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Doggerland – The Land Beneath the North Sea · Lost Civilizations: Ancient Aliens & Forgotten History

• 0:00
  It's September, 1931. A fishing trawler called
• 0:05
  the Colinda is out on the North Sea,
• 0:07
  somewhere between Leman Bank and Ower Bank, roughly 25
• 0:11
  miles off the coast of Norfolk.
• 0:13
  The skipper's name is Pilgrim Lockwood, and he's
• 0:16
  doing what fishermen along that stretch of
• 0:19
  the North Sea have done for years: trawling
• 0:22
  for herring — not for history.
• 0:25
  But when the net comes up, something's caught
• 0:28
  in it that isn't fish.
• 0:31
  A lump of dark, dense peat.
• 0:35
  The kind fishermen call "moorlog" — old, compressed forest
• 0:39
  floor, which they sometimes drag up from the
• 0:42
  seabed and just toss right back overboard,
• 0:47
  because who wants a chunk of peat.
• 0:49
  But this time, the lump stays on
• 0:52
  deck. And when it gets broken open, something
• 0:55
  falls out of it.
• 0:56
  A point carved from antler — worked, with
• 1:01
  barbs cut into the side. Not natural. Shaped
• 1:05
  by a human hand.
• 1:06
  It gets examined by the British Museum and
• 1:09
  presented to the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia
• 1:13
  in February 1932.
• 1:17
  At the time, people figured it was
• 1:19
  a few thousand years old.
• 1:21
  It was old — just not quite in the
• 1:25
  way anyone expected.
• 1:27
  When it was finally properly radiocarbon-dated in
• 1:30
  1988, it turned out to be somewhere
• 1:33
  between 11,950 and 11,300 years old.
• 1:40
  Older than most of Europe's famous cave
• 1:43
  paintings. Older than Stonehenge. Older than the
• 1:46
  pyramids — several times over. A harpoon, made by
• 1:50
  a human being, pulled up from the seabed 25
• 1:53
  miles from land, deep underwater, where today there's
• 1:58
  nothing but herring and oil rigs.
• 2:01
  It ended up there because there used
• 2:04
  to be no sea at all in that spot.
• 2:08
  There was land.
• 2:09
  There were rivers. There was forest. And
• 2:12
  there were people, hunting.
• 2:14
  Today, we've given that landscape a name:
• 2:16
  Doggerland.
• 2:22
  Fair question:
• 2:24
  why now?
• 2:26
  Doggerland isn't exactly breaking news
• 2:29
  — the idea of a lost land under the
• 2:31
  North Sea is over a hundred years old.
• 2:34
  But in the spring of 2026, a study
• 2:39
  came out in the scientific journal PNAS, led
• 2:43
  by Professor Robin Allaby of the University of
• 2:46
  Warwick, that gave us the most detailed picture of
• 2:49
  Doggerland we've ever had. Not by digging into
• 2:53
  soil — there's no soil left to dig
• 2:55
  into — but by reading DNA straight out of
• 2:58
  the seafloor sediment.
• 3:00
  Molecular sonar, you could almost call it.
• 3:04
  That's the kind of research that suddenly puts
• 3:07
  a subject like Doggerland back on the news feed.
• 3:10
  And it's also our excuse today to dig
• 3:15
  — or dive, if you prefer — into the story
• 3:17
  of this vanished land, the people who lived
• 3:20
  there, and the theories that have grown up
• 3:23
  around it.
• 3:23
  Some of those theories hold up. Some don't.
• 3:27
  And one of them, let's just say,
• 3:29
  is a pretty creative piece of fiction.
• 3:35
  Let's start
• 3:38
  with the geology, because that's actually where the
• 3:42
  story begins.
• 3:44
  In the early 1900s, an English geologist and
• 3:48
  botanist named Clement Reid was walking the
• 3:52
  coastline near Norfolk when he noticed something strange.
• 3:55
  At low tide, especially after storms, you could
• 3:58
  see rows of old tree stumps sticking up
• 4:01
  out of the sand and mud, far out where
• 4:05
  the sea normally covered them.
• 4:07
  Locals called them "Noah's Woods" —
• 4:10
  a nod to the biblical flood, because nobody
• 4:13
  could explain how a forest could be standing
• 4:15
  where there was now open sea.
• 4:19
  Reid gathered his observations into a book called
• 4:22
  "Submerged Forests," published in 1913, and he was actually
• 4:26
  the first person to seriously propose that
• 4:28
  there had once been a connected landmass sitting
• 4:32
  under what we now call the southern North
• 4:36
  Sea.
• 4:37
  He had no satellite imagery, no
• 4:40
  sonar, no DNA analysis. He had
• 4:42
  a pair of rubber boots and a healthy
• 4:45
  dose of curiosity — and he nailed it.
• 4:49
  It took several more decades, though, before the place
• 4:53
  got a proper name.
• 4:55
  That happened in 1998, when archaeologist Bryony
• 5:01
  Coles of the University of Exeter published a
• 5:04
  paper titled "Doggerland: a Speculative Survey"
• 5:07
  in the journal of the Prehistoric Society. She
• 5:11
  named it after Dogger Bank, the shallow sandbank
• 5:15
  in the middle of the North Sea
• 5:17
  that fishermen had known for years as a
• 5:20
  great fishing spot — without realizing they were actually
• 5:23
  fishing over the top of an old hill
• 5:26
  in a drowned landscape.
• 5:29
  And that brings us to the man who,
• 5:31
  more than anyone else, put Doggerland on
• 5:37
  the scientific map: Vincent Gaffney, an archaeologist at
• 5:42
  the University of Bradford.
• 5:44
  In the early 2000s, he and his colleague
• 5:46
  Ken Thomson had an idea that sounds almost
• 5:51
  too simple, but turned out to be brilliant:
• 5:53
  the oil and gas industry had spent years
• 5:56
  running seismic surveys to hunt for oil beneath
• 5:59
  the North Sea floor.
• 6:01
  That same data could be used for something
• 6:04
  entirely different — mapping the landscape that used to
• 6:07
  sit there, before the sea covered it
• 6:10
  up.
• 6:11
  Between 2003 and 2007, Gaffney's team mapped over
• 6:14
  23,000 square kilometers of that ancient landscape — rivers,
• 6:20
  lakes, marshes, ridgelines.
• 6:23
  And from 2015 onward, the University of Bradford
• 6:27
  took it even further with the "Europe's Lost
• 6:30
  Frontiers" project, funded by a major EU research
• 6:35
  grant, where a team of more than 30
• 6:39
  researchers began drilling sediment cores straight down
• 6:43
  into the seabed to get physical samples of
• 6:47
  the old landscape — not just a map, but
• 6:49
  actual pieces of the ground itself.
• 6:52
  The picture that's emerged is of a landscape
• 6:55
  that, at its peak — roughly 10,000 to
• 6:58
  8,000 years ago — connected Britain to
• 7:01
  continental Europe.
• 7:03
  Not a narrow land bridge, but a large,
• 7:06
  continuous region, full of rivers, marshes, forests, and,
• 7:11
  in all likelihood, quite a lot of people.
• 7:13
  But
• 7:23
  how do we actually know
• 7:25
  people lived there, and not just animals
• 7:28
  and plants?
• 7:30
  That's where Star Carr comes in.
• 7:33
  Star Carr is a site in Yorkshire — so on
• 7:37
  mainland Britain today, but back then it
• 7:40
  sat right at the edge of Doggerland, on
• 7:43
  the shore of a lake.
• 7:45
  It was first excavated by archaeologist Grahame
• 7:48
  Clark in 1948, and later, with far more
• 7:52
  advanced techniques, by Nicky Milner and her team.
• 7:56
  Star Carr is famous for one very particular find: headdresses
• 8:01
  made from red deer skulls, with the antlers
• 8:05
  trimmed down and holes punched through for
• 8:09
  straps, so they could be tied onto someone's
• 8:13
  head.
• 8:14
  At least 21 of them have been found.
• 8:17
  We don't know for certain what they
• 8:21
  were used for — hunting camouflage is one theory,
• 8:24
  some form of shamanic or ceremonial use is
• 8:29
  another. But they're about 11,000 years
• 8:33
  old, and they've been on display at
• 8:37
  the archaeology museum in Cambridge since 2018.
• 8:42
  What Star Carr tells us is that the people
• 8:45
  living on the edge of Doggerland weren't
• 8:47
  just a handful of wandering hunters. They had
• 8:51
  rituals. They had craftsmanship. They had, you could
• 8:55
  argue, culture, in the fullest sense of the
• 8:58
  word.
• 9:01
  And then there's Cheddar Man. He
• 9:02
  wasn't found in Doggerland — he was excavated all
• 9:05
  the way back in 1903, in a cave
• 9:09
  in Cheddar Gorge, in Somerset, southwest of the
• 9:15
  Doggerland region.
• 9:16
  But he's relevant, because he tells us
• 9:18
  something about who these people actually were.
• 9:23
  He's roughly 10,000 years old, and
• 9:25
  in 2018, researchers from the Natural History Museum
• 9:29
  and University College London managed to
• 9:32
  extract DNA from a tiny bone in his
• 9:35
  ear.
• 9:36
  The results surprised a lot of people:
• 9:39
  dark skin, blue-green eyes, dark, curly hair.
• 9:45
  He belonged to the same population group that
• 9:47
  must have lived in and around Doggerland — and
• 9:51
  researchers have actually identified a living descendant of his through a
• 9:56
  DNA match: a history teacher named Adrian Targett,
• 10:01
  who lives just a couple of miles from
• 10:03
  the cave where Cheddar Man was found.
• 10:07
  So the picture that emerges isn't of a
• 10:10
  few scattered hunters roaming a barren tundra.
• 10:16
  It's of a rich, populated landscape, with culture, ritual,
• 10:19
  and a population whose genetic fingerprint
• 10:23
  is still traceable in us today.
• 10:31
  Now let's get to the story
• 10:34
  of
• 10:36
  how it all ended. And here's
• 10:39
  where things get dramatic.
• 10:42
  Off the coast of Norway, along an undersea
• 10:45
  slope called Storegga, roughly 8,150 to 8,200
• 10:52
  years ago — around 6200 BCE — a
• 10:57
  massive underwater landslide occurred.
• 11:00
  An enormous section of the seabed simply gave
• 11:03
  way and slid down into the deep ocean,
• 11:06
  and that triggered a tsunami that spread out
• 11:08
  across the entire northern Atlantic and North
• 11:11
  Sea.
• 11:12
  For years, researchers have debated just how hard
• 11:15
  this tsunami hit Doggerland — and whether it was
• 11:19
  even the direct cause of the land's disappearance.
• 11:23
  A 2020 study, led by Vincent Gaffney
• 11:26
  and his team, found the first solid, confirmed
• 11:29
  evidence that the tsunami hit Doggerland directly:
• 11:33
  a sediment core, drilled up from what was
• 11:37
  once a river system researchers call "the
• 11:41
  Southern River," showed clear traces of a sudden,
• 11:46
  violent flood layer.
• 11:48
  But here's the important detail that a
• 11:50
  lot of the more sensational retellings leave out:
• 11:55
  DNA analysis of that very sediment showed
• 12:00
  the landscape actually recovered after the tsunami.
• 12:04
  The forest grew back. So the tsunami alone didn't
• 12:08
  send Doggerland to its grave.
• 12:11
  The final flooding was caused by the slow,
• 12:14
  relentless rise in sea level that continued
• 12:17
  for thousands of years after the tsunami.
• 12:22
  And that's where one of the more exciting
• 12:25
  — and more speculative — theories comes in:
• 12:28
  that Doggerland's population, forced to relocate as
• 12:32
  their land shrank away beneath them, didn't
• 12:37
  just disappear or drown — they moved into Britain
• 12:41
  and directly contributed to a shift from a
• 12:45
  hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming — what we now
• 12:48
  call the Neolithic transition.
• 12:56
  Now let's go a
• 12:57
  shovel deeper into what,
• 12:59
  for better or worse,
• 13:03
  is the internet's
• 13:06
  version of Doggerland.
• 13:08
  A popular YouTube channel called Ancient Architects has
• 13:12
  put forward a theory that up to 20,000
• 13:15
  of Doggerland's estimated 100,000 residents didn't
• 13:20
  just move into Britain, they actively seeded the
• 13:24
  Neolithic revolution there.
• 13:27
  It's a catchy idea, but it should be
• 13:30
  said straight away that the channel's own
• 13:34
  narrative is quick to flag it as speculation.
• 13:38
  "We just don't know, but it's certainly possible,"
• 13:41
  as they put it.
• 13:43
  The same source also hints at a possible connection
• 13:46
  between Doggerland's refugees and the famous Anatolian temple
• 13:51
  complex Göbekli Tepe, in modern-day Turkey
• 13:55
  — a connection that, to be fair, has no
• 13:59
  archaeological documentation behind it.
• 14:02
  There are thousands of miles between, and quite
• 14:05
  a few years between the two places, and
• 14:08
  there's no find that ties them together.
• 14:12
  But then there's a story that's a bit worse than merely speculative.
• 14:15
  One of the sources we reviewed for this
• 14:18
  episode, a French video, tells a
• 14:21
  fascinating tale about the famous underwater archaeologist Franck
• 14:25
  Goddio discovering an "Atlantean temple city" on
• 14:30
  Dogger Bank — complete with a 60-mile canal
• 14:34
  and more than 65 shipwrecks loaded with gold.
• 14:39
  It's a great story.
• 14:42
  It is just not true.
• 14:45
  Franck Goddio is a very real, internationally respected
• 14:48
  underwater archaeologist, but his career has played out
• 14:52
  somewhere entirely different from the North Sea:
• 14:55
  in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Egypt,
• 14:59
  where in the year 2000 he discovered
• 15:02
  the real, lost city of Thonis-Heracleion — and yes, that's a name that isn't exactly built to roll off the tongue, but we're working on it.
• 15:09
  Goddio never worked in the North Sea, and there
• 15:11
  is no documentation whatsoever of a channel, a
• 15:14
  temple city, or gold-filled shipwrecks on Dogger
• 15:18
  Bank.
• 15:19
  As far as we can tell, the story
• 15:21
  is entirely made up — a fabricated pseudo-documentary
• 15:25
  that borrows a real, respected name to lend
• 15:29
  a false story
• 15:33
  authority. That's a great example of what this podcast
• 15:36
  calls a "false anomaly" — something that looks like
• 15:40
  a mystery but is really just a construction.
• 15:48
  So let's take one step back and look
• 15:50
  at what actually holds up, once you
• 15:53
  set the wildest theories aside.
• 15:56
  The idea that Doggerland's population contributed to Britain's
• 16:03
  Neolithic transition isn't unreasonable on its face
• 16:07
  — population movement over time, as a landmass shrinks,
• 16:10
  is a well-documented archaeological pattern. But "contributed
• 16:15
  to" is a rather different claim from "single-handedly
• 16:18
  seeded,"
• 16:21
  and, as noted, there is no direct evidence
• 16:25
  for a Göbekli Tepe connection.
• 16:27
  It's an idea, not a conclusion.
• 16:31
  And when it comes to the tsunami, the
• 16:35
  crucial nuance is this:
• 16:37
  the Storegga tsunami was a dramatic, violent moment
• 16:43
  in Doggerland's history — but it wasn't the killing
• 16:46
  blow.
• 16:47
  The landscape survived it.
• 16:50
  What finally put Doggerland under the waves was
• 16:54
  the slow, nearly imperceptible rise in sea level
• 16:59
  over thousands of years, combined with what geologists
• 17:03
  call isostatic rebound
• 17:05
  — the Earth's crust slowly springing back after the
• 17:10
  enormous ice sheets of the last glacial period
• 17:13
  melted away.
• 17:15
  That process was first seriously modeled by geophysicist
• 17:21
  Kurt Lambeck back in the mid-1990s.
• 17:25
  And the Franck Goddio story? As we've covered,
• 17:29
  it simply doesn't hold up. Full stop.
• 17:34
  So what's
• 17:37
  the newest thing we
• 17:40
  can actually trust?
• 17:41
  That brings us back to the study we
• 17:44
  opened with:
• 17:45
  Robin Allaby and his team's work, published in PNAS
• 17:49
  in March 2026.
• 17:52
  The team analyzed 252 sediment samples from 41
• 17:58
  different cores drilled into the seafloor along that
• 18:04
  same ancient "Southern River" system — the very
• 18:07
  same river system that produced Gaffney's tsunami evidence.
• 18:13
  By reading DNA traces directly out of the
• 18:16
  sediment — without a single bone fragment or
• 18:20
  piece of wood to analyze, just the microscopic
• 18:23
  traces plants and animals leave behind in the ground
• 18:28
  over thousands of years — they found DNA from
• 18:31
  temperate forest species: oak, elm, hazel. And
• 18:37
  it showed up in layers more
• 18:40
  than 16,000 years old.
• 18:42
  That's far earlier than pollen records
• 18:44
  from mainland Britain had previously suggested for
• 18:47
  that kind of forest in this part of
• 18:50
  the world.
• 18:51
  But the most surprising detail is probably this:
• 18:54
  they found DNA from a walnut relative called
• 18:57
  Pterocarya — a tree genus believed to have gone
• 19:03
  extinct in northwest Europe since an earlier
• 19:07
  ice age roughly 400,000 years ago.
• 19:10
  Finding traces of it here suggests that
• 19:12
  southern Doggerland functioned as what's called a "refugium"
• 19:18
  — a sheltered pocket of climate where species could
• 19:20
  survive the worst of the ice age, while
• 19:24
  much of the surrounding continent lay buried under
• 19:28
  ice or tundra.
• 19:30
  That also means the final flooding of
• 19:32
  Doggerland can now be dated to roughly 6,000
• 19:35
  years ago — about 1,000 years later
• 19:39
  than previously believed.
• 19:41
  The land held on longer than anyone realized.
• 19:50
  So here's where we land. A rich,
• 19:53
  populated landscape that existed for thousands
• 19:56
  of years, survived one of the most violent
• 20:00
  natural disasters in Northern Europe's post-Ice Age
• 20:04
  history, and finally vanished so slowly and gradually
• 20:07
  that no single person likely experienced it as
• 20:10
  a catastrophe — just as the sea, year after
• 20:14
  year, creeping a little closer.
• 20:16
  And that brings us to one of the
• 20:17
  most interesting — and honestly, kind of surprising —
• 20:22
  points in this whole story:
• 20:24
  Doggerland is almost entirely absent from local English
• 20:28
  and Dutch folklore.
• 20:30
  There's no widespread legend of a drowned
• 20:32
  kingdom in the North Sea, no "North Sea
• 20:35
  Atlantis" living on in popular tradition, even though
• 20:41
  we now know for certain that
• 20:43
  an inhabited landscape really was there, and
• 20:47
  that it really did disappear beneath the waves.
• 20:50
  That's striking, because other cultures have this
• 20:53
  kind of myth in abundance.
• 20:56
  The Welsh legend of Cantre'r Gwaelod tells of
• 21:00
  a drowned kingdom in Cardigan Bay — but
• 21:04
  it has to be said, there's
• 21:06
  no reliable physical evidence that it ever existed
• 21:10
  as described.
• 21:11
  The Breton legend of the city of Ys
• 21:15
  is more interesting: in 2022, divers
• 21:19
  found genuine underwater structures near the Île de Sein,
• 21:24
  including a wall about 400 feet long, dated
• 21:28
  to roughly 7,000 years old — which has led some
• 21:32
  researchers to speculate that the myth of Ys
• 21:36
  itself might be inspired by a real drowned
• 21:39
  settlement.
• 21:41
  So here we have a well-known, undocumented
• 21:45
  legend
• 21:46
  (Cantre'r Gwaelod), a legend with a possible real
• 21:50
  archaeological fingerprint (Ys) — and then Doggerland,
• 21:54
  which is a hundred percent documented reality,
• 21:59
  but with no surviving myth at all.
• 22:02
  Why is that?
• 22:04
  Is it because the flooding was too slow to
• 22:07
  make a good story — no dramatic, sudden catastrophe
• 22:10
  to retell around the campfire?
• 22:12
  Is it because the people who experienced it
• 22:15
  scattered so widely that their stories dissolved
• 22:18
  instead of surviving as one shared narrative?
• 22:23
  Or have we simply not found the surviving
• 22:26
  tradition yet, if one even exists?
• 22:31
  That's not a question this episode can answer
• 22:34
  for certain. But it's, I think, one of the
• 22:37
  most thought-provoking parts of the whole Doggerland
• 22:40
  story: an entire country, an entire civilization, can
• 22:47
  vanish so completely that it didn't just sink
• 22:50
  beneath the sea
• 22:51
  — it slipped out of our collective memory too.
• 22:54
  And it took science — geologists in rubber boots,
• 22:58
  archaeologists with seismic data, and geneticists with DNA
• 23:01
  sequencing — more than a hundred years to give it
• 23:04
  back to us.
• 23:05
  And speaking of things that are hard to
• 23:07
  pronounce — thanks for putting up with my French
• 23:11
  first name for another episode.
• 23:15
  It's René, not "Reen-ay," not "Ren." We'll
• 23:18
  get there
• 23:20
  eventually. Thanks for listening. See you
• 23:22
  next episode.