 It's loading up now, right? I have the unenviable task of following up in the final slot of the day, a slew of fantastic presentations from various different people who have shown the level of detail with which they have dissected the various datasets we have from the North Sea landscape. But you know, I like a challenge, so I'll give it a go. It won't be anything quite so technical for me, but I guess I'm going to try and sum up some of the key points and extrapolate some further implications from some of what we've heard of today with regards to the archaeology, that is. And I guess I would start by going back to thinking about Doggerland within a broader global context and the sort of recent history of submerged paleo landscape archaeology. I think at least within the discipline, we've moved away from those somewhat tired old notions that there's nothing there, that people didn't live there, that even if they did live there, it's all being destroyed now or we have enough stuff on land that we don't need to look at what's under the water anyway. So I think we've kind of moved past that at least within the discipline and we've also begun to recognize that some of these submerged paleo landscapes that different times in the past might have actually been quite attractive places to live and that they also might have been staging grounds for some really exciting and important events and processes in human history. The people in the Americas along the submerged Pacific coastline, diaspora throughout the Southeast Asia and Australasia, I'm going to be hearing a bit more about this stuff tomorrow, I think. So there's not much more to be said except for Doggerland, obviously, which was mentioned at the very beginning of the conference today, is certainly among the, if not the best studied submerged paleo landscape that we have in the world at the moment. So a big part of this presentation is going to be based around the work of the various colleagues I have on the ELF team and a lot of what's being talked about today. I'll also be drawing upon researchers from other fields, collaborators and colleagues from different projects, archaeologists and non-archeologists to talk a little bit about how this landscape changed and what this means for our understanding of it during the early Holocene and also more broadly, the North Sea Basin and Northwest Europe during this time. So the map you can see in the smaller map there in the top left is a map published in 2018 by the British ice team. And we picked up on this, we thought it was quite important. It shows that the northernmost extent of the Doggerland landscape was not as far north as has traditionally been thought of, even going quite far back. So that's 21,000 years ago. And the larger map shows the coastline for the north at ten and a half thousand years ago. You see that not much has really changed here. You can also see in the south. I don't know if you can see my cursor, but if you can, you can see in the south. We have this deeply in size marine inlet here that Simon was talking a bit about earlier in his presentation. This is where we think the coastline was roughly at ten and a half thousand years ago. Now, I know that coastlines are difficult things to reconstruct. The sea level index points can vary quite a lot locally and we have to factor in place your isostatic adjustment models, too. But these are model coastlines that we are getting better at being able to refine as time goes on. And these have some broader implications. So we can now support the argument from from some in Scandinavia that Doggerland was probably not a staging point for the colonisation of Scandinavia at the end of the Paleolithic. We can also say that the lack of Doggerland north of the Doggerbank makes it hard to imagine that any Arends-Bergen folk might have been coming to Scotland via this route. They may have been coming through the mainland UK or up a submerged coastline. But the lack of an actual Doggerland landmass north of this point makes it difficult to see how it could have figured in these models, which it sometimes has done. It also means that the Viking Bergenflint, which is found far north of the Doggerbank, is either much older than the LGM, or alternatively has been reworked and moved there post-epicitionally. And this map kind of really brings these points home, I think. You can see there's a relatively stable coastline to the north between 16,000 and 11,000. And after 11,000 is when the landscape begins to change quite rapidly. I would emphasise that the point of this is that there is a landscape there. I'm not trying to imply that it is static throughout this time and I'm changing just that the coastline does not move inland that much, or at least that's what it looks like. And you can see in the south in that little white box the costier of fine spots and that we have around that southern marine inlet and around the brown bank, which was just talking about there. So we've established that Doggerland was there throughout the Lake Glacier and post-glacial. We know that southern Doggerland was never glaciated, even during the worst excesses of MIS too. And if we look at the Southern River Valley cause that various people have been talking about earlier on, the Southern River Valley would have been not too far south of the most southerly glacial extents during the LGM and one core in particular, L34, has some particularly interesting bits and pieces going on in it. We see what we typically think of as early Mesolithic arboreal taxa appearing early on, birch, pine and hazel, because it wouldn't be a talk about Mesolithic archaeology if we didn't talk about hazel. And there are also other lines of evidence that suggest there might have been some strange things going on here, perhaps warm loving fish and other types of data. I mean, I guess the point of this is that as you've seen throughout today, this project entails a large number of different specialists working on a wide variety of different data types and trying to integrate those different data, having a multiproxy approach is really the strength of this project. This is one core. I will not try an over-reg pudding here. It is just one core, but we are pulling together different lines of evidence and it does seem like these taxa are appearing relatively early on during younger drives. Perhaps this is part of a mini-refugee of some sort. Perhaps this is just one small isolated area within a much broader landscape where things never got quite that bad, that trees died off in the way we thought they might. There are various issues with this, like I say, it is just one core, but we're already starting to see a few unusual patterns that we hope we can continue investigating in the future as the project continues. And I guess if the point about Dogaland being there in the Paleolithic is interesting that it was there and relatively stable in terms of that northern coastline, what happens in the Holocene is a very different story and we're faced with a very dynamic landscape then with the coastline changing relatively rapidly. Here we can see how the Dogabank land mass goes from being an upland area to an island to a relatively diminished island by under 8,000 BP. And we can also see the evolution of that marine inlet to the south that Simon failed and colleagues in Belgium, Michael DeClerc and people have been working on. And I guess what you can really see here is that Britain actually separates from mainland Europe a little bit earlier than has traditionally been thought in a lot of circles quite recently. We reckon around nine and a half thousand years ago, which is quite closely aligned with what Brian Clark predicted back in the 1930s, funnily enough. And a lot of the emphasis on Dogaland since the work of Brian E. Coles has been seeing this as a landscape that was habitable. And I think, you know, we still need to emphasise that point. But we also begin to see with the narrowing of the strip that connected Britain to the rest of the mainland that the landbridge element may also have been important for porno and flora that were native to Britain prior to the separation and indeed for people and different animals and plants moving inwards. These are all things that we might try and look at in the future as well, through distribution analysis. I think that we have sites like Star Car in Bowden, a cliff now with evidence of waterfaring technology. So we know that the British Mesolithic people were just as capable of this kind of stuff as the European counterparts were. So the opening up of this inlet and the various other waterways that were changing within Dogaland may not have been unnavigable to people, but the narrowing of this connection is nevertheless an important revelation, I think, particularly at how early on it's happening. And thanks to the various work that people have been doing, we've been able to zone in at a resolution that's previously not been possible. Now, some of the maps we're making are still, you know, it's important to mention that they are still relatively crude and generalised. It nevertheless allows us to begin to think of some aspects of the submerged landscape in a way that we've previously not been able to in terms of where lithic outprop locations might have been in terms of different ecosystems, where people might have had to go for fresh water fish as opposed to marine resources, that kind of stuff. Although it is very coarse and simplified, we're beginning to actually think about parts of the southern North Sea landscape like this now. And this slide shows, I've stolen the shamelessly from Simon in his presentation earlier, shows one such sort of schema for what the East Anglium romp, as we're calling it, might have looked like, a part of the Doggalan that survived a bit longer than some other places. Towards the end of the Mesolithic, we have two events that we struggle to grapple with. One is the Sterega tsunami. And the other is the 8.2 event. Now, the Sterega tsunami, by all accounts, does appear to have been a terrifyingly huge wave. But because of the isostatic adjustment, we haven't found much evidence of it from the southern North Sea basin. And the traditional narrative surrounding the Sterega tsunami is that that was the end of Doggaland. However, we know that tsunamis typically don't result in permanent inundation. And when we found evidence of Sterega in one of our cores, the aptly named Elf 1A, we found a return through the various proxy dates we had a return to a terrestrial signature after the tsunami deposit, indicating this return, perhaps not to normality, but a return, nevertheless. We also know that tsunamis have a highly regionally variable effect, so they might hit some places much worse than others. And with the new modelling we have about how the coastline is changing and the rates of inundation, we think that the Doggal Island, as it would have then been, may well have been inundated when the Sterega tsunami happened. If it was inundated or even if it was still there, it may have also had an impact on the damage that the wave caused to areas to the south. It may have exacerbated it in some areas and it may have mitigated the impact in others. So we're at least beginning to move towards a more nuanced understanding of events such as the Sterega tsunami. And with regards to the 8.2 event, well, this is perhaps why much of the Doggal Island had become inundated by this time. You can see that there was a relatively rapid rise in sea level just prior to the Sterega tsunami happening. And for archaeologists, we often talk about the 8.2 event in terms of a temperature drop. But actually, perhaps the bigger issue, certainly for people living in Doggal Island and in and around the North Sea Basin, would have been the rise in sea level and the changes that that had on the landscape. Because neither the Sterega tsunami nor the 8.2 event actually spelt the real end of Doggal Island, we might want to think a bit more carefully about the existence of submerged coastal fringes into the late Mesolithic and beyond. Previous attempts have been made at reconciling the fragmentation of Doggal Island with changes apparent in the Mesolithic archaeology, some of the work on the house at how it has been linked to this in the past. I mean, it now seems from what we were talking about earlier that Britain may have separated much earlier than these models suggest. It doesn't mean that they're not related somehow, but it's less well aligned than the previous models had us thinking. But it's nevertheless important to think about the impact that the fragmentation and diminishment of this landscape might have had, how social networks may have fragmented too. We know, for example, from the work of people like Peter Gendl in the 1980s about how waterways may have acted as territorial barriers, but equally from other researchers, just Chris Turner Smith, that they may have been important, routeways and highways connected to territories and groups with one another and trying to think about these in a dynamic way. I mean, it's difficult enough within the framework of terrestrial archaeology, but we have to bear these ideas in mind as we see. Broadly speaking, a relatively homogeneous final paleolithic across this area become a bit more fragmented. And we also have to contend with the idea that this landscape may have survived into the Neolithic to some extent. We have the Ertobolar and Swifter band, for example, kind of similar in some respects here. The linear band Kramet coming up behind them, maybe they're facing increased pressure between the coast and the incoming farmers. This is all a bit speculative, but there are ideas that we need to reconsider. Yes, the habitable landscape has diminished significantly, but the relative available coastline is increasing. And that's something that doesn't often get talked about. The stuff I've talked about so far all kind of relates to how the various research done under the ELF project and other colleagues and collaborators as transformed in the last few decades and even in recent years, our understanding of the Doggerland landscape and what this might mean for archaeology of it. When it actually comes to archaeology, we have a bit of a different story on our hands with regards to Britain, most famous submerged Mesolithic sites, Goldcliffe and the Serving Estuarine's Tidal site and Bouldercliffe, which I think we'll be hearing about again tomorrow in the southern. We have a few sites in the northeast of England and some more around the Thames Estuary, including stratified sites. But these are actually some of them quite far inland up River Valleys and so on. Again, if we look at the Danish stuff, there's huge amounts of submerged Mesolithic archaeology in Denmark. Fantastic work is being done there still. Anders Fischer and colleagues and Peter Maastrup and some others. Most of this stuff is focused on the store belt, which I'm sure I've just pronounced incorrectly, but never mind. And the Limfjord region, we have relatively few examples, as hope you can see here on the Atlantic facing coast of Denmark. Likewise, in the Netherlands, we have the Yangtze Harbour site, which is a truly unique site at the moment, excavated at a depth of 20, 25 meters plus, I think. But most of the evidence, again, we have comes from the infrastructure development at the Europort Zone or from beach replenishment exercises. We have relatively little stuff coming from the offshore zone beyond the 12 nautical mile limit. And the 12 nautical mile limit is the area for which all these countries barring Belgium, as they signed up the UNESCO treaty, are legally required to protect and investigate. So we see we have relatively few sites from this offshore zone beyond 12 nautical miles. Most of the sites we have are fine spots. Most of them are clustered so far around that Southern Marine Inlet in the Brown Bank area, relatively few on the Dogger Bank. We lack stratified sites. There's only two from the North Sea, a Seaton crew, which hasn't been in the northeast of England, which hasn't been investigated, probably since the 1930s, I don't think. And we have the Yangtze Harbour site, which is mentioned, so. And I think the difficulties of looking for this stuff are reasonably well known. It gets worse the further out at shore you go and the deeper you want to go, there's problems with visibility, there's problems with sediment and water overburden. It becomes expensive to get the right equipment, which gets a coarse resolution of excavation. It becomes dangerous, I think, to go diving beyond depths of about twenty four or twenty five meters or so, that there are various issues we have to contend with from a logistical perspective. And then, of course, there's actually finding the stuff. And a lot of people have talked about Pete today and Ruth was just talking about it, too. And I mean, Pete and the more log deposits that we've been talking about as well are at the heart of Mesolithic archaeology in the North Sea. This is a map of 1909 showing that log deposits, as we're then known from this area. And really, the history of Mesolithic archaeology is inextricably entwined with Pete studies, the Kalinda Harpoon found not far away from the Refugia Corp, which I'm dangerously terming it from earlier, around a similar date, the late Younger Dryas. That was found in a lump of moorlog, Starr Carr famously found in a peat bog by Graham Clark, who was part of the Fenland Research Committee with people like Harry and Margaret Godwin, who were inspired by the Kalinda Harpoon and the work of people like Prem Reed, even the Maglamosian culture, the name comes from the Maglamos peat bog. So it's difficult to get away from the importance of Pete here. Pete may not have been an attractive place for people to live, which might be a bit of a problem for us, but it does preserve or can preserve organic materials that we sometimes lack in terrestrial Mesolithic sites. And whereas, as Vince was saying at the very beginning of today, early research in this project was aimed at river channels because they were things that we could look for and we could build up from there. We're now reaching a point on this slide, which shamelessly stolen from Andy Fraser. We're now looking at a point where we can start to reconstruct Pete in other parts of the landscape and think about where else we might want to look at at least Pete, if not the areas of potential of human occupation and the various preservation qualities they might hold. And then really, on a sort of more abstract theoretical level, we need to be able to know where people were. We need to be able to know where archaeology might survive and we need these two things to co-align. So that's what we're looking for. The phrase, Anelina Haystack, has been used several times. I think Ruth just used it in her talk and I think I also like the idea of the Swiss cheese model, which is something that's used in risk aversion modelling. So I think Penny Spikens and Morten Engen likened this to looking for archaeology in submerged conditions as like field walking in dense thick fog. So imagine someone's dropped a slice of cheese over an orsee and we have to choose where we want the holes. We want the holes to overlie with that overlap in that bend diagram between where people were and where things might survive. And of course, we're using predominantly terrestrial data sets, ethnographic data sets that might be highly generalized, derived from relatively recent history, otherwise non analogous. And I mean, the good thing, at least, is that we are able to take some of the more developed paleo geographic data sets we have and develop models of threat and uncertainty and preservation potential for future perception then switched on and getting their bend. Don't worry. So this is an all doom and gloom. In 2019, an expedition between British and Belgian colleagues went out. I think they did a little surveying work over the Browne Bank areas and the stuff that Ruth was talking about. They also went out to the Southern River Valley and we came back with the Southern River Valley Fin. Now, the lithics study of this suggests that this is a debitage fragment from a hammer stone. And really, the significance of this is that we know there is a early Holocene potentially land surface in this area. Yes, this is a single find. Yes, it comes through the surface and not from a stratified context. But this is the first time. And I think this is a global first might be wrong, but I think it's a global first that people have gone out into the offshore zone with the objective of looking for archaeology and come back having found it. So it's a silver lining of what might yet be come. And that's really thanks to the resolution that people have been able to provide. I think Ruth summed it up really well. And she's talking about the various British cities who are moving between in that survey area. We're covering a huge, huge area. And we're beginning as we saw in Martin's presentation, not without caveats and problems and issues, but we're beginning to each a point where we might actually be able to provide a localised resolution of data. With regards to the future, I'm sure many of you certainly in Britain will be aware of the plans for new green energy sources. And I think most of us can probably agree that this is a good thing that we need to be looking for more carbon neutral ways of powering country and this is something that's not just happening in Britain, it's going to be happening in various countries around the world and in around the North Space. And you see this map here that Rachel finally made. Just how much of the North Sea is going to be taken up by offshore wind farms in the future. You can also see just how much of the Doggerland area we have that will be covered up by this. This could be a problem, but thanks to the cooperation and collaboration of people at Willhaston, who have really given a significant chunk of data over to us, we're hoping that we can actually work with these companies to take us to the next step, which will hopefully be kind of like Ruth was hinting at at the end of her project, getting down to questions at a real archaeological level. So I'm really standing on the shoulders of giants here today. I'm talking generally about stuff that other people have talked about in much greater detail. It's a point worth emphasising that there are so many different specialists involved in this and it's needed to make this work. Work is ongoing. I'm only really able to talk about preliminary findings at the moment, but already our understanding of Doggerland landscape throughout the early Holstein and Terminal Pleistocene has changed massively compared to how it stood, say 15, 20 years ago. And we had a bit of a discussion at lunchtime amongst the panelists about how to explain this just to hit the point at home. We thought maybe we could appease European colleagues and use Belgium as a reference. The Yorkshire contingent obviously wanted us to use Yorkshire, but we went with the time on the tradition in Britain of comparing things to an area the size of Wales. Doggerland is not just an area the size of Wales, it's an area the size of Wales eight times over. Just to give you an idea of just how huge an area of land we're talking about its maximum extent. Of course the actual human geography of this landscape is lagging behind physical geography somewhat, but we know that it has all these tantalising hints that it's there. There's a paper just this year, a really exciting paper talking about how some of the bone points may actually be made of human bone. There's all this kind of stuff. We don't have stratified sites yet, but people are doing fantastic work that we do have. We're just hoping that we can maybe soon be able to take it to the next level. And the future, well, it's really going to rest on what we can do in collaboration with the various stakeholders. None of what has been done so far in terms of policy, paleo-landscapes project and all things would have been possible without the support of industry organisations like PGS. We are hopeful with the cooperation of, gracious cooperation of people at Royal Haskining and that we can work with the wind farm developers. This could actually be a fantastic opportunity to finally take this research to the end stage of hopefully finding people in this landscape. Thank you very much for listening. Ben, I guess. Okay, thank you, James. And remarkably, at the end of that day, we're coming in slightly early, which is great. So thank you to all the speakers keeping time in this afternoon's session. There's a few questions and comments here. Martin's made a comment about difference between Pete and Minerogenic said and who might return to that one and just maybe pick up on a few questions. We have one from Jerry Gillies. I hope that's pronounced right. You've dismissed movement from Dogland into Scotland. How would you explain the appearance of Pitt houses on the 4th, see 10,500 BP before anything similar elsewhere in Britain? Well, so, I think that the issue is that now that it's reasonably well established that there is a Paleolithic in Scotland, the question was inevitably raised that people may have come via Dogland into that area. That Dogland didn't extend that far north simply means that people cannot have, that Scotland was not physically connected by land as may have previously been thought. I'm not opposed to the idea of people going through Dogland or from Dogland into Scotland via submerged coastlines or via mainland UK or via boat even, it's just the idea that people walked across a portion of land that it seems wasn't there. And that happened relatively early on. I would say this is a point of contention for Paleolithic stuff really. So, one thing I would say from a more personal take on it is don't underestimate the ability of people to network. So, I have no problems imagining that people are quite physically travelling backwards and forwards, whether it was water or land in their way. Thank you. A question here from the legend that is Martin Bell, how much potential is there in identifying potential site location using models derived from terrestrial Mesolithic site locations which exist at least for Denmark and the Netherlands. So, that's explicitly so in Britain. I mean, I think it has great utility at a near shore level. I think Peter Maastrup has done some great work recently looking for early Mesolithic sites and where they might be in Danish waters because a lot of the work that Anders Fischer achieved was predominantly focused on later Mesolithic sites. People have talked about the application of this model elsewhere, Jonathan Benjamin and a few others as well. I don't think it's really been implemented but with regards to the offshore site. I don't know. Really, it's probably too deep to be diver surveying without using something like an ROV. So, I think that would be a significant factor if nothing else. It's not unfeasible but logistical problems I think is probably the main issue there. Hopefully that answers the questions.