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Sunken Antiquity: Ancient Sites Flooded By Rising Sea Levels

I can't say that anything in that video impressed me very much.

But the bridge is largely natural. In a post glacial time of rising sea levels, the waters would encroach over the low-lying land between India and Sri Lanka from both north and south, until only a narrow strip remained. The people living thereabouts may have tried to protect this natural connection by building a causeway on top of it, which would explain any man-made structures that are found there, but as the seas continued to rise the causeway too would become submerged...
There was some interesting Hindu legend, and some thought-provoking ideas about whether mythical ape-men were actually early hominids, but the idea that a bridge was built by contemporaries of homo erectus over 1 million years ago seems a bit too far-fetched.

As you say, Rynner, it's more likely that if there is any man-made element to Adam's Bridge, then it's by locals trying to hold back the rising sea to protect a route that already existed. I can see possible parallels between this and the stories of Cantre'r Gwaelod, and the possible origins of the various sarns along the West Wales coast.
 
There was some interesting Hindu legend, and some thought-provoking ideas about whether mythical ape-men were actually early hominids, but the idea that a bridge was built by contemporaries of homo erectus over 1 million years ago seems a bit too far-fetched.

As you say, Rynner, it's more likely that if there is any man-made element to Adam's Bridge, then it's by locals trying to hold back the rising sea to protect a route that already existed. I can see possible parallels between this and the stories of Cantre'r Gwaelod, and the possible origins of the various sarns along the West Wales coast.
Yes, I think I'm with you on that. Natural formation, later constructed upon to keep it usable as a land bridge.
 
This book review covers a wide range of subjects, but I guess it fits here as well as anywhere else:
The Making of the British Landscape by Nicholas Crane review – how the sun shaped the land
This magnificent book, ranging from the ice age to the present, considers the influence on the countryside and cities of climate, geology and a long history of immigration
Andrea Wulf
Friday 30 September 2016 14.00 BST

Around 12,000 years ago Britain was still connected to the mainland of Europe. Glaciers covered much of the north while the south was an arid wind-blasted tundra with grasses, mosses and low shrubs. Around 9700 BC, it became a little warmer, and that’s where Nicholas Crane’s story begins. As he argues in this ambitious, magnificent book, Britain’s destiny was shaped to a surprising degree by the sun and by southerners. It’s a tale of stops and starts – devastating at times, uplifting at others.

As temperatures rose, the ice melted, greenhouse gases surged and Britain became greener. Crane, an explorer and geographer, writes evocatively about this changing landscape. “Relieved of its burden, the Earth’s crust sprang slowly upward in the far north,” while the coastline of the south was reconfigured by rising sea levels. River courses altered, trees grew taller and animals such as deer and boars arrived.

With them came the woodland people who, unlike the early hunters, lived in large groups and stayed for a while in one place. They brought tools and made flames with wooden fire drills. Britain’s geology provided them with a vast array of stones, which in turn produced a new sound: “a rhythmic knocking accompanied by high-pitched tinkling” – the sound of the woodland people fashioning them into tools and objects. Meanwhile Doggerland, the area that connected Britain to the continent, was facing the onslaught of rising seas; its inhabitants marched west to escape. Britain has always been a land of migrants.

The first “little ice age” hit around 6700BC. About 500 years later, a huge North American lake broke through its dam and dumped such a huge amount of fresh water into the Atlantic that the Gulf Stream shut down. Temperatures plummeted, trees died, sea water pushed into rivers and Britain’s landscape changed again. Only 200 years later – a geological blink – a tsunami crashed over Doggerland. Britain became an island and isolated. Two thousand years later it was nearly inhabited, and then the climate changed again. The next wave of immigrants arrived – the “house people”, who crossed the channel in their boats and built the first rectangular houses.

They bred animals, grew grains, cleared forests and sculpted the land, leaving traces of human activity on the landscape. Crane describes growing populations, Stonehenge and new materials – copper, iron, bronze. “Technology ages landscapes,” he writes, as ore was hacked out of the land and enormous numbers of trees were used for smelting. By 1000 BC, more of the south of Britain was patterned by rectangular fields – in Dartmeet, for example, a grid covered 3,000 hectares. Then another little ice age hit. Then it got warmer again. And so it goes, up and down. Forts were built, and later lowland settlements, goods arrived by ship, and raw materials left the island.

When the Roman emperor Claudius invaded Britain in AD43, he came, Crane says, with “an army of psychopathic builders” and the British landscape was soon altered beyond recognition. Camps and towns were built along gridded streets. Trees were felled, turf was cut, ditches dug and streams diverted to lace the island with roads. Within four generations, Britain had 24 major cities, palaces, amphitheatres, mosaic flooring and hot baths. It was warm and the soil produced food. And then the climate changed once more.

Crane is excellent at describing climate, geology and shifting shorelines, but is at his best when plaiting together earth-shaping events with humankind and civilisation. [To TV viewers Crane is probably best known as one of the presenters of BBC's "Coast" - the one with the umbrella stuck in his ricksack!] The end of the Romans in Britain, for example, was linked to a 40-year drought in inner Asia, which started in 338 and pushed the nomadic Huns westwards, who in turn drove the Goths into the Roman empire. With their hands full on the continent, the Romans had problems defending Britain and trade routes were affected. Britain was attacked, looted and robbed. Taxes were raised, which meant people couldn’t afford goods any more, and production slowed: “life leeched from British towns”. By 407, the Romans had left and an air of disrepair veiled the south.

Crane takes his readers from the farmed countryside and the urban boom of the Norman conquest to the freeze in the early 1300s, which was rapidly followed by rains and famines – and then the first wave of the Black Death in 1348 (after which came several more). As the population fell from 6 million in 1300 to 2.4 million in the 1440s, the landscape changed again: villages were abandoned and fields left unploughed.

etc...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/30/making-of-british-landscape-nicholas-crane-review

And you can buy a copy cheap through the Guardian Bookshop!
 
I just received an email from our MP, letting me know that the new flood defence system has been approved and will commence shortly.

So we won't be adding Newhaven to the list yet.
 
Penzance man left mesmerized after discovering petrified forest on West Cornwall beach
By Tom_Gainey | Posted: February 13, 2017

A West Cornwall man said he felt "privileged" to witness an "incredible" sight on a beach last week, after a recent spell of bad weather uncovered a petrified forest.
Peter Williams, 44, was walking his dog between Eastern Green beach and Long Rock last week after the severe weather had shifted the sand levels.
He walked at the water's edge at low tide, a far distance from his usual route, but was mesmerized by what he came across next.

"I noticed below me what looked like a large flat shiny rock", he said.
"It looked out of place & thought it was strange, when I stepped on it I was very surprised to feel that it was spongy.
"Upon closer inspection it seemed to be a [???]. I could not believe what I was seeing, the Ancient forest which once stood where Mounts Bay now exists.
"I was amazed as I had heard about this forest existing but never actually seen it."
Mr Williams looked around the vicinity and discovered that the whole area was littered with actual remains of a forest.
He found old branches set in the sand and even a tree stump.

Penhaul%20101.png

Photo: Peter Williams

"I have lived in the area all of my 44 years and have never witnessed this before," he added.
"It was truly amazing and I felt privileged to be one of the few people to see this incredible sight.

"I understand that the forest was called 'The Forest of Lyonesse'".

Mr Williams added that he also read The Cornishman's article on the WW2 defences and lost French shipwreck - which were also uncovered nearby after sand levels shifted - with great interest.

http://www.cornwalllive.com/penzanc...ch-discovery/story-30132411-detail/story.html

Saturday's Full Moon created Spring Tides, when the Low waters are lower than average. That and the shifted sand levels mean the sunken forest does reappear to view from time to time.
 
Whilst I see it alluded to in a couple of older posts one flooded kingdom not to have been directly mentioned in this thread is that of the Welsh legendary city of Cantref (or Cantre'r) Gwaelod.

A City which purportedly sat several miles off the cost of Aberystwyth, and a kingdom which would have covered a significant part of modern day Cardigan Bay.

I say purportedly, because very little has ever been found to support the claim that this kingdom actually existed. Some older texts refer to there being evidence of sunken remains of human habitations visible in the 1700s. There is no evidence of it today.

The earliest mention of the kingdom is in the Black Book of Camarthen, which is for the most part an (incomplete now through pages lost across the centuries) book of triads, folklore and poetry.

As a Student at Aberystwyth I always found the notion that there might yet be some kind of Welsh Atlantis somewhere out to sea to be quite an entertaining one. Supposedly Cantref Gwaelod was the kingdom of King Gwyddno Long-Shanks (or occasionally Gwyddno Cornaur - Golden-Crown) who lived in the early to mid-6th century. The kingdom supposedly created by a large sea dyke, which
 
The aforementioned plans to explore the Doggerland area are finally being realized ...
Thriving Plateau Region That Slipped Beneath North Sea 8,000 Years Ago Reveals Its Secrets
A vast plateau of land between England and the Netherlands was once full of life before it sank beneath what is now the North Sea some 8,000 years ago. Archaeologists now hope to find out what the vast landscape looked like before it slipped beneath the salty water so long ago.

To do this, they've hauled up cores of sediment from the bottom of the North Sea in an area called Doggerland. It's named for the shoal called Dogger Bank in the southern part of the North Sea ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/64214-drowned-landscape-north-sea-doggerland.html
 
Lost city of Heracleion gives up its secrets
A lost ancient Egyptian city submerged beneath the sea 1,200 years ago is starting to reveal what life was like in the legendary port of Thonis-Heracleion. ...

Explorations of Heracleion continue, and they continue to turn up new items of interest ...
Divers Find Remains of Ancient Temple in Sunken Egyptian City

Divers swimming through Heracleion, an ancient Egyptian city that's now under water, have discovered a trove of artifacts, including the remains of a temple, gold jewelry, coins and the missing piece of a ceremonial boat, according to Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities.

Heracleion — named after the legendary Hercules, who ancient people believed actually visited the city — was a bustling metropolis in its day. When it was built in about the eighth century B.C., it sat on the edge of the Nile River, next to the Mediterranean Sea. Cleopatra was even crowned in one of its temples. Then, about 1,500 years ago, it flooded, and now sits under about 150 feet (45 meters) of water.

Ever since archaeologists discovered it in 2000, Heracleion (also known as Thonis) has slowly revealed its ancient secrets. During the latest two-month excavation, archaeologists were delighted to find the remains of a large temple, including its stone columns, and the crumbling remnants of a small Greek temple, which was buried under 3 feet (1 m) of sediment on the seafloor, the ministry reported. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/66045-underwater-ancient-egypt-city-temple.html
 
Hasankeyf is thought to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements on Earth, dating as far back as 12,000 years and containing thousands of caves, churches and tombs.
But this jewel of human history will soon be lost; most of the settlement is about to be flooded as part of the highly controversial Ilisu dam project.
Construction work on the dam and its hydroelectric power plant started in 2006 and Hasankeyf is now just weeks away from destruction, despite a fight by residents and environmental campaigners to save it. The Turkish government has given residents until 8 October to evacuate.


https://www.theguardian.com/cities/...res-to-flood-12000-year-old-city-to-build-dam
 
Monster! Great name for a town.

MONSTER, THE NETHERLANDS—On a clear, windy autumn afternoon last October, Willy van Wingerden spent a few free hours before work walking by the sea not far from the Dutch town of Monster. Here, in 2013, the cheerful nurse found her first woolly mammoth tooth. She has since plucked more than 500 ancient artifacts from the broad, windswept beach known as the Zandmotor, or “sand engine.” She has found Neanderthal tools made of river cobbles, bone fishhooks, and human remains thousands of years old. Once, she plucked a tar-covered Neanderthal tool from the water’s edge, earning a co-author credit in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) a few months ago.

“Sun, wind, rain, snow—I’m here 5 or 6 days a week,” she says. “I find something every day, almost.”

Van Wingerden’s favorite beachcombing spot is no ordinary stretch of sand. Nearly half a kilometer wide, the beach is made of material dredged from the sea bottom 13 kilometers offshore and dumped on the existing beach in 2012. It’s a €70 million experimental coastal protection measure, its sands designed to spread over time to shield the Dutch coast from sea-level rise. And the endeavor has made 21 million cubic meters of Stone Age soil accessible to archaeologists.

That soil preserves traces of a lost world. During the last ice age, sea levels were 70 meters lower, and what is now the North Sea between Great Britain and the Netherlands was a rich lowland, home to modern humans, Neanderthals, and even earlier hominins. It all disappeared when glaciers melted and sea level rose about 8500 years ago.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...ly_2020-01-30&et_rid=394299689&et_cid=3186295
 
Archaeologists are planning a campaign to survey the currently submerged coastal periphery of Jersey.
Jersey 'drowned landscape' could yield Ice Age insights

Archaeologists are planning an ambitious survey of part of the seabed off Jersey where Neanderthals once lived.

The site is part-exposed during spring low tide, giving the team a four-hour window to dig while the sea is out.

Stone tools and mammoth remains have been recovered from the Violet Bank over the years.

Neanderthals are known to have inhabited what is now Jersey for hundreds of thousands of years.

The Violet Bank is a type of coastal zone known as an intertidal reef. It's underwater at high tide but some 10 sq km of seabed is exposed during the low spring tide.

In May, the team will spend a week living at an offshore fort built in the 18th Century and then digging on the seabed for three to four hours before the area is inundated. ...

The effort aims to discover records of early human behaviour, insights into the ancient environment and could shed light on past climate change.

It will seek to understand how people used this landscape before the sea covered it around 6,000 years ago ...

"The Island has an incredible Neanderthal story to tell and one that has already been placed on the international map by the ancient site of La Cotte de St Brelade, located on Jersey's south-west coast.

He added: "We look forward to seeing what this new and innovative survey reveals."

Neanderthals lived at La Cotte de St Brelade between 250,000 and 50,000 years ago. Some researchers believe our extinct evolutionary relatives were driving mammoths off cliffs at the site, allowing their carcasses to be butchered on the beach below.

Jersey may have been one of the last outposts of the Neanderthals in north-west Europe.
FULL STORY: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51299755
 
More on Doggerland. Vid at link.

Maps of a now-submerged land help reconstruct the lives of ancient Europeans
By Meagan Cantwell Feb. 13, 2020 , 8:00 AM

A region beneath the rough waters of the North Sea, known as Doggerland, holds archaeological clues to the past. Watch how researchers are using advances in mapping and leads from dredging sites to piece together the history of this vanished landscape.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/maps-now-submerged-land-help-reconstruct-lives-ancient-europeans
 
Hasankeyf is thought to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements on Earth, dating as far back as 12,000 years and containing thousands of caves, churches and tombs.
But this jewel of human history will soon be lost; most of the settlement is about to be flooded as part of the highly controversial Ilisu dam project.
Construction work on the dam and its hydroelectric power plant started in 2006 and Hasankeyf is now just weeks away from destruction, despite a fight by residents and environmental campaigners to save it. The Turkish government has given residents until 8 October to evacuate.


https://www.theguardian.com/cities/...res-to-flood-12000-year-old-city-to-build-dam

Goodbye, Hasankeyf.


 
Wasn't Doggerland finally finished off by the Storegga (sp?) Slide?

Apparently not ... New / ongoing research indicates an archipelago of islands (newly dubbed the "Dogger Archipelago") remained above water after the Storegga slide and mega-tsunami. This raises the possibility that humans returned to, and inhabited, these islands for centuries until rising sea levels flooded them once and for all.
Lost islands beneath the North Sea survived a mega-tsunami 8,000 years ago

Some ancient islands now submerged beneath the North Sea survived a devastating tsunami about 8,000 years ago and may have played a key part in Britain's human prehistory, according to a new study.

The research suggests some parts of the ancient plain known as Doggerland — which connected Great Britain with the Netherlands — withstood the massive Storegga tsunami that submerged most of the region in about 6200 B.C.

The so-called Storegga tsunami was caused by the underwater collapse of part of Norway's continental shelf, about 500 miles (800 kilometers) to the north. Scientists had long thought the towering wave entirely submerged the Doggerland region between the east coast of England and the European continent. ...

But the new research, based on submerged sediment cores sampled during ship expeditions in the North Sea, suggests some parts of Doggerland survived the ancient tsunami and may have remained inhabited by Stone Age humans for thousands of years.

And if they did, the surviving islands of Doggerland might have played a part in the later development of Britain, such as the introduction of agriculture about a thousand years later said study co-author Vincent Gaffney, an archeologist at the University of Bradford. ...

They found that by the time of the Storegga tsunami, much of Doggerland would have been already underwater due to slowly rising sea levels, Gaffney said.

But a remarkable sediment core from the seafloor near the eastern English estuary of the River Ouse, known as the Wash, shows land there remained above water many years after the tsunami — and computer modeling suggests other regions nearby survived as isolated islands too, he said.

The researchers have now dubbed these islands the "Dogger Archipelago," and it's thought the highest parts of a central region now known as the "DoggerHills" also survived the Storegga tsunami, becoming "Dogger Island." ...

Some parts of Doggerland may even have been better suited to humans after the devastation of the tsunami and the retreat of its waters, Gaffney said. ...

The surviving islands may contain early evidence of the introduction of agricultural technologies into Britain, which presumably spread there from the European continent ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/lost-island-north-sea-ancient-tsunami.html
 
Detailed and extensive analysis of how the coastline of Cornwall and the Scilly Isles has changed over 8,000 years.

The current Scilly Isles would have been one contiguous land mass and there would have been at least one more sizeable island (now a shallow reef) between them and the Cornish mainland.

So, rather than today's 40km ferry trip to St Mary's, or a 30 minute flight from Newquay airport, it could have been a short boat crossing through shallow waters, with one or two stop-offs, for early Holocene travellers.

A nice thought that the enduring legends of Lyonesse (aka the Cornish Atlantis) are a folk memory of ancient West Country journeys to a land now under 20 metres of the Atlantic.

lyonesse.JPG


lyonesse2.JPG

http://skrifennow.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-lost-land-of-lyonesse-update-with.html
 
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Scientists Are Close to Finding a Hidden Underwater Civilization


Earth’s magnetic fields may soon reveal the submerged Doggerland.

  • Doggerland is an ancient landmass submerged under what is now the North Sea, a large body of water among England, Denmark, and Norway
  • Scientists are now analyzing magnetic field data gathered from magnetometers to explore this ancient landmass and to search for evidence of our Mesolithic ancestors

Scientists at the University of Bradford in the U.K. are turning to a novel method in marine archaeology and analyzing magnetic fields in the hopes of discovering mysteries of human activity in Doggerland. The researchers describe the area as “amongst the most resource-rich and ecologically dynamic areas during the later Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods,” so there could be a lot to discover along the seabed.

502px-Doggerland_10000_BP.jpg


“Small changes in the magnetic field can indicate changes in the landscape, such as peat-forming areas and sediments, or where erosion has occurred, for example in river channels,” says University of Bradford Ph.D. student Ben Urmston. “As the area we are studying used to be above sea level, there’s a small chance this analysis could even reveal evidence for hunter-gatherer activity.”

Urmston will be analyzing magnetic data gathered by Royal Haskoning, a survey firm that’s been exploring the North Sea. This data is collected using magnetometers, which are torpedo-shaped instruments usually towed behind a ship that leverages an atomic physics principle known as the Overhauser effect to record magnetic fields along the ocean floor.

This technique is often used to find shipwrecks of iron ore deposits, but Urmston hopes to pick up the existence of things like middens, which are essentially trash dumps filled with bone and other biological material that could give an intimate snapshot of how Mesolithic Doggerlanders lived.


https://www.popularmechanics.com/sc...dden-underwater-civilization-magnetic-fields/

maximus otter
 
The Atlantis of the North.

Archaeologists have mapped out the lost city of Rungholt for the first time.

Legend has it that the once thriving city, which now sits off the coast of northern Germany, was swallowed by the North Sea in a single night following a heavy storm as punishment for its inhabitants' sins.

According to folklore, these sins included things such as drunkenness, impiety, and the flaunting of wealth, according to The Times.

So the stories go, the life of abundance led to an immoral life, and the end came around Christmas when a gang of young drunkards tried to force a priest to give a pig the last sacrament at a local inn.

The cleric went to the church and prayed and asked God to punish the young men. He left town the next day, and shortly after, the great storm hit that wiped Rungholt off the face of the Earth.

In medieval legends, the sound of its bell tower could be heard from the depths of the North Sea.

While some historians questioned whether the town ever existed outside myth, new research has uncovered the remains of this "northern Atlantis" in the Wadden Sea, per the report.

Archaeologists from Christian-Albrecht University in Kiel found approximately 1.2 miles (1.9 kilometers) of medieval mounds around an island now known as Südfall after mapping the site with a geophysical survey.

"Settlement remains hidden under the mudflats are first localized and mapped over a wide area using various geophysical methods such as magnetic gradiometry, electromagnetic induction, and seismics," Dennis Wilken, a geophysicist at Kiel University, says of the research in a press release.

The new findings included a harbor, the foundations of a large church, and drainage systems, according to new research. ...

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-legendary-lost-city-swallowed-by-the-ocean-has-been-found
 
Lost lands of Oz.

A Vast Realm Off The Coast of Australia May Have Been Populated by Millions​


A colorful landform


(US Geological Survey, Geoscience Australia)

For much of the 65,000 years of Australia's human history, the now-submerged northwest continental shelf connected the Kimberley and western Arnhem Land. This vast, habitable realm covered nearly 390,000 square kilometres, an area one-and-a-half times larger than New Zealand is today.

It was likely a single cultural zone, with similarities in ground stone-axe technology, styles of rock art, and languages found by archaeologists in the Kimberley and Arnhem Land.

There is plenty of archaeological evidence humans once lived on continental shelves – areas that are now submerged – all around the world. Such hard evidence has been retrieved from underwater sites in the North Sea, Baltic Sea and Mediterranean Sea, and along the coasts of North and South America, South Africa and Australia.

In a newly published study in Quaternary Science Reviews, we reveal details of the complex landscape that existed on the Northwest Shelf of Australia. It was unlike any landscape found on our continent today. ...

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-vast...australia-may-have-been-populated-by-millions
 
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