00:00Doggerland? No, it's not a country of dogs, as you probably first thought. It's a land
00:07the size of Great Britain in the north of Europe. But don't bother trying to find it
00:12on the map of the old continent. Your search will come back empty. Doggerland hasn't existed
00:18for thousands of years. But where was it exactly? And did humans live here? Scientists are doing
00:24their best to answer these questions. Let's start with the name. In the 1990s, a British
00:32archaeologist named the area Doggerland, after Dogger Bank, a sandbank some 60 miles off
00:39the east coast of England. The word probably comes from Dutch. It was used for a fishing
00:44boat with two masts. Makes sense, since today, the North Sea is a rich fishing area. But
00:50thousands of years ago, people living here had a different diet. Some 12,000 years ago,
00:56the last major ice age was slowly reaching its end. Doggerland didn't feature seawater,
01:02but marshlands, lagoons, forests, and gently sloping hills. At that time, Britain and Ireland
01:10weren't islands. They sat deep inland. You could set off in Denmark and walk all the
01:16way to the north of Scotland. There was a system of rivers that emptied themselves in
01:21the North Sea. Back then, it was more of a channel that separated Doggerland from Norway.
01:27The rivers were different too. The Thames flowed into the Rhine. The ancient river they
01:32formed flowed into the place of today's English Channel and emptied itself into the Atlantic
01:37Ocean. Doggerland even featured a lake. There were some glaciers as well, but the land was
01:43still inhabitable. So who lived there? There were communities of hunter-gatherers from the
01:51Middle Stone Age. This was the time of human history when our ancestors mastered chipped stone
01:56tools. They used these stones with sharp edges for spears and arrowheads. This came in handy
02:02at Doggerland, which was the richest hunting area in all of Europe. It could have easily
02:07been the most populated region in the northwestern part of the continent. The hunters' prey likely
02:13consisted of reindeer, mammoths, oxen, wild pigs, brown bears, wolves, and many other species.
02:21In short, nobody went hungry here.
02:26Meat wasn't the only thing on the menu. Ancient residents of Doggerland collected hazelnuts
02:31and berries. They lived in wooden huts. They built them close to rivers, and they even
02:37constructed their settlements on hills. Remember Dogger Bank? It now sits underwater, but it
02:44used to be a mountainous region. Doggerland must have been prime real estate in prehistoric
02:48times. Its total surface area was over 18,000 miles, but things were about to go under, literally.
02:59The last ice age was ending. All the water trapped in glaciers and ice sheets started
03:04to melt. You experience this process firsthand every time you order a cold drink. Even if
03:10you drink it bottoms up, after a while, the glass is full again. Why? Because the ice
03:17cubes have melted. Think of Doggerland as that glass. The sea levels started rising
03:23quickly. Every century, the sea flooded from three to six feet of dry land. Just imagine
03:29what this would mean today. Miami's elevation is just over six feet. The city would be flooded
03:36in less than a hundred years. But there was one event that speeded things up. The Storagas
03:44Slides were a series of submarine landslides in the Norwegian Sea thousands of years ago.
03:50And what happens when huge chunks of earth shift suddenly underwater? Gigantic waves.
03:56You probably know what a tsunami is. Doggerland was likely pounded by several of them. They
04:02were so powerful that researchers believe they washed away Great Britain's land bridge
04:07to the rest of the continent. All that was left of Doggerland was an island the size
04:12of whales. Scientists estimate that the waves of this ancient tsunami were at least 40 feet
04:18high. Some 6,000 years ago, Doggerlanders were on the move. They were migrating to higher
04:27grounds, England and the Netherlands in their case. The ironic part is that when we literally
04:33translate the name of the country of Netherlands into English, we get lower lands. But thousands
04:40of years ago, this was higher ground for hunter-gatherers escaping the flood. Once it was all over,
04:46the continent of Europe got the shape we easily recognize today. But Doggerland was
04:51nowhere to be seen. It's been sitting under the waves of the North Sea for 8,200 years.
05:00Does the idea of Doggerland remind you of a more famous case of a submerged land? The
05:05lost city of Atlantis comes straight to mind. But there is an important difference. Atlantis
05:11is only a legend. Everything we know about it comes from the writings of the Greek philosopher
05:16Plato. Scientists have been searching for Atlantis for a long time. And up to this day,
05:21they can't even agree where exactly it was. Theories range from the Mediterranean to even
05:28Antarctica. Doggerland is not a myth. Everything science knows about this lost land comes from
05:35hard evidence. In 1931, a fishing boat was doing its thing off the coast of Norfolk in England. At
05:43the time, the crew would drag a net along the seafloor, sweeping everything in its path. And
05:48they caught something more than fish. It was peat. Like the stuff we find in Alaska and in Ireland.
05:56But what was it doing at the bottom of the North Sea? It didn't belong there, because seawater
06:02destroys peat. There was only one possible explanation. The area must have been dry land
06:08at some point in history. The final proof was that the peat contained a harpoon spear point,
06:14a sure sign of human activity. The idea wasn't new though. Since the Middle Ages,
06:22there has been talk of submerged land with underwater forests. In 1913, a British geologist
06:30came forward with the idea of an undersea world in this part of Europe. Scientific evidence kept
06:36piling up. Local fishermen started pulling out human-made tools and animal bones. Researchers
06:42dated them to be around 9,000 years old. But the deep murky waters of the North Sea made it
06:48impossible to send down divers. One archaeologist noted that they knew more about the surface of
06:54the moon than what lay at the bottom of this relatively shallow sea. The discovery of oil
07:02in the area in the 1960s was a real game-changer. Companies from the industry provided seismic survey
07:09data to scientists. This helped them piece together the full image of what Doggerland
07:14used to look like. Computer models soon produced images of river valleys, coastlines, freshwater
07:20lakes, and hills. There are even footprints of nomadic tribes preserved on the seafloor. Today,
07:27marine biologists are using magnetic fields to map out this lost underwater world.
07:32But Doggerland isn't the only place on Earth that went under the waves. Beringia is another lost
07:41world of global importance. This used to be a land bridge between Asia and North America. It
07:47got its name from the Bering Strait. It is 53 miles wide at its narrowest point. But,
07:53until the end of the last Ice Age, this was dry land that our human ancestors called home.
07:58Genetic evidence shows that Native Americans lived in Beringia for some 15,000 years.
08:05If you want to imagine what this land looked like, think of present-day Arctic Alaska. It
08:12was a shrub tundra. There were also small willows and birches. Sorry, no woolly mammoths. Large
08:20grazing animals simply wouldn't have had enough food in Beringia, though there were probably elk
08:25and bighorn sheep in the area. But the Ice Age wouldn't last forever. Like in Doggerland,
08:31sea levels started to rise. This happened some 13,000 years ago. It wasn't all bad news, though.
08:38Scientific evidence suggests that around this time, people started moving south. They left
08:44the slowly sinking Beringia and crossed over into Alaska. From there,
08:49they populated both Americas. These were the ancestors of Native American tribes.
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