read, because both versions are in the bible.
Apologists will typically claim 'it must have happened twice', but that's a weak retort given how monumental it must have been in order to be reported in the first place.
I recently finished David Fitzgerald's second book in his trilogy 'Nailed', which was a fascinating read (the first in the series is lighter & shorter, but a compelling introduction to the subject). Prior to publishing the first book, he wrote an essay that you may find interesting [1] that describes some more profound contradictions & provably-false myths / beliefs.
The idea that "the whole world" means what we think of as the globe didn't really emerge until roughly 900 AD.
And there is plenty of evidence in Mesopotamia of flood events which are not inconsistent with conceivable dates for the the biblical flood event and which had the potential to have wiped out a civilization (a city/state and its government) -- thus "the whole world".
My understanding is that there is no evidence for pre-historic human societies that had advanced technologies. We have hard data in our genetics for the timeframes of human existence (statistical rate of random genetic drift vs nearest ancestors) in addition to the fossil record, we have good information from ice cores about when/what of particulates were in the atmosphere, we know general rates of tectonic movements , and it's easy to observe what's under kilometers of strata with drilling cores if anyone has a good hypothesis as to where to drill.
The core difference between Science and Theology is how they deal with statements of "truth" without evidence.
Theology starts with "it's true because I said so"
Science starts with "it's true because I can demonstrate it"
That humans were complex in the past is a good hypothesis. It needs evidence before it can be accepted as fact, or even necessarily expect respect from others. The lack of recent skull changes would seem to be a good start.
If someone believes the hypothesis to be true, they will go explore and find evidence to back their claims. If there was a complex society in the English Channel, it's likely well preserved, just waiting to be found!
To believe this is to cut yourself off from an unfathomably rich collection of human knowledge, and it is sad to see someone committed to it.
God speaks to someone. That someone says "It's true because God told me so."
I have read religious works, I'm not cut off from them. It's impossible to be cut off from theology in the USA. However, they all start with "it is true because I (the author) say so".
I think at least some of the people in this thread would argue against that, seeing as how it is about the idea of advanced or at least extant cities in the distant past. That would be exactly one of the points being argued on.
Similarly to biological evolution, on any sufficiently long time scale the descendents aren't more advanced, simply better adapted to different conditions. Our ancestors' societies reflected wildly different contraints and path dependence, not primitiveness.
I understand what you mean, yet I refuse to call concepts like universal human rights, rule of law and the unacceptability of war crimes as simply different adaptations, as opposed to being strictly more advanced than the predecessor ideas.
1. sophistication is driven by specialization
2. the ability to specialize is driven by access to surplus energy
3. before the advent of agriculture bands of humans simply did not have the excess calories available to them to support a priesthood and philosophers and bureaucrats, etc.
Sophisticated technology is driven that way for sure, Sophisticated culture, I would argue, does not have those preconditions.
The people in Mesopotamia (and in other similar areas which were slowly turning into a desert) didn't really have a choice. Building and maintaining irrigation systems takes a lot of people and coordination. Since most would probably prefer to be the ones handling 'coordination' aspect rather than digging trenches in the mud priests and philosopher classes had to appear to maintain social cohesion. It's much easier to convince peasants to give X% their harvest to the local strongman when they know that he's an divinely appointed king or maybe even a living god himself.
This is a long but highly informative presentation by Sander van der Leeuw from 2012:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pOyQqPi28ug
Relevant segment begins at about 8m30s.
I agree that it doesn't make sense for there to be a single 6,000 year time period of human prosperity and collaboration, its much more likely that there have been multiple periods over a 200,000 time span. Perhaps some traits in humans continually set us back to a rudimentary lifestyle with thinned populations.
I’m just thinking war tactics and war machines keep it in check too.
Sea level change would be a bigger global risk, but aside from sudden flooding, you would expect that to just push back an established civilization to the uplands of their territories rather than wiping them out root and branch.
Well, not steel framed buildings or anything like that. But our modern civilization has certainly done things that I think stand a good chance of lasting hundreds of millions of years. Take for instance glass bottles. Those tossed into the ocean won't last more than a few decades before they're eroded to nothing (see: sea glass), but we've created so many glass bottles and distributed them so far and wide, it is virtually certain that many of them will survive in the soil for a very very long time. There is no doubt that glass can last for millions of years under the right conditions; there is a lot of volcanic glass around that attests to this. There are so many glass bottles in landfills or littered around the world, at least some of them are certain to be in geologically stable conditions.
Then there are things like mountaintop removal mining. Maybe normal quarries get filled in and hidden over time, but there's no hiding the top of a mountain being sliced right off.
On top of that, we don't even have exact knowledge of where to look. Most places we do discover have plenty of signs and evidence, they are just buried under 10ft of dirt and thus essentially undiscoverable.
Ah, but how do you know that? You weren't there. ;)
Sometimes the absence of evidence really is evidence to the contrary, but other times it isn't. It all depends on whether or not it's reasonable to expect evidence to be found given the amount of looking we've done and the nature of the evidence we're looking for. If we don't find a ton of glass coke bottles in the soil around the world, after digging around in innumerable construction sites on almost every corner of the globe, that's strong evidence that nobody was mass manufacturing coke bottles 50k years ago.
Contrast that with the lack of evidence for ancient wooden sailing vessels. We don't have any evidence of wooden ships 50k years ago. But supposing there were a shipbuilding culture back then, would we really expect to find evidence for it? All those wood artifacts would be LONG gone, even the oldest bog wood ever found is less than 10k years old. In this case, the absence of evidence is weak evidence to the contrary at best.
It's also good to remember that there has been an ice age for the last 2.5 million years. The climate is generally too cold and dry for agriculture, except during relatively short interglacial periods. Maybe there was an opportunity for a civilization to develop in the Eemian period 130k to 115k years ago, but that was likely the only window of opportunity.
It's a certainly fun through experiment to think of some lost ancient civilization with glittering cities and high technology that was ground down to dust by the last ice-age, but there's literally no factual evidence to support such a notion and plenty of factual evidence to disprove it, so it's best not to get sucked too far down that particular irrational rabbit-hole.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaeus_(dialogue)
“Let me begin by observing, first of all, that nine thousand was the sum of years which had elapsed since the war which was said to have taken place between all those who dwelt outside the Pillars of Heracles and those who dwelt within them: this war I am now to describe.
Of the combatants on the one side the city of Athens was reported to have been the ruler, and to have directed the contest; the combatants on the other side were led by the kings of the islands of Atlantis,”
There is nuance here, in the degree to which uncertainty due to lack of evidence is surfaced in scientific communications for the public.
Take for instance, the behavior of dogs. Science cannot [yet] objectively answer the question of how much the subjective qualia of a dog is comparable to the qualia of humans. What then can we say about whether dogs feel 'love'? Some might say that science has not yet answered this question; that is fine.
But others get overeager and assert that because science hasn't demonstrated that dogs feel love, the scientific position is to assume all apparent demonstrations of love from dogs are little more than elaborate food seeking behavior. This goes too far, it assumes a lack of evidence is evidence to the contrary, implicitly treating science as complete until proven otherwise. I think this overzealous sort of 'scientific' thinking reflects a dogmatic attitude which is actually antithetical to the real scientific method.
When you get to the edge of knowledge, ignoring obvious things and glossing over tends to rule the day.
Knowing what we know about people, it seems absurd to think that people just went poof, “civilization” has arrived! There were a lot fewer humans in the past, and hundreds of generations are lost to time. But the narrative of the pageant of history, often leading to the <insert nation here> greatness of today doesn’t work with “I don’t know”
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=CcXXQ6GCUb8
And if you pause to consider that emotions, particularly such core and foundational ones as love (maternal, partner, tribal) are all but certainly evolved, then existence of them or precursors in other species seems all but certain. That thought had occurred to Charles Darwin, who wrote a book on the question, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
I don't think anyone believe that's the case? It's just what we have records for. You need a lot of prior development to arrive to the point where you have recorded history.
In 2008, this is what a certain group in Hollywood thought 10,000 B.C. was like... anachronisms and all.[0]
"Against the grain" points out that it's not obvious as number of people increases everyone wants to live in cities ruled over and taxed by someone else.
"I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history."
If you mean beyond 12k years or so I would not say it's "pretty clear". I would go as far and say it's psychologically and biologically feasible, but we have no evidence to back this up.
What archaeological evidence does prove, is that arrival of anything resembling civilization was a shambolic affair lasting thousands of years, composed of waxing and waning city-sized polities that could at maximum control only few tens of square kilometers of area.
What we do have are sites like Göbekli Tepe at max 12 000 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
The arrival of agricultural plants is around the same time during Neolithic Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution
I think you would need to expand on the meaning of "sophisticated". I don't want to presume your intent with the use of this word.
But, a hunter gatherer society looks quite a lot different from an agricultural society.
Of course the people living in a hunter gatherer society could very well be artistically and philosophically very developed. But the likelihood of an "Atlantean supercivilization" would be very small.
I think both options are pretty cool. As a species we have a history of 200 000 years. Either our past is riddled with complex emergent societies that have been ground to dust, forgotten, only for the cycle to start again a new over and over again over thousands of years. And only on our current cycle we've managed to start to reach the full potential of our species.
Or, there have not been "civilizational cycles" which would make our anthropocene epoch with it's industrialization and science something even more mind blowingly astonishing.
Both options are humbling.
https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...
Bookkeeping is not the only prerequisite for written language, e.g. in the new world, sophisticated bookkeeping mechanisms existed for centuries without written language.
History is written records.
There were many prehistoric societies, but because civilization tended to have some form of written records, the prehistoric societies are not considered civilizations.
No scholars would clai that humanity sprang out of nothing in those places. I mostly hear that from bible literalists. But if some of their people weren't in cities, the society was not civilized. And if there was nobody to write about them they were prehistoric.
What about cave paintings?
They absolutely would have had conversations around campfires. Talking about what, I wonder?
It's great people care enough to set that up/preserve/study it.
A comment from a documentary about Rome stuck in my mind, it goes something like : "There is no history of Europe before Rome because for most of Europe, history starts with Rome conquering that region. They were the first to write anything down."
Similarly, we know how slavic peoples migrated into Europe because those regions stopped sending written updates back to Rome. Did they then revert back to pre-history? Or does a region continue to "have history" even if for a few centuries nobody in that area writes anything down?
The regions heavily affected by glaciation are relatively few, relatively lately settled (for obvious reasons), and hence, less significant to overall availability of evidence of early agriculture.
Other disturbances resulting from glaciation, notably sea level rise and the innundation of previous coastal and low-lying regions may contribute somewhat more to obscured evidence.
This only sounds prepostrous if you don't understand what the terms mean.
This is also roughly the timeframe when the last stone-age society near Europe finally got subjugated by Europeans and stone age finally ended in the old world, when the Spanish crushed the Guanches in the Canaries.
It'd be really nice if all parts of the internet engaged in good faith debates on topics they were knowledgeable but finding that phrasing preposterous isn't unreasonable if you've spent a decent chunk of time exposed to reddit and twitter.
I agree that you're correct and reasonable, but I also agree that the person you're replying to was correct and reasonable when expressing caution over how things are worded.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/314/314162/the-dawn-of-every...
They don't tend to last very long without varying dramatically from the original version.
tl;dr Historically oral history was the only form of discovering what is true and specifically regarded as more rigorous than written accounts.
At least, when taking history into account.
Etymology is also interesting:
> From Middle English historie, from Old French estoire, estorie (“chronicle, history, story”) (French histoire), from Latin historia, from Ancient Greek ἱστορίᾱ (historíā, “learning through research”), from ἱστορέω (historéō, “to research, inquire (and) record”), from ἵστωρ (hístōr, “the knowing, wise one”), from Proto-Indo-European *weyd- (“see, know”). Doublet of story and storey.
Fascinating that history is based on "seeing and knowing."
AFAWK there has been no significant change in the anatomy of humans in the past 200k years, and similarly nothing to indicate that we’ve had major changes in things like our ability to abstract. The bicameral theory of mind has been thoroughly discredited.
If you can show me the tomb of a prominent world leader from the last, let's say, 500 years that's decorated with images of his/her enemies' severed genitalia, I'll concede the point.
Generally every theory which talks about these great leaps in human cognition, and ties these to human "development" while ascribing diminished intellectual capabilities to our ancestors, seems to fall apart after scrutiny (e.g., Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, bicameral theory of mind).
Also, we've seen plenty of "undoing" of abstraction in long-continuing cultures. E.g., in Hinduism, idol worship wasn't really a thing in Vedic times, and only became popular in Puranic times (over a 1000 years later). Many Hindus do believe that some idols contain portions of gods, especially those idols that reside ones in "big" temples. I would not say that these folks have lost their ability to abstract. As another example, post-Vedic religion underwent a large amount of abstraction in the Upanishads, but then reverted to personification of deities via the bhakti movement and in Puranic religion. Again, I wouldn't say that Hindus lost their ability to think abstractly.
Isn’t something like this the general explanation for the Flynn effect? (that newer generations in modern societies are better at IQ tests because they’re better at IQ test-style abstractions)
I get the impression that the degree to which people took religion literally varied a lot from person to person, and even priest to priest throughout history.
It’s not clear whether more people took religious belief literally, or if they just said they did for political and social reasons.
Sure it claims way too much, but I don’t think every nearby direction is discredited. That would mean everyone in history had the exact same theory of unitary consciousness we do (that we have free will, our actions come after conscious thought, there’s a conscious/subconscious/unconscious or id/ego/superego, dreams come from our own memories, etc.)
There’s a lot of Buddhists out there to this day, and they do officially belong to a religion with a you-don’t-exist policy. How this is integrated with resurrection depends on the lineage of course.
Myself I just want to know if the Babylonians were taught math by a fish alien named Oannes. Maybe he can tell us if P=NP.
Most of the recent academic work I'm familiar with tends to emphasize the opposite case, tempered by the fact that ancient religion and culture tend to be very alien. Take, for instance, popular reviews by Irving Finkel in his "Noah" book, or Ed Barnhart's work on the Moche, etc.
But, I read about the piles of genitalia in Toby Wilkinson's "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt" and about the god-statues in Trevor Bryce's "Babylonia: A Very Short Introduction."
Download almost any anime-style game off the Google Play store and you'll see the exact same thing
There aren’t streets, rather everyone supposedly traveled on top of everyone else’s roofs. There were family homes but not public buildings. And they buried their dead family members right inside their own houses and sometimes kept their skulls out for decoration.
First we thought the Earth was the center of the universe. Then we thought it was just our solar system. Then we thought the Milky Way Galaxy was the whole of the universe. Some astronomers persisted in this belief all the way up to the 1920s. Now...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field#Hubble...
... and we've just launched the JWST which will be able to see a lot further than Hubble.
Gobekli Tepe pushed the date for civilization back a few thousand years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe
It'll probably get pushed back some more. Also I've always thought there are too many flood myths around the world for it to be chance. No I don't think there was a true global flood since it makes no sense, but the end of the ice age would have brought sea level rise and enormous regional floods due to things like the bursting of glacial dams. This would have occurred over the same period of time across the world, leaving behind traces in myth and legend but also physically destroying a lot of evidence of civilizations in the path of these disasters.
It puts the climate change narrative in perspective a bit. In someways, the change we are experiencing isn't as unprecedented as some people perceive. In other ways, if we are going to be on a highly accelerated version of something like the event in the story than we are going to be in for a hell of a ride.
> Ur was an important Sumerian city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern "Tell el-Muqayyar" in south Iraq's Dhi Qar Governorate. Although Ur was once a coastal city near the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf, the coastline has shifted and the city is now well inland, on the south bank of the Euphrates, 16 kilometres from Nasiriyah in modern-day Iraq. The city dates from the Ubaid period circa 3800 BC, and is recorded in written history as a city-state from the 26th century BC, its first recorded king being Mesannepada.
The pictures of the Ziggurat are really impressive.
6. If a man violates the right of another and deflowers the virgin wife of a young man, they shall kill that male.
7. If the wife of a man followed after another man and he slept with her, they shall slay that woman, but that male shall be set free.
... and slaves of course ...
Has it been like that for 4000+ years (at some places) :-(
> pictures of the Ziggurat are really impressive
Yes :-)
> The north-eastern coast of the UK experienced waves between 3–6 m, much like the eastern coast of Scotland ... Wave heights are predicted to be around 1 m on the UK coast and up to 5 m on the northern coast of Doggerland. The maximum elevation of Doggerland here is less than 10 m, with large areas of less than 5 m. It is therefore possible that much of Doggerland would have been flooded by such a wave.
In reading now about the factors involved in this work, one issue is the amount of post-glacial rebound. While I've found that Scotland has rebounded a lot, I can't figure out how much that has been since 8,000 years ago. If I read figure 1 of http://people.rses.anu.edu.au/lambeck_k/pdf/152.pdf correctly, the Bridge of Earn, Firth of Fourth was 4 meters lower, relative to sea level rise back then.
I also know that geography can cause tsunamis to have local effects which are much stronger than average, as when a narrowing bay channels the wave upward. But I have no clue how that relates to the deposits seen in Scotland.
Edit: and figure 3 seems to say Dogger Bank was 6 meters higher (relative to sea level) than now, again, due to post-glacial rebound effects.
"Some models of the Storegga slides estimate that tsunami waves exceeded 20–25 metres (65–80 feet) in height along the coast of the Shetland Islands, 10–12 metres (33–39 feet) along the Norwegian coast, and 5 metres (16 feet) along the coast of eastern Scotland."
> The resulting tsunami had run-up heights of around 10–20 m on the Norwegian coast, over 12 m in Shetland, 3–6 m on the Scottish mainland coast. ...
> We compare results from our multiscale model to previous results using constant-resolution models and show that accounting for changes in bathymetry since 8.15 ka, neglected in previous numerical studies of the Storegga slide-tsunami, improves the agreement between the model and inferred run-up heights in specific locations, especially in the Shetlands, where maximum run-up height increased from 8 m (modern bathymetry) to 13 m (palaeobathymetry).
The Time Team episode (mentioned elsewhere here) says the wave at Doggerland was up to 10 meters. https://youtu.be/XTvOcm5dgDI?t=1835 .
The most recent publication I found on the topic is https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2021.7674... :
> The Storegga tsunami has previously been theorized as having brought about a swift and catastrophic end to Doggerland, the submerged palaeolandscape of the southern North Sea (Weninger et al., 2008). However, a more nuanced understanding is beginning to emerge in the wake of numerical modelling of the wave’s dispersal (Hill et al., 2014; Hill et al., 2017), and the discovery of the first confirmed evidence of the tsunami from a submarine context, “core ELF001A” from the “Southern River” submerged river valley, recovered by the Europe’s Lost Frontiers team (Gaffney et al., 2020). Clearly the Storegga tsunami hit some of the coastlines of the southern North Sea with considerable force, but the severity of this impact was probably variable (Walker et al., 2020).
It cites "run-up heights in excess of 25 m recorded in parts of Scotland and Norway".
Whyyyyyy?
To hedge your bets with "no evidence" that these people managed to navigate shallow sea waters to a nearby island, which they had inhabited for thousands of years and knew like the back of their hand, seems… unnecessary? Disrespectful?
I mean, we already know Mesolithic "hunter gatherers" managed absolutely mind-boggling feats of both art and engineering. More is becoming known every year, and it consistently amazes us in the direction of "No way!"
Building a boat / canoe for island-hopping over well-mapped marshes and shallow seas is the least of it.
If speculate on "no evidence" we must, my bet goes 100% in the opposite direction: The gradual increase in sea levels prompted new inventions and spectacular constructions, now lost to time. As far as speculations go, it seems a safer bet than "couldn't paddle".
From https://researchframeworks.org/maritime/the-mesolithic/#sect...
> Evidence for Mesolithic seafaring includes the colonisation of islands involving long sea journeys, such as Shetland and the Outer Hebrides (Warren 2005), as well as the location of sites on islands involving very difficult sea crossings, such as Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island) in North Wales, where one must negotiate the treacherous Swnt Enlli (Edmonds et al 2009).
From https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544031...
> Tolan-Smith (2008, 151) notes that at this point there is clear evidence for Mesolithic seafaring, with Ireland being occupied along with the Isle of Man, Rhum, the Hebridean Archipelago and Howick on the East coast of England. Thus, as Warren (2005) and Garrow and Sturt (2011) have argued, there is ample evidence for a strong seafaring tradition in the Mesolithic.
What Doggerland – and underwater archeology in general – has to reveal is quite exciting. How did these Mesolithic people conceptualize the world and themselves? What innovations and dead-ends "didn't quite make it" (in the evolutionary sense) to the start of protohistory, to us today?
So much of the juiciest evidence from that era is now under the sea!
And which of those now-dead innovations were genuinely obsoleted ideas, and which died out due to ecological happenstance? A bad timing, bad place for an otherwise brilliant life hack… especially on the psychological/cultural/spiritual front.
Unfortunately such aspects of prehistory are the hardest to piece together. But given the jaw-dropping accomplishments of many Paleolithic and Mesolithic peoples, and given the time scales, even their maladaptations must be worth a study.
In this age of Twitter, imagine something chiseled to perfection by groups of smart humans over thousands of years. Then swept away by something as "trivial" as a tsunami, or the agricultural revolution/slavery that marks the dawn of history. A truly multivariate optimization problem, with a rather shady objective function.
Australian Aborigines have an oral culture with ancient roots, and life hacks that have resulted in an astonishing long-lived culture.
The Khasi, as an example of a matrilineal culture, help remind us that certain things we take for granted - like how men are supposedly more competitive than women - simply isn't true.
(https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w13727/w137... - "amongst the Khasi ... women choose the competitive environment more often than Khasi men").
Or concepts revolving around "third gender" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender .
This is a collection of plausible renderings:
https://pammack.sites.clemson.edu/lec392/earley2.html
Channel Islands off the coast of present-day Santa Barbara, CA.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-northern-Channel-Isl...
It's also odd to read about Europe in measurements like "cubic miles" given there's only one country in Europe using imperial and their system is different from the US imperial. The author is a self-described "Yorkshireman" so I assume it's UK imperial but I have no idea what that means for American audiences. Are US and UK miles the same?
(In my everyday thinking I use meters and miles alongside each other, which is...ridiculous. But I was a little too late to the world to properly learn inches and pounds, so it's centimetres and kg all the way.)