AI Summary
5 min readIn 2013, a powerful storm hit the coast of Norfolk, England, and scoured away layers of sand from a beach at Happisburgh. What it exposed was a layer of ancient estuary silt—and preserved in that silt were human footprints. At least five individuals had walked along that riverbank, adults and children, leaving their marks in the mud. The footprints themselves are just holes, impossible to carbon-date directly. But the surrounding sediment tells a story. The magnetic elements within it solidified before the last reversal of Earth's magnetic poles—an event that happened 780,000 years ago. Other clues, like the presence of vole species that went extinct 600,000 years ago, narrow the window further. The best estimate places these footprints somewhere between 990,000 and 780,000 years old. That makes them the oldest evidence of hominids outside of Africa, and they were found on a beach in England.
The Lost Land of Doggerland
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Cold Open: A Mysterious Fossil** - Hannah Fry hands Michael Stevens a large, fossilized bone she bought on holiday, starting a guessing game.
- 2 (05:14) **What Was Doggerland?** - The hosts explain that the British Isles weren't always an island, and that the land was lost surprisingly recently.
- 3 (06:05) **The Accidental Discovery** - The history of how Doggerland was discovered, starting with fishermen pulling up ancient bones.
- 4 (07:58) **Neanderthal Evidence & The Oil Industry** - Further discoveries and the definitive proof of a lost landscape.
- 5 (10:17) **The Catastrophic End: A Tsunami** - The explanation for how Doggerland was destroyed and the UK became an island.
- 6 (12:55) **Geological Evidence of the Tsunami** - How scientists can be sure the tsunami happened.
- 7 (13:38) **Why "Doggerland"?** - A brief etymology of the name.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Hannah surprises Michael with a mammoth bone from Doggerland, the lost Ice Age land that once joined Britain to mainland Europe, and now lies beneath the North Sea. Who lived there, what roamed it, and how did an entire landscape disappear under the waves?
Then it's your questions: where did "cool" come from as a word for style, and how did it stick around for so long? What on earth is "skank face"? And what are Hannah and Michael reading right now?
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