the stems woody and tortuous
the leaves glabrous above,
Tomentose beneath.
Eleven thousand years
and warmth returns
as abruptly as it vanished,
the seas rising fast,
the land changing shape,
offering food and shelter
to birds and animals,
fish and amphibians,
and to humans:
a people poised
between the Old and the New.
Based on ‘Doggerland: A Speculative Survey’ by B. J. Coles, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 64, 1998, pp. 45–81.
20
Maybe the oddest thing is knowing what is to come. As the ice melts and retreats and the weather grows warmer, the shape of a country we now call Doggerland begins to be revealed and yet even as the land emerges the sea is preparing to cover it over. I’ve been looking at a newspaper photograph showing the long crack that is forming and widening within the polar ice sheet and only yesterday there was the publication of a study that says we are on the edge of a sixth extinction, another Big Cut, like the one that marked the end of the age of the dinosaurs. These days it often seems as if the next chapter of the world’s story is already irrevocably prepared and we are close to the moment when we must enter it.
But for now Doggerland is waking from its long sleep. In areas that were not covered by the ice sheets, the soil had been held within the grip of the permafrost and as it melts a pale and exhausted ground is revealed, littered with glacial deposits of rock and debris and covered by layers of windblown and gravelly sands. The great weight of ice in the more northern areas has created an undulating uniformity of lowland, with a vast lake at its heart measuring around a hundred kilometres long and thirty wide. This lake is known by fishermen as Outer Silver Pit and is one of the underwater ‘deeps’ where flatfish and crabs and other bottom feeders congregate in the company of stones and bones and the wrecked remains of ships. Smaller lakes are filling up and spreading out, while new rivers are gathering energy; as they serpent across the land, they plough deep wide channels into it, scooped indentations that can still be traced on the bed of the North Sea.
Doggerland’s sodden surface is scored with ridges and white outcrops of chalk that have emerged like the bones of great skeletons. There are also numerous salt-dome hills, just a few metres high and with a strangely visceral appearance. These domes are crowned with little depressions, similar to what you find on the tops of old burial mounds. Some hold flints or other stones that can be used to make tools and weapons. There are also depressions called pingos, formed by the breaking up of blisters of ice in the melting permafrost. The pingos that survive today in Norfolk appear as clusters of little round ponds and some of them are still fed by an underground source within the rocks beneath.
Further up the coast and out to sea from where I live, the low-lying land is dominated by the stark silhouette of a flat-topped, steep-sided chalk mass, one hundred and sixty-five metres long, thirty metres wide and thirteen metres high. It has been given the name of the Cross Sands Anomaly and you can see it on maritime maps. The people who came and settled in Doggerland could guide themselves by its commanding presence.
But then, thirteen thousand years ago and just when this new world seems to be settling down, the warming of the climate and all the changes that follow in its wake triggers the Laacher See volcanic eruption in western Germany. I only learnt of this event quite recently when I was at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, talking to Felix Riede, from the department of prehistoric archaeology, who had the white lines of the waves of an unnamed sea printed within a white rectangle on his black T-shirt. He was studying the recolonisation of Northern Europe after the Ice Age and that was when his interest in the volcano began. He has since been working alongside a team on what is called Past Disaster Science, piecing together the evidence of the eruption and assessing its effect on the landscape and on the living creatures within the landscape. They have also been studying what warnings the volcano might offer us as we move towards our own uncertain future.
Charred woodlands and other macro botanical remains show that the eruption occured in the late spring or early summer. It was huge beyond any leap of the imagination and the sound of it as it broke through the earth’s surface could be heard from north-west Italy to north-west Russia. In our modern age people have said that a volcano makes the noise of metal crashing against metal, and the journalist James Cameron, who witnessed the detonation of the first atomic bomb, said it sounded as if the doors of Hell were being slammed shut. But in that other time, there was nothing to give form or understanding to the catastrophe that was taking place.
Over 700,000 square kilometres of land were affected by the fallout from the Laacher See and the eruption column reached heights of some forty kilometres, which means that on clear days it was visible throughout the land mass of Europe. The area lying at what is called ‘the eruptive centre’ was covered by volcanic deposits fifty metres thick, but a much wider area was affected by deposits that destroyed all vegetation and all the life that went with that vegetation. Entire valleys were obliterated, the Rhine was blocked to form a lake and when that lake eventually burst through, the debris was carried as far as the English Channel.
After the initial darkness, the air remained thick and murky for months or even years: ash clouds drifting and settling like dust before rising and drifting again. Ash in the hair, ash filling the mouth with its gritty taste, ash contaminating the water, covering the grasses on which animals graze, affecting trees and bushes, flowers and fruit, insects and birds. Lightning storms in seasons when such storms could not be expected, with lurid sunsets, loud noises and heavy, pendulous curtains of what are called mammatus clouds.
Throughout much of Europe the volcano immediately caused seasonal temperatures to drop way below average and there was an increase in rainfall. According to Felix and his team, a similar event is very likely to happen again in Europe and elsewhere within the next three or four decades. When I ask him what he means by ‘likely’, he smiles a broad and amiable smile and says, ‘One hundred per cent; such disasters are the natural consequences of lifting the weight of ice from the land.’
But to return to that other time. Far away from the epicentre of the eruption, birds are falling from the sky, animals are dead or dying or trying to flee in a panic and the bands of hunters who have come to Doggerland to explore the newly rich marshes and waterways must escape, but they do not know where to escape to.
Two hundred and fifty years go by and the effects of the volcano have diminished and life is beginning to resume its old patterns, but then, with a sudden ferocity, a new period of extreme cold sets in and temperatures drop by as much as 6 degrees C within a single decade. This period of cold lasts for a thousand years and is called the Younger Dryas, after the white flowers that do so well in a bare and empty landscape.
21
Eleven thousand five hundred years ago and the Younger Dryas passed with a dramatic temperature rise of 10 degrees C and then there was a steady increase of warmth until the weather was not much different to what we have now and this was the start of the Holocene.
Doggerland comes into its own: lake and pool and estuary; marsh and swamp and river; island and peninsula and the great expanses of mudflats and marshes where the reeds move like water. There would have been the same enormity of the sky that I have grown accustomed to: the shifting mountain ranges of clouds; the sudden enveloping darkness of a thunderstorm; creeping mist and soft rain and the drama of sunset and sunrise.
Woodlands take shape and establish themselves on higher ground, although they are very different to anything we are used to because our woodlands are all managed in one way or another, while these are large stretches of uniformity, only broken by valleys, uplands, marshes and beaver meadows, or by
the natural consequences of storms, fire or disease. I’ve been told of a place called Białowiez˙a on the border of Poland and White Russia that is said to mirror the woodlands of Doggerland most closely, although the person who told me about it had tried but failed to get there.
It is hard to imagine the density of life within this landscape because we have drifted so far away from a world where so many varieties of species can be supported in huge numbers. I have watched starlings thickening the evening sky, seals gathered in their breeding colonies, an exodus of toads too numerous to count; but every year there is less to see and my memory tries its best to forget what it has known, for fear of being made too sad by the reality of the loss. We learn to grow accustomed to the absences, because it seems we have no choice.
In that other time along the intricate northern coastline of Doggerland, the glittering expanses of mud and sand are stippled with worm casts and made electric by jumping sand fleas and crabs, shrimps and all the other small creatures that are food for the bigger creatures. The air is thick with the sound of birds: curlews’ laments, whimbrels’ babbling in seven notes; the triple call of redshank and greenshank, the soft twickering of sanderlings, the rattle of turnstones. They go on crying into the dusk, when the night birds join them and eventually take over. The darkness echoes with what it contains.
If this is spring then the migratory birds have arrived: barnacle geese and greylag geese turn the sky black, their pulsating cries so loud and determined you can’t hear yourself shout. Whooper swans and Bewick’s swans, necks outstretched, their wingbeats and their bugling calls creating two distinct layers of sound. And then all the rest: stork, crane, spoonbill, pelican, a long list whose being here is recorded in the little scatterings of bones that have survived them.
Where the shallow sea begins, the silver eel move in droves as if they are fast currents of water within the water. Terns, their heads at a stark right angle to their bodies, plummet like falling stars to snatch at them. Gull, cormorant and gannet, shag and guillemot and all the others: a dizzy crowd, eating and preening, conversing and competing.
If this is spring, fish are spawning in the sea; you see the ripple of bellies as they turn in the sunlight. Further out and dolphins are leaping in acrobatic arcs, an intimate smile creased on their faces. The white whales known as beluga move in droves, seals loll about in great restless heaps along a sandbank where they can keep their young safe. Some of them are singing; the fat of their bodies ripples under the shining fur.
Animals are always near, some among the woods of the higher ground, others close to the sea and the rivers that run into the sea. The stubby-faced shaggy horses and the reindeer have gone and the big-horned aurochs are diminishing, but bear, deer and wild boar are numerous, alongside fox and wolf, otter and beaver, polecat and weasel, mice and red squirrel, vole and shrew and hedgehog. The hum of mosquitoes. A carcass moves with the maggots inhabiting its flesh.
People are at the water’s edge, a small group of them among the other living creatures and, like the others, busy with staying alive. They know how to hunt and forage; how to make fires and weapons, canoes, wooden shelters, traps and weirs. They have ceremonies to bury their dead and ceremonies to offer gifts to the mystery of the world that they inhabit. All this is not so long ago when you think of everything that has gone before, but it is a huge stretch of time when you think of everything that must come after.
22
The book that impressed me so much when I was living on the farm was Specimens of Bushman Folklore compiled by Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd. It was first published in Cape Town in 1911.
Bleek was born in Berlin in 1827. He graduated with a doctorate in linguistics and then focused his attention on African languages. In 1855 he went to the Cape to help compile a Zulu grammar and in that same year he heard about a race of people known under the general term of Bushmen, though now they are called the San.
The Boers used to go hunting for the San with the same spirit of bloody adventure with which they went hunting for lions and rhinoceros, and many of those who were not killed were sent to the penal colonies, accused of stealing livestock. Bleek’s first contact was with prisoners on Robben Island and the Cape Town Gaol and House of Correction in 1857. You see them in the photographs, their bodies enclosed in fusty, ill-fitting European garments, their eyes fixed in a haunted and inward gaze.
In 1862 Bleek married Jemima Lloyd, who had come to the Cape with her sister Lucy, and in 1866 he was introduced to two |Xam-speaking San, prisoners in the Cape Town prison, who came from the most remote desert regions. They began to help him to compile a list of words and sentences and an alphabetic vocabulary of their language.
By 1870, working together with his sister-in-law Lucy, he received permission to bring a young man called ||a|kunta from the prison to stay at his home in Mowbray. There was also an older prisoner called ||kabbo who became Bleek and Lloyd’s first real teacher, explaining the beliefs and traditions of his people. Over the following years members of ||kabbo’s family and other |Xam families came to live at the house in Mowbray, all willing to tell the stories of their people and the culture to which they had belonged until the disaster of colonisation began to wipe out everything that mattered to them.
When Bleek died in 1875 Lucy Lloyd took over the completion of the huge task they had set themselves, making sure that the archive they had collected was preserved.
Bleek and Lloyd worked primarily as linguists when they took on the challenge of recording an ancient language that did not easily or directly translate into German or English. They did not try to turn the |Xam stories into westernised folk tales, but painstakingly produced accurate parallel texts that provide a vivid record of the halting repetitions and hesitations of human speech and the complexity of a system of beliefs, customs and memories.
The |Xam allow one to see the world with different eyes. People are animals and animals are people; a man becomes a lion, a lion becomes a man. A praying mantis is as important as an old woman, as a young child, as an ostrich; they have equal status. The wind is a person and so are the moon and the stars, trees and stones and water. Everything speaks in its own voice and can be understood, even if what it says has the shifting confusion of a dream.
Now, as I try to pull closer to the people of the Mesolithic who lived in Doggerland, I keep turning to the |Xam, in the hope that their words can help me to understand the distant mystery of a way of life that is so different to anything I have known.
Time Song 8
When a person’s heart aches the person says,
‘Let a lion take this person, let him vanish from our house!’
and the lion hears
and the darkness falls
and the lion stealthily approaches him
and takes hold of him and kills him and he dies
and vanishes from our house.
This month he was dead;
and this month he was dead;
this, the fourth month Ixue went
and today, this day,
ixue went into the lion’s house.
This day,
ixue speaks like the lion
and the lion understands.
told by |inanne and Tamme
Lucy Lloyd notebooks 113:9324–30, quoted in Claim to the Country: The Archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd by Pippa Skotnes, Jacana Media Ltd and Ohio University Press, 2007.
My anthropologist friend Hugh Brody says that the hunter-gatherers of the Arctic Circle and the Dene Nation of British Columbia with whom he lived for several years, along with the San who came to stay with Bleek and his family, the Neanderthals who followed the reindeer and the hunter-gatherers who lived in Doggerland all share what he calls ‘porous boundaries’ in their connection between the living and the dead and between animals and humans, the animate and the inanimate
.
23
Professor Bryony Coles is the person who gave Doggerland its name. I met her in the central foyer of the British Museum. My bag had been checked for sharp objects in case I wanted to create havoc and I had set my back against a marble pillar: an island within the flowing river of visitors. She was wearing a red wool jacket and strong walking boots. I had imagined her to be taller and more severe, but that was just the muddle of preconception from having seen a head-and-shoulders photograph on her university website.
She is a friendly woman, humorous and alert. We headed for the museum café, the smell of things baking directing us as we walked past early Greece and a bit of Abyssinia. I was tempted to stretch out my hand to run it across the figure of a king with a solid tubular beard, his great chest fused into the block of stone from which he was carved, as if the stone and the flesh were equally immutable.
We ordered tea and a muffin dotted with a stain of blueberries that made me think of a short film I had watched a couple of nights before, which followed a year on a newly established nature reserve in Holland. The place tries to re-create the Mesolithic environment, with aurochs-like cattle and stocky, broad-faced horses, alongside deer, hare and beaver and a profusion of birds. Everything is left to itself to proliferate and to struggle to survive and in winter the flat landscape is littered with cold corpses and whatever is interested in feeding from them. There is an autumn scene in which a noisy flock of starlings is feasting on elderberries and then settling on the backs of the horses, spattering their shaggy dun-coloured coats with purple-black stains. Same colour as the blueberries in the muffins.
In the 1980s Bryony’s husband was studying Swedish rock carvings and she often joined him on his research trips, crossing the North Sea on the ferry which doesn’t run any more. There was a big map of the depths of the sea on the ship’s wall and she was drawn to the island shape of Dogger Bank, so close to the surface compared with everywhere else, so she would wonder what lay on the seabed beneath and what sort of an environment it once had been, before the waters rose to hide it from view.
Time Song Page 10