The Megaflood That Ended Doggerland

Bright Side

Imagine a land bridge that once connected Britain to mainland Europe, called Doggerland. Around 8,000 years ago, a massive megaflood wiped it off the map. This flood, caused by melting glaciers and a huge underwater landslide, created the North Sea as we know it today. People living there had to flee as their homes were swallowed by water. Today, archaeologists find remnants of this lost land underwater, giving us clues about the ancient world that disappeared in the blink of an eye.  Animation is created by Bright Side. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music from TheSoul Sound: https://thesoul-sound.com/   Check our Bright Side podcast on Spotify and leave a positive review! https://open.spotify.com/show/0hUkPxD34jRLrMrJux4VxV   Subscribe to Bright Side: https://goo.gl/rQTJZz  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Our Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brightside  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brightside.official TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brightside.official?lang=en   Stock materials (photos, footages and other): https://www.depositphotos.com https://www.shutterstock.com https://www.eastnews.ru ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  For more videos and articles visit: http://www.brightside.me

Transcript

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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