Doggerland: Lost at Sea

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

0:31mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. Hey, it's Joel. And Matt. From HowToMoney. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back. Prices, they're still high, and the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress. That's right. Yeah, each week we break down what's happening with your money, the most important issues to focus on, and the small moves that make a big difference. Kick off the year with confidence, listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:07I'm John Polk. For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement, the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight. You might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story. John has never been anything but gay, but he really tried hard not to be. Listen to Atonement, the John Palk story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:51Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. and this is a good old-fashioned episode of Stuff You Should Know. It's got history. It has geology. It has lost lands. It has abbreviations like KYA. All sorts of great stuff in it. Oh, boy, my friend. If I know Josh Clark loves something, it is submerged or lost lands. It really is. I love it. I know this kind of thing really floats your boat. It does. It floats my submerged land. We're talking about dogger land, by the way, everybody. That's right. We should probably just say kind of what it is first, right, before we get into the details.

2:40Yeah, we've talked about it here and there. I could not for the life of me remember what episode, but it's come up once or twice. But I think it bears repeating for sure. Yeah, it's a lost land, a submerged landmass off the coast of Europe. It's in the North Sea, probably anywhere from 50 to 60 to 100 feet down. And it used to be land. It used to connect, they pretty much firmly believe now, connect the UK and Europe. And not only that, but it was a land that kind of flourished, depending on when you're talking about, with plants and animals. and even people. Yeah, they think that it's possible.

3:21So this was really populated during the Mesolithic era. Or era. They think that this area during the Mesolithic era was one of the most densely populated places in all of Europe. That's right. And by the way, did you ever see Taylor Swift on her areas tour? I didn't. But I can feel a Taylor Swift area coming on eventually. in my life. Through the concert, she sort of walked the audience through all of her different areas. This is my knee. The left one. Knees and toes, knees and toes. So, yeah, I mean, it sounds kind of like, wait, that's it? There's like a landmass that once connected the UK and Europe?

4:04That's enough. Like, you can see somebody making an absurd or obscene hand motion thinking about that, right? But no, listen. I know exactly what you're thinking. Stick with us because this is, it's fantastically interesting, even though we know very, very little about it. The stuff we do know is so tantalizing that it's like the archaeologists who are studying this are just, they want to just say like so bad. There's so much stuff down there. We just know it. But they're being deliberate and methodical, so they're not letting themselves say that. But we can say it for them. Yeah, and it's called Doggerland, and that's just cool.

4:42It sounds like a movie title or something, you know? It's starring Lily... Tomlin? No. The younger one. Alan? No, not that young. Von Stupp? No. What is her name? Come on. Taylor? Yes. Oh, really? She was in a movie called maybe Dog Face or something like that or Dog. Oh, yeah. Dog Fight? No. It doesn't matter. We should probably edit this out. If we were a different podcast, we would edit this out. No, man. I came up with like four or five Lilies. You got to leave that in. Okay. True. True that. But I don't even remember how I got on the Lily thing. Well, I said it would be a good movie and you reckon that Lily Taylor would be a good star with that movie.

5:29Yeah. Because you were talking about it's a cool name. And the name comes after the Dogger Bank, which is a shallow fishing area, very productive fishing area in the North Sea. and the Dogger Bank is named after a type of Dutch cod fishing boats that were used for hundreds of years in the area. So there you go, Doggerland. That's right. I hope we got all that right. But it's a pretty shallow sea as far as seas go, about 220 ,000 square miles, and it sits in between the U.K. and Europe, of course, because if there was a land bridge that connected those two, that's where the North Sea would be. It has long been a very crucial shipping route and trade route.

6:09And as for this story, you know, it's pretty key that in the 1950s and then 60s, gas and oil reservoirs were found there, and companies started licking their chops, and they will come into play later, oil companies and gas companies, as being actually, you know, finally kind of key to helping out science. and scientists in their explorations. So, yeah, that will come in later. It's also, there's a lot of shipping that goes on. Apparently, that's a very ancient thing. People have been shipping things over the North Sea for a very long time. And then now it's become a really attractive site for renewable energy, as we'll see.

6:51So the North Sea is very important, and it's been used for a very long time, but its depths were just unknown. Like, people hadn't explored it. They didn't have the means to, really. Yeah, even though it's fairly shallow, it's still deep for back then. Yeah. 100 feet? What are you going to do? Hold your breath? Exactly. I mean, the moment you get down on the bottom, you have to come right back up. It's terrible for exploration, holding your breath is. Yeah. But there were some tantalizing clues that came up over the years that did strongly suggest that there was something down there that had once been above the sea's surface.

7:28That's right. The first thing that happened, late 19th century, they started, you know, better fishing technology came along and you could fish a little bit deeper. So they started fishing a little bit deeper, which is great because you can get, you know, a lot more fish down there. But it was kind of a pain because they started dragging up what they called moorlog, which is, you know, peat. This kind of nasty clumped together peat. And in that peat, sometimes they would find animal bones, not fish bones, but like mammal bones. And I guess it was the 19th century, so it just sort of hassled their fishing progress.

8:05So they would just usually toss them overboard. Occasionally, if they had some really well-preserved skull or deer femur or something like that, they might keep it. But that's when the first sort of whisperings of like, something used to be down there, started happening. Exactly. And then in usual fashion, it's worth mentioning H.G. Wells. who's probably one of the best speculators in the history of speculative fiction. This is pretty cool. He heard about some of those finds, and he wrote a story called The Story of the Stone Age, which is basically like there's a continent under the North Sea between the UK and Europe.

8:44Don't forget, this guy is the guy who, in the late 19th century, wrote stories about humans sending rockets up into space and placed the launches at Cape Canaveral. Like, that's how smart this guy was as far as seeing in the future goes. I love it. Yeah. He's a pretty great writer, too. Yeah. Interesting dude. Man, we should do one on H.G. Wells. He deserves his own show, I think. Okay. All right. All right. Moving on. As we crawl through Noah's Woods now, before the 19th century, and those bones and that Morlaug Pete started coming up, there were whispers then. And I said the first whispers came in the late 19th century.

9:28That's not exactly true. Because during low tide, way back when, the water levels would drop. And some of these folks living in the UK at the time would see these tree stumps. And this is like medieval times. And they called it Noah's Woods with the idea that this was possibly the area where Noah from the Bible lived before God decided to flood the earth because he was grumpy. Yeah. Yeah, and here was plain, bright-in-your-face evidence of it. So that had stuck around since the medieval age. And apparently, according to UK or early British lore, this is where Robinson Crusoe, who is the model for Robin Hood, emerged from the water and gave Arthur the sword in the stone.

10:17That's right. So Noah's Woods was just kind of like a local thing. I'm sure the churchy types really talked about it more than anybody else. But scientists hadn't paid much attention to it until a very forward-thinking scientist and his wife, Clement and Eleanor Reed, came forward. And they started looking into it. And they kind of were the first people to put together Noah's Woods, the fact that there are tree stumps, weirdly ancient ones, in the sea. People are pulling up animal bones for terrestrial animals. It seems pretty obvious what's happening. Yeah, they're like, there is something submerged that used to be above the water.

11:00And we think it's a land bridge that connected the UK and Europe. Yeah, they, and I noticed there were a couple of scientists married couples that worked on this along the years. I did too. This is a golden age for that. Yeah. In 1913, they published Submerged Forests, which was the very first study on those woods. And yeah, that's when they really kind of put it out there. And it was, you know, it was the kind of thing where they didn't have any hard evidence other than these peat samples. But when they started finding like willow leaves and hazel and birch and fern, they were like, hey, not only do I think there was something down there, but it seems to have existed at least partially at a time that was like maybe kind of nice.

11:49Yeah. Temperature wise. Sounds pretty nice, actually. I'd like to live in Doggerland, but it wasn't called Doggerland yet, as we'll see. Yeah, that's right. So the reeds had this pretty great theory. Apparently, I read that they concluded that the only possible explanation for this was that sea level rise had flooded and sunk in this land. So they were really right on the money. But this is a very obscure theory. People weren't paying much attention to it. Even in academic circles, it was pretty obscure. But then there was a discovery in 1931 that really grabbed the archaeologists in the area by the throat and shook them.

12:31until their tongues turned blue and hung out of their mouths. And it said, look at this. This is important. That's right. Did you say 1931? Because that's when it was. That's when a trawler called the Kalinda was fishing off the coast of Norfolk, came along, and again, a big old chunk of moorlog was hauled in in the net, and they were digging through that. And this guy's got a great name. The skipper of the Kalinda's name was Pilgrim Lockwood. So good. I would say that's a hotel check-in name, but it's just a little too eye-catching. Too suspicious? Yeah. Yeah, it is pretty suspicious, actually.

13:08Yeah. Hi, Pilgrim Lockwood checking in. Yeah, okay, buddy. What's your real name? And who do you think you are? Right. So Pilgrim Lockwood is busting up this peat with a shovel. Just like out of a movie, he hits something hard, reaches in and finds, and this is the kind of discovery that all of a sudden, like you said, everyone's going to be like, okay, there's really something happening here because it was an eight-and-a-half-inch-long harpoon head, a harpoon point, carved with hands out of an antler. But here's the deal. At first they were like, okay, I mean, this is kind of cool, and they even offered it to the British Museum.

13:46But they said, nah, we've got some harpoons. We're all set. We've got a couple of them. And the idea was that everyone thought like, hey, this is probably just was lost over the side of a boat or something. what's the big deal. Yeah, they're like, pretty cool. I mean, like, don't throw it back. Hang on to it. Yeah. Because it was very clearly fashioned by humans. I think in addition to just being smoothed out to be fashioned into a harpoon, I think it was decorated as well. So there's no arguing that it was a human artifact. It had been found in a moor log, so a chunk of peat. And then somebody along the way, another married couple, Harry and Margaret Godwin, said, let us see that peat.

14:30We have a little hypothesis we want to test. And they looked at that peat and they said, everybody get this. That peat was formed in a freshwater environment, meaning that it could only have been formed above the sea's surface on land, in a wetland, but on land. And the harpoon being in there means that a human was on land above the sea's surface when they were using it and they lost it in the peat. Yeah, I picture Margaret Godwin just storming in the room and saying, that didn't fall off of any boat. And then, even better, the British Museum gets in touch with Pilgrim Lockwood after this and he's like, well, well, well, look who's come crawling back.

15:17Yeah, that would have been pretty great, actually. Yeah. So they used a pollen analysis to figure this out. And later on, they were able to date this thing. And this harpoon head they found was about 14 ,000 years old. Neat. Which would place it kind of squarely in the Mesolithic era. Well, about toward the beginning of it, I think. Well, it's in the area. It's a squishy one. And the other thing that's so exciting about Doggerland and finding stuff out about it is we have very little information about Mesolithic people of this area of the time. Okay? Okay, everybody. In addition to all that, Chuck, there were some more things that came up during the 20th century that were like, there's something really interesting down there.

16:02They were finding bits of textile. Yeah. They found a Neanderthal skull fragment that they managed to, it was between 70 ,000 and 40 ,000 years old. Okay. We'll talk about it a little later, but there's a facial reconstruction. You know, they love to do like the 3D. Oh, yeah. They have the guy smiling, just a huge, big, sweet, goofy smile. And I thought that was a nice touch. Yeah, that's always nice. That's like when they recreated what they thought Jesus would really look like, and he looked like he was on The Simpsons or something. Right, or he's doing the eye wink and the double guns. I've seen that before, too.

16:38Oh, yeah, that's classic. But despite all these finds, kind of throughout the 20th century, they still, the scientific community still were like, okay, so there were people there. But like this was just, they were just traveling along the road. Right. Like nobody lived there. They were rambling on. They were rambling on through the area and the era. And maybe we should take a break. Yeah, let's. All right. We'll be right back with more on Doggerland.

17:12Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hari Kondabolu. It's a new year. And on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that? Or am I just depressed? We talk to experts who share real experiences and insight. You just really need to find where it is that you can have an impact in your own life and just start doing that. We break down the topics you want to know more about. Sleep, stress, mental health, and how the world around us affects our overall health.

17:51We talk about all the ways to keep your body and mind, inside and out, healthy. We human beings, all we want is connection. We just want to connect with each other. Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, this is Dr. Jesse Mills, director of the Men's Clinic at UCLA Health and host of the Mailroom Podcast. Each January, guys everywhere make the same resolutions. Get stronger, work harder, fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? To kick off the new year, I sat down with Dr.

18:29Steve Poulter, a psychologist with over 30 years experience, helping men unpack shame, anxiety, and emotional pain they were never taught to name. In a powerful two-part conversation, we discuss why men aren't emotionally bulletproof, why shame hides in plain sight, and how real strength comes from listening to yourself and to others. Guys who are toxic, they're immature, or they've got something they just haven't resolved. Once that gets resolved, then there comes empathy and some compassion. If you want this to be the year you stop powering through pain and start understanding what's underneath, listen to The Mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

19:11New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast, and every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

19:50All right, so you mentioned before the break at some point that Doggerland was not named Doggerland at this point. It would be, I think, 1998 before that name would finally be coined. and again this was still like just sort of the scientific community that was getting pretty excited like even the broader archaeological community was still not super pumped on this area yet they were studying it in the 70s but in 1998 a archaeologist named Briony Coles put out a paper called Doggerland colon a speculative survey wherein and this is what made the scientific of community kind of say like, ooh, what's she talking about?

20:33She named it Doggerland after that sand bank, the Dogger Bank, like you were talking about. And she's the first one that said, you know what, everyone? I think people, like, lived here, and I think it was kind of pretty awesome. Yeah. This wasn't a land bridge. This is essentially like a part. It was an extension of the European continent, and a lot of people lived there, and a lot of stuff happened there. Yeah. Maybe she busted into the room and said, that was no land bridge. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, and there's just this collection of archaeologists and scholars, and it's getting increasingly elbow to elbow in there.

21:08And hot, because there's no AC for some reason in this room, okay? Yeah. And it's July, and there's a lot of rotting fish in the room, too, for some reason. Yeah, that's a weird addition. Everyone wondered about those fish. Yeah, and then somebody is eating leftovers of Vietnamese food and it's loaded with shrimp paste. Oh, man, that's shrimp paste. And then there's one guy who's got leather patches on his elbows and it's chafing the people on either side of his arm. Oh, God. Because they happen to be wearing short sleeves. Yeah, Neil always wears that thing. So it's really difficult to get across how groundbreaking Bryony Cole's study was because she was working with really minimal information.

21:58I saw that she went to the extent of like collecting anecdotes from old fishermen who had brought up stuff while they were trawling. And she took all this and put it together. And not only like just wrote a book like, hey, get this. This is what's really down there. She created maps of what Doggerland would have looked like, not just once, but throughout different areas of the time period that it was above water. So what she did was an amazing triumph of intellect. Like it's really tough to get across like how big a deal what she did was. And that's why people started to get into Doggerland, because it was so convincing, too.

22:44Yeah, for sure. You know, these different little pictures of different points in time, she said, hey, I think during the Paleolithic, it might have gone all the way from the Shetland Islands of Scotland to the Netherlands. Maybe, I think, during the Holocene period, that sea began to rise, and it became an island for a while. And then finally, she put it at 5500 BC. She figured it disappeared entirely. We've seen anywhere between 5 ,000 and 7 ,000 years ago is what people speculate. But she even, despite all that, was like, hey, this is just, I'm speculating here, everybody. Much later, an archaeologist named Vincent Gaffney, along with a graduate student named Simon Fitch, Fitch or Finch?

23:31Yeah, Fitch. In 2001, got on the scene. And after about eight years of work, Gaffney said, you know what? She was reasonably correct with all this stuff. Nice, nice work. And Gaffney was in a really good position to say that because, like you said, he worked for years and years and years on a project that he had come up with with Simon Fitch that was pretty clever. They were like, there are a lot of oil exploration companies that have been mapping the seafloor of the North Sea for decades now. Surely they have some amazing data sets that they'll share with us. So they started going around to oil companies, and they finally found one, actually, Petroleum Geoservices.

24:13And PGS said, sure, we'll share a little bit of our undersea mapping with you. And they gave them data for 23 ,000 square kilometers of the North Sea. And Vincent Gaffney fainted. But luckily, Simon Fitch was there to catch him. And that was just that was what Simon Fitch is all about. He's always there to catch you. Yeah. And this was a situation where like to the oil company, they were like, let's just give them a little bit of our stuff and maybe they'll stop calling us. Archaeology magazine later called that the largest geophysical survey ever made available to archaeologists. Pretty cool.

24:49So that's sort of the difference between the sort of the oil company sector and the scientific community and what they consider a little bit of data. Yeah. And this was really groundbreaking for underwater archaeology because this is our underwater archaeology. This point was like dive down in scuba gear. Hope you find something. There were some techniques where you can actually kind of excavate something that's close to the surface. They have big vacuums that they go through the silt that's taken up on board the ship above. So it's not like it was just completely just a concept at the time. But this really opened it up, this underwater mapping.

25:29But Simon Fitch and Vincent Gaffney found out these maps are, the resolution's not enough to be like, there's a site, there's a site, a look that skeleton's waving at us, let's go investigate there. But it was enough to give it a give them a big picture of Doggerland. And it was very clear that this was not just some land bridge. This was, yeah, again, like it essentially a new country that they had discovered under the sea. And they were able to match that with existing finds. Yeah. Like they're like, well, there's this mastodon skull found over here, and that makes sense that it would be here.

26:07So let's kind of look for humans over there. That's the kind of technique that they managed to come up with. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And in the end, they basically said, we think this was, not only were there people here, but they think it was, quote, a significant Mesolithic population. And, you know, it was, like you said, it was pretty groundbreaking. I thought we did an episode on underwater archaeology, but I think it might have just been that I wrote that article for HowStuffWorks.com back in the day. Oh, we should do that then. Nah. No? Okay. I don't know. If it was something I wrote, I'm not sure it's that great.

26:45No, you've written tons of good stuff. Oh, you're sweet. In 2022, well, I guess we should mention in 2014, Gaffney started working at the University of Bradford. And he founded the Submerged Landscape Research Group there because he was dogged about Doggerland. And then eventually in 2022, I guess seven-ish years later, eight years later, he joined the Unpathed Waters Research Project. and that was a pretty cool initiative to make the maritime history of the United Kingdom just kind of put it out there for the public to digest. Yeah, so did you check this map out? Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, it is.