From the Vault: The Sunken Lands, Part 1
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Hello and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Joe McCormick. Today is Saturday, so we're reaching into the vault for an older episode of the show. This one originally published November 28th, 2023, and it's part one of our series called The Sunken Lands. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And in today's episode, we're going to be kicking off a series that we're calling The Sunken Lands that is about the idea of lands submerged under waters. Now, not too long ago, we did a series of episodes on the tendency people have to quite readily, in

interpret any weird-looking, low-resolution photograph as evidence of our highly speculative theory of choice, whatever you like. So here's a picture of a shape that maybe doesn't look organic in origin, so it is evidence of an alien spacecraft that crash-landed on our planet 5,000 years ago.

But then as we discussed in that series, often if you're able to get a higher resolution image of the same object or just get more contextual information, oh, wait, it's actually a rock.

But one very popular genre of imagery for this exercise is underwater photography. It happens with, you know, images of things in the sky as well or things just obscured in various contexts. But underwater photography is especially juicy here. I think because the conditions of underwater photography naturally lend themselves to the kind of

tantalizing state of low information that sets our imagination running wild and lets you fill in the gaps with whatever you're excited about. And when the weird looking thing is underwater, the highly speculative theory people use to explain it might still be aliens, as we discussed in the example of one underwater object, probably a glacial erratic boulder, but

that people did in some cases interpret as a crashed alien spacecraft. But another common explanation for weird looking things underwater is the sunken civilization, most often Atlantis. But there are other candidates as well. And the idea of a lost civilization vanished under the sea is so captivating to people.

It is hard to resist the urge to see an underwater rock with sharp corners and say, that's not a rock, that's a building. This is one of their ancient skyscrapers, and now it's hidden under the waves. Yeah, it's basically the same energy, but in a different temporal direction.

Instead of looking to aliens from beyond, you're looking for some sort of advanced civilization from the past that may or may not match up with realistic expectations of the past.

Right. Now, of course, in some limited cases, there are examples of human artifacts or human built edifices that can be found underneath the water now. And we'll probably talk about some of those examples. But in most cases, we can say with pretty high confidence that the thing the things people are looking at in these images are not even intelligently designed artifacts. It's usually like a rock or some kind of undersea creature, something like that.

And for various reasons that we might get into, even if what you find under the water was designed by humans, there are strong reasons for doubting anybody who says, aha, we have discovered Atlantis.

Rob, I don't know if you want to talk about this now or later, but there are reasons for thinking Plato's allegory of Atlantis was maybe not even meant to refer to an actually existing place. Or if there or if it was, there is no reason to think that it's anything more than a legend, that it's like a thing we should actually be looking for on Earth.

Yeah, let's get back to Atlantis in just a second. Though we could easily devote an entire podcast or more to just chasing the idea of Atlantis around, but we'll try and keep it contained. But while all of that is true, while Atlantis hunting is probably a misguided exercise, it's also true that there actually are some places on planet Earth where what is now the seafloor was relatively recently land.

land that could have been or in some cases was occupied by humans. And so that's what we want to talk about in this series, places on Earth that are now under the waves but were once part of the world above. And while we're mostly, I guess, talking, like we talk about the waves, we think about Atlantis, we think about the ocean, but we may also touch on some examples that have been lost underneath rivers or lakes, cities.

sometimes with man-made lakes in play. But perhaps we'll come back to that in another episode. Oh, that's a good variation, yes. Now, one thing to be clear about is that part of what makes these sunken lands interesting is merely a question of time, because, of course, Earth is geologically active. It has a dynamic surface, and over millions of years, the crust of the Earth undergoes changes. There's continental drift.

There are all kinds of changes that happen to the crust of the Earth. Areas that were formerly exposed are buried. Areas that were formerly buried are exposed. Areas that used to be ocean become land. Areas that used to be land become ocean. So we know that happens on a geological timescale. What we're talking about here are lands that have become covered in water relatively recently, maybe on the order of thousands of years or even less.

Yeah, yeah. So we have these basic geologic realities to keep in mind. But then we see them reflected in different ways in our folklore, our mythology, our religion. Like even if you somehow avoided...

Mm-hmm.

So given all of this, though, again, it should come as no shock that just the mere idea of sunken islands, lost islands, phantom islands, lost continents, etc. This has long stirred the human imagination.

And a lot has been written on this. But interestingly enough, one of the more like well-regarded books on this, it's a slightly older book, came out, I believe, 1954. So it doesn't reflect, you know, decades upon decades of additional contemplation and discovery. But L. Sprague de Camp, who lived 1907 through 2000, wrote a book titled Lost Continents, The Atlantis Theme in History, Science and Literature.

Now, DeCamp is an interesting fellow because he was also an influential sci-fi author who

whose works include 1939's Less Darkness Fall. He was also a posthumous collaborator with Conan creator Robert E. Howard. So he actually contributed quite a bit to the literary world of Conan the Barbarian. And interestingly enough, he served as an advisor on both 1980's Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer movies, as well as 1997's Cole the Conqueror, which does not have Arnold in it.

but is an adaptation of a Conan novel.

novel. It is. Okay, so that's the one that's got Kevin Sorbo in it. Right, right. Kevin Sorbo. TV's Hercules. Yeah, so I think it was based on a Conan novel, but then they just changed his name to Cole the Conqueror, who's another character in Robert E. Howard's world, but I'm not super familiar with this movie or this other character. I've never seen that one, but my mind is aroused at the thoughts of scripts that Schwarzenegger said no to. Yeah.

Now, it is worth noting that Robert E. Howard was one of numerous pulp era authors to make use of lost and sunken islands. And a lot of this does have to do with sort of the timeline of interest in these fantastic ideas. I'll touch on a few other examples from the pulp era in just a minute. But in this book, DeCamp discusses at length this idea of human fascination, literary fascination.

pseudo-historical, pseudo-geological, various interests in this idea of lost lands, lost continents, etc. And he points out that a lot of it comes back to this idea of a lost land that is often situated in

as some sort of utopia. It's a utopian ideal or it's an Eden. It is a place where we got it right or things were right before the fall. You know, this idea that, OK, things are not great, but there must have been a point in time where things were in balance. And of course,

And in summoning this idea, there is at least implied the idea that we might be able to return to it either by our own efforts or by some sort of divine intervention. Yeah, I think that's interesting. And that's correct. A lot of these stories about sunken lands and the civilizations that inhabited them.

And I guess there are some exceptions, but they don't usually seem to be, well, this is just another place like many others, you know, that was just happened to be low lying and was swallowed by the waves or there was some kind of weather event. It almost always is idealized in some way. It's a place that was especially good or especially advanced or especially bad in some way. Yeah.

Yeah. And in some manner or another, this place ties it all together, which comes back to so many of these these threads that we've discussed in conspiracy thinking and and so forth. The idea that like, OK, I have found something. And if true, and of course, I believe it is true, it will explain all these other mysteries. Yeah. You know, you drop this in the middle of everything and it all makes sense. It's the master key. Yes. Yeah.

So I don't really want to do an exhaustive list of every mythical and fictional sunken land. I mean, there's just, there's a lot there. And a lot of them are also closely connected. I mean, just in fantasy alone, it's like who, anybody engaging in some broad world building is going to have a

perhaps in Atlantis or at least a lost land. I mean, it's just it's too attractive a trope to give up on. Right. But I thought we might hit some notable examples in the main three or four categories you might consider mythology, fiction, pseudoscience. But I do want to note that some entries will move between these classifications because once once you introduce an idea and other folks will come and and use it, maybe drifted into another category.

So in mythology, I thought I might mention Avalon, of course, the magical island where King Arthur was taken after sustaining mortal wounds. It's also the origin place of his sword Excalibur and in general, just a magical land of Arthurian legend, possibly linked in origin to Fata Morgana or Glastonbury Torr.

Note that this isn't even the only sunken island in Arthurian legend, though. There are others. It's just, again, an irresistible, magical idea. Though, again, one that may be rooted in strange observations, islands that seem to be there but are not, that are, you know, fata morgana, that are due to an illusion of one sort or another, or just a mistake of cartography, of trying to figure out what's out there and making mistakes.

Both direct perceptual illusions and knowledge illusions give rise to the idea of islands that used to be there, but now you can't find them. Right. And then, of course, in the background, again, the geologic reality that things do change. And it is perhaps not beyond the realm of possibility that...

A lost island could truly be lost. It could have been a physical place and is no more. Another one is Brazil or High Brazil. This has generally nothing to do with Brazil, the South American country. This is an Irish lost isle of myth, a phantom island that is covered by mist most of the year, but then that mist opens up.

sometimes featured on old maps and was sought after by cartographers. Because again, you have, anytime you have this idea of an island that is thought to exist, and then it seems like it doesn't exist, I mean, that's a mystery that has to be explored. Now, it doesn't have to be an island, of course. You can also have coastal areas that are swallowed up. There's a mythical city in the traditions of Brittany and France called

And I may be pronouncing this one wrong. Ys, I believe it's Y-S. I assume it's not Ys. But anyway, it's allegedly consumed by the ocean and it's featured into a number of creative works, especially in French traditions. But of course, the whole other realm is fiction, of course. And once something has been introduced in myth, given enough time, it may enter into fiction. And this leads us to Atlantis. Yeah.

As we've already discussed, yeah, the lost continent of Atlantis, so-called, has a prominent place in pseudoscience and conspiracy thinking and fiction.

Among the many entries here, I have to point out a couple of things from 1982. One I brought up many times before, but if you have not seen the commercial for Atari's Atlantis video game from 1982, look it up. It's marvelous. I think I saw this when I was like four years old and it scared and amazed me.

Rarely does a 30 second TV commercial have such a bone chilling plot twist. It does. They really packed a lot into this one. I have no idea if the game was fun at the time or is well remembered as like a retro experience.

But as I was revisiting this, because any time this comes up, I have to go rewatch it. And then I discovered, weirdly enough, that the Brothers Hildebrandt did a wall calendar of original art themed around Atlantis the same year. And I kept thinking, well, these have to be connected. There must have been some connective tissue here. If there is, I couldn't find it. But I love the Brothers Hildebrandt. They did, of course, a lot of great Tolkien work, and they did Tolkien calendars back in the day.

And yeah, they have this one calendar of Atlantis art with all sorts of like fantastic adventures going on, some sort of like demon lord, a dragon, so forth. So many people don't realize that...

The origins of Atlantis are also based in fiction. You go back to around 355 BCE. That's when Greek philosopher Plato discusses the concept of Atlantis in a pair of dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. Atlantis is described as a naval empire that rules the Western known world, but they ultimately fail when they come up against the Athenians. Then they fall out of favor with the gods and their world is consumed by the Atlantic Ocean.

It's described along the lines as being like the, you know, the idea, the ideal of Plato's Republic. But here's the thing. There's no other surviving mention of Atlantis in the ancient Mediterranean world, aside from commentaries and responses to Plato's work.

So in other words, there's no indication that this was a pre-existing idea, that this was something that was considered actual history or even like a pre-existing, I guess you would say, literary trope. Right. So it's not even clear that it was thought to actually be a place. Right. Now, among those various commentators over many years, it looks like many took it as metaphor and or as myth.

Though you do have some folks that pop up that end up taking a more literal approach to it, or so it seems, based, again, on surviving texts. As such, you end up with a legacy of varying interpretations, which DeCamp summarizes as either

Taking it on as a fiction, finding actual societies that you can compare to Atlantis, the investigation of land bridges and islands with Atlantis in mind, and also just the wholesale acceptance of the concept as historical truth.

And, of course, this approach especially is widely regarded as pseudo-history at the very least. Now, again, though, just because something is introduced in fiction doesn't mean it stays in fiction. That's one of the interesting things about this, and I guess in general about human imagination, is once something has been imagined, it doesn't have to stay in that realm of sort of safe unreal in fiction. It can move into other categories of the unreal, the mythological, the...

You know, the pseudoscientific, the pseudo-historical, the pseudo-archaeological, etc. I have to wonder if in thousands of years there are going to be people being like, you know, when Tolkien talked about the elves going to Valinor across the ocean, was that referring to the island of Cuba, do you think? Yeah, exactly. And you do end up with that sort of inquiry.

I mean, and part of that, of course, too, is you have someone like Plato who has such high standing in sort of the intellectual world for centuries and centuries. You know, people are going to come back and reanalyze everything that they wrote. ♪

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That's oracle.com slash strategic. This is Joel and I am Matt. We are with the How to Money podcast. So Joel, you took a trip with your girls this past fall to Washington, D.C. And of course, you stayed at an Airbnb. Of course we did. We had a blast in our nation's capital. Staying at this Airbnb in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, it made everything about this trip so much more relaxed.

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Now, in terms of fiction, I will just mention in passing like a few examples. I love the work of Clark Ashton Smith and a lot of his stories involve lost continents. I think he has three different lost continents. Well, the one of them is a continent from the future that doesn't exist now. So it's sort of kind of again, kind of the same concept, but put put in reverse, taking into the future and saying in the future there will be a new continent. And these are the sort of adventures that will take place there. Yeah.

And of course, J.R.R. Tolkien got in on the action as well. We have the lost kingdom of Middle-earth, Numenor. This was corrupted by Sauron in his fair form, and then it's destroyed in a cataclysm as the kingdom turns against the Valar. Oh, is Numenor swallowed by waters? I never understood that. I guess I just thought of it as like an empire that fell. Yeah.

Yeah, it's like a star-shaped island, I believe, according to the maps. And the recent Amazon series, I believe, depicts the fall of Numenor. I'm having trouble remembering offhand. I need to revisit it before they put out another season, I guess. I haven't watched that yet, but I've been meaning to check it out at some point. High production values. Yeah.

Now, in the pseudoscientific world, and again, there's a lot of overlap with these sort of loose categories, you have the island of Mu. This is both a place of pseudoscience and fantasy, according to De Kamp, proposed in the 19th century by British-American archaeologist and photographer Augustus Le Plongion, who used it to connect Mayan civilization to ancient Egyptian civilization. Again, this is one of those classic examples of like

If this exists, it explains everything. Like getting into this idea of like, well, look, we have things in Mayan civilization. We have things in ancient Egyptian civilization. They remind me of each other. There must be some like missing link to connect them. Otherwise, this doesn't make sense to me. They could they both built pyramids sort of. So that couldn't be explained by them both just figuring out how to build pyramids. Right, right.

But then on top of this, British occultist James Churchward would go on to write about Mu as well, associating it with Lemuria, which we'll get to in a second, in works of pseudoscience that argue that it was the not only was it this kind of like missing link in terms of understanding global civilizations, but it was the location of the Garden of Eden and a cultural connection for various ancient civilizations.

And then Atlantis also enters the mix here. And even though its origins, I think most serious scholars would agree, is as a metaphor, is as a work of fiction. Various individuals have made arguments for the discovery of a lost Atlantis or have gone all in on the idea of Atlantis. And according to DeCampo, a great deal of modern Atlantis mania stems from 16th century enthusiasm for the concept of

And a lot of this enthusiasm coincided with excitement for the new world of the Americas. So, you know, again, you have a lot of energy, like new lands are discovered and then you have this idea of Atlantis. And then people were proposing things like, well, are the Americas Atlantis? Well, no, but.

I guess you can lean into that interpretation if you so desire. You know, I was just thinking about the sort of common strain of thinking that connects conspiracy thinking with with highly speculative lost civilization thinking and like why you would typically find both.

both beliefs in the same brain, like why people are drawn to one if they're often if they're drawn to the other. The idea of a lost civilization that was vanished beneath the waves is a is a literal physical manifestation of the type of hidden knowledge or covered up knowledge that that, you know, guides conspiracy thinking. Like if you're a you're a conspiracy thinking person, you think that there is a

There is a mechanism somehow that explains all these disparate phenomena, but the nature of that mechanism is being covered up. It is hidden from you somehow. Usually it's a social mechanism. It's like, you know, an agreement of people or it's a, you know, an extraterrestrial mechanism. There are aliens doing things or something like that.

The lost civilization under the waves is kind of like that. It explains history in a similar way, but it has been literally physically covered up. Yeah. And again, it goes back to this idea of lo-fi information to support an idea. Though, interestingly enough, like coming back to the idea of Mayan and Egyptian civilizations. So obviously, like the Great Pyramids are not lo-fi evidence. Right.

Likewise, you know, various megastructures in the Americas are not lo-fi evidence either. But if you're using both of these as evidence for this third thing that doesn't exist, then they do become kind of lo-fi because, again, there is there is not a thing there to prove. There is not this lost civilization that connects the two.

You might also, though, be coming at them from a position of low information in that you don't have a lot of contextual knowledge about these civilizations. And thus, you know, you just see, like, similarly shaped buildings and think, like, that's

has to be a common source between them. Yeah. Now, I don't want to make it seem like, you know, just the idea of lost continents and lost lands that aren't there, you know, are entirely rooted in, you know, conspiracy thinking and sort of non-logical inquiry. Because another example to touch on, coming back to Lemuria, is this was an 18th century hypothesis to explain similarities between species on distant continents.

You know, we have organisms that look like this here. There are organisms that look like this over here. And there's just too much distance. How can we possibly explain this? And so this was one idea. Well, perhaps there is a lost landmass. Something is missing between these continents that would explain these species being in both places. However, a much better theory came around, that of continental drift. Yeah.

But once introduced, again, the idea of Lemuria ends up taking on additional role.

to various interpreters, you know, becomes the cradle of human civilization in various occult worldviews and in various fictions. And you often see this kind of loop, I think, with serious theories feeding occult nonsense and feeding fantasy, feeding, you know, things that are, you know, just purely enjoyable. And then that may feed back into other things as well.

So there are more examples to be sure, and we may come back to some of these. But I think these examples nicely sum up some of the associations and ideas here. It's kind of a missing link concept, a lost place that could more easily explain the world and or a lost golden age.

And in this, the concept is closely connected to various ideas of spiritual lands just beyond the reach of mundane experience. So, you know, there might be like there's a Shambhala in Tibetan Buddhism. I think there are various kingdoms in Russian folklore, you know, almost like cities in the sky that are just beyond reach.

And you find these in various forms. I mean, Avalon is basically the idea, you know, this place that is now beyond the reach of the mortal world. So across the whole spectrum of fiction, myth, legend, and obsolete scientific hypotheses, there have been ideas of lands that were covered over by the waves or vanished beneath the waters somehow.

But now I want to talk about a real and firmly established, provable example of lands that were in quite recently sunk beneath the waters within the span of human history. Is it Atlantis? It is not Atlantis.

Okay, so I want to start with an anecdote about a strange find. And a lot of my details here are coming from an article published in Archaeology Magazine by Jason Urbanus called Mapping a Vanished Landscape. So in 1931, one night in September, there was a British fishing boat called the Kalinda, which was trawling in the North Sea off the eastern coast of England around the county of Norfolk.

If you're not familiar with trawling, it is a method of fishing where you drop a large cup-shaped net into the water and you pull it behind the boat. And there's mid-water trawling and bottom trawling. With mid-water trawling, you drag the net through the middle of the water column. With bottom trawling, you let the net sink to the bottom and the net has weights that keep it

stuck to the bottom and keep the mouth of the net open. So the boat drags the net along the seabed, sort of bulldozing the top layer of sediment and scooping up whatever is in its path large enough to get trapped in the net. The Kalinda was trawling off the coast of Norfolk, about 25 miles out, at a place where the water was roughly 120 feet deep, or about 37 meters.

After hauling up the net from a bottom trawl, a guy named Pilgrim Lockwood, who was the skipper of the boat, noticed a big chunk of

of peat stuck in the catch. And bottom trawling often creates a lot of what's called bycatch. That term usually refers to unwanted animals that you get in the net that are not part of what you're fishing for. But also it just gets a bunch of objects from the seafloor because, again, it's kind of like bulldozing the top layer of sediment as it gets dragged along. So a lot of stuff ends up in the net and that stuff has to be discarded.

Now, this peat from the bottom, here's a really good word I came across. I've seen sources that mention that these chunks of peat pulled up from the ocean like this were often referred to in England as moorlog, M-O-O-R-L-O-G. Is there a band? I didn't check. That'd be a good bog metal band name. Oh, yeah. I can see the album cover right now with like a bog mummy on it.

So the skipper, Pilgrim Lockwood, he's got this chunk of peat that's part of the, you know, not what they're fishing for, obviously, is stuck in the net. So he gets it out. He starts to smash the peat up with a shovel. But while he was doing that, he found something rigid lodged inside. And he actually said that it sounded when his shovel hit this object, he said it sounded like it was clanging against metal.

It was not a rock. He pulled it out, and what he found was a sharp instrument, about 8 1⁄2 inches or 22 centimeters in length, with a pointed tip at one end and barbs or teeth running most of the way down its length, like some kind of weapon.

And it was a weapon. This is not a case where, you know, it was actually some deep sea organism that, you know, was mistaken for a human artifact. This was an artifact. This was technology. It was ancient technology. And this artifact came to be known as the Kalinda harpoon.

So experts from the British Museum studied the artifact and they determined that it was the tip of a fishing spear from the Mesolithic period or the Middle Stone Age, which would have been somewhere between 10,000 and 4,000 BCE. It's an intriguing looking weapon. So it's got the sharp end. It's got the saw teeth, but it's also got these ridges sort of gashed in it along the opposite end from the tip.

You know, it does remind me a little bit of the fabled weapon of Cú Chulainn. Oh! You know, that was supposed to be, in some cases, like barbed, like the barb of a stingray. Yeah, yeah. Though, of course, to your point, clearly this is not a nature fact. This is an artifact. This is something that was carved and made through human craft and ingenuity. Yes, absolutely made by human hands. But that raises questions. How did this Stone Age weapon...

end up buried in peat in the ocean more than 20 miles off the coast of modern-day Britain. Like, was it possible that ancient hunter-gatherers carried it out to sea that far on a boat or a raft and then dropped it to the bottom? At the time it was found, that seemed possible.

Possible, but not very likely. Today we know more about the Kalinda harpoon. According to the Norfolk Museums, the harpoon tip was made from the antler of a red deer. That's the species Cervus elaphus. And it has been radiocarbon dated to about 11,790 years ago.

Mentioned in the Archaeology Magazine article is another strange fact. A year after the Kalinda harpoon was discovered, scientists analyzed the pollen contained in the peat or the moor log from around where the spear tip was discovered.

And they found something bizarre. Even though the peat was more than 100 feet under the water, it had been formed in a freshwater context, lakes and rivers and topside bogs, not ocean floors. So the person carrying the Kalinda harpoon all those thousands of years ago had not been a seagoer, but an earthwalker, possibly fishing in a river.

And this isn't the only Stone Age human artifact recovered from the bottom of the North Sea. We can come back to that. But I want to move on to something else because the Kalinda harpoon was not the first indication that there was something odd about the sea to the east of Great Britain. I'd now like to read a passage from a book called Submerged Forests, published in 1913 by the British geologist Clement Reid. Clement Reid writes, quote,

Most of our seaside places of resort lie at the mouths of small valleys, which originally gave the fishermen easy access to the shore, and later on provided fairly level sites for building. At such places, the fishermen will tell you of black, peaty earth with hazelnuts and often with tree stumps still rooted in the soil.

seen between tide marks when the overlying sea sand has been cleared away by some storm or unusually persistent wind.

If one is fortunate enough to be on the spot when such a patch is uncovered, this submerged forest is found to extend right down to the level of the lowest tides. The trees are often well-grown oaks, though more commonly they turn out to be merely brushwood of hazel, sallow, and alder, mingled with other swamp plants, such as the rhizomes of osmuta.

These submerged forests, or quote, Noah's woods, as they are called locally, have attracted attention from early times, all the more so owing to the existence of an uneasy feeling that, though like most other geological phenomena, they were popularly explained by Noah's deluge, it was difficult thus to account for trees rooted in their original soil and yet now found well below the level of high tide.

And, ooh, thinking about the submerged forests, it gives me a spooky feeling. So at the lowest level of the tide, when the water goes back farthest, even all the way down to that level, you will sometimes find, especially if there has been maybe a violent storm that has shifted the sediment around and pushed sand out of the way, you will find uncovered tree stumps still rooted apparently in their original position. Trees can't grow in the salt water. So what was happening there?

Yeah, this is enticing. And it does remind me, though, that something we've discussed in the past in the show,

that for most of human history, we didn't have a high resolution understanding of the world beneath the waves. And so a lot of it was based on guesswork. And there were a lot of ideas about cities and forests beneath the sea. And like this general idea that anything that you certainly see in Western discourse, that anything that exists in the surface world would have an analog beneath the water.

So you have a lion up here. Well, you have a sea lion under there. You have a horse up here. You have a seahorse beneath the waves. Oh, yeah. You have people up here. You have mare people down there. Yeah. Yeah. So like, you know, you have that huge category. You have these, you know, accounts of great floods and so forth. So there's a lot of there's a lot of like background mythology and observational data to feed into to any kind of discovery like this. Yeah.

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Alright, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird-shaped knives and forks with the appropriate cheeses. And I plugged in the Bartesian. Bartesian? It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites, too. I just got it for

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Of course we did. We had a blast in our nation's capital, staying at this Airbnb in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. It made everything about this trip so much more relaxed. Plus, it helped us save money, which you know I love. We had a full kitchen. We cooked breakfast together every morning before heading out to see the sights.

My girls, they loved our adorable historic apartment. And our host made us feel like we were home while we were traveling. And it got me thinking, why am I not creating this experience for someone else by hosting on Airbnb too? You really should, man. Yeah, I cannot recommend it enough. I loved hosting with Airbnb because it's easy and it was a great side hustle to earn some additional income. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host.

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Joel, as you know, my father served in the military. He was in satellite communications, SATCOM. I'm not sure if that's what they still call it these days. Sounds cool. But when I think about him, truly, and the other veterans I know, I'm reminded of their quiet strength, their resilience.

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Learn more at NavyFederal.org slash veterans. Navy Federal is insured by NCUA. So how do you explain these submerged forests? In this work, Clement Reid goes on to document and make all kinds of observations about them. But he reached a strange but unavoidable conclusion.

Sea levels were not constant, and the sea had to be higher now than it was in the past, meaning that much of what was once the relatively shallow North Sea had actually been not a sea, but a vast alluvial plain, the hidden lowlands of ages past, and these lands were most recently covered with trees.

There are still places today where when the tide is at its lowest, you can find indications that there used to be forests on lands that are now covered by the North Sea. And of course, recently enough for remains of tree trunks and stumps to still be preserved there. One commonly cited example is a place called Pet Level Beach in Sussex, where the remains of a forest can still be seen at low tide with indications of oak trees, elm, yew, and beech.

Rob, I've got some pictures for you to look at. Both these pictures here are from Pet. But another example that I came across is from the remains of a submerged forest that is still fully submerged. So this appeared in the media within the last decade. I was reading from an article in BBC News Norfolk and its attached video segment. This was from 2015 and it was called Ancient Underwater Forests Discovered Off Norfolk Coast.

And the report says that it was documented by a couple of research divers named Rob Spray and Dawn Watson. This was after a major storm had shifted sediments in an underwater region off the North Norfolk coast. So just like Clement Reed was saying, you know, it's especially after there's been some violent event, maybe a big storm moves the sediment around and uncovers things. Yeah.

In an interview for this news segment, Dawn Watson, one of the divers, describes coming across this region by accident. She said she had been swimming for a while. She was almost out of her air supply toward the end of a dive when she came across an enormous mass on the seafloor. She says it was, quote, almost a standing wave of black stuff in front of me. It took me a while to work out what it was, and it was just wood shaped like a wave.

So she says at first she thought it was a shipwreck. Maybe it looked like the hull of a boat. But then she realized it was actually a huge hunk of unprocessed solid wood, not the planks of a wooden ship's hull, but the trunk of a tree laying down horizontally. And the divers, after examining this location, say that it seems to be the remains of an ancient forest, probably primarily oak trees, but

Lying horizontal, so the trees appear to have been knocked flat by some event long ago. They speculate possibly outwash from a glacier, but we don't know for sure.

And when you see the footage in this video segment, it's amazing how much in some ways it still looks like a tree trunk. You can even see what look like, you know, knots in the wood or maybe trunk wounds, little holes in the trunk, which have now charmingly been inhabited by starfish and crabs. Rob, I attached a screenshot for you to look at. You can see crabs getting down in the little hidey holes. Oh, nice. Yeah, there they are.

And the divers in this interview emphasized that they almost missed it. It is pure luck that the forest was exposed by the violence of a recent storm and that they just happened to come across it at the end of a dive. But they also point out an interesting thing about marine biology, just about undersea life. As soon as this buried timber from thousands of years ago was exposed, sea organisms flooded in, just like with, in fact, we've done episodes on this in the past, like with shipwreck

that come to resemble in some ways the

habitat dynamics of coral reefs, a hard surface at the bottom of the ocean quickly becomes a teeming habitat. Bottom-dwelling organisms can build a whole world around a solid floor. So maybe smaller organisms like the hard surface that they can attach to, or they like little nooks and crannies and pieces of shelter. They come in, they inhabit it, then bigger organisms come in to eat them, and it creates this whole ecosystem. Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Oh, and another thing I've got for you to look at here, Rob, I took a screenshot of part of this ancient submerged forest. It's just got starfish all over it, which we know from our recent headlessness episodes, the starfish, they're not without a head. They are all head. So we're just seeing like dozens of heads all smushing into each other here on this ancient tree trunk.

So you put all this together, these ancient human artifacts miles and miles off the east coast of Britain, oak forest preserved on the bottom of the sea so that we can still see the stumps and crabs can make a home in the wood. What does all of that point to? Well, today scientists have firmly established what explains it all. This is not a highly speculative theory. This is clearly what's the case. It is all evidence of an ancient landmass known as Doggerland.

So what was Doggerland? Doggerland was an area of what used to be dry land during the peak of the last ice age, when much of the world's water was locked up in polar glaciers during the peak of the last ice age. And this land is now submerged beneath the sea. It was a large stretch of low-lying earth.

mostly flat alluvial plains extending north from the Netherlands and Germany, connecting Great Britain to the rest of continental Europe. And at the eastern end, Doggerland seemed to have gone up against what is today Jutland or, you know, the Denmark peninsula. Wow, this is impressive. You included an

an illustration here showing like what this would have looked like when I illustration a map and it is quite impressive, like essentially like a thick land bridge connecting, like you said, UK to mainland Europe. Right. So at the time, Great Britain was not an island, but a peninsula. It was connected to the rest of Europe by land. So not all sunken lands

are misinterpretations of ancient writings or pseudoscience or pseudohistory. There are actually sunken lands that played a significant role in ancient ecosystems, in how life developed on ancient continents, and were in some cases occupied by humans. And now, despite the difficulty of trying to do things like archaeology in areas that are now underneath the sea,

There's a lot we can know about them. So in the rest of this series, we're going to talk more about Doggerland, what happened to it, what we know about it, and more of the sunken lands of planet Earth. Yeah, so who knows what we'll get into and who knows what will emerge from the deep darkness of the ocean or various lakes and rivers in the episode or episodes ahead.

All right. We're going to go ahead and close this episode out, though. We'll be back on Thursday. Just a reminder, once more, that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast with new episodes, new core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do Lister Mail on Mondays. We tend to do a short-form Artifact or Monster Fact episode on Wednesdays. And on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.

If you follow us on social media, check out those feeds because our social media team has been putting out little bits of content to let you know what the latest episode is. And that includes some neat little video stuff in there. If you are on Instagram and you don't follow us, we are stbympodcast there. So give us a follow. We're trying to build up our followers after we lost access to our old account.

And, yeah, what else do you have, Joe? I can't think of anything else we lost access to. It's like a lost civilization. It's like an Atlantis that's sunk beneath the waves. I think it has like an episode on airships or maybe it's the Herzog interview are right up there at the top. And then it's at some point after that, that account sank beneath the waves. Whoopsie. Never to be reclaimed.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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And the Newsagents USA podcast.

They're eating the dogs, the people that came in. Listen to The News Agents on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I've been getting into the holiday spirit by listening to my favorite seasonal punk rock songs on a Sonos Move 2 speaker. It's a smart speaker, and that's cool, but my favorite thing about it is that I could just lift it up off its charging cradle and take it anywhere in my house and

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