Doggerland

[Abramelin]

Just for your information: I have continued my search about Doggerland elsewhere.

Unless I post something spectacular I know I will have to do the work all alone here.

Sorry about that, but I can't offer you a grand ancient civilization with wonderfull megalithic structures.

It's hard work, digging through websites about archeology, genetics, liguistics, mythology and geology.

I assumed there were enough specialists here who could tell me more, but either they are blind, or simply not interested.

As far as I am concerned, the topic is now closed.

Here, that is.

.

Edited November 6, 2009 by Abramelin

[Abramelin]

Here's a link to a thread about Doggerland on my own site:

http://www.artforthemasses.us/castacon/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2291&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Just to tell you all the topic is still active...

[Abramelin]

"At 7,500 BC the coast of northern Europe ran directly from eastern England to Denmark. It was deeply incised with estuaries that led into narrow-sided valleys that in turn wound their way between gently rolling hills. Doggerland - the region now submerged beneath the North Sea - had a coastline of lagoons, marshes, mud-flats and beaches. It was probably the richest hunting, fowling and fishing grounds in the whole of Europe. Graham Clark, the excavator of Star Carr, believed that Doggerland had been the heartland of the Mesolithic culture."

After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC by Steven Mithen

[Abramelin]

Doggerland – romance and fearful possibilities

Most cultures around the world have a Noah's ark-style story – of a great inundation that consumes the whole planet. One rare exception is the eastern parts of the British Isles. Which is odd, because the archaeologists have recently established that just off the east coast of England there was a great lost land, an area greater than the existing UK, you might even call it a culture, which disappeared completely beneath the waves only around 6,000 years before today [correction: this should be 6000 BC]. One explanation for this loss might be that the repeated invasions of the east coast in the historical period disrupted regional myth cycles, in contrast to the continuity of Celtic cultures of the west coast.

But one effect of this historical disruption is clear: it makes Europe's Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland particularly fascinating and gripping – slightly odd really, when you consider that this has the dry-sounding subtitle of "Research Report No 160 Council of British Archaeology".

You'd have, however, to be a very dry sort indeed, not to be captured by the tale of the gradual unfolding of knowledge of an entire lost world in Europe – a world that the geological surveys of oil companies and pipe-laying firms has enabled the experts to map, and the archaeologists to reconstruct. Some of the seismic data is a bit on the technical side; some of the images (and the council deserves credit for producing such a finely and voluminously illustrated as well as accessible monograph) are only for the expert to really judge, but they do bring alive this story of a lost – and possibly one day recoverable – culture.

The name Doggerland comes from the Dogger Bank, a relatively shallow area in the North Sea from which fishermen have for decades been dredging artefacts – including some finely carved tools and weapons.

Europe's Lost World takes the unusual step for something labelled a "research report" of following the gradual unfolding of knowledge of Doggerland, starting with the work early in the 20th century of Clement Reid, who in a little book called Submerged Forests identified the potential archaeological value of buried lands: "In them the successive stages are separated and isolated instead of being mingled."

The report then goes on to look at what is known from the land of the sites of the period – the Mesolithic, the intermediate culture that it says has traditionally been neglected between the deep mysteries of the Paleolithic and the excitement of great change into farming of the Neolithic. The authors here make a now fashionable claim that at least some of the peoples of the time were considerably less nomadic, and built grander structures, than has traditionally been thought.

They look in detail at the site of Thatcham in Berkshire, centred around a hut about 6m in diameter. (It is impossible now due to erosion to know whether this was solitary or part of the group.) "All the evidence suggested that the house had been maintained and rebuilt on several occasions by a family group, perhaps six or eight people, and that it served several generations of hunters… burnt bone fragments included wild pig, fox and, possibly, a domestic dog. Marine shellfish, particularly dog whelks, were also present on the site."

The seismic analysis that is at the core of this book creates a virtual environment in which it is possible to place people like this, and also creates an understanding of the way the sea would have gradually intruded on this always watery landscape:

"[The analysis] has provided information on c. 16,000km of river channels and no fewer than 24 lakes or marshes, with the largest of these covering more than 300 square kilometres… the heart of Doggerland was a massive water body, mapped for more than 1700 square kilometres, filling the Outer Silver Pit….It seems likely that Markham's Hole was also a large lake during the early Mesolithic… and may contain substantial palaeoenvironmental deposits that archaeologists might consider coring for further information…the features mapped are almost all areas where animal and plant resources that might be of value to hunter-gatherers are likely to be concentrated."

The possibilities here are mindblowing – and the authors are honest in what is known and what is not, stressing in their attempt at reconstructing the climate and vegetation of Doggerland how many unknown unknowns there might be.

That's also their approach to trying, tentatively, to understand how the people of Doggerland might have understood their landscape.

"The heartland of the Mesolithic in north-west Europe would have been constantly shrinking and this would have been obvious to the inhabitants. Sometimes slow then terrifyingly fast, the sea inevitably reclaimed ancestral hunting grounds, campsites and landmarks…[but]the emerging salt marshs may well have been regarded as a gift from the sea… the Mesolithic occupants of Doggerland and the adjacent regions would have regarded water in a unique manner, as a place where the ancestors dwelt and thus an area of special importance. At periods of low tide, these ancestral homelands could have been revisited and venerated."

But the authors don't stop there. They continue on to put Doggerland in a global context, identifying two other comparable sites: Beringia, in which is now the Bering Straits around Alaska and northern Siberia, and Sundaland, which is now the Sunda Shelf and the coastal strip around Malaysia, Indonesia and the South China Sea. But these, due to the lack of the detailed seismic data available for the North Sea, remain terra incognita.

So the experience of Doggerland, however distantly and dimly we can see it, is a reminder of something we had almost forgotten, and that climate change is all too rapidly making us rediscover, rethink – that there are forces and changes on earth far greater than anything we can control. (The report also includes a detailed account of the Storrega tsunami of c. 6100BC, when a huge submarine landslip the size of Scotland produced devastating tsunamis in Scotland and Norway, and may well have finally submerged some islands that remained of Doggerland.)

The authors note that the rate of sea rise in the 20th century – 20cm, "may be higher than at any time since the loss of Doggerland" (and they note that between 18,000 and 5,500 BC sea levels rose by more than 140 metres.) And they note the huge, human, difference: "Ultimately, the Mesolithic communities of the great plains were flexible and mobile. Suffering there must have been, but the communities moved and adapted. Modern society does not have that luxury…Unlike the inhabitants of Doggerland, we have nowhere else to go."

And they have a poignant final point. The archaeological record of Doggerland likely to have been preserved by the sea for thousands of years is now under threat from human development – from industrial fish trawling, from wind farm development, from pipelines. They note that the UK has never ratified the Unesco Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage, and that more, given the extent of Doggerland, its protection would require an international agreement. Fitting, really, for a lost land that now has no native protectors of its own.

http://philobiblon.co.uk/?p=3201

Edited December 8, 2009 by Abramelin

[digitalartist]

Here's a link to a thread about Doggerland on my own site:

http://www.artforthemasses.us/castacon/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2291&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Just to tell you all the topic is still active...

Maybe this megalithic site finder for denmark can be of use in your research

http://www.megalithic.co.uk/search.php?query=&country=8

[Abramelin]

Maybe this megalithic site finder for denmark can be of use in your research

http://www.megalithi...uery=&country=8

I know of this site, thanks digitalartist.

But they don't show any dates of construction.

One of the things they don't show is the date of occupation of the Stonehenge site: 7000 BC.

And from what I found, the area where Stonehenge is located was occupied by some sort of death cult.

[digitalartist]

Here is another site listing pretty much all the sites and monuments in denmark. It's only in danish though. Sorry if you know about this one too.

[Abramelin]

Here is another site listing pretty much all the sites and monuments in denmark. It's only in danish though. Sorry if you know about this one too.

LOL, you forgot to add the link.

No problem, Google will do the translating.

[digitalartist]

LOL, you forgot to add the link.

No problem, Google will do the translating.

Let's try this again

http://www.dkconline.dk/

[Abramelin]

OK, you win, Google makes a mess out of it.

Can you give us some sort of summary?

Dates? Pics?

[Abramelin]

The next is about 'white Europeans'. If you go search for info on 'white Europeans', you are bound to end up in the Stormfront site, a site about White Supremacists... I am not one of them, that would be weird to say the least...

Anyway, I found something about the place where white Europeans first showed up.... Doggerland. True or not (and I don't know where this guy found his info):

The first white people in Europe were probably from the Aurignacian and Magdalenian Cro-Magnon cultures. This group is uniquely identified by the genetic constitution of an individual chromosome called the Atlantic Modal Haplotype and are thought to have originated on the littoral plains of the European continent during the last ice age. These people ranged from the Iberian peninsula, where they wintered, to summer ranges in what is now the Baltic Sea area and developed what may have been the first civilization of modern homo sapiens.

The difficulty of determining where their homeland might have been is that what was then littoral plain is now under water. Thirteen thousand years ago, around the time the white skin mutation probably appeared, the geography of Europe was very different. The seas were two to four hundred feet lower than they are today. Orkney was part of mainland Scotland, Denmark was about twice its present size, and only a very narrow channel separated Ireland from Galloway in Scotland. Cardigan Bay did not exist, and in its place was the lowland forest of Cantre'r Gwaelod - the drowned land. Lyonesse joined Cornwall to the Isles of Scilly. In those days, there was no English Channel, and very little North Sea. The Thames and the Rhine joined somewhere between Harwich and Vlissingen, and between the Ouse and the Elbe was the peninsula archeologists call Doggerland. The Dogger Bank is now a mere hazard to shipping, but in the Magdalenian era, it was a habitable upland.

Often referred to as a land bridge, Doggerland was in fact more than that. Linking present-day East Anglia, Lower Saxony, Belgium and the Netherlands, and extending as far north as Denmark does now, Doggerland was a crucial region for the Magdalenian people. During the summer, they could safely hunt sub-arctic species in Britain, but when the deep winters of the era bit hard, they retreated to the littoral plains of Doggerland and the adjoining areas. As the centuries passed, the ice retreated, enabling deeper forays into Scotland and Scandinavia.

Around 9600 BCE [wrong: it happened later], the low-lying field connecting Dogger Bank to the European mainland flooded from a process called "isostatic rebound". When the immense weight of the ice-sheets that depressed the continental plates under them during the last Ice Age was removed, the edges of the continental plates began to adjust, with mantle rock flowing into the rising landmass from adjacent areas, including Doggerland. This process is still continuing. The strongest earthquake ever recorded in the British Isles occurred in 1931, measuring 6.1 on the Richter Scale. Its epicenter was located on the Dogger Bank, 60 miles off the Yorkshire coast in the North Sea.

That well may be where the homeland of the first white Europeans lies.

http://gabby3239.pol...mmentId=6924644

Edited December 11, 2009 by Abramelin

[Salami Swami]

Theres one thing im not getting... how is it that doggerland flooded and stayed flooded, but britain stayed afloat all the time?

[cormac mac airt]

Just a couple of thousand years ago these areas that are now below sea level might indeed have been marshes then.

--

But thousands of years earlier, things might have been different:

Now about this ´running to the hills´, I assume they forgot what happened some 8000 years BP

And here a detailed pdf about that event and it's effect on the land around (and now under) the North Sea:

The catastrophic final flooding of Doggerland by the Storrega Slide tsunami

Noah must have been a Doggerlander (trying to stay on topic here, lol).

Abramelin,

How accurate is this map considered to be? My understanding is that the Dogger Bank is roughly 50 - 120 feet below sea level with the North Sea on average being 310 feet deep. Sea levels being about 400 feet lower at the Last Glacial Maximum, circa 18,000 BC, there would appear to be a significantly greater area that is now submerged than is being shown. Therefore a significantly greater area in which evidence should be looked for.

cormac

[Abramelin]

Theres one thing im not getting... how is it that doggerland flooded and stayed flooded, but britain stayed afloat all the time?

You didn't read this thread, obviously.

Britain and the other countries surrounding countries have a higher elevation than Doggerland, which was a lowland (and one hill, the present Dogger Bank). They didn't stay 'floating'...

Btw, if you read in this thread about the Storegga Slide, you will know that Scotland and the islands up north got the most of that tsunami, but they are still above the sea level.

Dogerland was a large lowland, surrounded by hills, hills that are now Britain, Norway and Scotland.

[Abramelin]

Abramelin,

How accurate is this map considered to be? My understanding is that the Dogger Bank is roughly 50 - 120 feet below sea level with the North Sea on average being 310 feet deep. Sea levels being about 400 feet lower at the Last Glacial Maximum, circa 18,000 BC, there would appear to be a significantly greater area that is now submerged than is being shown. Therefore a significantly greater area in which evidence should be looked for.

cormac

The map is the area of Doggerland as it was shortly after (not during) the LGM.

But because of melting ice and isostatic rebound, Doggerland slowly but surely submerged over the next thousands if years.

And when the tsumani caused by the Storegga Slide hit what was left of Doggerland (as you can see on the maps I posted later in this thread), Doggerland was already a lot smaller; and that was around 8100 BP (6100 BC).

The Doggerland area at that time, 8100 BP is more promising than go look for evidence in the larger area it occupied during the LGM. During the LGM Doggerland was nothing but a large frozen tundra, but around 8100 BP it was a good place to live; some say the avarage temperature was a few degrees Celsius higher than in present Britain. It had large forests, lakes, marshes, meadows, rivers and hills (but not as high as the Dogger Hills).

Edited December 13, 2009 by Abramelin

[Abramelin]

[Abramelin]

Btw: the numbers in the picture are outdated: the date for Dogger Island should be 6100 BC according to the latest information, and it was a lot larger (the size of Ireland) than shown in the pic above, and still connected to mainland of Europe and Britain.

At 5000 BC is did not exist any longer as far as is known now, or it was nothing but swampy wasteland (after the tsunami) just a little above sealevel.

.

Edited December 13, 2009 by Abramelin

[Guest]

According to the next site - I already posted about it in the Seafarers thread today - the language of the Meglamosian culture might indeed have been proto-Something-else (lol), like a language related to the present Finno-ugric:

http://www.paabo.ca/uirala/index.html

Just wade through the site, it's worth reading.

Now again about these Picts: there is - according to me - a chance their original language (and before they mingled their genes and/or language with those of the later arriving Celtic tribes in the presentday Brittish isles and Ireland) may have been related to that (proto) Finno-ugric language. And maybe this is the case too for the original inhabitants of Doggerland.

I need a linguist here, lol.

But first read that site, please.

======

EDIT:

Something else: I already mentioned in this thread that the name of the seagoddess Nehalennia may have been of non-Indo-European origin, a name later adopted by Celtic/Germanic tribes. Some linguists have tried to explain it as either Celtic or Germanic in origin, using etymology, but they are not certain about that explanation.

But then I found this:

"One point I have to make is that Finno-Ugric and Indo-European are classifications for two totally seperate language families. Finnish might be spoken in Europe, but it is just as seperate from the Indo-European languages as Basque is. We linguists get a little niggly about the different classifications! It would be possible to track Nehalennia's origins through language use, though, and Ragnar is right in thinking that Nehalennia sounds much more Finno-Ugric than Indo-European, I've never seen a word outside of Finnish that resembles the same pattern! "

http://www.paganlibr...&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

.

You may find this interesting;

"The other languages now spoken in Europe are generally thought to be unrelated to Indo-european and consist mainly of the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic phylum, which includes Finish, Estonian, Sammi(Lapp) and Hungarian. these languages have a completely different word structure to Indo-European languages and are sometimes called 'agglutinating' because of the habit of sticking extra particles onto and into words to modify their meaning and use. In this respect Uralic languages resemble Austronesian languages and the extinct orphan language Sumarian. Some linguists even suggest the possibility of a genetic link between Uralic languages and Sumerian"

Stephen Oppenheimer,Eden in the East, p121

"Mother and father Move west?

The F maternal mtDNA cluster as defined by Torroni and Colleagues, also has two isolated cousins among Caucasian types. One of these comes from a group of Swedes and Finns. There is another Asian echo in Scandinavia. Generally caucasian populations have completely different mtDNA from East Asians, but independent evidence of Asian intrusions into Arctic Europe comes from the paternal or Adams Y chromosome. Tatiana Zergal at the University of Oxford along with her colleagues have linked a unique asian Y chromosome mutation present in Uralic-speaking populations in central asia to the linguistically related Finns estonians and Sammi innorthern Europe and Mari in northwest Russia. Several examples of the mutation also crop up in Norway, suggesting local spread into Norse speaking populations. From the distribution of the mutation Zergal and her colleagues speculate an origin in the Mongolia/China region.....

The saami, who can be traced back by rock engravings to 4200BC, may be genetically the closest survivors to the migraants from the East. A shamanistic culture, their legends record such migrations."

Stephen Oppenheimer,Eden in the East,p211

"The Voguls, a people speaking a Finno-Ugric language located either side of the Ural Mountains, have a flood version that harks right back to the Sumerian or Babylonian original"

Stephen Oppenheimer,Eden in the East,p263

So its eems that the Doggerland settlers may have chosen Doggereland because of its resemblence to their Eastern home.

Br Cornelius

[Abramelin]

You may find this interesting;

"The other languages now spoken in Europe are generally thought to be unrelated to Indo-european and consist mainly of the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic phylum, which includes Finish, Estonian, Sammi(Lapp) and Hungarian. these languages have a completely different word structure to Indo-European languages and are sometimes called 'agglutinating' because of the habit of sticking extra particles onto and into words to modify their meaning and use. In this respect Uralic languages resemble Austronesian languages and the extinct orphan language Sumarian. Some linguists even suggest the possibility of a genetic link between Uralic languages and Sumerian"

Stephen Oppenheimer,Eden in the East, p121

"Mother and father Move west?

The F maternal mtDNA cluster as defined by Torroni and Colleagues, also has two isolated cousins among Caucasian types. One of these comes from a group of Swedes and Finns. There is another Asian echo in Scandinavia. Generally caucasian populations have completely different mtDNA from East Asians, but independent evidence of Asian intrusions into Arctic Europe comes from the paternal or Adams Y chromosome. Tatiana Zergal at the University of Oxford along with her colleagues have linked a unique asian Y chromosome mutation present in Uralic-speaking populations in central asia to the linguistically related Finns estonians and Sammi innorthern Europe and Mari in northwest Russia. Several examples of the mutation also crop up in Norway, suggesting local spread into Norse speaking populations. From the distribution of the mutation Zergal and her colleagues speculate an origin in the Mongolia/China region.....

The saami, who can be traced back by rock engravings to 4200BC, may be genetically the closest survivors to the migraants from the East. A shamanistic culture, their legends record such migrations."

Stephen Oppenheimer,Eden in the East,p211

"The Voguls, a people speaking a Finno-Ugric language located either side of the Ural Mountains, have a flood version that harks right back to the Sumerian or Babylonian original"

Stephen Oppenheimer,Eden in the East,p263

So its eems that the Doggerland settlers may have chosen Doggereland because of its resemblence to their Eastern home.

Br Cornelius

The problem is that you cannot equate genetic links with linguistic links.

The language of the Meglamosian culture may have been some sort of proto FU-Uralic, but that doesn´t mean the people of that culture over that whole area were of the same stock.

I also have read that this culture may have spread from west to east, bringing their language along with them. and in the east and far north(Baltic and Saami) mixed with the peoples you mentioned.

And, btw, Oppenheimers conclusions and theories are being criticized by many other linguists and geneticists.

As soon as they find bones of homo sapiens at the bottom of the North Sea will we know much more about their genetic make/up.

[Guest]

The problem is that you cannot equate genetic links with linguistic links.

The language of the Meglamosian culture may have been some sort of proto FU-Uralic, but that doesn´t mean the people of that culture over that whole area were of the same stock.

I also have read that this culture may have spread from west to east, bringing their language along with them. and in the east and far north(Baltic and Saami) mixed with the peoples you mentioned.

And, btw, Oppenheimers conclusions and theories are being criticized by many other linguists and geneticists.

As soon as they find bones of homo sapiens at the bottom of the North Sea will we know much more about their genetic make/up.

I think the point is that both Genetic and Linguist tracers support each other in the evidence they suggest. When isolated outcrops of both genes and language coincide it points to the probability that they came together. Of course its a matter of interpretation as to which way the flow went.

Br Cornelius

[Abramelin]

At home I have this book, "De Stenen Spreken", by Reinoud de Jonge and Gerard IJzereef.

They are scientists and also interested in sailing and navigating the seas.

According to their theory, many petroglyphs on megalithic structures in Europe (and America) are navigation maps.

They also wrote in English (with an American co-writer), and published this book:

How The Sungod reached America

I re-read the "De Stenen Spreken" (The Stones Speak), and found them talking many times about ancient petroglyphs that depicted the ancient North Sea, when part of Doggerland was still above sea level.

According to the them, the "Wash", an area in the present UK, was connected to the Doggersbank, the largest hill on Doggerland, and the last part of Doggerland that disappeared beneath the waves. These maps I mentioned depict a route to sail around Doggersbank which, apparently, was still above sea level (or just below).

The petroglyphs they are talking about in connection with Doggersbank can be found in Aboboreira, Portugal.

Again, according to their theory, peoples from the western Meditteranean (the ancestors of the Basques???) sailed the seas and carved their maps on megalithic stone structures.

The oldest petroglyph in Aboboreira dates from before 5500 BC.

It's a pitty that these petroglyphs are not online, and that I don't have a scanner to be able to post those petroglyphs here.

Btw, their theory is quite controversial.

EDIT:

A request:

If anyone knows of these Aboboreira petroglyphs, and is able to upload them here, please do.

Edited December 21, 2009 by Abramelin

[Abramelin]

Today I thought I hit jackpot...

I thought I finally found a name of the flood that devastated Doggerland.

I had been Googling for hours again, and came upon a pdf file about the "Oera Linda Book", a known hoax about the history of the Frisian people, and about the land that once was called "Aldland", or what's now called Doggerland.

The book was first published in the 19th century, but during WWII it was re-published, with commentaries by a guy called 'Overwijn'.

He tried to prove that all of it was true, but he had a problem with the date of the destruction of 'Aldland" : 2193 BC.

In the following pdf file you can see - alas for most of you, it's in Dutch - he mentions the "Kimbrische Vloed" (Cimbrian/Cymbrian Flood")...... of 6250 BC !!

http://94.215.66.137...inda%20Boek.pdf

..... scroll down till you see a picture of Doggerland, or better, the dry land that is now the North Sea, and read his comment just below the picture: "Noordwest-Europa voor de Kimbrische Vloed in ca. 6250 v.Chr"(= "North Western Europe before the Cimbrian/Cymbrian Flood, around circa 6250 BC").

But other sources (Strabo) say this 'Cimbrian' Flood occurred much more recently, like 110 BC, and according to an old Dutch source (Schotanus) 350-360 BC, and even 600 BC.

Now what I think is kind of surprizing that this Overwijn guy said 6250 BC, which is almost the exact time as scientists NOW believe to be the final moment of Doggerland (6100 BC).

Edited December 22, 2009 by Abramelin

[Abramelin]

Personally I think the whole "Oera Linda Book" is a hoax, and many here in Holland think the same.

The 'etymology' that floods this book - or better, the interpretation of these socalled ancient Frisian writings by later Dutch interpreters - is simply silly. But you have to understand Dutch to be able to come to this conclusion.

And that is the main problem: Dutch is the language of a minority on this earth.

Nevertheless, this Overwijn guy - in his enthousiasm to prove the manuscript to be true - hit jack pot, as far as I am concerned.

But I have no idea where he got his info from; during WWII nothing was known about Doggerland, or the ancient sea bed of the present North Sea.

Well, as far as I know, that is.

Edited December 22, 2009 by Abramelin

[Abramelin]

But what keeps bugging me is this: according to some, Doggerland is the homeland of the 'white people', during and after the last ice age.

Frisians are amongst the most white, blond, and blue-eyed people on earth ( and I really do hope this thing doesn't evolve into somekind of racial thing, jeesh. I mean, no one has a problem with anyone trying to pinpoint the origins of the black people or the mongolian people, but as soon as you start talking about the origins of the white people, people start getting visions of nazis and the like. Well, I am certainly not one of them. I hope that much is clear)

.

Could it be that this Oera Linda hoax was created on some very ancient stories of that very 'homeland'?

I searched and searched, and even the present Frisians think it's bull.

Edited December 22, 2009 by Abramelin

[Abramelin]

And yet another pfd file worth the trouble of reading when you are interested in this topic:

http://geochemistry.usask.ca/bill/Courses/Climate/Coastal%20catastrophe%20prt.pdf