Livescience.com: Deep beneath the North Sea, scientists have discovered a fossilized forest in which traces of early prehistoric humans can be found that lived there about 10,000 years ago - before this land was covered in waves.
The discovery gives researchers new hope in their search for "lost" hunter-gatherer settlements during the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age - the period between Paleolithic and Neolithic), as the find shows that researchers have discovered a special type of ancient landscape.
Scientists took sediment samples from the submerged petrified forest during their 11-day voyage in the North Sea on the research ship RV Belgica, in the Doggerland area known as Brown Bank or Brown Ridge. Scientists say they are confident they are close to finding traces of prehistoric human settlement in the flooded lands.
“We are absolutely confident that we are very close to the find,” says one of the project leaders, archaeologist Vincent Gaffney of Bradford University in the UK. “Numerous artifacts of historical origin from this region tell us that there is something there. We have now clearly identified the areas where the Mesolithic surface is close to the seabed surface. So we can use dredges or grabs to get more surface samples.”
Scientists now plan to inspect the Brown Bank area on a Dutch research vessel with heavier dredging equipment that will allow them to take more samples from the flooded petrified forest, Gaffney said.
On the last expedition, the researchers used special dredgers to take bottom samples, but the hard, petrified wood of the flooded, petrified forest made the task much more difficult. Therefore, the next time researchers explore the area on a ship, heavier dredgers will be used.
However, the layers of compressed peat below the seabed indicate that the area previously had vast swamps that could provide near-ideal conditions for early human habitation. “Optimal areas are wetlands with water, birds, fish and shellfish,” says Gaffney.
Sediment samples from the last expedition are now being studied, although a full analysis will take several months. Also, the data of the expedition will be used to further update the archaeological maps of underwater Dogerland, which were prepared on the basis of seismic studies and sediment samples obtained over the past few years.
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Existing maps of Doggerland show now flooded areas where coastlines, rivers, lakes and wetlands were once located - even a giant salt marsh. That is, there is a huge flooded prehistoric landscape under the sea. At the same time, its coastal parts are covered with relatively modern sediments discharged by some of the largest rivers in Europe, such as the Rhine and Meuse.
The researchers now hope that their future expeditions to the Brown Bank will lead to the discovery of all the signs of a human settlement, such as ancient human bones or even artificial artifacts.
“We are very close to finding this settlement. All we need is heavy dredging equipment, a ship, good weather and a little luck,”concludes Gaffney. According to him, a new expedition to Doggerland will take place this fall.
Editorial comment
Since everyone in Northern Europe knows about Doggerland, livescience does not focus on contour maps and we will have to clarify what it is about.
There is a huge bank in the North Sea called the Dogger Bank: the depth of the sea in this area of the bank ranges from 15 to 36 meters, which is about 20 meters shallower than in the waters surrounding the bank.
Since, for some unknown reason for fishermen, the shoal has long been a region rich in cod, fishing trawlers are constantly jostling there, which, along with fish, lift the bones of mammoths and other large animals, some prehistoric tools and other garbage.
On this basis, archaeologists have suggested that once Britain and Europe were a single whole, but, as a result of some events in the region of 6200 BC. e. (that is, about 8,000 years ago) were separated by the North Sea. The English Channel at that time was a huge river, but as a result of these events it became a strait.
The highest floodplain is the Dogger Bank. It is believed that there was an island the size of Ireland that was the last to be submerged. This island with adjacent spaces is like Doggerland.
We will not cling to the dating of the flood that has been sucked out of our fingers, stopping, for a start, on its official reason - the so-called Devensian glaciation, as a result of which the sea level rose by … 120 meters.
To call this academic heresy bullshit is to offend the horses. So, if ALL ice melts on Earth, starting from Antaktida, where it is 4/5 and ending with Greenland, the sea level will rise by only 65 meters. Some of them, of course, will be slightly inundated, but this will not lead to a global flood: the general contours of the continents will remain the same.
Thus, where the figure of 120 meters came from and what kind of glacier was there is simply an incomprehensible mystery to the mind. That much liquid will not work, even if the atmosphere is cooled to absolute zero and the ice planet is covered with seas of liquid nitrogen. Therefore, the only possible reason for the flooding of the prehistoric valley of the English Channel is its subsidence due to some nightmarish lithospheric processes. And this catastrophe occurred, according to the OFFICIAL version, only 8,000 years ago.
And although the melting of some glacier, which caused the sea level to rise by 120 meters, is unimaginable delirium, the figure itself is most likely correct. So, according to a completely official study of the North American shelf, it was flooded with the same name about 12,980 - 11,600 years ago by a rise in sea level to a height of 400 feet, that is, the same 120 meters. Presumably, this happened as a result of an asteroid or comet falling to Earth, which caused the deformation of the lithosphere.
For some reason, this theory, which explains the sudden rise in sea level, is in perfect agreement with another theory from 2007, which tries to explain the scattering of magnetic metal microspheres observed on at least 4 continents and occurring in rocks about 13,000 years old.
They also found traces of burnt carbon, an increased content of radioactive isotopes, an increased concentration of nickel and iridium, placers of platinum particles and even dust from a special form of diamonds. Therefore, combining all these data, many researchers are more and more inclined to the conclusion that 10-13,000 years ago, a large celestial body crashed into the Earth, the dust from which covered the world. Then widespread fires began, clouds of smoke covered the sky, there was a cold snap, glaciation and so on.
In general, a fairly convincing and interesting theory, however, balances and bulldos do not agree with the dating. Some say that the catastrophe happened 8 years ago, others write that it was 10-13,000 years ago. Meanwhile, the Egyptian Sphinx was already built 15,000 ago. That is, at least in Egypt, there were already some people who, at least, knew writing. So they would have noticed some kind of “glaciation” or “fall of an asteroid” and immortalized this event in stone. But there is no such evidence.
But there is other evidence of the catastrophe, which the officials are pushing back by 70,000 years. So, in the past few years, astronomers have been actively discussing the so-called Scholz star - the red dwarf WISE 0720-0846, which about 70 00 years ago flew through the Oort cloud and was at a distance of only 52 000 AU. e. from the sun. As a result, the orbits of peripheral objects of the solar system have changed significantly and now astronomers are racking their brains on the subject “why do asteroids fly so strangely?”.
If we assume that everything was exactly like this, on Earth this astronomical event should have responded very seriously, especially since Scholz's star was not alone, but flew in a pair with its twin - a brown dwarf with a mass of 65 ± 12 Jupiter masses.
When the Earth, the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn line up, the entire lithosphere on Earth trembles. And here only the companion star of Scholz's star was as massive as several dozen Saturns and Jupiters.
However, there is no official geological data on a tectonic catastrophe 70,000 years ago, except that the supervolcano Toba in Indonesia exploded somewhere in this period. Well, volcanoes are constantly exploding and it's not even a fact that Toba erupted exactly 70,000 years ago, and not 7,000 years ago, for example.
Actually, where did the figure of 70 years come from? Astronomers sat astride Scholz's star and accurately calculated its speed and direction?
WISE 0720-0846 was first identified as the closest star to the Sun by the German astronomer Ralf-Dieter Scholz in 2013 and has been named after him ever since. Therefore, let's calculate how the distance to it was measured, starting in 2013.
There are 31,536,000 seconds in one year, which we round up to 30 million. The speed of Scholz's star is said to be 80 km / s. Multiplying them by 30 million, we get 2,400 million kilometers - the path that a star travels in a year.
A light year is 10,000,000,000,000 kilometers. The distance ratio of 10 billion kilometers is 2.4 kilometers. This is twice as much, as if you look from Pluto at the distance that a man walking on Earth has traveled in half an hour. This is what it is like to look from a distance of 1 light-year at the path of Scholz's star, which it travels in a year!
In this case, the star is actually already 20 light years away! In this case, the star does not move perpendicular to the line of sight of the observer, that is, its angular velocity is microscopic, and how the officials measured this speed, and this distance is a complete mystery for everyone.
Thus, and most likely, this tale about the passage of the Oort cloud by Scholz's star 70,000 ago is a fantastic fiction. If we proceed from the OFFICIAL geological data (that is, the flooding of Europe 8,000 years ago, the flooding of the coast of America 12,000 years ago) - astronomers made a mistake with the trajectories ten times and Scholz's star flew past the Earth somewhere in this historical period. That is, about 8 - 10,000 years ago. And the Sumerians painted, as it were, this flight already on all walls and in full growth, which is not to say about the "great glaciation" and "meteorite strikes":
Thus, the version of the sinking of Europa 8,000 years ago by the passage of the Scholz star seems to be the most logical and convincing of all that is proposed today.
The ocean level cannot rise by 120 meters, but the lithosphere may well sink to such a depth. But for the lithosphere to sink by 120 meters, at least in Europe, very, very serious tectonic events are needed. There are traces of such events: diamond dust, glass spheres in geological layers, and so on. However, there is no reason for them.
If there was an asteroid, then a hole should have remained from it, and the hole was very large, since the impact should have raised real waves in the crust. To ensure the impact of the required force, the diameter of the asteroid had to be under 1,000 kilometers, but there are no traces of such an impact on Earth.
And since there is no crater for half of the continent, what remains is only the passage of some huge celestial body past the Earth, the gravity from which generated powerful waves in the crust. And the star of Scholz is the most likely OFFICIAL candidate for this.
Although, of course, there are also unofficial candidates, since the process of cataclysms on Earth is definitely cyclical and some red dwarf at a distance of 20 light years cannot keep up with cycles lasting approximately 500 years. Namely, the real history of the world, hidden from the masses, consists of such cycles.
In addition, the very official dates of the flooding of Doggerland and other misfortunes are taken, as we have already noted above, from somewhere from the ceiling. All such events are dated by archaeologists based on the depth of occurrence of certain objects raised from the ground, but these geological and other layers themselves are distributed over time periods extremely unconvincingly.
To question them, there are enough tons of objects made definitely by people, raised from "layers" that are millions of years old. That is, when there were not only people on Earth, but even complex worms and lizards, not to mention mammals. Therefore, the Doggerland could have flooded both 8,000 years ago and 800 years ago, perhaps even in an even more foreseeable time period.
And the cataclysms that began around the world indicate that we have just come to the very edge of this cyclical period of catastrophes. Some invisible Destroyer is approaching every day, so sooner or later the level of the planet's surface will begin to jump again.
We do not know how the arrival of Rarusher will look from Earth when he gains full strength, but people will most likely accompany his departure in something like this: