Lessons from a Lost Land
What we can learn from the experiences of the ancient climate refugees who were some of the first to reach Great Britain & some of the final thoughts on our future from one of the greatest scientists to come from these shores.
The UK Met Office’s annual look at the UK’s climate and weather reveals that sea levels are rising much faster than a century ago. Sea levels have risen by around 16.5 centimetres since 1900, but the Met Office says the rate of rise is increasing. They are now rising by 3–5.2 millimetres a year, more than double the rate of increase in the early part of the last century. The figures are concerning; the impacts could be profound. They could be as profound as the sea-level rises in our deep past that created this sceptered isle, for we have not always been an island group of nations. Under the oily grey gelatinous mass of the North Sea is a lost land destroyed by climate change. Its submersion created refugees who were among the first to arrive and settle in Great Britain. Understanding the story of this lost land and the impact of climate change on our long-dead ancestors might help us understand the scale of the impact the Met Office figures could generate and breathe life into the living today fleeing climate change, shedding a new light on their experiences.
In the early twentieth century, a new design of deep-sea trawling nets started to catch the bones of mammoths from the sea floor. Remains of horses, reindeer, wolves, and bears, animals from the Holocene, our current geological epoch which started 11,500 years ago, followed. The bones were not worn or damaged in any way as they would have been if buffeted by the tides and moved from elsewhere. They could only have been there because there, at the bottom of the cold grey sea, was where the animals had lived. There was an awareness of this lost land’s existence by the late 19th century. H. G. Wells referred to it in his “A Story of the Stone Age” which is set in “a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is underwater in these latter days.” But it had been conceived of as a land bridge, an ice age superhighway used to cross from one area of habitation to another.
Then in 1931, the trawler Colinda hauled up a lump of peat whilst fishing 25 miles east of Norfolk and it found the first evidence of the presence of our ancestors. The peat contained an eight and half inches long, barbed antler point, carved by hand to be used for hunting, which dated from between 4000 and 10,000 BC. It, like the animal bones, was not worn or damaged. It was found off Dogger Bank, a large sandbank in a shallow area of the North Sea about 62 miles off the east coast of England, named after medieval Dutch fishing boats, called doggers.
The work of Bryony Coles in the 1990s, who named the area “Doggerland” after “the great banks in the southern North Sea”, renewed interest and started to change our understanding of this lost land. Coles liked the etymology of dogger, which seems to derive from the Danish word dag, meaning dagger. Dogwood used to grow on Dogger Bank too. The pliable stems of that wood were used by Mesolithic peoples for making fish traps, while the hard heart wood was used for spears and daggers. Coles produced speculative maps of the area, recognising that due to millennia of settled sediment, the seafloor of the North Sea does not give a true representation of the topography of Doggerland. Coles described a land full of life.
Between 2003 and 2007, a team at the University of Birmingham led by Vince Gaffney and Ken Thomson started to produce a much more accurate mapping using seismic data provided for oil exploration research by Petroleum Geo-Services. These geological surveys have suggested that Doggerland stretched from what is now the east coast of Britain to the Netherlands, the western coast of Germany and the Danish peninsula of Jutland, its total size like that of England today.
We know the big picture story of the changing climate of the last few million years from ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers that show how the Earth’s climate has responded to changes in greenhouse gas levels. This is supported by evidence from tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. So, we know that during the last Ice Age, which began about 2,580,000 years ago, Britain was a highland peninsula of Europe, the far corner of the continent, covered in ice, but nonetheless joined by land to the rest of the continent. At the southern edge of the ice sheet a large lake was fed by some of northern Europe’s major rivers including the Thames and Rhine. South of this, the channel river flowed into the Atlantic. As much of the world’s water was bound up in ice the sea level was about 390 feet lower. As the climate warmed from 18,000 BC onwards the ice began to melt.
By around 12,000 BC, Britain, as well as much of the North Sea and the English Channel, was low-lying tundra. Herds of mammoths would have roamed the tundra. Woolly rhinoceros, Sabre toothed cats and cave lions would have shared this lost land with them. It was about this time that the eighth attempt to colonise Britain occurred and for the first time was successful. Our ancestors crossed Doggerland and migrated west to settle, as later the Beaker people, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Fleming, French Huguenots, Romani, Indians, Irish, Africans, Germans, Russian Jews, and then since 1945 many more from Ireland, the former colonies including the Windrush generation, from all over Europe, and countless other groups and individuals would all do. On a long enough timeline, we all come from somewhere else.
About 10,000 BC the north-facing coastal area of Doggerland had a coastline of lagoons, estuaries, tidal creeks, salt marshes, mudflats, and beaches as well as inland streams, rivers, freshwater marshes, and lakes. It may have been the richest hunting and fishing ground in Europe, with red and roe deer, elk and pig replacing the animals better suited to the cold tundra. By 9000 BC parts of the area would have consisted of woodland. But the glaciers continued to melt as the climate warmed and this caused sea levels to continue to rise. When we reach 6500 BC Doggerland was reduced to low-lying islands before its final submergence, possibly following a tsunami caused by the Storegga Slide, a great submarine landslide in which some one thousand miles of an underwater cliff collapsed close to the Norwegian coast. Another view speculates that the Storegga tsunami ebbed back into the sea, and that later Lake Agassiz (in North America) burst, releasing massive amounts of fresh water that caused sea levels to rise and the final flooding of Doggerland. Whatever the cause, Doggerland eventually became submerged, cutting off the British peninsula from the European mainland, leaving the upland Dogger Bank as an island until at least 5000 BC.
This process of warming and rising sea-levels would have caused profound changes to the nature and distribution of birds, animals, and vegetation. Woodland birds would have deserted areas where there were no longer berries or small prey to feast on. The land would have smelt and sounded different, the light would have changed as water seeped in and reflected the sun in ways the earth could not. As salt water encroached it would have killed the woodland in its path, semi-submerged dead forests would have stood as harbingers of what was to come for the people of Doggerland.
The figures describing the process of the submerging of Doggerland, suggest it was a slow process, a few centimetres a year, occurring over generations, maybe even imperceptible within a single lifespan. However, sea level rise is dynamic and non-linear. Rapid changes can happen abruptly as thresholds are breached and tipping points reached. These radical changes happened at the local level during people’s lifetimes. The people of Doggerland would have been denied access to land that they previously used for hunting, living on and a variety of other social purposes. But none of this tells us about the experience of the people of Doggerland. How did they cope with the loss of their land? For how long did they hope the tide would turn and return what they had lost?
The archaeological evidence from bones of those from the period can give us some clues. Writer Julia Blackburn, in her wonderful Time Song: Searching for Doggerland tells us that, “Everything speaks of what it has been: the leg bone of a wading bird holds the image of that bird standing on the mud of a shoreline, poised on its own mirror reflection.” Hominoid bones speak of hunger and starvation, accidents, and the efforts of carrying heavy loads that most of our ancestors experienced. You can work out that half of the children did not make it to become teenagers and few adults were older than sixty. Their bones tell us that many adults, both men and women, died from violent interactions with other humans. We can speculate that the loss of land will have increased tensions between groups and resulted in warfare. This should cause us to look worryingly to areas that are today losing resources to climate change, such the Sahel where desertification has made key resources like water scarce and has the potential to pit group against group and country against country. In the near future, the impact of increasing temperature rises will make water one of the most valuable and fought over resources on the plant and put great pressure on arable land.
The land on which these people lived, however, provided more than the natural resources to survive. It would have provided identity to these people and communities. Human lives are enmeshed with place. People are embodied and located. Externalist philosophers argue that the conscious mind is not only the result of what is going on inside the brain, but also what occurs or exists outside the subject. People are embodied and located. We are in our environment and of it. When places are removed so is a person’s place in the world. Speaking to people in war zones as conflicts escalated and communities became torn apart, I often heard a reticence to accept that the place they once knew had gone. There was often hope that the fighting was a brief anomaly, and things would return to normal, that persisted past the point when it should have been clear that the conflict was now embedded and there was no going back to how things once were. Sites of concentrated deposits of Mesolithic weapons and tools in liminal areas in Denmark and the Netherlands suggest ritual offerings were made by those in coastal communities with similar hopes, to placate the rising tides.
Doggerland was more the natural resources it offered its people; it housed the memories of generations and key binding narratives, and community myths were written into its land and wildlife. When we look at migrants today crossing the now flooded Doggerland, the focus is on what they are coming to take from us rather than on what they have lost. The people of Doggerland lost the land that was the resting places of their gods, the birthplaces of their kin, the places of burial of their ancestors and filled with community landmarks rooted in the earth. It’s not possible to supplant these on to a new land, but it is natural to try when you reach your new home.
Climate change is often spoken off in terms of the climate scientist: measurements of time and distance, maximum temperatures, and centimetres of sea level rise. But this is not how people experience it. Those fleeing both war and climate change today will suffer similarly precious and intangible losses, that will be irreplaceable. How were those now placeless people who left Doggerland seen by those living in the lands they migrated to? Rather than recognising the dislocation of their experience and their vulnerability, did those whose lands they moved to see them only as a threat, or a group to be scapegoated?
Whether you believe climate change is just a natural part of wider climatic cycles or the scientific consensus that it is also being influenced by man-made activities, our climate is changing and changing at an accelerated rate as the Met Office figures document. The late English scientist, engineer and environmentalist James Lovelock claims that “Geological change usually takes thousands of years to happen, but we are seeing the climate changing not just in our lifetimes but also year by year.” Doggerland shows how profound the impacts of climate can be and how long those impacts can last. Sea-level rises are already threatening the homes of millions of people in the tropics. Large areas of countries like Bangladesh and Indonesia will soon be underwater for much of the time. Its not just in the tropics though. In 2018, 1.2 million Americans were displaced by extreme conditions, fire, storms and flooding; by 2020, the annual toll had risen to 1.7 million people. In Britain, villagers in Fairbourne, Wales, have been told their homes should be abandoned to the encroaching sea as the entire village is to be “decommissioned” in 2045. Cardiff, is projected to be two-thirds underwater by 2050.
Current global predictions suggest a further sea-level rise of one metre in the next century. Currently 267 million people worldwide live on land less than two metres above sea level. By 2100, with a one metre sea level rise and zero population growth, that number could increase to 410 million people. A 2020 survey published by Climate and Atmospheric Science, suggested coastal cities should prepare for rising sea levels that could reach as high as five metres by 2300. The UN International Organization for Migration estimates that there could be as many as 1.5 billion environmental migrants in the next 30 years.
In some of the areas today most at risk from climate change there are also nefarious actors deliberately fostering conflict. In 2021, President Putin used the flow of migrants from Belarus into Europe as a weapon to sow disunity. The president of Belarus, a Russian client, threatened to flood the EU with armed migrants. Belarusian authorities started promoting tours to Belarus and giving those who bought them Belarusian visas, and then advice and bolt cutters to make their onward journey. The Wagner Group, the private military organisation seen by many analysts as an unofficial foreign policy tool of the Russian government, are now influencing conflicts across the Sahel, including in Libya, Mali, Central African Republic, Sudan, and Burkina Faso all countries that are losing thousands of hectares of farming land a year to the expanding Sahara Desert. By gaining influence in these countries, Russia is now able to manipulate conflicts, and refugee flows into Europe for decades to come.
We may now be an island, but more people will come seeking sanctuary from changes outside of their control moving across the sea that now covers the ancient pathways of Doggerland. Demographically this should be seen as a good thing. Many countries in the global north that will be the destination of climate migrants have increasingly elderly populations supported by a too-small workforce. North America and Europe have 300 million people above the traditional retirement age (65+), and by 2050, the economic old-age dependency ratio there is projected to be at 43 elderly persons per 100 working persons aged 20–64. We should be encouraging migration rather than scaremongering and scapegoating.
In her soon to be released Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval , British environmental , Gaia Vince, claims “Migration is not the problem; it is the solution.” Vince goes on to state that, “How we manage this global crisis, and how humanely we treat each other as we migrate, will be key to whether this century of upheaval proceeds smoothly or with violent conflict and unnecessary deaths.” Vince also points out that the creation of political boundaries to prevent people from moving unchecked about the globe is a relatively new development in human history.
Vince warns us we are running out of time to manage the coming upheaval before it becomes overwhelming and deadly. In the meantime people crossing the channel today, most of whom will not have a legal route to apply for asylum to this country open to them, will drop possessions to the bottom of the sea. Tragically some of them will end up settling on a seabed that was once land. Some of these will resurface over time. If we don’t take the effects of climate change seriously, there will be no archaeologists of the future to find them.
Lovelock, in his last book Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, describes the new age where our reign of sole understanders of the cosmos comes to an end. Lovelock believes the Anthropocene, the unofficial geologic era that describes the recent period in the Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on climate and ecosystems, is coming to an end. He claims this will be followed by the Novacene, the age of “cyborgs”, that will have designed and built themselves from the artificial intelligence systems we have already created. These purely electronic “beings” will be able to think 10,000 times faster than we do and will program themselves and their descendants in ways that will be beyond all human understanding.
Lovelock believes we need not be afraid of these superior machines. They may have little interest in the archeological remnants we leave behind, but they will realise that they need organic life to keep the planet at a habitable temperature. Even electronic life could not survive on an Earth that veered into runaway global warming. Lovelock believes it will suit the cyborgs to keep us around. Lovelock quotes the American writer Richard Brautigan who, writing in 1967, saw a future when we are “all watched over / by machines of loving grace,” but also concedes we may have to console ourselves with the pride of giving birth to our superiors who will inherit our planet beyond our existence as a species.
Lovelock is perhaps best known for his “Gaia hypothesis”, the idea that the Earth can be understood as a single, complex, self-regulating system, much like an organism. His theory has been enormously influential in the almost fifty years since he first put it forward, even if it remains controversial with many scientists pointing to the multiple examples where life has had a detrimental or destabilising effect on the environment and lack of evidence of it acting to instead regulate it. Lovelock believes that the cyborgs of the future will be part of Gaia, a natural next stage of evolution that enables our old planet to keep regulating itself. Lovelock sees overheating as the greatest threat to life on earth, especially if combined with another extinction level event, like an asteroid hit or major volcanic eruption, as he states, “we are made by our star, which provides energy for life, but we are also threatened by it.”
However, despite the frailty of the aging Earth, which he liked to his own ageing body as he approached one hundred years of age, he remained positive that the system will find solutions even if humans were not around to see them. While we are around he believes we need to drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels (instead using nuclear fuel), and also proposes man-made solutions to cool our planet such as sending up a sunshade into space to reflect some of the sun’s rays and cloud seeding (like the Chinese government are currently doing to counter drought in southwest China). We should be spending more time and money working on such global technical solutions rather than building walls to keep the victims of global heating out or escaping to inhospitable Mars.
If by any chance there are people in the future, hopefully they will not look back on the generations alive today with incomprehension as to why we did not do more to mitigate climate change that will ultimately impact us all. We can also hope our human ancestors will not have to speculate as we must when thinking of the hopes and fears of the people of Doggerland. Instead we will record the stories of those seeking refuge on our shores, and those stories will be of acceptance, accommodation, and humane understanding. They will tell of how we gave those who have suffered precious and intangible losses the chance to try to rebuild what they lost.
Looking across the North Sea, gently undulating under a summer breeze, the sun’s liquid rays dancing like infinite pods of dolphins porpoising through the swell, it is hard to believe that 300 feet below people used to live, love, and die. Before profound change it is often hard to conceive of its possibility.
Dedicated to James Ephraim Lovelock, environmentalist, chemist, biomedical scientist, engineer and inventor, born 26 July 1919; died 26 July 2022
See full obituary in link: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/27/james-lovelock-obituary
Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval by Gaia Vince is out on 25 August
