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Stone Age settlement found under the sea in Denmark
- kazinator 1y agoStonge Age settlements can be found in numerous cities around the world, above water and bustling with contemporary human activity.
- KingOfCoders 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_continuously_inhabited_cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_continuously_in...
- skeezyboy 1y ago*that we know about. Humans are maybe 100k years old, and look how good we are with wood even today. We surely had settlements all over the place made from wood that just rotted away.
- KingOfCoders 1y agoYeah, the city I was born in was written about by a Greek geographer in ~15BC. But the city suspects there was a much older Celtic city because the name can be traced to the Celts. But we can't prove it.
- alexey-salmin 1y agoDo you mean just coincidental re-settlement of an old city or continuously inhabited settlements? Former could definitely happen (and most likely did many times) but for the latter I never heard of any city from the stone age. Bronze age -- sure, but stone age? What are the examples?
- Empact 1y agoGiven 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.
- timschmidt 1y agoAgree 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.
- rhplus 1y agoA 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-north-sea-atlantis 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/doggerland-mesolithic-submerged-landscape/ https://archaeology.org/issues/march-april-2022/letters-from...
- kennyloginz 1y agoThat’s awfully short sighted.
- tracerbulletx 1y agoThis 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
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- SoftTalker 1y agoIt's interesting to me that items are well preserved. I thought salt water was particularly damaging and corrosive.
- pfdietz 1y agoCorroding what? This is before metals were widely used.
- mikert89 1y agonot corroding, but all the wood/bone/soft materials basically disappear over 10k years. very little will be left
- alexey-salmin 1y agoThe salt water part is not particularly surprising to me, after all we have plenty of wooden shipwrecks from the bronze age. Wood is preserved much better in the salt water than on the ground (unless it's a desert). What I don't understand is how it survived the surf. 2 meters per century means that the place had spent a century in the surf line, and surf grinds everything into sand and dust and scatters what it can't grind. I would have understood a sudden flooding but this is surprising.
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- simonh 1y agoThey’re not always or necessarily anthropogenic. That doesn’t mean they can’t be anthropogenic.
- palmfacehn 1y agoOne of the reasons why control groups are so important in science.
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- hopelite 1y agoOn a related note, since the Paleolithic rarely comes up on HN, something that seems to rarely come up in English language content; Menhir [1] (Long stone) or standing stones, which are spread all across Europe, some very elaborately decorated, others with sight holes cut in them, others extremely large, i.e., 30-40 feet tall before they were knocked over by the invasive meme, Christianity. They are found from Portugal all the way to Siberia, but very little is known about them following the Christian meme eradicating the indigenous cultures through the many purges and programs from 300CE on. There are some references that imply at least in some places they were a kind of connection to the afterlife and ancestors that would turn into birds that would perch on top of the standing stone, something that is still part of indigenous beliefs and practices in parts of Asia. It's basically the indigenous culture of the Native Europeans that middle eastern Christianity destroyed and eradicated like it destroyed and eradicated the Native Americans and so many other native people and cultures around the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menhir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menhir
- Mistletoe 1y agoI think you are seeing this a little too 2d. The reason the Christian meme spread so well is more complex than that. A codified belief system written down, the thought of a God that loves and cares about you, a path to redemption and forgiveness for sin or mistakes, these are just some of the reasons that it has been so successful. It wasn’t always just forced on people although there was that too. It’s just a really good meme and great story when you get to the heart of it. The people meeting in secret when Christianity started and risking their life to do so weren’t forced into it at all. Like capitalism, Christianity fits a lot of human needs and desires that are hard coded in humans.
- skylurk 1y agoThere definitely was a moment when Christianity was a secretive cult ostensibly fuelled by brotherly love, but certainly by the time of Constantine it had become a major political force. My impression is that Christianity took over Europe more for political reasons than the good story. There were strong incentives for pagan rulers to "convert", and force it onto the populace. I agree that the good story is key to its staying power.
- vintermann 1y agoOne of the fun parts of genetic genealogy is that it's always exciting to see what old DNA turns up in archeological projects like these. It's a stretch to hope for, but wouldn't a paternal-line relative from Doggerland be cool...
- danans 1y ago> exciting to see what old DNA turns up in archeological projects like these. While amazing advancements have taken place in ancient DNA analysis (esp. by David Reich at Harvard and his collaborators), I think all of these have been done from dry human remains on land, not submerged ones. Does DNA in bones survive long term in seawater? Intuitively I think it would "wash away", or be hopelessly contaminated with other DNA in the water.
- devjab 1y agoThis is not related to the story as such, but I live in Aarhus and this is the first I hear about it. I read three national news outlets and one specific to my local region of Østjylland a couple of times a day. I wonder if I should swap some of them. I know about black trashbags being thrown out of a window in the white house and then I find an actually interesting non-tech story about something happening right outside my house here on HN...
- bjarneh 1y agoSeems that we focus on all the crazy stuff Trump is doing, just like we did the last time he was president, depressing stuff. All of it.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoSadly he's one of the most powerful people in the world and we can't ignore the crazy stuff he does.
- thaumasiotes 1y agoIs one of those ideas connected to the other one? Historically, being one of the most powerful people in the world is not even a minor barrier to most people ignoring the things you do, crazy or otherwise.
- card_zero 1y agoHistorically there was no journalism and everybody ignored everything that was happening. Or do you mean in more modern history?
- AlecSchueler 1y agoWell yes, historically most people ignored most things, but it's 2025 now.
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- obfuscator 1y agoNot far away, but partially preserved by the mudflat, lies Rungholt. A city of ~1000-1500 (some sources say 3000) inhabitants that was drowned in the Grote Mandrenke (1362 AD). That's a very big city in that time. In my childhood we were told, while wandering the tidal flat, that we should listen closely if we could hear the church bells under the mud. Only in 2023 the whereabouts of the sunken city were definitely confirmed and mapped. "Rungholt" probably means "wrong/low wood". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rungholt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rungholt
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> "Rungholt" probably means "wrong/low wood". This is an interesting point. Names are often older than they appear. I have a book on Greek mythology that takes the position that Hercules, including his name, is considerably older than most of the Greek pantheon and should be thought of as a foreign import. But the form of his name ("Heracles") looks so natural in Ancient Greek, "glory of Hera" in the same way that you see other Greeks named Agathocles or Themistocles, that the mythology around the relationship between Hera and Heracles, which is extensive, must have developed from that apparent similarity. Potentialities like this keep us on our toes when we look at names like "Rungholt".
- obfuscator 1y agoAbsolutely, though in this case it would be the most obvious translation, since it was a frisian settlement and "Rung" and "Holt" are both frisian words in use. It is possible that Rung here could mean stanchion/post (so for wood that makes strong posts), but unlikely so close to the sea, is it not? I get what you mean, though. Here is a village called Großenwiehe, easy to be translated as "Great Consecration", and that was the commonly accepted meaning. Only much later it became apparent that "-wiehe" probably came from wighæ, so "Great Fortification". And in fact the old fortifications are still visible today.
- jorisboris 1y agoEvery time I read an article like this I end up in a rabbit hole of reading about ice ages, sea level changes, and how the human evolved throughout it. It’s mind boggling that only 20000 years ago the sea level was 120 meters lower and much of Northern Europe was covered in ice
- iamflimflam1 1y agoI wonder how rapidly the change occurred - were the people aware of it happening? Did they have people saying “don’t listen to Yarg! These recent floods are just normal weather…”
- simonh 1y agoIt was a relatively sedate 2m per century a lot of the time, but there was one catastrophic Tsunami event called the Storegga Slide around 6200 BC that would have been pretty dramatic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide
- jorisboris 1y agoAt that time time they were still hunter gatherers. So they might have been aware of their surroundings, but I presume not as much if they would have been a sedentary community. The first communities started to settle more or less after the ice age ended, the sea level had risen and the planet had a more pleasant climate around 10000 years ago (source: I'm not a professional on this topic, just summarising what chatgpt tells me)
- dpassens 1y agoWhy would hunter/gatherer cultures be less aware of their surroundings? They depend on them a lot more; need to know where to move next to find good food sources for the current season. Plus, it's not like these people haven't had sacred spaces that they visited, which requires knowing how to get there from wherever you currently are.
- skeezyboy 1y ago
- jupiterelastica 1y agoRelated BBC podcast "In Our Time" about Doggerland, a landmass which was inhabited about ~10k years ago, but is now submerged in the north sea. https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m0006707 https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m0006707
- unfitted2545 1y agoSome say the inhabitants are still in their cars to this day..
- madaxe_again 1y agoThats doggingland you’re thinking of.
- jl6 1y ago> As today’s world faces rising sea levels driven by climate change, the researchers hope to shed light on how Stone Age societies adapted to shifting coastlines more than eight millennia ago. Unfortunately I don't expect there is any particularly reusable solution to be uncovered. Ancient peoples facing rising tides almost certainly just walked a bit inland and built new huts there. They probably thought nothing of it. They were a far more physically mobile culture, without great dependence on immense, immovable infrastructure - nor on rigid land ownership rules. Our culture's migration will be entirely different.
- ehnto 1y agoRigid land ownership seems to be the source of a great deal of our troubles.
- inglor_cz 1y agoNow try non-rigid land ownership, where land and buildings can be expropriated in the name of nebulous greater good. Been there, done that, it is worse than the alternative. People will stop cultivating anything, because why bother if a random officer can just take things from you at will. Western regulations about land appropriation are strict for a reason, and they always require just compensation for a reason. That is the only way to prevent powerful people from just grabbing what they want, cloaking the thieving act in word bubbles about common prosperity.
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- diggan 1y ago> Now try non-rigid land ownership, where land and buildings can be expropriated in the name of nebulous greater good. Maybe there could be some balance instead of "Either everything can be owned, or nothing is!". It isn't impossible to move cities if it's really needed and someone is footing the bill, even in a democratic Western country that is famously highly regulated, like Sweden. Since a mine in the north is expanding, they have to move the entire city (paid by the mine's operator in this case), building by building, which of course isn't without complaints, but it's a thing that actively being done as we speak. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3xp4xlw9o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3xp4xlw9o
- ostacke 1y agoThere's an episode[1] of In Our Time covering Doggerland. Recommend. [1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/6jlHaJMCfRmsMsrqqLBY3O?si=1d83045338934bde https://open.spotify.com/episode/6jlHaJMCfRmsMsrqqLBY3O?si=1...
- egberts1 1y ago"Sea levels rose by a global average of around 4.3 centimeters (1.7 inches) in the decade up to 2023." There are seven-inch difference of sea level between Pacific and Atlantic ocean ... at the coastlines of Panama.
- nick49488171 1y agoMakes you wonder what would happen if that was opened to a river instead of a canal.
- egberts1 1y agoPanama would erode away.