To make it clear to you, we shouldn't argue in vain so that
Think about the terrible flood.
An incredible downpour flooded everything then.
It is not beer that kills people; water kills people.
A song from the comedy film "It Can't Be". Words by Leonid Derbenev
Historical science versus pseudoscience. That's what makes it good to work for "VO"? The fact that there are many people here who are interested in learning something new and, perhaps, the main thing is that the level of their intelligence allows them to correctly assess it. That is, in order to ask the correct question, you need to know half of the answer, and VO readers mostly know it. But it is clear that they are interested in details. For example, the topic of the global flood that surfaced recently when discussing an article about the ancient Russian chronicles. And this topic, by the way, is the most military one. After all, any "sinking" of the land leads to its deficit, and the deficit is the surest path to war. Therefore, it is not surprising that a number of our regular correspondents spoke in favor of publishing a series of materials about the "flood". And since the people want it, they certainly get it, at least my opinion is this: they must get it! And we will begin this cycle not with biblical stories, although they are very, very interesting, but with what science has discovered today and what is an indisputable scientific fact. That is, we will devote our first story to Doggerland and Sturegga!
And it so happened that the Great Glaciation happened on our planet. It lasted a long time, the glacier was advancing, then receding, but the main thing for us will not be the periodization of this event, but only the fact that at that time people already lived in Europe. Well, already in our time it was known that in the very center of the North Sea there is a sandbank called Dogger Bank, which became famous for the fact that during the First World War, a battle of English and German battle cruisers took place near it. Bank as a bank - you never know them in the world. However, it so happened that in 1931 the fishing trawler "Kolinda" caught a piece of peat there, and in it a prehistoric antler, which was clearly worked and was nothing more than a 220 mm long harpoon tip. Then the remains of a mammoth and a lion were raised from the bottom here, and, most importantly, prehistoric tools and weapons. Then, 16 km off the coast of Zealand, a fragment of a Neanderthal skull was raised from the bottom of the sea, which is about 40,000 years old.
It was obvious that the land was hidden under the water, which was previously dry land, but which was then covered by water. It was evident that it occupied the entire southern part of the North Sea and connected Britain with Denmark. Archaeologist Briony Coles gave this land mass the name Doggerland. It gradually became clear that Doggerland in the Mesolithic era was inhabited by people, and it had a rich flora and fauna.
About 10 thousand years ago, when both the North Sea and almost the entire territory of the British Isles were hidden under a layer of ice, the sea level was 120 meters lower than the current one. There was no English Channel, and the entire bottom of the North Sea was a tundra zone. But then the glacier began to melt, and the level of the World Ocean gradually increased. By 8000 BC. NS. Doggerland was a flat terrain formed by the sediments of the Rhine, and its coastline was teeming with lagoons, marshes and beaches. It is believed that during the Mesolithic era, these lands in Europe were a real paradise in terms of bird hunting and coastal fishing.
Here everything was about the same as in modern Holland. A lot of birds nested in the reed beds, and the streams, rivers and lakes were full of fish. In addition, the sea near the coast was also shallow, and there were also a lot of fish in it. Moreover, the fish is large, otherwise the bone harpoon would not have been raised from the bottom of the sea. It is quite possible that local residents built pile dwellings and lived in large pile villages, perfectly protected by swamps and lakes from the invasion of any kind of enemies. In addition, since this was the Mesolithic era, they already knew the bow and arrow, which means they could fight at a distance and … beat the bird in flight. That is, the place where primitive man lived was very convenient in all respects. And a convenient place is never empty, it is not for nothing that the remains of a human skull were found here.
For a long time, it was believed that the rise in the level of the World Ocean, caused by the melting of glaciers, occurred gradually. The sea first cut off prehistoric Britain from Europe (about 6500 BC). Then Doggerland flooded, but in its place until 5000 BC. NS. the island was preserved.
However, evidence has recently been found that the flooding of Doggerland was sudden. That it was flooded by a giant tsunami about 8,200 years ago (6200 BC), and it was caused by a landslide of underwater soil near the coast of Norway, which was named Sturegga. After this catastrophe, Britain finally separated from the continent. And besides, a local cooling began, caused by the influx of cold water from the glaciers that melted in Norway.
The seismological data helped to find out what the topography of the seabed in these places is, and they, in turn, were received by oil producers. It turned out that Sturegga (Old Norse. Storegga, that is literally translated as "big edge") was not one, but three consecutive landslides. It is believed that Sturegga is one of the largest disasters in human history.
But where did the "material" for these landslides come from? It was brought by streams and rivers from a melting glacier. River sediments have been deposited on the edge of the Norwegian continental shelf for several millennia and are becoming more and more abundant. And then there was an underwater earthquake, and all this huge mass of silt and sand began to move and slid down the steep slope further into the ocean. The landslide covered about 290 km of coastline, and the volume displaced was about 3500 cubic meters. km, which is a lot, because with such an amount of rock it would be quite possible to cover the whole of Iceland with a layer 34 m thick.
Radiocarbon analysis of plant remains found beneath the sediments of this tsunami showed that the last of the series of these landslides occurred around 6100 BC. NS. Moreover, in Scotland, the sea penetrated up to 80 km from the coast, and its traces were found at an altitude of 4 meters above the level of the highest modern tides. Fortunately for us, a repetition of such a catastrophe is impossible. Rather, it can happen, but only after the end of a new ice age and the accumulation of another portion of the washout rock on the bottom of the Norwegian shelf.
And now let's look at the art of the people of the Mesolithic era known to us. The painting of this time became more abstract. If in the Paleolithic era 80% of the images are animals, and 20% are humans, now the main part falls on people, and not one specific person is depicted, but a community. Hunting scenes, when a mass of people chases a mass of animals, scenes of mass dances and rituals are very popular. In the Valltorta gorge, the researchers found, for example, a whole gallery of picturesque compositions with scenes of hunting deer, wild boars and rams. Images of the first battles between people and people appeared (that is, the war has now become an object of art), as well as a unique drawing depicting an execution (in the center of it is a man pierced with arrows, and around there are people with bows in their hands: the real St. Sebastian!). However, there is no such detail as before. But in the drawings, movement, a plot appears, which means that the human brain has developed to the level of abstract thinking and has become capable of generalizing objects and phenomena. Without a doubt, this kind of thinking should have affected the level of language. That is, oral folk art, legends, tales and fairy tales, passed from mouth to mouth, appeared.
And hence the conclusion: such a large-scale catastrophe as the flooding of a huge area of Doggerland, simply could not but find its reflection in the memory of people. After all, not everyone died there, who survived, and then painted (and perhaps even painted!) Their adventures to those people who were not affected by the cataclysm.
Well, as an epilogue, let's read the end of A. Belyaev's novel "The Last Man from Atlantis" - better than him, and you can't say:
"And on long winter evenings he told them wonderful stories … about the terrible death of an entire people and country, about the terrible downpours that accompanied this death, about the salvation of a few of them … and about his own salvation …"
"… People listened to these stories with the fascinating curiosity of children, passed on to each other, added and decorated these stories from themselves, cherished them like a sacred tradition."
