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Lost world revealed by human, Neanderthal relics washed up on North Sea beaches
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago> MONSTER, THE NETHERLANDS—On a clear, windy autumn afternoon last October Can I just say how cool it would be to say that I live in a town called Monster?
- jacobriis 5y agoMonster doesn't mean monster in Dutch.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoI figured that. Neither does *UCKING, Austria have the same English meaning: https://www.dw.com/en/austrian-village-of-fucking-decides-to-change-its-name/a-55740967 https://www.dw.com/en/austrian-village-of-fucking-decides-to...
- Bayart 5y agoYou can write « Fucking », you know.
- jhgb 5y ago> ... « ... » ... Pardon your French? ;)
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoI did not know. Thank you.
- 1-more 5y agohttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/monster#Dutch https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/monster#Dutch sure it does. Probably not how this town got its name, but it does.
- 317070 5y agoIt does. Monster is also a dutch word, with the same meaning as the English monster (horrid creature), but can also be used as synonym for "a sample". In this case, the name of the village probably comes from the same word as the English "Monastry". Other places have the same etymology, e.g. the city Münster in Germany.
- schoen 5y agoI think the horrid creature meaning and the sample meaning are cognates (both from Latin for 'show', in one case because the sample is made for purposes of showing it to someone, and in the other case because you can't look away, so to speak). (Or because the gods wanted to show you that they were displeased with you, maybe.)
- CorrectHorseBat 5y agoYes it does
- RalfWausE 5y agoIf you want it a bit creepier you can live in a village that would roughly translate into "Dwelling of the dead": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todenhausen_(Wetter) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todenhausen_(Wetter) . . . . But as the wikipedia article states: The creepy name derives from an entiry different origin ;-)
- ntrz 5y agoIs the dredging process stripping a great degree of archaeological context from the items, or has being under the sea for so long already scrambled them up to a degree that we aren't losing all that much information by bringing them up in this way? I get the impression that modern archaeology tends to emphasize viewing a site holistically and painstakingly recording as many details as possible, to the extent that some sites are just left alone rather than risk an imperfect or destructive excavation, so I'm curious whether anyone in the field is upset that these artifacts are surfacing as a byproduct of an unrelated civic project that isn't even trying to adhere to those standards.
- naturalauction 5y agoSlightly different but I remember viewing the subways in Athens and seeing the ruins that they had discovered while just digging subways. I know the tube in London has run into similar issues. In the UK, a lot of archeologists are employed by building companies in order to ensure a new development isn’t on archeologically significant land and that if something is encountered that it is cataloged. There are definitely standards that can be implemented to allow archeology and development to coexist.
- JackFr 5y agoA friend who’s an archaeology professor told me that’s where the real money is in archaeology. Working as expert to come up with the “nothing historical here - ok to build a mall” report that many municipalities now require.
- yarcob 5y agoClassic archaeology is all about layers. When excavating, a lot of effort is made to determine where one layer starts and where a layer ends. You can often tell eg. by soil color or other hints. So yes, dredging up the ground destroys all context, and you get finds that are very hard to date (carbon dating and other scientific methods have limited precision if you don't have any reference points) On the other hand, I guess you take what you can get, and archaeologists often work with finds like that. A farmer might accidentally have dug up some roman coins on their field, or people with metal detectors may find some clothing pins (not sure of the correct english word) or something. These people may also not be eager to tell you where they found it (farmers really don't want excavations on their fields)
- dalbasal 5y agoWow. Some of these seem highly significant. EG "Neanderthal flake with birch tar grip - 50kya" AKAIK, birch tar production has already been attributed to neanderthals, but hafting hasn't yet been. I wonder what kind of tool that is. It doesn't look like a spear point or axehead.
- yarcob 5y agoI think the most fascinating, and also frustrating, thing about archaeology is how little we actually know. We find these tiny fragments, and they tell us something about the past, but every artefact invites a lot more questions than it provides answers. My late father spent some time researching tattoos and body marks in antiquity. A common pattern that appeared often were 4 dots arranged like the vertices of a rhombus. The pattern appears eg. on terracotta figurines and must have had some significance. But we have no idea what it meant, and all we can do is make wild guesses.
- kilroy123 5y agoI too feel frustrated that we know so little. One big issue, I've come to realize after visiting so many sites around the world. A lot of the amazing archaeological sights are in countries that struggle/struggled economically and security wise. (E.g. Iraq, Ethiopia, Turkey, Syria, etc.) Many sites are destroyed or we simply can't invest the proper time and money. Very frustrating.
- exporectomy 5y agoBut how could it not be that way? No matter how much we can find, there will always be something just a little out of reach or just a little bit getting destroyed. If it was easy to find, it wouldn't be very interesting.
- yupper32 5y agoI think part of it is that some items/patterns/etc might actually mean absolutely nothing. It might be a dead end even with perfect knowledge. Some Neanderthal was fucking around with some rocks one day and we look for some meaning in the remains. Was it a tool? Religious artifact? Nope, just Bobby Neander being bored and hitting rocks together into a shape with no meaning. To be clear, that doesn't mean it's not worth trying to find the meaning if there is one.
- chrisco255 5y agoGood ole Bobby "Bashrocks" Neander. RIP Bobby.
- skyde 5y agoif i was at the beach and found one of those "artefact" there is no way I would they they are important or old. Can someone explain how to easily know if what you are looking at is important or not.
- mod 5y agoStone tools worked by humans are all important. It's not easy to distinguish Neanderthal from ours, or anything like that, or modern from ancient, but it's vastly more likely you'll find an ancient stone tool than a modern version. Very few people are making them, and even fewer are leaving them out on the ground.
- ncmncm 5y agoNo natural process chips off flakes right next to one another, all along the edge, or both edges, or both sides of an edge, of a stone. Anytime you find a stone like that, it's an artifact. A rock with just one chip generally needs evidence of a habitation or other activity to identify it. There is a site in southern England where somebody found a whole pile of chips, and fitted them all together showing the missing space left over had been a spear point.
- gpvos 5y ago(2020)
- gpvos 5y agoUntil 31 October 2021 there is an exhibition about Doggerland in the Rijksmuseum voor Oudheden in Leiden.
- messo 5y agoI can reccomend this exhibition, visited it this summer and it does a good job painting a picture of what life could have been like. Lots of artifacts on display.
- datameta 5y ago> Eventually, that, too, came to an end. On the basis of sediments and computer models, researchers think a tsunami originating off modern-day Norway around 6150 B.C.E. devastated Doggerland with waves at least 10 meters high. Soon the landscape vanished as global sea levels continued to rise. Ah, another explanation for one of the many "Great Flood" myths.
- Tagbert 5y agoPretty much any culture living next to water is going to, sometime, experience a massive flood event that seems to affect the “whole world”. It’s pretty easy to see that being encoded into an oral tradition and expanded on over time.
- krylon 5y agoIn passing, the article reveals that in the Netherlands, there is a place called "Monster", and Willy is a woman's name. But the archaeology is fascinating, too, of course. It is both sad and exciting to think about how much human culture and history has been lost to time, and how there still is out there, waiting to be discovered. There is an episode of Star Trek TNG where Captain Picard gets neurally linked to an alien probe and gets to experience the life of a person in a civilization that has long since ceased to exist. It is frustrating sometimes how Sci-fi can implant such appealing ideas in our minds that are - AFAIK - scientifically impossible. But how amazing would it be to live for just one day among the mammoth hunters of Doggerland. Also, this makes me think about what we leave behind for some future explorer to unearth. Maybe we should start creating time capsules, so future archaeologists won't have such a hard time figuring out what life was like back in the 21st century.
- doovd 5y agoWith climate change etc there probably won't be future archaeologists so :shrug:
- steve_adams_86 5y agoMaybe they'd be from another solar system.
- medstrom 5y agoThis is not a chatroom, think twice. Climate change won't kill literally everyone.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- koheripbal 5y agoThe AI that evolves from us within the next hundred(s) years, will likely have a good memory persistence. Then again, I suppose if it is destroyed by an AI from a neighboring region/galaxy, that too might be lost. I wonder how many civilizations have been obliterated and forgotten by the AIs they created.
- shoto_io 5y agoIt’s amazing that just 10k years ago England was part of continental Europe… I wonder if people back then were worried about climate change too.
- pomian 5y agoWell, they lost their land bridge. At some point they had to say farewell to their relatives across the water. It probably didn't happen all at once. It just got harder every year to make it across. Then one year, that low low tide, didn't happen. Makes you imagine all sorts of adventures and stories related to 'the crossing'.
- WhompingWindows 5y agoIt's pretty wild to think Belgium/Netherlands/France were connected to Great Britain via a huge swath of land. This means all the cultures intermixed for many generations moving back and forth. It's no wonder we have Stonehenge and all of the ancient cultures in Britain if there was an actual land-bridge to that area! I wonder if places like Ireland or more of the Scandanavian Islands would've been accessible as well? This doesn't even account for all the other places in the globe that humans may have moved around differently, like in China or India there may be other ancient differences too.
- medstrom 5y agoI think you're overstating the importance of land bridges. The English Channel is narrow and hunter-gatherers have crossed much greater bodies of water, like in Oceania. Actually, water is essentially a teleportation device: you arrive by slow foot travel to some coast and end up on the opposite coast pretty quickly. But everything is different when you go to prehistory, it seems hard for us laymen to imagine correctly. A given band of hunter-gatherers would not have travelled far in one generation. And I don't really see why the Stonehenge couldn't have been erected by a culture that had not even met another culture for a hundred generations. Look at the statues of Easter Island (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_island).
- fleddr 5y agoThe specific way of stacking massive rocks as seen in Stonehenge (upright with horizontal on top) is spread far and wide across Europe, found in almost every country. Using that exact same "design". Hardly a coincidence, I'd say.
- simonh 5y agoAgreed, but the ones in Britain all date from much, much later than the inundation of the land bridge.
- shkkmo 5y agoAgriculture predates stone-henge and the major oceania migrations by quite a bit so "hunter-gatherer" is probably a misnomer in those cases. As far as we know, land bridges were crucial to major migrations during the time periods this article discuses. I think you are generally confusing quite different pre-historical periods. I do think it is quite reasonable to suspect that the ability to cross the english channel predates stonehenge.
- lalos 5y agoReminds me of Gobekli Tepe which is also ~10K old evidence of human lost worlds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
- fernly 5y agoOff topic, DAE find that drop-down Science Mag "eyelid" banner extremely annoying? I see it both here and on the In The Pipeline blog[1] I often read. Is there a browser extension that will kill such things? [1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/
- ncmncm 5y agoThis is fascinating. But I find it extremely odd that they talk only about Doggerland and, in passing, Beringia (connecting Alaska with Siberia) and "archipelagos of Oceania". Meanwhile, they leave unmentioned literally millions of square miles of prime habitat occupied by modern humans for at least 50,000 years before it was inundated, now called Sundaland and Sahul. Sundaland is now sea between Indonesian islands, reaching up along Vietnam and out to Taiwan (thus not an island), all the way up to Korea (thus not a peninsula). Sahul filled the gap between Australia and New Guinea. They also leave unmentioned the Persian Gulf and the sea southeast of Pakistan, more thousands of square miles of recent land. The first cities (that we know of) were built immediately upstream from those parcels. Buildings were exposed in the latter parcel before the big recent tsunami, where fishermen's nets have long got snagged. Knowing that so much of what we think of as prehistory happened in places that are now flooded makes what we call "Atlantis" and "Noah's flood" legends into legitimate oral history. The old question of where the water came from, and went afterward, is answered: from the glaciers, and it's all still there. Australian oral histories record negotiated resolution of conflicts from people obliged to move uphill and crowd into where other people had lived for tens of thousands of years. There were places the shore moved inland another meter each year, for centuries. Your grandparents' seaside village was always just offshore. It is easy to imagine how stories would have turned that into a dramatic deluge, over subsequent millennia.
- slongfield 5y agoMy impression of the history of the "Noah's flood" story is that mythologists tend to trace it back to the origin of civilization in the fertile crescent, a historic flood plain. Specifically, there are very strong parallels between it and the Gilgamesh flood myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth
- colordrops 5y agoThat doesn't account for the fact that nearly every major culture and region on earth has a flood myth.
- dpeck 5y agoThere’s a great “In Our Time” episode about this area and the archeology going on around it if you’re interested in a listen https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-our-time/id73330895?i=1000442927858 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-our-time/id73330895...
- jimsmart 5y agoArticle is from early 2020 - would be nice if the year was in the HN title here.
- waybaily 5y agoIt really makes me wonder how did the people of the lost world lived.