This book has been sitting in my "to be read" pile for ages. I finally was motivated to read it after finishing Tim Flannery's "Europe: A Natural History," which I have reviewed here. I faulted Flannery on two grounds: not giving enough background on how we know what we know, i.e. methodology, and not devoting enough attention to the reoccupation of Europe after deglaciation. In a sense, this book is a remedy for both.
During the glacial maxima so much water was removed from the oceans that sea levels fell some 400 feet or more below today's. As a result a great deal of continental shelf was dry land, but was submerged once the ice melted. When the shelf was exposed many areas which are now islands were merely high points in a dry landscape, allowing free passage for plants and animals. We know that Florida was much bigger then than now and served as a refugium for many organisms displaced southward by the glaciers. The role of the Bering "land bridge" between Asia and North America was first suggested as far back as 1590 (!). Biogeographers familiar with the SW Pacific routinely speak of "Sundaland," the vast area connected back then but now fragmented into thousands of islands. "Doggerland," named for the Dogger Bank, a troublesome shoal in the North Sea, is the area now underwater but then dry and connecting the British Isles to the Continent. In the 19th Century oyster dredgers routinely dragged up strange debris from the floor of the North Sea: gobs of peat or lignite, which they called "moorlog," as well as fossils of extinct megafauna and, every once in a while, human artifacts. There were also visible remains of drowned forests along the immediate shore. Clement Reid (1853-1916) put all this together and published a book ("Submerged Forests") about Doggerland in 1913. Thus it was known over a century ago that there had been dry land--an area as large or larger than the British Isles, as it turns out--where the sea is today, and that it was occupied by plants, animals, and, apparently, people. The technology to get at a more complete picture of this lost world only became available in the past few decades. This remarkable and copiously-illustrated book explains that technology, how it was brought to bear, what we have learned and what we would like to (but may never) learn. For those interested in how science works as a synthetic enterprise, this is an immensely valuable "read." It may be too technical for the average lay reader, however. It was published as a technical report of the Council for British Archaeology, and the authors are leaders of the actual research team. They are well aware of the broader implications of their findings and where else in the world their methods might be brought to bear. However, Doggerland is unique in that so much geophysical and bathymetric data already existed before the paleoecological-archeological inquiry began. The Doggerland approach, if practical, could shed great light on the problem of the peopling of the Americas and of the SW Pacific. Most of us now believe the Americas were peopled not by pioneer hunter-gatherers trekking southward into the interior of North America via a narrow ice-free corridor (as routinely portrayed in textbooks), but in watercraft moving much more rapidly down the Pacific coasts of both continents. But the critical evidence, if it exists, is underwater, offshore. We now know that humans moved extraordinarily rapidly through SE Asia and the archaic SW Pacific. The aborigines were in Australia and New guinea 50-60,000 years ago. Australia and New Guinea were connected to each other but not to Sundaland, so some of this journey had to be in watercraft. We have a lot to learn.
The authors rightfully stress that previously-submerged areas were not merely "land bridges," or corridors for the dispersal of terrestrial organisms. Those organisms, including humans, not only dispersed across them, they lived and bred in them, sometimes for many millennia. That means changing sea levels have influenced not only the geographic pattern of occupancy, but the evolutionary history of the organisms as well.
The book provides a delightful resume of earlier submerged-world fantasies, including Atlantis and Mu. (One factual error: Madame Blavatsky's name was Helena Petrovna, not "Petrovsky" (p.131).) The authors do not mention the fantasy of a "lost Pacifica continent" that for a while in the 1970s enticed cladistic-vicariance geographers into erecting a strange explanatory edifice for trans-Pacific distributions. My late colleague Eldridge Moores, who more than anyone else popularized the concept of accreted, exogenous terranes along continental margins, to his great credit never took the "Pacifica" notion seriously.
The authors rightfully point out that projected sea-level rise due to climate change will predictably result in the history of Doggerland being repeated globally, including in many of the most densely-populated places on Earth. On p.162 there is a map of what Britain would look like if sea levels were to rise as much in coming centuries as they did at the end of the Pleistocene. It can be paraphrased "There'll always be...half an England."
Yesterday's New York Times had a big article about the pros and cons of building a massive seawall to prevent NYC from becoming another Doggerland.
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Top reviews from other countries
joy santink
was greatly pleased to receive it as was not aware such book ...
Reviewed in Canada on August 3, 2016
alf oddvin lund
new and exiting view at the mesolithique evolution from doggerland to the cost of norway.
Reviewed in France on March 23, 2014E. D. Shakespeare
Keep your wellies to hand
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 7, 2013Paul D. Foy
It's good to know about recent developments.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 12, 2024