Earth's Lost Islands

Earth should really stop losing all those islands. Pretty irresponsible of it.

Great video by the way! Glad to have contributed.

England having a land border with France? I can't imagine a worse timeline.

2:54 - Doggerland - A sunken land mass connecting the British Isles to mainland Europe
11:10 - The Grand Banks - A few sunken land masses off the east coast of Canada
23:23 - The Channel Islands - Use to be a larger single landmass off the coast of California called Santa Rosae
27:33 - The Tuamotu Atolls - Use to be an island archipelago in the South Pacific
29:06 - Sunken Island Chains in the South Pacific off the north east coast of Papua New Guinea use to be more prominent
30:56 - Salas Y Gomez Ridge - A series of sunken island chains near Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the South Pacific
33:56 - The Mascarene Plateau - A sunken island archipelago in the West Indian Ocean between the Seychelles and Mauritius islands off the east coast of Madagascar

Regarding the Scotian Shelf: The Mi’kmaq, the local indigenous people, have likely been here at least 10,000–13,000 years, but there are some gaps in the archaeological record. It has been theorized that their ancestors actually settled parts of the Scotian Shelf that were exposed during the last glacial maximum, resulting in these sites now being covered by ocean. Considering they were historically a semi-nomadic people with strong fishing and boating traditions, it would make sense that they would settle the coast and gradually retreat inland as the waters rose.

Am i the only one who wants a full map of the earth but with these islands and the lands from the lost continents video?

I think that would be so cool looking.

You joke about a place on the east coast of Canada called "Auckland" and confusing people, but every once and a while, a news story pops up about a tourist winding up in Sydney, Nova Scotia, when they meant to book their flight to Sydney, Australia. Naming any extra islands in the general vicinity of Cape Breton after anything found in the Southern Hemisphere would just be on brand.

These videos just keep getting better! I've been hoping to see you make a video on the Aral Sea, but if there's enough content there, an "Earth's Lost Seas" video might be a nice inverse-companion to this one...

One thing about the "Dogger Island" and other glacial moraine formed islands is that they are basically just gravel piles. This means that they would have no mineral wealth (coal, iron, copper, ect), or atleast only in the form of nuggets. This would definitely lock the inhabitants behind in terms if technology until they started trading with a mainland culture with access to substantial ore veins.

42 minutes? Holy Gods of Atlas, we have been blessed.

It's awesome that you touched on the Mascarene Plateau. In geography class in high school in the late '90s, our teacher asked us to write a profile of a fictional country located somewhere on Earth. I created a country out of the whole Mascarene Plateau, imagining that it was hundreds of meters higher than in reality. I made a whole backstory about its peopling, its culture, and its role in world history, similar to Cody's speculations at the end of the video. I also drew maps for it and imagined different tropical landscapes and biomes across the large island. I unfortunately lost the poster and description I made some time during high school, but I still remember it fondly as one of my best and most imaginative school assignments.

Doggerland is so fascinating because it is really a lost world. I live in The Netherlands and I was walking on the beach not long ago and I found a piece of mammoth bone. I still have it and it is makes it special if you found it yourself, but it's not even that exceptional because the waves just drop these treasures every day. Even pieces of human skulls are found

Just to clarify a few history points:
-The Celts were/are Indo-European themselves. They were simply historically the first Indo-European tribes to settle (overtaking true pre-Indo-European tribes) most of Western Europe before the expansions of mainly the Germanic, Italic, and Slavic tribes.
-The British Isles were first settled by the Celts (again, overtaking pre-Indo-European peoples), followed briefly by the Romans, but they didn't really stay too too long, then came the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, then the Vikings, and then finally the Normans.

I can't believe you don't have 1M subscribers yet?! Your content is such a high quality. Super engrossing.

I would say Doggerland (island version) would have had a very similar history to the Orkneys and the Shetlands-a cross between the Scandinavian and British worlds.

Every single one of your videos is a masterpiece that outshines my pending PhD thesis, and you put them out every month or so. The fact that you aren't a professor already is a shame but also a blessing for the rest of us, because you're teaching the world about biogeography and now even presenting original ideas and research.

If Dogger Bank had been a higher, longer-lived island, I could actually see it being another refuge of the Neolithic Farmers that occupied most of Europe before the Corded Ware folks came out of the east (the Corded Ware folks came in and appear to have dominated and intermixed with the Farmers, or even mostly replaced them like in the UK). Sardinia was like that as well - genetically, native Sardinians are mostly Neolithic farmer in ancestry, whereas most of Europe is a high mix of those and Corded Ware people.

Atlas Pro: The Earth is active, nothing stays the same
Mia: You know who else doesn't stay the same... PET ME, BABY

A wise cat beyond her years, the finest geographer of all

I actually raised Doggerland out of the sea on an earth map minecraft server.
Even better, I got the dirt to do it by getting rid of Denmark.

Regarding the Grand Banks area, it's no longer a great fishing place because from the 1950s to when Canada started regulating it in the early 1990s, fishing ships with increasingly absurd technology pretty much flattened the cod population, to the point of annihilating a number of fishing villages that had been operating in Newfoundland for more than a century. It's a bit of a sore topic for the descendants of those folks.

As for possible settlers of an island there, I'm surprised you didn't consider the indigenous people of Newfoundland. The Mi’kmaq, at least, did survive partially based on cod fishing, and while they may not have initially had any interest in going out that far, at some point over the 8000 or so years they were there, someone could have gotten swept out in that direction, found shelter on the island, and managed to make it back. And then "oh hey, there's this island out there that's kinda a great place to live, and it's a lot warmer than here" would make it just as attractive to the Mi’kmaq as it did to the Vikings. (Perhaps more so, given Vikings tended to like raiding and/or trading with other iron-age civilizations.)

And while we have found archaeological evidence that confirms at least the very rough details of the Vinland Saga, it's very notable that they approached Newfoundland from the Northwest. That suggests they took a similar navigational path to many trans-atlantic flights do - bouncing from coastline to coastline rather than going out into the middle of nowhere. I'd suggest that Grand Banks Island might have been a possible next step of exploration from the Viking settlement on Newfoundland, but that settlement failed. (which according to the Vinland Saga is because the peoples they met there managed to drive them away...which is impressive considering they would be one of the very few cultures the Vikings met where they'd have had a distinct technological advantage - European subtleties of iron smelting might have offered one group or the other a slight edge, but iron weapons are distinctly superior to stone, wood and bone, which is what the indigenous population (possibly the Beothuk, according to Kathrine Gilks in the replies) would have had access to. Kinda suggests that they were pretty badass.) Thus there were no expansions into other more comfortable parts that they could have reached (we can tell by the lack of anything that suggests they made it to Nova Scotia or down into the States), so reaching Grand Banks Island from that approach seems unlikely.

Conversely, the Basque would almost certainly have set up fishing villages if there was a land to put them on. Deep ocean fishing is dangerous work, which is why most fishing villages are found in places where fish are in relatively local waters. Having a village where you could pack up the catch of the day from all the little fishing vessels and send them over in a larger ship would probably make the whole exercise much safer. And if you're right about not considering the First Nations as a possible early source of settlement, it would be literally free real estate. (And if they were both there, it's very possible the Basque might have established a more successful relationship...from what I've read, the Sagas' account of the Vinland expedition indicates that it was the Vikings who kicked things off by killing someone they thought had been stealing from them. This...didn't go over very well and the idea of weregild doesn't really translate to other cultures all that well. Especially not if they don't have the obsession with money that European cultures tended to have.)

32:00 I would like to point out a correction to this, you say 6k-8k years ago for the earliest settlements on the SA Pacific coast, but there is at least Monteverde in Southern Chile dating to around 15k.
That gives more time for the possible westward expansion, but there is the problem of a subducting trench in between making the "Nazca island chain" farther away from the coastline, and the coastline itself being a desert.