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Exploring Doggerland — 14 Comments

  1. Never before heard of Lake Agassiz, and I went to high school on the bank of one of the Great Lakes!
    I’m wondering about the biological consequences of the fairly rapid dilution of sea water by this fresh water dumping. Since salt water is denser than fresh, the top few feet of the Atlantic ocean must have been diluted, and that fresh water perhaps layered out for a time.

  2. Many ancient legends have bases in facts. For example, there are myths of a great flood that covered the whole world. Jews and Christians are familiar with the Noah story, while Babylonian legends of Hammurabi are substantial similar. Ditto some of the earliest legends of ancient Egypt.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burckle_Crater

    If the Burckle Crater in the Indian Ocean represents a meteoric impact, the tsunami generated by the strike would have washed all the coastlines of the Indian Ocean, including Australia. Curiously, there are Dreamtime lgends of a flood…. As the tsunami rolled into the Arabian Gulf, the waters would have been funneled into the Red Sea as a wall of water carrying everything away before it, perhaps reaching the Mediterranean.

    Archaeologists have been investigating the site, called Tall el-Hamman in Jordan, just northeast of the Dead Sea. It was a thriving Bronze Age city about 3700 years ago. Some of the pottery shards excavated show signs of intense heat; enough to turn one side of the shards to glass. The area may have been destroyed by the explosion of a meteorite, with the equivalent energy of a 10 megaton nuclear explosion.

    https://www.universetoday.com/140752/a-meteor-may-have-exploded-in-the-air-3700-years-ago-obliterating-communities-near-the-dead-sea/

    You’ve probably heard of it; a little place called Sodom.

    Many archaeologists intensely dislike astronomical phenomena as impacting the ancient Earth, but happens over and over. The Younger Dryas was almost certainly caused by a meteoric impact about 15K years ago.

    Open Google Earth, and wander the world looking for circular mountains. There are two, and only two, mechanisms that create circular mountain formations. These are volcanoes and impacts.

  3. “What’s especially interesting is that the changes in a lake in the middle of North America would have such an effect on sea levels.”

    Agree. On the surface it is hard to conceive of a lake so large and so deep that its release (how might that h appen) can increase GLOBAL levels to that degree. Earth is, after all, a water planet. I’d like to see the actual proposed figures to the guesstimate but off hand I’d say it seems about as significant to sea level rise as emptying a water glass into a swimming pool.

  4. This is fascinating. I did take a year of geology, and still didn’t hear about Lake Agassiz, but I was made aware of the enormous geological changes which have happened on our continent.

    I’ve seen ancient pottery and other items in the Egyptian Museum from about 5,000-6,000 BC, before the great dynasties, left by the peoples who moved into the Nile Valley from what had been fertile ground in the Western Desert and Libya.

  5. Passing strange, before this morning around 10:00, I’d never heard of Doggerland.

    Then I watched a YouTube video about the prehistory of the British isles, circa 1 million BC to 8,000 BC. There, this very morning (did I mention how odd it is to find this post today afternoon?) I was told of Doggerland, its convenient land bridge effect for the traveling homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthal to move into and out of England and Scotland territory as the ice ages ebbed and flowed.
    [ https://youtu.be/kk5-ynRPfss ]

    Lake Agassiz, on the other hand, I’d heard of five or six years back.

  6. I had to go to the Wikipedia link to answer my most burning question:
    Doggerland was named in the 1990s, after the Dogger Bank, which in turn was named after the 17th century Dutch fishing boats called doggers.”

    As to whether long-distant geological events can persist in tribal memory —
    The Irish legend of the Giant’s Causeway tells of a path between Ireland and Scotland that enabled giant heroes to fight each other.
    http://www.irelandsmythsandlegends.com/the-giant-s-causeway

    Long long ago there lived a giant named Finn McCool. He was the biggest and strongest giant in all of Ireland. He was 54 foot tall and he was said to have the strength of 500 men. His voice could be heard for miles around. He lived happily with his wife Oonagh on the Antrim coast. At the same time there lived a giant name Benandonner on the Scottish coast. Benandonner believed that he was the strongest of all the giants. He constantly taunted and shouted at Finn from across the water. One day Finn became so mad with Benandonner that he picked up a huge lump of earth and threw it at him. The earth missed him, but it landed in the middle of the Irish sea making the Isle of Man. The hole left by Finn became Lough Neagh.

    Tired of all of Benandonner’s taunting, Finn finally accepted to fight Benandonner to settle who was the strongest giant. Finn started to build a path to Scotland that he called the causeway. With his enormous hands he laid down thousands of rock. When Benandonner heard what Finn was doing he decided to build a path from Scotland to meet up with Finn’s path. The two giants worked vigorously for weeks building their paths.

    The Wikipedia entry for “Giant’s Causeway” says the basalt columns or “steps” formed millions of years ago, which is much more boring than the legend, and way to early for prehistoric homo saps to remember, even speaking Jungianly.

    Wikipedia’s “Doggerland” has a map suggesting a wider connectivity that included Ireland:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Doggerland3er_en.png

    ..but this has been disputed (note that a “controversial new theory” implies the prior existence of a non-controversial old theory):

    https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland-never-linked-to-scotland-1.1156874?mode=amp

    Thu, Sep 9, 2004, 01:00
    A land bridge never formed between Ireland and Scotland, according to controversial new research, writes Dick Ahlstrom.

    Ireland was always an island and a land bridge never formed to connect it to Britain, according to new research from the University of Ulster. Contrary to the general view, sea levels never fell far enough to allow dry land to emerge between the two landmasses.

    However, even if Ireland was never connected to Britain directly with an anglo-gaelic Doggerland, there might be something to the memory of a causeway of some kind, as implied at the end of that article:

    This raises questions about how animals such as the great Irish elk could have made it to Ireland without a land bridge, but the team believes it can answer this. There are plenty of sandbanks and shoals known today in the Irish Sea’s north channel, and a 30 metre fall in sea level would have been more than enough to lift many of them out of the water to become islands. Movement from island to island “would have made passage by sea much easier”, he says.

    The elk could well have reached these islands and ultimately Ireland by swimming between them according to the University of Maine researchers. “They have observations of moose swimming out five or six miles to reach islands in large lakes,” says Cooper. “It is conceivable that the elk could have done this across the islands, using them like stepping stones.”

    If Elk can use islands for stepping-stones, so can people, swimming or boating.

  7. Ken: thanks for the meteor article; I hadn’t seen that before, and it was very interesting.

  8. I strongly suspect they will find “human remains” (80%). I had heard of the ice bound lake around the Hudson Bay, but not that it’s name was Agassiz (or don’t remember the name). Additional sea rise from global warming will be due to more ice melting, especially off Greenland and the Antarctic ice glaciers. The multiple flood myths means there likely was a huge sea change in history.

    We know the Earth has had Ice Ages, and has warmed up after.

    For now, I believe we’re about to enter around 2 decades, 20 years or so, of new global cooling, due to minimum sunspots. Predicted to start in 2020; longer cool weather this year might be an early start, or just another variation.

    The increase in CO2 from about 270 ppm way way up to 400 ppm, almost 100% increase, has been good for growing plants who can breathe, but so far most warming has been in computer models, not so clearly world temps. Every 2001 UN global warming model has been wrong — their science is insufficient. We don’t yet understand cloud formation and cloud net effects on temperature, not enough to accurately, i.e. scientifically, predict future climate.

    I have long thought “giants” and giant legends were related to early encounters with Neanderthals, including Beowulf.

    Earliest human cultural “memory” is a very interesting next topic to follow earliest personal memory.

  9. Most artifacts of this epoch, except megalithic structures like Stonehenge, were small stone tools that can not be found from mapping or sonar imagery.

  10. We know too little about ancient seafaring, but it seems now it was much more efficient and capable than we now imagine. The history of settling of many islands and archipelagos in Oceania indicate not accidental, but purposeful going into open sea to find new lands. There were expeditions of settlers, commands of young people with women and girls on the board with explicit goal to found new settlements.

  11. Almost all the sea level rise after the last Ice Age came not from Antarctica or Greenland ice sheets (they are still with us, with little ice lost), but from huge land glaciers like the one that covered most of the Northern America and was 2 miles thick. After it melted, a huge lake emerged which was called Lake Agassiz. It filled a deep depression in the Earth crust resulted from its bending under the weight of the glacier. Today Great Lakes are relatively small remnants of this lake that were formed when the crust rebounded after glacier melted.

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