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Science

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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Lost World Revealed By Human, Neanderthal Relics Washed Up On North Sea Beaches

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  • I've been here since 1999 and NOW I have to create an account to post. It's the end of an era I tells ya.
    • Try the desktop version.

      • I'm really upset about it. From the days of 4-5 digit ID's...to this. Oh well.
        • 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...

    • It does rather suck, doesn't it? It also drove away APK which is a shame.

    • Sounds to me like someone has forgotten their password. Oh dear. How sad. Did you not take some sort of precaution? Such events are so utterly unknown - it has literally never happened to anyone since 2019.

      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).

  • by taiwanjohn ( 103839 ) on Saturday February 01, 2020 @03:29AM (#59678050)

    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.

    • by pz ( 113803 )

      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.

      • 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

        • Post-glacial rebound isn't significantly changing the volume of the Earth. Where places are rising above sea level (which is only important in terms of giving a datum which is approximately level), they're doing it by means of deep flow in the mantle - a hundred or so km below the surface (and ~50km below the base of the crust). That means that around areas of glacial rebound, there are broader areas that are sinking. For example, while Scotland and Scandinavia are rising at a couple of millimetres a year,
  • by t4eXanadu ( 143668 ) on Saturday February 01, 2020 @11:15AM (#59678974)

    The most interesting part of that summary is the fact that there's a town called Monster in The Netherlands.

    • I'd be slightly more surprised if there were a town called "Monster" (or for that matter, called "Rhubarb Milkshake") in a country where English is a common first language and has been for many generations.
    • by ToddN ( 190561 )

      It caught my eye too, we have an office there. Next time I go I'll have to do some beachcombing.

  • by Hans Adler ( 2446464 ) on Saturday February 01, 2020 @05:02PM (#59679904)

    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

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