Sea Sick - Dark Mountain

Mankind owns four things

That are no good at sea:

Rudder, anchor, oars

And the fear of going down

– Antonio Machado (from ‘Proverbs and Songs’, trans. Robert Bly)

Once upon a time I spat into a test tube and sent it forthwith to a gene-reading service. I’d paid $50 to find out whence my ancestors came and how much Neanderthal DNA was in me. I was especially interested in the latter part as I’d recently written about the bum rap our artistic, peaceable, porridge-eating human cousins were still getting at the haughty hands of us Homo sapiens ¹.

Several weeks later the test results arrived to tell me that my forebears had taken shelter in southwestern Europe during the last Ice Age, and that some prehistoric commingling had given me an ‘above average percentage’ of Neanderthal DNA. The report also confirmed what I’d been told of my family story, showing genetic distribution amongst Ireland, Denmark, and Germany. But with one breathtaking exception: a place with a weird name I’d never heard of. A place called Doggerland. No, Doggerland was not to be found in my historical world atlas.

After a feverish few keystrokes I learned that Doggerland is a disappeared place, a submerged place. And yet, a place that could be called the fertile crescent of Europe, from which the first Neolithic farmers may have migrated, bringing with them the practice of building stone circles and passage tombs. Once upon a time, Doggerland joined what are now the British Isles and Ireland to mainland Europe and to Norway.

Britain was just a range of hills on the edge of Europe back then and the land that is now under the North Sea would have been the prime place to live, with plentiful fish, birds, animals and fresh water to be found along the rivers and coastlines…²

That is, until, it all went down, down to its resting place on the bottom of the North Sea.

Online sources told of a place destroyed by a tsunami ca 6150 BC, which one author called the largest tsunami ever recorded on Earth. A tsunami triggered by a landslide on the west coast of southern Norway, triggered by rapidly melting ice sheets, triggered by rapid global warming. A place that eventually fell out of human memory, though legends of it were said to survive.

But not all of Doggerland was lost. Some people survived, and I have the DNA to prove it. And it makes me wonder, what do our genes know and remember of sudden climate change, of climate cataclysms, of famines and floods and furious seas?

The first modern cognisance of ancient Doggerland came in 1931 when a curious object was dredged up by a fishing trawler off the Norfolk coast. What would become the first documented artifact of human life from beneath the North Sea was a Mesolithic antler harpoon, beautifully rendered. But little archaeological interest or investigation followed that first ‘message in a bottle’ until more recent times.

In the decade since I first searched online for Doggerland, more information has floated to the surface, mostly the result of disturbances to the sea floor, such as offshore oil and gas exploration and wind-farm development. Many of the artifacts gathered and analysed in recent years were inadvertently deposited on the shoreline by an experimental project to protect the Netherlands’ coast from rising sea levels. In 2012, a half kilometre-wide swath of the sea floor was dredged, and the massive load of sea soil – which happened to be suffused with prehistoric life remnants – was spread on the shore with the hope that it would provide a bulwark against future inundation. Since then, local residents and amateur archaeologists have found thousands of artifacts along the shoreline, including flints, arrowheads, tool fragments, and a very small number of human remains, all enough to fill a museum.

Online maps of Doggerland now show the extent of the great land mass – and the stages of its demise. The tsunami, I now learn, was only the second of three episodes of catastrophic climate change, centuries apart, that the people living there adapted to, perished by, or fled from. And now there is reliable dating of underwater remains that gives us a picture of the antiquity of this place, documenting almost a million years of human habitation.

How many great grandmothers and great great grandfathers would I trace back to find my way to Doggerland? If it’s true that one’s genome can be traced to a place where so few human remains have survived their underwater burial. And now I want to know what name the people who lived there called their land. What name for their great sea and its shores and tides and skies? Surely it wasn’t Doggerland. Nor, come to think of it, would it have been a name, an appellation in letters and words, as we know names. No, it would have been an oral naming – a sound or sounds. A vocal note, a chant, a sounding. A sounding to measure the depth and height of the sea. Did they sing the sounds, the names? Did they en-chant them?

I once attended a programme about the prehistoric musical instruments of Ireland. It was given at King House, in the town of Boyle, where I was working at the time. The instruments were laid out on a long table before us in chronological order, and through the course of the evening, the presenter, Simon O’Dwyer, played each one. The sounds. The soundings. Reverberating through the great hall of King House. The first and oldest musical instrument on the table was a pair of sea shells. Did we then begin as sea people making shells sing? Blowing into small shells for high notes and large shells for deep notes? Playing conch shells in homage and song to the sea, or to call in the fishers, or to signal danger? Even today we hold a conch shell to our ear to hear the waves within. And I wonder, do we still have within us the rhythms of high tide and low, of spring tide and neap, of full moon and new? If we heard a warning sounded from sea shells, would we be able to hear it, if not heed it?

To enter this world we must first erupt from our sack of water. From our own circular sea we come, from water we plunge into air, our birth the reverse of a drowning. In school we learn that our amniotic prologue from the first foetal cell is a re-enactment of the arc of human evolution sparked by a primordial cell in a primordial sea. And it was the sea that set the pattern of ions in our blood.

I live now in Minnesota, in the middle of a vast continent. The only ‘sea’ within my ken is the ghost of a vast glacial-era sea called Lake Agassiz. And yet a few more minutes of research and I learn it was an ‘outburst’ of Lake Agassiz in 5500 BC that caused the final, fatal inundation of Doggerland. The ‘outburst’ disgorged such a magnitude of fresh water it caused sea levels to rise worldwide, and the parts of Doggerland that had survived the tsunami to be completely submerged.

We say an outburst of tears or of anger, just as we say we feel overwhelmed with tasks or stress. I see now we’ve lost touch with the natural phenomenon behind what are now, for us moderns, rote metaphors. An outburst was, in the beginning of the ‘Word’, a volcanic eruption of water, an Earth-altering flood. And if you were overwhelmed in the original sense of the word, you were drowned at sea.

When Agassiz outburst, the force of its flow carved out the Minnesota River Valley. The Minnesota River joins the Mississippi River at a place the Indigenous people, the Mdewakanton Dakota, have named Bdóte, the sacred centre from which their people originated. The Dakota people rose up from the water there, in the wake of the most recent Ice Age. The adjoined rivers then flow as one some two thousand miles into the Gulf of Mexico and then into the great world ocean. It’s near the bluff of the Minnesota River Valley that one strand of my family took root. To this day, a lake, a creek and a watershed that drain into the Minnesota River bear the name of my Irish ancestors, immigrants from famine.

I live in the middle of a vast continent, but every drop of water I use ends up in the Mississippi River which ends up in the Gulf of Mexico which ends up in the great world ocean, carried northward and into the Atlantic by the Gulf Stream, the Gulf Stream, which I first heard was faltering the same year I heard the sea shells in King House in the Irish town of Boyle.

How is the Gulf Stream doing now?

How are we doing?

Has the memory of this first climate collapse harrowed and haunted the human genome in an epigenetic kind of way all down the ages?

Were the people who survived the flooding and submersion of Doggerland traumatised to see their homeland overwhelmed? Has the memory of this first climate collapse harrowed and haunted the human genome in an epigenetic kind of way all down the ages since?

Do we humans live with unconscious foreboding? Unconscious foreboding that is now becoming conscious?

The more I learn about the drowned land, the more I want to stand on the sea’s edge and gaze north. From here in Minnesota I will wade into the purling shallows and imagine the forests and river valleys that were home to our ancestors. Our ancestors, who have news for us. Though it’s not ‘new’. I feel a growing resonance as I stand here on the shoreline of my imagination looking north over the water, listening to the sea lapping at the tenuous shore.

The language of Ireland gives me a sound, a word for what I feel: ‘oo-wig-ness un khlo-dee’ – uáigneás án chládaigh – the sense of loneliness on the shore; the haunting presence of people who lived and died long ago³. Of people who have something to tell us. I am listening…

IMAGE

Lucy Mu Li
Skin
Digital photograph
This image was taken at Stonesteps Beach in Encinitas, California this past winter during the low tide at twilight. It is from my photography series ’Where Land Meets Sea’, which encompasses two years of devoted documentation of the Encinitas coastline across the seasons and cycles of the Earth. This series chronicles my journey of meeting kin –for to know a place is to greet and recognise the many shapes and faces that live there.
Earlier this spring, the City of Encinitas began a $43 million-dollar sand replenishment project that involves placing 340,000 cubic yards of borrowed sand across 7,800 feet of coastline. The Project will span 50 years, replenishing the beaches every five years or so. Motivations for this project include protecting public and private infrastructure and preventing bluff failures due to the escalating effects of climate change and rising sea levels, as well as creating the picturesque sandy beaches that drive tourism.
‘Where Land Meets Sea’ comes from an intimate gaze. I have searched for and loved deeply all these fleeting moments and meetings at the shoreline, a world that is constantly transforming itself. I have quite literally gotten down on my hands and knees to be witness to this ongoing myth, to hold as much of its beauty as I can. Because of this, I’ve cultivated a particularly loving lens for this ecosystem that allows me to be acutely aware of what is being disrupted in this futile attempt to gain control in the climate crisis. There is so much beauty that is quite literally being buried because we do not know what to hold sacred.

Lucy Mu Li is a Chinese-American artist based in Southern California. Her work emerges through intimate conversations with Earth, working across mediums to weave stories of our interconnectedness. or the last few years, her practice has resideddeep within the world of where land meets sea, exploring it as a place of myth and meetings.

NOTES

1’ Brink’ (Dark Mountain: Issue 7)

2 Vince Gaffney quoted in Kate Ravilious, ‘Fears dash for wind power could cut off the lost world of Doggerland’ (The Guardian, 19th March 2022)

3 Manchán Magan, Sea Tamagotchi (RedFoxPress)