Hacker News Reader

Comment by Empact | Hacker News Reader

Given human propensity to settle near bodies of water (exhibited even to this day), and the change in sea levels after the last ice age, the bulk of intra-ice age settlement artifacts are probably submerged within a relatively short distance from our existing coastlines. I would be personally interested in an effort to systematically investigate these areas.

View on HN

A recent episode of The Ancients talks about how oil and mineral exploration companies have been sharing their seismic mapping data of Doggerland with archeologists:

https://shows.acast.com/the-ancients/episodes/doggerland-the...

Partnering with industries that are mapping areas is certainly the only cost effective way for academic to work in submerged landscapes:

https://archaeology.org/issues/march-april-2022/letters-from...

That’s awfully short sighted.

The sea level rose more than 120 meters in the last 20000 years, so it won't necessarily be that short distance, but I think at least it should be easy to calculate where to look.

An area with a half % slope could have an entire city below the waterline.

I think we're going to find that much like central and parts of South America, the extent of civilization has been vastly underestimated because Nature has covered over it.

Yes, even more recently the entire space between England and continental Europe used to be connected landmass, Doggerland [1]. It was home to Mesolithic people just 8,200 years ago.

[1] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/doggerland...

It would be great to see more underwater archaeology, I'm sure there's a lot to find. But due to variations in local conditions it's really tough to systematically investigate: every site has to be treated individually. Plus doing anything underwater becomes at least 10× harder and more expensive. Human scientific divers can only work easily down to about 30m: anything significantly deeper requires commercial diving protocols, submersibles, or ROVs which raise the difficulty and cost even further.

I mean something more of the sort of a survey of sea floor and subsurface which would have been coastline at the glacial maxima, boats trawling multispectral scanners to identify candidate locations. There are a few different recent systems that push in the direction of this being feasible, e.g. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/cmhrp/news/usgs-designed-tool-...

The Australians have found a few sites between Australia and Papua New Guinea/Indonesia

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-28/underwater-ancient-ab...

This is not even the only stone age settlement under water in Denmark, there is at least one other I know of on Zealand, article in Danish about it: https://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/fagligt/marinarkaeologi/ma...

And here's one nearby in modern-day Sweden https://www.forskning.se/2016/11/07/valbevarade-spar-fran-st...

Sorry can't find much in English or much about it at all. Iirc I once chanced upon a meet-some-archaeologists stall set up in a town square nearby and listened to an archaeologist talking about it and showing fancy maps and diagrams that really excited me, but none of that seems to have spilled online.

There are likely way more, given that continental Europe was much larger just 8,000 years ago: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/doggerland

Agree strongly. Especially around the Mediterranean including the north coast of Africa and the southern horn of Africa. Ancient humans are known to have inhabited the southern tip of Africa into the last interglacial period, and human migration across and settlement in the occasionally green Sahara could explain some things.

Unfortunately most have probably been destroyed by dragnet fishing.

I was listening to Stefan Milo recently and he said something similar about how people might have lived along the coast of the Americas but because it was all mud and wood back then and is now covered in water, it'll mostly be lost at this point.

This is probably especially an issue for early North American settlements if people crossing over during the ice age glacial maximum were traveling down the coasts right after coming over the Bering Land Bridge

Less than you'd think. The white sands footprints push things back far enough that virtually all coastal sites would have been destroyed by glaciers at the LGM. We're still trying to map out the specific details.

Maybe if you specifically care about "the first people in North America". But even if that was really 20kYA+ (wild that this is a serious possibility now!) there's still a vast gulf of more recent prehistory that we know so little about. And there's probably loads of fascinating evidence to uncover.

The Gulf of Thailand to the Java Sea was dry land 16000 years ago. China's coastline was 100 miles out. New Guinea was fully connected to Australia. The Persian gulf was walkable.

https://sea-level.vercel.app/

The Archeology of Europe‘s Drowned Landscapes: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-37367-2

Reply on news.ycombinator.com