Transcript

Doggerland: Lost at Sea | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW

From Stuff You Should Know · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 39 min · 7,108 words · 131 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Doggerland: Lost at Sea | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW", an episode of Stuff You Should Know published December 20, 2025 (39 min, about 7,108 words). It mentions 51 people, works and ideas, including Doggerland, North Sea, Chuck Bryan, Vincent Gaffney, Nikola Tesla.

What this episode is about

Doggerland is a submerged landmass in the North Sea that once connected the UK to mainland Europe, believed to have been a flourishing habitat for plants, animals, and humans during the Mesolithic era. As sea levels rose, this once densely populated area was lost to the ocean, highlighting the significant geological and historical transformations in Europe.

Key takeaways

  • Doggerland sounds like a fantasy epic, but it's Europe's prehistoric Atlantis swirling in the North Sea.
  • From steamy fishing cod to ancient shipping routes, the North Sea is history's versatile aisle.
  • Oil companies inadvertently became science heroes by exploring forgotten relics beneath the waves.
  • Exploring Doggerland today requires methods far beyond holding one’s breath and hoping for luck.
  • North Sea’s tale of submerged landscapes rivals mythic lost worlds, baffling archaeologists with hidden secrets.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: North Sea, Doggerland, Dogger Bank, Mesolithic
  2. – 10:00: North Sea, Cape Canaveral, Submerged Forests, The Story of the Stone Age
  3. – 15:00: Pilgrim Lockwood, British Museum, Margaret Godwin, Doggerland
  4. – 20:00: Doggerland, Simon Fitch, Dogger Bank, North Sea
  5. – 25:00: Doggerland, Simon Fitch, Underwater archaeology, Archaeology (magazine)
  6. – 30:00: Doggerland, North Sea, Boreal (period), Pollen analysis
  7. – 35:00: Doggerland, Isostatic rebound, Mesolithic, Neolithic
  8. – 39:04: Doggerland, North Sea, Andy McDonald, Apple Podcast

Notable quotes from "Doggerland: Lost at Sea | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"

  • Yeah. It's it's a lost land, a submerged land mass off the coast of Europe. it's in the North Sea probably anywhere from 50 to 60 to 100 ft down and it used to be a you know it…
    about North Sea · at
  • Yeah. And it's called Doggerland and that's just cool. It sounds like a movie title or something, you know.
    about Doggerland · at
  • Yeah, 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.…
    about Dogger Bank · at
  • Digging through that. And this guy's got a great name. The skipper of the Clinda's name was Pilgrim Lockwood.
    about Pilgrim Lockwood · at
  • First, they were Okay, this is kind of cool. And they even offered it to the British Museum. But they said, Nah, we've got some harpoons. We're we're all set. We got a couple of them.
    about British Museum · at
  • 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 which would place it kind of.
    about Pollen analysis · at
  • Archaeologist named Vincent Gaffffne along with a graduate student named Simon Fitch or Finch. Yeah, Fitch in 2001 got on the scene and after about 8 years of work, Gaffne…
    about Simon Fitch · at
  • Yeah. And this was really groundbreaking for underwater archaeology because this was underwater archaeology at this point was like dive down in scuba gear, hope you find something. there were some techniques where you can.
    about Underwater archaeology · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

Books & papers

  • The Story of the Stone Age — Book · 1 mention · first at
    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.
  • Submerged Forests — Book · 1 mention · first at
    Yeah. in 1913 they published submerged forests which was the very first study on those woods and yeah that's when that's when they really kind of put it out there and it was you know it was the kind of thing where.
  • Bible — Book · 1 mention
  • Doggerland: a speculative survey — Book · 1 mention
  • Robinson Crusoe — Book · 1 mention

Companies & orgs

Products & tech

  • Undreamed Shorelines — Product · 1 mention · first at
    Just does all this different super cool stuff. It's definitely worth checking out. The unpath waters undreamed shorelines, I think.

Concepts & topics

  • Younger Dryas — Concept · 6 mentions
  • Wind farm — Concept · 5 mentions
  • Underwater archaeology — Concept · 3 mentions · first at
  • Holocene — Concept · 3 mentions
  • Mesolithic — Concept · 2 mentions · first at
    Yeah. They think that it's possible. So, this was really populated during the Mesolithic area or era and they think that this area during the Mesolithic era was one of the most densely populated places in all of Europe.
  • Pollen analysis — Concept · 2 mentions · first at
  • Facial reconstruction — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    We'll talk about it a little later, but there's a facial reconstruction. You know how they love to do like the 3D Oh, yeah.
  • Paleolithic — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Different little pictures of different points in time. she said, Hey, I think during the pale paleolithic it might have gone all the way from the Shetland Islands of Scotland…
  • Boreal (period) — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Grasses. the climate started warming over you know the course of thousands of years and during the pre-boreal period the holysine there were birch and pine trees and all of a…
  • Neolithic — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Yeah. So this is where the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic happens. It's pretty much what they consider the change or the beginning of the Neolithic was when people started farming. And that happened on Dogger.
  • Isostatic rebound — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Don't know if you remember, but in our younger dus episode, we talked about isostatic rebound or adjustment where the glaciers and ice sheets were so heavy that they actually…
  • Homo antecessor — Concept · 1 mention
  • King Arthur — Concept · 1 mention
  • My Sharona — Concept · 1 mention
  • Preboreal — Concept · 1 mention
  • Storegga Slide — Concept · 1 mention

Places & events

  • Doggerland — Place · 19 mentions · first at
  • North Sea — Place · 12 mentions · first at
  • Dogger Bank — Place · 2 mentions · first at
  • Cape Canaveral — Place · 1 mention · first at
    And placed the launches at Cape Canaveral. Like that's how that's how smart this guy was as far as seeing in the future goes. I love it. Yeah, he's he's pretty great writer, too.
  • Shetland Islands — Place · 1 mention · first at
    Think during the pale paleolithic it might have gone all the way from the Shetland Islands of Scotland to the Netherlands. maybe I think during the holysine period that sea…
  • Norwegian Sea — Place · 1 mention · first at
    And completely wiped out Dogger land. and they were caused by these submarine landslides in the Norwegian Sea called the Sterega slides.
  • Bouldnor Cliff — Place · 1 mention
  • Isle of Wight — Place · 1 mention
  • Norfolk — Place · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too. And this is a good oldfashioned 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 uh really uh uh floats your boat.

It does. It It floats my submerged land. Uh we're talking about Dogger Land, by the way, everybody.

That's right. Uh we should probably just say kind of what it is first, right, before we get into the details.

Yeah. And we've talked about it here or 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 it's a you know, a lost land, a submerged land mass uh off the coast of Europe. Uh it's in the North Sea probably anywhere from 50 to 60 to 100 ft down and it used to be a you know it used to be land. It used to connect they pretty much firmly believe now connect the UK and Europe uh and not only that but was a land where that that kind of flourished depending on when you're talking about uh with plants and animals and even people.

Yeah. They think that it's possible. So, this was really populated during the Mesolithic area or era

and they 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 uh I'm I can feel a a Taylor Swift area coming on eventually in my mind. She she uh 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, uh yeah. I mean, it sounds kind of like, wait, that's it? There's like a land mass that once connected the UK and Europe.

That's enough. Like you can see somebody making a absurd or obscene hand motion talk thinking about that, right? But no, listen.

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 tanalyzing 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 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. It sounds like a movie title or something, you know.

It does. Starring Lily. Um, Tomlin. No, the younger one. Allan. No, not that young.

Von Stup. No. Why is her name Con Taylor? Yes. Oh, really? She was in a movie called maybe Dog Face or something like that or dog.

Oh. Uh, yeah. Dog uh 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 liies. You got to leave that in. Okay. True. True that. Um, 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 uh star of that movie.

Yeah, 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 um cod fishing boats that were used for hundreds of years in the area. So there you go. Doggerland.

That's right. Uh 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 UK and Europe of course and because if there was a land bridge that connected those two, that's where the North Sea would be. Um it's a has long been a a very crucial uh shipping route and trade route. And as for this story, uh you know, it's pretty key that in the 1950s and then60s, uh gas and oil reservoirs were found there and companies started licking their chops and they will come into play uh later. oil companies and gas companies being as being actually in you know finally kind of key to helping out science uh

right you know and scientists in their explorations. So um yeah that will come in later. Uh 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. Um and then now it's become a really attractive site for renewable energy as we'll see. So, the North Sea is very important and it's been used for a very long time, but its depths were just unknown. Like, 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, uh, there were some tanalyzing 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.

That's right. Uh, the first thing that happened late 19th century, uh, 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, uh, 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 morog uh which is you know pete this kind of nasty clumped together pete and in that pete sometimes they would find animal bones not fish bones but like mammal bones

and I guess it was the 19th century so uh it it just sort of hassled their fishing progress. So they would just usually toss them overboard. Occasionally if they had some like really wellpreserved, you know, skull or deer femur or something like that, they might keep it. Um but that's when the first sort of whisperings of like uh something used to be down there started happening.

Exactly. Um and then in in usual fashion, it's worth mentioning HG Wells, who's probably one of the best speculators in the history of speculative fiction.

This is pretty cool. he um 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.

Don't forget this guy is the guy who in the late 19th century wrote stories about humans sending rockets up into space.

Yeah. And placed the launches at Cape Canaveral. Like that's how that's how smart this guy was as as far as seeing in the future goes. I love it. Yeah, he's he's pretty great writer, too.

Yeah. Interesting, dude. Uh, man, we should do one on HG Wells. He deserves his own show, I think.

Okay. All right. All right. Let's do it. Moving on. Uh, as we crawl through Noah's Woods now, um, before the 19th century, uh, and those bones and that Morlo Pete started coming up, there were whispers then. I said the first whispers came in the late 19th century. That's not exactly true. Uh because during low tide um way back when the water levels would drop and some of these folks living uh in the UK at the time would see these tree stumps and this is like medieval times and they they called it Noah's woods with the idea that this was you know possibly the area where Noah from the Bible lived before God decided to flood the earth because he was grumpy.

Yeah. And here was plain right in your face evidence of it. Um, so that had stuck around since the medieval age and apparently according to UK or early British lore. Um, this is where Robinson Caruso, who is the model for Robin Hood, emerged from the water and gave Arthur the sword in the stone.

That's right. So, um, nosewoods 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 [clears throat] 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.

Mhm. People are pulling up animal bones for terrestrial um animals. Pulling up seems

pretty pretty obvious what's happening. Yeah. They're like there is something submerged that used to be above the water and we think it's a landbridgeidge that connected the UK in Europe.

Yeah. They uh and I noticed there were a couple of uh scientists married couples that worked on this along the kind of cool.

This is a golden age for that. Yeah. uh in 1913 they published um submerged forests which was the very first study on those woods and yeah that's when that's when they really kind of put it out there and it was uh you know it was the kind of thing where um they didn't have any hard evidence other than uh these pete 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.

Yeah, they like temperature- wise. Sounds pretty nice actually. I'd like to live in Dogger Land, but it wasn't called Dogger Land yet as we'll see.

Yeah, that's right. So, the um Reeds had this pretty great theory. Apparently, I read that they um concluded that the only possible explan explanation for this was that um sea level rise had flooded and sunken this land. So they were really

right on the money but they 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 till their tongues turned blue and hung out of their mouths and it said look at this. This is important.

That's right. Uh, did you say 1931? Cuz that's when it was. Uh, that's when a trwler called the Kinda was fishing off the coast of Norolk came along.

And again, a big old chunk of Morlo was hauled in in the net and they were digging through that. And this guy's got a great name. The skipper of the Clinda'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. Yeah. Hi, uh, Pilgrim Lockwood checking in. Yeah. Okay, buddy. What's your real name? And who do you think you are?

Right. So, uh, Pilgrim Lockwood is busting up this Pete with a shovel just like out of a movie, 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 8 and 1/2 in long harpoon head, the harpoon point, uh, carved with hands out of an antler. Um, 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. But they said, "Nah, we've got some harpoons. We're we're all set. We got a couple of them."

Uh, 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 um to to be fashioned into a harpoon, I think it was decorated as well. So, so there's no arguing that um it was it was a human artifact. It had been found in a morlog, so a chunk of Pete. And then somebody along the way, another married couple, Harry and Margaret Godwin, said, "Let us see that Pete. We have a little hypothesis we want to test." And they looked at that Pete and they said, "Everybody get this. That Pete 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 pete.

Yeah. I mean, I 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."

Uh yeah, that would have been pretty great actually. Yeah. Um so they used a pollen analysis to figure this out and later on they were able to date this thing and this harpoon head uh they found was about 14,000 years old which would place it kind of squarely in the meolithic era.

Well about toward the beginning of it I think because this is it's in the area.

It's a 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 meolithic 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 this this is there's something really interesting down there. They 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. Uh we'll talk about it a little later, but there's a um a facial reconstruction. You know how they love to do like the 3D

Oh, yeah. Um 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 when like when they uh 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 eyewink and the double guns. I've seen that before, too.

Oh, yeah. That's classic. Uh, but despite all these finds, um, 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?" Uh, 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 Dogger Land. All right. So, you mentioned before the break at some point that Doggerland was not named Doggerland at this point. Uh it would be I think 1998 before that name would finally be coined. Um 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. Mhm. Um they were studying it in the ' 70s but in uh the 1998 a uh archaeologist named Brienie Kohl's put out a paper called Doggerland Colon a speculative survey wherein and this is what made the scientific community kind of say like oo what's she talking about?

Um, she named it Dogger Land 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 landbridge. This is essentially like a a it was a an extension of the European continent and a lot of people lived there and a lot of stuff happened there. And

yeah, maybe she busted into the room and said that was no landbridge. Yeah. So, u Yeah. And there's just this collection of uh of archaeologists and scholars and it's getting increasingly um elbow to elbow in there and 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 in the room too for some reason.

Yeah. That's the a weird addition. Everyone wondered about those fish. Yeah. And then somebody is eating um leftovers of Vietnamese food and it's loaded with shrimp paste. Oh man, that's shrimp paste.

Uh, and then there's one guy who's got leather patches on his elbows and it's chafing the people on either side of them's arms.

Oh god, they happen to be wearing short sleeves. Yeah, Neil always wears that thing.

So, um, it's really difficult to get across how groundbreaking Brian E. Cole's um, study was because she was working with really minimal, um, information. I saw that she went to the extent of like collecting like anecdotes from uh old fishermen who had who brought up stuff while they [snorts] were trollling. Um like and she put 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 um time period that it was above water.

So, what she did was a a an amazing triumph of intellect. Like, it's 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 Dogger Link because it was so convincing, too.

Yeah, for sure. um you know these these different little pictures of different points in time. Uh she said, "Hey, I think during the pale paleolithic um it might have gone all the way from the the Shetland Islands of Scotland to the Netherlands. Uh maybe I think during the holysine period that sea began to rise and it became an island for a while and then finally uh she put it at 5,500 BC she figured it disappeared entirely. Uh I've we've seen anywhere between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago is what people speculate.

Um but she even despite all that was like hey this is just I'm speculating here everybody. Um much later a uh archaeologist named Vincent Gaffffne along with a graduate student named Simon Fitch uh Fitch or Finch. Yeah, Fitch in 2001 uh got on the scene and after about 8 years of work, Gaffne said, "You know what? She was reasonably correct with all this stuff." Like nice, nice work.

And Gaffne 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. Um yeah, they were like

there are a lot of oil exploration companies that have been like 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 geoervices and uh PGS said sure we'll share we'll share a little bit of our our um undersea mapping with you. and they gave them um data for 23,000 square kilometers of the North Sea and Vincent Gaffne 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 uh 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.

So 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 was underwater archaeology at this point was like dive down uh in scuba gear, hope you find something. Um there 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 uh 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. But um Simon Fitch and Vincent Gaffne found out these maps are the resolution is not enough to be like there's a site, there's a site, a look that um skeletons waving at us, let's go investigate there, but it was enough to give it a give them a a big picture of Doggerland. And it was very clear that this was not just some landbridge. This was yeah, again like essentially a new country that they had

discovered under the sea. Um, and they were able to match that with existing finds.

Yeah. Like they're like, "Well, there's this mastadon um skull found over here and that makes sense that it would be here, so let's kind of look for humans over there." Um, that's that's the kind of technique that they managed to come up with.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. Uh, and in the end, they uh basically said, "We think this was not only were there people here, but uh they think it was a quote a significant messolithic population." And you know, it was, like you said, it was pretty groundbreaking. Um, I was I thought we did an episode on underwater archaeology, but I think it might have just been that I wrote that article for how StuffWorks.com back in the day.

Oh, we should do that then. No. Okay. I don't know if it was something I wrote. I'm not sure it's

No, you've written tons of good stuff. Oh, you're sweet. uh in 2022 um well I guess uh we should mention in 2014 Gaffne started working at the UN uh University of Bradford

uh and he founded the submerged landscape research group there because he was dogged about Doggerland. Uh and then eventually in 2022, I guess sevenish years later, eight years later, uh he joined the Unpath 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 was cool. Yeah, it is. So, the resolution is it's very like um like pitfall.

It's that level of bit resolution. The reason why is because if they took all the data that they actually have and rendered it in some sort of way that looked kind of whisbang, it would crash your computer the moment you started to try to load it, right? So they had to because there's so much information that they have, they had to kind of narrow it back down into that kind of a lower resolution version. But the stuff that it does is amazing. Like you can go forward in time, backward in time. You can see the sea level rise and fall. Um the you can actually control people by setting up a camp and then sitting back and watching what they do and if there's like a um a caribou or a moose or something nearby, they'll go kill it and then they process the carcass and it just does all this different super cool stuff. It's definitely worth checking out. The unpath waters undreamed shorelines, I think.

Wow, that's a very pretty name. It is. Uh should we take another break and talk about what was there? Uh yeah, let's take let's take that break. All right, Chuck. So, ever since Brian E. polls um came up with the Doggerland speculative maps and Vince and Gaffffne and Simon Finch and all of the um projects that they've worked on have have you know improved that information. Um, in addition to all that, more and more artifacts have been coming up. And apparently there's a good working relationship between archaeologists who are studying Doggerland and the trollling fishermen who bring in these um finds. Because before it was like, "Hey, check out this this uh what what do they call them? More logs. This big chunk of logs. And look, there's a probably what a masttoon tooth. Is that what that is?"

And they'd say, "Well, where did you get this?" And be like, "I don't know. I was over I somewhere in the east north sea and that didn't help very much. But now that they've kind of formed this relationship with these fishermen, the fishermen are like, well, here's the here's the GPS data for where we pulled that up and now the our underwater archaeologists can go and look and say like, yep, this this seems like a good site to explore. The problem is this. The the this area is so covered in sediment that even for underwater archaeology, this is a challenging place to find artifacts because there's so many rivers that flow into the North Sea. And unlike rivers that flow into the ocean, that sediment doesn't just disperse. It gets trapped between the UK and Europe. So, it just settles and there's a lot of sediment on top.

Yeah. Very messy scene. Uh but nevertheless they have persevered and learned a lot about what was there uh through these finds. In 2017

uh they were trying to you know they were trying to figure out what plants and animals were there and they figured hey during the younger das which we all know now because uh we did that episode very recently on the younger das

that was a happy episode too. They said Doggerland was a was a tundra. It was just ferns and shrubs and grasses. uh the climate started warming over you know the course of thousands of years and during the uh pre-boreal period the holysine uh there were birch and pine trees and all of a sudden it went from a tundra to a forest

and then later during the actual boreal period um birch got replaced by hazel and you got these freshwater lakes uh which is you know early on remember when they found that uh they did the pollen analysis and they found that freshwater evidence so that kind of explains that And as far as the animals living there, uh that is shifting along with the climate basically over the period of you know tens and hundreds of thousands of years.

Yeah. Because those those animals were adapted to um the ice age. And so when the younger dus was like ice age is back, those animals hadn't died out yet. So they're like awesome, we got another 1300 years. But after the younger dus ended and the ice age finally came to an end about 11,600 years ago, the things like the woolly rhinoceros and mammoths and reindeer had uh really nowhere to go and largely died off or else migrated northward

and they were replaced by wild boar. Birds came along, which is always a good thing. Otter showed up.

If Yeah. If you've ever seen an otter holding hands with another otter, you're glad that those otter showed up. Beavers, one of our favorite animal episodes. Um, it's it was just a huge change in not only the vegetation, but also the animal life. And the animal life also included humans, too.

Yeah. I mean, we mentioned there were people there, and there were the first hominids there. Uh, well, they weren't human, actually, so I sort of misspoke, but they were called Homo uh anticessor, which was the predecessor to humans, and they were there about 800,000 years ago. And then finally, you know, we mentioned that Neanderl fragment, skull fragment. Um, they moved in when Doggerland was a tundra. Uh, and I guess it was 2001 when they found that uh skull fragment. This is off the coast of the Netherlands. And they named this one. I love it when they name uh these, you know, ancient humans, but uh I'm not even going to try and pronounce it. It's K R I JN. Not sure how you would say that in Dutch. I saw that it was one syllable, so I'm not sure either, but it's not kin like I was saying.

The J's got to be silent, right? It's It does something weird. Yeah, it does something weird. Uh but they um reckon that fossil, they dated it to about 70,000 years old.

And they said this guy probably ate a lot of uh meat as his diet, maybe some fish.

Um but definitely was chowing down on some pretty good food. Um, and then you know they found all sorts of stuff over the years on the coast of the Netherlands Netherlands just like like a bone point or an axe or any kind of carved pointed you know arrowhead or harpoon head would just wash up on shore.

Yeah, this is some of the evidence that we have that um that Neanderthalss were pretty smart and actually well adapted or suited to cold climates. So they were still around during the younger dus. humans had kind of come along um before the younger dus the younger dus came along they beat them back and then finally after the younger dus um homo sapiens really start to show up.

Yeah. I think as early as like 14,000 years ago um and again this is the the beginning of the mealithic in Europe and they were hunter gatherers. They had just basically migrated westward from continental Europe because they could get there by walking um from Europe to the UK and they were like, "This Dogggerland place is pretty nice. We're going to stick around here."

Yeah. So, you know, for a while they were migrating around, following the animals, going where the food was.

Uh but they said, you know, they're basically like anyone else from that time uh in that place from that era and area. Uh man, this is really just fitting together like a glove, you know.

I love it. Uh they were, you know, carving things from stone, carving things from antlers. We have direct evidence of both. And animal bones, they were wearing animal skins. Um but they said they think eventually, like you said, they decided like, hey, this place is nice. Let's let's set up camp here and maybe even farmed there.

Yeah. So this is where the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic happens. It's pretty much what they consider the the change or the beginning of the Neolithic was when people started farming. And that happened on Dogger land.

Um, this is where they essentially found the place that they could grow crops. It was warmer then around this time than it was than it is now in that area. So they were very easily raising crops, figuring it out as they went along. So that because they were raising crops, they were more sedentary, which means that their populations grew a little larger. So, some of the things they're starting to find are like um evidence of villages. There's a a really amazing underwater archaeological site called Bolder Cliff off the aisle of White and they've found what seems to be like a dock that probably went out into an ancient river. Um there was like burials there, houses and pits. Like there's a lot of really cool stuff. And this is a really tanalyzing view of and I can't use that word enough in this episode, tanalyzing. This is a tanalyzing view of all the stuff that's probably underwater throughout Doggerland.

Yeah. And I guess we should talk about why it's underwater. Uh this, you know, I think we already kind of gave it away that it didn't happen all at once. It happened over hundreds of thousands of years, little by little.

Uh glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising. Um, and there's, you know, like I said, estimates anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 years ago, uh, or 7,000 rather of when people think it finally like, you know, was completely submerged. Um, and it may not, you know, it may have become so uninhabitable, you know, long before that, maybe even thousands of years before that.

Why? Uh, well, I mean, there's a couple of theories. There's a tsunami theory um that says about 8,000 years ago there were a bunch of massive tsunamis that you know pummeled the coast of Britain and completely wiped out Dogger land. Uh and they were caused by these submarine landslides in the Norwegian Sea called the Sterega slides.

Uh but Gaffne was like I don't think it was that actually. I think it was uh climate change because I think Doggerland itself like I he didn't doubt the tsunamis happened but he said I think Doggerland itself was kind of protected by the the wooded hilly terrain.

Yeah. But still a lot of people would have died because they think that the tsunami swept 25 miles inland which is Yeah. It's a lot of a lot of settlements that you can take out 25 miles in. And I don't know if you remember, but in our younger dus episode, we talked about um isostatic rebound or adjustment where the glaciers and ice sheets were so heavy that they actually pushed the earth downward and it took some areas of laying down with it like Scotland, but it raised other areas up. Kind of like if you put a bowling ball on a mattress, which you know you usually do. And one of the areas that got raised up was Doggerland, right? So when the glaciers melted, Doggerland started to sink. And then in addition to that, the glaciers melting made the sea levels rise, which is why this stuff was happening so quickly. They think that possibly sea level rise was happening as fast as a meter over a century, which doesn't

sound like much, but right now the sea level rise we're worried about is happening like 30 centimeters a century. So that is a really fast uh sea level rise. So, it's not like it would have caught people off guard, but their way of life would have been disrupted pretty significantly by the tsunamis and the sea level rise.

Yeah, I saw even, you know, potentially up to 2 meters per century. So, that's, you know, super fast.

Super. That's like twice as fast at least. So, as the as the sea levels rose and Doggerland sank, Scotland, by the way, is still rising. Um, the land wasn't just some flat mass. There were highlands, there were hills and all that. So little by little it was submerged and they think that the last bit was probably Dogger Dogger's Bank because it's so it's one of the most shallow parts of the North Sea. And by the time it was completely submerged, all the people who had moved upward in the British Isles were now officially British. They were cut off from Europe now for the first time. And like you said, that was between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago.

uh these days uh there's sort of a new threat to the idea of a lot more science happening there uh because of those wind farms you mentioned early on. It's it's a pretty great area for wind farming.

Um but it's threatening uh you know parts of the North Sea. Uh like we said, it's it's fairly shallow as far as seas go and there's lots of great wind there. Uh and the plan is by 2030 uh that the southern part of the North Sea is just going to be riddled with wind farms. Uh the downside of that, I mean this great renewable energy, but the downside is that that stuff is really disruptive to um the the ecology there and certainly disruptive to all those Doggerland sites that they're still hoping to explore.

Yeah, I was reading that because this North Sea is so shallow, um the the kind of wind farms that they can put in can actually be bolted to the bedrock, which is way cheaper than like the floating version. So they're salivating over putting wind farms there. But again, that means that they're bolting wind turbines to Doggerland, which is nay good for the archaeological aspect. It's naked,

right? That's exactly right. So they don't I mean, it seems like these wind farms are going on. Stupid wind farms always ruining the environment for everybody.

Yeah. Uh, and I don't know that anybody's going to be able to change it because everybody thinks Doggerland's cool, but not necessarily disrupt progress as far as renewable energy goes. Cool.

Yeah. So, [snorts] I guess that's it for Doggerland. That's right. Uh, Chuck said that's right, which means everybody, it's time for listener mail.

Uh, this is from Andy. Hey guys, been listening since CO 2020. Uh, I've heard your entire library and I've almost agreed with everything that Chuck says. Uh, I think it was titled Brother from Another Mother. Uh, we're close in age, so we have similar childhood memories. And this morning when Chuck brought up the guitar solo from My Chirona, I knew that we were made from the same cloth because for many years now, I have touted that guitar solo as my most favorite solo of all time.

Wow. Uh, glad to hear that I'm not alone. So, thank you, Chuck, uh, for being like a brother to me. Uh, on another note, you failed to mention the true father of AM radio guys, Nicola Tesla.

Tesla actually patented the technology before Maronei did, making him the actual father of radio. Maronei quote bothered and quote Tesla's technology and ran with it. And he was just a much better businessman than Tesla, so he was able to monetize the technology, earning him the notoriety that he has today as the father of radio.

So Jefferson Starship should have said Tesla plays the mambbo. Yeah, I guess so. Okay.

Tesla played the mamba. It works. It would have worked. Yeah. Read many books on Nicola Tesla and his inventions and find him one of the most fascinating men of all time. Without him, we might not have had such things as the remote control, robotics, and wireless transmission. Uh, thanks for everything, guys. You make my commute to work relaxing and educational three days of the week. And that is Andy McDonald.

Thanks, Andy. That was a good email. Um, surely then if you've listened to our back catalog, you're aware of the the electricity wars we went over with Edison and Tesla, but I feel like Tesla could definitely stand his own episode too.

Yeah, maybe. Okay. Um, well, let's see. If you want to get in touch with us like Andy, you can do that. Send us an email. You say whatever you want. Uh, send it off to stuffodcast.com.

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Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Doggerland: Lost at Sea | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"?

Josh Clark (Host), Chuck Bryant (Host), Jerry (Guest), Andy McDonald (Guest).

What is "Doggerland: Lost at Sea | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW" about?

Doggerland is a submerged landmass in the North Sea that once connected the UK to mainland Europe, believed to have been a flourishing habitat for plants, animals, and humans during the Mesolithic era. As sea levels rose, this once densely populated area was lost to the ocean, highlighting the significant geological and historical transformations in Europe.

What is mentioned in this Stuff You Should Know episode?

51 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Doggerland, North Sea, Chuck Bryan, Vincent Gaffney, Nikola Tesla, Younger Dryas. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Doggerland: Lost at Sea | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"?

The episode runs 39 min; the transcript is about 7,108 words in 131 timestamped sections.

More from Stuff You Should Know

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.