Lost World Revealed By Human, Neanderthal Relics Washed Up On North Sea Beaches (sciencemag.org) 57
sciencehabit writes: Most days, Willy van Wingerden spends a few free hours walking by the sea not far from the Dutch town of Monster. Here, the cheerful nurse has plucked more than 500 ancient artifacts from the broad, windswept beach known as the Zandmotor, or "sand engine." She has found Neanderthal tools made of river cobbles, bone fishhooks, and human remains thousands of years old. Her favorite beach -- made of material dredged from the sea bottom offshore -- preserves traces of a lost world, when sea levels were lower, and what is now the North Sea was a rich lowland, home to modern humans and Neanderthals. While she and other dedicated amateurs amass artifacts, scientists are applying new methods to date the finds and sequence any genetic traces, as well as to map the sea floor and analyze sediment cores. Together, researchers and collectors are bringing to light a vanished homeland of ancient Europeans.
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Yes, but not to you.
Translation: No. And I'm a douchebag.
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Before you object, do note that all change is "change".
I love arguing for unfalsifiable stances.
Re: Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
Sea "level" is a combination of the /land/ rising or falling plus the overall amount of water in the sea. Land has been rising as the glaciers melt, because ice is heavy and the land is rebounding upward. Conversely, extracting groundwater causes land to compress and therefore sink. Also, the land itself is not completely stable, and is both moving and being eroded at the same time.
This article describes 70 METERS of sea level change in the last 8500 years. Yes, that's how fast the earth changes. This is not a simple-minded situation where you can prove that the sea level is rising or falling absolutely. It's dynamic.
Re: Hmmmm (Score:4, Informative)
The earth's crust and continents are floating on the mantle underneath and a change in configuration of the continent (such as ice loading) will cause the land to move up or down. In geological science it is called "isostasy". The requisite Wikipedia references are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
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It's real though, this is known as isostatic depression/rebound. The continents essentially float on an ocean of magma.
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Land with glaciers on it is riding as they melt, but land where people actually live has been falling as sea level rises and pushes down on it, and as aquifers are pumped dry and the land collapses. Your statement was disingenuous.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:4, Informative)
There is no need to "explain" something that is made up (or actually the explanation is that it is a lie.)
Real research on sea level at Roman coast sites [jstor.org] show sea level to have been fairly stable since 500 AD until the last century.
This is a common climate denialist stunt, claim some extreme water level anomaly at one site, but provide no evidence for the claim, but assert that it negates the findings of global sea level studies. Sometimes (but not in this case) they cite location known to have a high rate of post-glacial rebound and pretend that rebound does not exist.
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Which is why we need fewer people. Maybe something like a plague to reduce the population. Then there would be cheaper housing, higher wages, and less pollution.
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You're welcome to go first.
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Last we heard, Obama will go to the White House in the Sky before Martha's Wasteland for the Rich goes under the wave. Time is important, climatic change isn't bad, climatic change in 10's of years is.
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Is that why Obama just last year bought a $12 million waterfront house on Martha's Vineyard? Talk about putting your money where your mouth is!
What is that even supposed to mean? For some reason people that might be interested in the environment aren't allowed to live by the shore?
His money, and where he wants to live, my good man. One of those things about living in America.
The seashores always change, be you republican or democrat. That house built a hundred feet from the shore might end up half a mile, or in the water. Environmentalist or coal rollin' patriot that wants a return to the 1800's.
But I am a little disturbed about how some
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today its more difficult for people to move because of realestate investments, they spent their life savings on a wood frame house on the coast
How do you know? I'll bet prehistoric coastal villages had just as much value to the people who lived there as modern ones do; maybe even more, life was more difficult then, a good place to live harder to come by due to the difficulty they would have had in modifying a location.
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And the other fraction of people is hell-bent on transforming our societies into culturally monolithically pure, male-dominated, ethnically-cleansed (except for the ethno-restaurants), culturally inflamed, soulless (no thought for fellow humanity), rootinest-tootenist cowboys east, west, north, AND south of the Pecos, environment destroying, screwing mass of barely healthy people too stupid to take their health care seriously but expecting SS and Medicare to be there no matter how they skip out on their tax
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'And the other fraction of people'
Good thing that the totality of the fractions have an equal opportunity to drive their respective hive mentalities.
It provides the rest of us with one hell of a laugh..
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Check in with the residents of Miami and how some of their streets are now flooded at high tide. The Arctic is melting because it feels like it. That glacier in Antarctica is losing its mooring because it is getting fundamentally fed up with staying put in one place all the time. Australia is burning because of aliens. See, its all explainable with alternative hypotheses.
I hate you. (Score:1)
Re: I hate you. (Score:2)
Try the desktop version.
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Re: I hate you. (Score:2)
There seems to be a bug in the mobile version that won't allow anonymous posting. I can't remember now what got me to register, but I resisted until later in the first year and ended up missing the 4 digits. Didn't get invited to the anniversary party...
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It does rather suck, doesn't it? It also drove away APK which is a shame.
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You've had to log in to post (except as an invisible Anonymous Cowherd) here since 1997 or so (I struggle to remember when I set up my account - it was when I was an 5p/minute dial-up, so logging in cost me real cash money).
Finally... (Score:3)
It's nice to see some work being done on "land" that disappeared after the last ice age. Obviously these aren't the first results from that period, but most of our knowledge of that time comes from sites many miles inland of the ancient shorelines. It will be interesting to see if they find anything different or surprising.
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It also illustrates that while we must mitigate anthropogenic climate change in a concerted and immediate manner, to presume that the shorelines have never and will never change is an example of mankind's narcissistic hubris, no different from, say, the geocentric view of the solar system.
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It also illustrates that while we must mitigate anthropogenic climate change in a concerted and immediate manner, to presume that the shorelines have never and will never change is an example of mankind's narcissistic hubris, no different from, say, the geocentric view of the solar system.
I hope this is either a strawman or just a good putdown of some of the most stupid people on earth.
Shorelines always change, and they change in a really rapid fashion, as in days and even minutes. A tour of the Outer Banks in North Carolina is illustrative. When my wife and I dove through, so many of the restaraunts and stores had pictures on the wall of where their business used to be and an aerial photo of the storm that necessitated the new building. We drove through areas where the bank was only ab
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From the local council housing. For Americans, translate that as "ghetto". Since England no longer has any fathers for children, It's where all the poor moms live off the "dole" and keep "partners" for just long enough to get pregnant and start the next generation who think they're about to find jobs and wealth from all the Poles Greeks no longer coming in on EU passports.
Hey, I lived there a few years, and that is *exactly* what it is like around the "council housing".
They also call them "man deserts". This council housing situation is truly human parasites that contribute nothing. I sometimes wonder if things like Brexit are a sort of reaction to this unsustainable situation in some part.
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It was dredged off the ocean floor, and then recently washed on the beach.
The travesty is that they just dredge up the bottom without any concern for the irreplaceable archaeological sites that they're destroying. Anything to make it easier to burn more oil and get a container ship to your front door so you don't have to manufacture anything locally, I guess. Anything at all.
Re: We need to close this beach immediately! (Score:1)
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It was dredged off the ocean floor, and then recently washed on the beach.
The travesty is that they just dredge up the bottom without any concern for the irreplaceable archaeological sites that they're destroying. Anything to make it easier to burn more oil and get a container ship to your front door so you don't have to manufacture anything locally, I guess. Anything at all.
One of the first things that came to my mind. A lot of location data was lost. In defense of the dredgers, it probably wasn't known at the time. Perhaps a proper site survey and good research could be made in likely spots that haven't been disturbed. Here in the states we catch hell if we move a dinosaur bone without proper techniques/documentation.
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Before dredging, you almost always have to do a pre-work site survey. That's needed as part of the application for permission to start dredging. If nothing else, there are still hundreds of war graves on the seabed which are unrecorded. Also, pulling aboard a stick of 500lb bombs with mercury fulminate and brass which has been rotting in s
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While I'm less than happy about dredging archaeological sites, I'm pretty sure that before the dredging was allowed there would have been a significant process of "Environmental Impact Statements", pre-dredging site surveys (there might have been, for example, WW2 war graves in the area, which it is a criminal offence to disturb).
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It may be that the greatest engineers of modern earthworks are also the least concerned with preserving however things were in the past, before they showed up. ;)
Monster (Score:3)
The most interesting part of that summary is the fact that there's a town called Monster in The Netherlands.
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It caught my eye too, we have an office there. Next time I go I'll have to do some beachcombing.
Doggerland (Score:3)
The former plane that is now the southern North Sea floor is generally known as Doggerland after the Dogger Bank. The Dogger Bank was once a mountain in this plane, then an island in the North Sea. Today it is a shallow area in the North Sea that is important because it is dangerous for shipping. It is named after the doggers, a Dutch type of fishing boats. The nets of these boats often scrape the North Sea floor and have been the source of interesting finds from various eras when the North Sea floor was dry. The last one was during and around the last Ice Age.
The following map shows a part of Europe centered around the North Sea:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/... [wikimedia.org]
- On the left today's situation.
- On the right the situation during the last Ice Age, when all of the British Isles and Scandinavia were covered by ice and France and Central Europe were comparable to today's Siberia. Only the most southern parts of Europe had appreciable human populations.
- In the middle the situation at the time when the Doggerland plane still existed and was already warm enough to be suitable for extensive human habitation by hunter-gatherers. This was roughly from 16000 BCE till 7000 BCE, although the last remnant of Doggerland, in the shape of an island where we now have the Dogger Bank, didn't disappear before around 5500 BCE.
The period depicted in the middle of the map is what the original article / news story is about. We are talking about the time when Britain and Ireland were last (not for the first time!) transformed from a single peninsula into two big islands and the Rhine-Thames river became the English Channel separating Britain from France.
Similar things happened elsewhere in the world at the same time. The world at the time of the Last Glacial Maximum (the height of the last Ice Age) can be seen on this map: https://commons.wikimedia.org/... [wikimedia.org] . Notably, the area around Indonesia was a huge peninsula -- a subcontinent of Asia much larger than the Indian subcontinent. Just like Britain, Indonesia was turned from part of a huge peninsula into an island.
The global sea level rise can be seen on this graph: https://commons.wikimedia.org/... [wikimedia.org] . Note that the horizontal axis is labelled in 1000 years ago, not in years BCE, so the Doggerland period is in the range from 18 to 9 on the map, and the catastrophe that flooded the Dogger Bank island was near 7.5 -- at a point when sea levels were beginning to stabilise almost on today's level. As far as I know, global sea level changes alone do not fully explain what happened to Doggerland. If I remember correctly, the current theory is that in the relevant period the still massive Scandinavian ice shelf depressed the Scandinavian land mass by several metres, and that this made Doggerland rise a few metres. (Recall that the continents are floating on magma.)
I think nothing is known about the genetics of the hunter-gatherers of Doggerland yet, because no human bones have been found yet. We do however know that the earliest humans who left significant genetic traces in today's population were the Western Hunter-Gatherers. They were 'black'-skinned and blue-eyed and are responsible for roughly a third of the ancestry of today's Europeans. It seems natural to speculate that the inhabitants of Doggerland belonged to this group. (Since 'black' skin is a specific adaptation for the tropics that our earliest human ancestors in Africa developed when losing their fur, it was relatively easy for evoluton to return Europeans to 'white' skin, which is more advantageous in northern regions. This is about trade-offs betwen skin cancer prevention and vitamin production in the winter.) Many people in the Baltics have almost exclusively Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry, so apart from skin colour they might be most s