Transcript
04:07 - Under Pressure
I actually want to be in that field just there. Let’s go take a look. So after the last ice age, where the global temperatures increased, global sea levels therefore increased as that ice melted. And in the North Sea basin, well, land that had been once exposed to air for thousands of years now began to be submerged by the sea itself. Doggerland was low, flat, and wide. Vince Gaffney describes it as a landscape where small rises in the sea levels caused enormous changes. The change wasn’t dramatic day to day, but it was relentless.
Well, Gaffney and his team were able to now start seeing this process unfold beneath the seabed. They identified hundreds of ancient rivers, some for hundreds of miles, along with dozens of large lakes and marshes, some covering hundreds of square kilometers. The guesswork had been removed. We now have clear visible mapped features. A country frozen in geological cross-sections.
Gaffney makes an important point here. Inundation is not linear. The sea doesn’t simply rise and stay put. It advances. It pauses. It pulls back and then advances again. And for people living here, well, this would have been confusing rather than catastrophic. Familiar places changing shape but not disappearing entirely.
Crucially, this was good land. Gaffney and his team are very clear about this. The land that this was now becoming and turning into, in some ways, wetlands. Well, that is prime real estate for the hunter-gatherers of the time. Freshwater, fish, birds, reeds, seasonal resources, you name it. This was a place where the Mesolithic people wanted to live. It was a place that was worth adapting to as it changed.
But adaptation has its limits. Doggerland thinned out in many places, and roots that once connected groups now became bottlenecks. Crossing points became tidal. River mouths widened into unpredictable estuaries. Knowledge of safe paths, where to cross, where to camp, became harder to maintain across generations. Doggerland was becoming unstable. Still usable, still inhabited, but increasingly difficult to read. Doggerland was becoming stretched.
Wow. Right. Finally, finally found it. Never had the opportunity to see this in person for real. This is the Neolithic stone axe sharpener, and you can polish your stones in this part here for hours on end, probably over two and a half thousand years in use after this event that we are talking about today. And speaking of that event, well, this is a crucial turning point for me now because that event came well when the landscape of Doggerland was already hugely under pressure. Wow.
Freshwater, fish, birds, reeds, seasonal resources, you name it.
AND, it was close to the Walmart...