00:00Doggerland, no, it's not the country of dogs, contrary to what one might think.
00:07It was a land the size of Great Britain, located in the north of Europe.
00:11But it's useless to look for this land on the map of the old continent.
00:14It would be a lost cause.
00:17Doggerland disappeared thousands of years ago.
00:19But where was it exactly?
00:21And did men live there?
00:23Scientists are trying to answer these questions.
00:27Let's start with the name.
00:29In the 1990s, a British archaeologist named Briony Cowles
00:33named the Doggerland region after Dogger Bank,
00:36a sand bank located about 100 km off the east coast of England.
00:41This term probably comes from Dutch and designated a fishing boat with two masts.
00:46It seems logical, because today, the North Sea is a rich fishing area.
00:50But thousands of years ago, the inhabitants of this region had a very different regime.
00:55About 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last great glacial period,
00:59Doggerland did not have sea water, but swamps, lagoons, forests and hills.
01:08At that time, Great Britain and Ireland were not islands.
01:11They were part of the continent and were far from the sea.
01:14One could thus leave Denmark and walk to the north of Scotland.
01:18A network of rivers then threw itself into the North Sea,
01:22which looked like a wide canal separating Doggerland from Norway.
01:27The watercourses were also different.
01:29The silt was thrown into the Rhine,
01:31and the river thus formed flowed instead of the current Channel to overflow into the Atlantic Ocean.
01:37Doggerland even housed a lake, Lutter Silver Pit.
01:40Despite the presence of a few glaciers, the terrain remained habitable.
01:44But who could live here?
01:47There were communities of hunter-gatherers since the Mesolithic.
01:51At that time, our ancestors mastered the carved stone tools
01:55that they used to make axes and arrowheads.
01:59These skills were particularly useful to Doggerland,
02:03the most abundant hunting ground in Europe.
02:06Doggerland could easily have been the most populated region of the northwestern part of the continent.
02:12Hunters probably hunted reindeers, mammoths, oxen, wild boars, brown bears, wolves and many other species.
02:20In short, no one lacked food.
02:25Meat was not their only resource.
02:28The former inhabitants of Doggerland collected berries and hazelnuts.
02:32They lived in wooden huts that they built near rivers and on hills.
02:39Do you remember Dogger Bank?
02:41Today submerged, this region was once mountainous.
02:45Doggerland must have been a very busy place during prehistory,
02:49with a total area of more than 29,000 square kilometers.
02:53But things were going to change radically.
02:59The last glacial era was coming to an end.
03:02All the water trapped in the glaciers and the ice caps began to melt.
03:07You can observe this phenomenon every time you order a cold drink.
03:11Even if you drink quickly, the glass fills up again as the ice melts.
03:18Doggerland was a bit like this glass.
03:21The sea level began to rise rapidly,
03:24submerging every century between one and two meters of dry land.
03:28Imagine what it would represent today.
03:32With an altitude of just 1.8 meters,
03:35Miami would be submerged in less than 100 years.
03:40But an event accelerated this process.
03:43The Storrega landslides,
03:45a series of underwater slides in the sea of Norway,
03:48occurred thousands of years ago.
03:51When large volumes of land suddenly move underwater,
03:54it creates gigantic waves, in other words tsunamis.
03:58Doggerland was probably hit by several of these tidal waves.
04:02They were so powerful that researchers think
04:05they carried the Earth's bridge linking Great Britain to the rest of the continent.
04:09All that remained of Doggerland was an island the size of Wales.
04:13Scientists today estimate that the waves of this tsunami
04:16measured at least 12 meters high.
04:21About 6,000 years ago,
04:23the inhabitants of Doggerland began to migrate to higher lands,
04:27such as England and the Netherlands.
04:30Ironically, while the Netherlands owe their name
04:33to their remarkable lack of elevation,
04:36it was at the time a more welcoming land for hunter-gatherers fleeing floods.
04:41Once this process was completed,
04:43the European continent took the form we know today.
04:47Doggerland had disappeared,
04:49submerged under the waves of the North Sea,
04:51for the next 8,200 years to come.
04:58The idea of Doggerland may remind you of another famous submerged land,
05:02the lost city of Atlantis.
05:05However, there is a major difference.
05:08Atlantis is only a legend,
05:10known mainly through the writings of the Greek philosopher Plato.
05:14Scientists have been looking for Atlantis for a long time,
05:18without being able to agree on its exact location,
05:21with theories ranging from the Mediterranean to Antarctica.
05:26Doggerland, on the other hand, is not a myth.
05:30All that science advances on its subject is based on concrete evidence.
05:36In 1931, a fishing boat off the coast of North Folk,
05:41in England, dragged a net along the seabed,
05:44raking everything on its way.
05:47The crew then caught something more than fish,
05:51similar to those found in Alaska and Ireland.
05:55But what was it doing at the bottom of the North Sea?
05:58Sea water normally destroys the net.
06:02The only possible explanation was that this area
06:05must have been a firm land at some point in its history.
06:09The highlight of the show was the presence of a harpoon tip in this net,
06:13indicating human activity.
06:17The idea was not new.
06:19From the Middle Ages, it was a question of submerged lands
06:22and their underwater forests.
06:25In 1913, a British geologist named Clement Redd
06:28advanced the idea of an underwater world in this part of Europe.
06:32Scientific evidence then ceased to accumulate.
06:35The fishermen in the area began to reassemble tools
06:38made by man and animal bones,
06:41which researchers have judged date back to about 9,000 years.
06:44However, the deep and turbulent waters of the North Sea
06:47made diving impossible.
06:50An archaeologist also noted that one knew the surface of the Moon better
06:53than the bottom of this relatively shallow sea.
06:59The discovery of oil in this region in the 1960s
07:02marked a turning point.
07:05Oil companies provided scientists with seismic data,
07:09helping them to reconstruct the complete image of Doggerland.
07:13Computer simulations quickly produced images of river valleys,
07:17coasts, lakes of fresh water and hills.
07:20Traces of nomadic tribes are even preserved on the seabed.
07:24Today, oceanographers exploit the magnetic field
07:28to map this lost underwater world.
07:33Doggerland is not the only place on Earth to have been submerged.
07:37The Bering Sea is another world lost of capital importance.
07:41This land bridge used to connect Asia and North America
07:44and takes its name from the Bering Strait,
07:4785 km wide and its narrowest point.
07:50Until the end of the last glacial period,
07:53these dry lands were the home of some of our ancestors.
07:57Thus, genetic evidence shows that the Amerindians
08:00lived in Bering for about 15,000 years.
08:05And the central part of this territory was nine times larger than the Channel.
08:09To imagine what this land looked like,
08:11think of the arctic part of present-day Alaska.
08:14A shrubby tundra where we find boulders and small soils.
08:18No mammoth here,
08:20because the great herbivorous animals
08:22would never have found enough food in the Bering Strait,
08:25although there probably were swamps and swamps of America in the region.
08:29But the glacial era would not last forever.
08:32As for Doggerland,
08:34sea levels began to rise about 13,000 years ago.
08:37It was not only bad news, however.
08:40Scientific discoveries suggest that at this time
08:43people would have begun to migrate south,
08:46leaving the Bering Strait in a submersion route to move to Alaska.
08:49From there, they would have made the two Americas populate,
08:52becoming the ancestors of the first Amerindians.
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