 Good afternoon. You have heard in the last two days, an astonishing series of original and forward-looking papers that confirm seabed prehistoric research as a mainstream intellectual component of archaeology. In every paper there's been a description of recent discoveries, a promise of rapid future technical growth, and improved intellectual understanding. In this summary, I will try to fit these developments into a model of how the subject has developed over the last hundred years, and how the curve of growth and increase of knowledge continues onwards and upwards in a logical way. Several of the speakers have expressed well-founded views on the future priorities, so I'm going to focus a bit on predictive methodologies. The argument to be presented will be an outline of the growth of the subject in the last hundred years, my previous attempts at forecasting in different disciplines, examples of various forecasts, then evidence from the present papers and my final conclusion. I'm not going to read the details on this slide, you can browse it yourself and look at it later if you want to. The early 19th century has been quite well documented just in terms of recognition of submerged terrestrial landscapes. Then in the second half of the 20th century, the discovery of seabed in situ stratified deposits, especially in the Baltic and the Mediterranean coast of Israel. Then increasing collaboration until we get to the splash cost project and discovery of sites pre-last glacial maximum involvement of research in Australia and the USA. And then finally, very significantly in the last year, the ability of teams to work consistently in multidisciplinary research to identify seabed sites in areas where there were no previous sites known. That is to say, they were able to work from first principles, not from the clues given by chance finds previously. Forecasting development in different subjects, I have some previous experience. In the sixties, I worked on the protection of marine technology for commercial groups and then the UN law of the sea conference. I did some work on prehistoric archaeology, the geological society, and then various other assessments up to the European Marine Board strategic framework in 2014. The forecasting techniques vary from trying to fit to the existing trends, either a linear straight line, power law, log law, the exponential S curve with growth of flattening and so on. And to extrapolate this into the future to an extent which you think is reasonable to identify various technological and social factors which may cause nonlinear jump. I should explain for the younger members of the audience the shake your money factor. In the 1970s, when shake your money was a representative of the OPEC oil cartel, he was being quizzed on the extent eventual exhaustion of oil and therefore people moving to other resources. He admitted that oil would eventually cease to be our main source of energy, but pointed out that the Stone Age came to an end, not because people ran out of stones, but because they found other technologies. And that's a very important point when trying to extrapolate curves into the future. My first and probably most important experience of trying to make technological forecasts was for a group of large British companies in 1966 to 67. I predicted at the time that manganese nodules would not be exploited for many decades. This was a complete contradiction of what everybody expected at that time. They really thought they would be exploited within a few years. I got the rate of growth of depth of oil and gas exploitation about right, fish farming about right. I predicted the increase in depth and duration of diving excursions extremely accurately and even predicted the exact time and date of John Bevan's deep dive. I won't read all the details here, but there were plenty of failures as well. I didn't foresee subsea fiber optic cables at all, but they didn't come until the 1980s, which was really beyond the 10-year horizon that I was working to. I thought that container ships would grow beyond 500,000 tons, but they didn't. It stopped around 200,000 or 300,000. I saw that satellites could be used to measure marine weather, but not the seawater and oceanographic properties. I didn't foresee an autonomous underwater vehicles, though I didn't see ROVs coming. My next operation was in the law of the sea, where I was the scientific advisor to the British delegation to the law of the sea committee. Picking up the data from the previous commercial study, the United Nations at the time hoped that the exploitation of manganese nodules in the international area of the sea could be licensed by the UN, and that this would produce sufficient funds to support the costs of the United Nations as a whole. I had to point out that this was not going to be the case, and it was a rather unpopular prediction, but absolutely correct. Deepwater hydrocarbon production and manganese nodules, I've already mentioned, the coastal development of mangrove forests was in farce continental shelf-free histories concerned. I had several examples to describe. The first pretty was what called nowcasting, that's to say analysis of the present friends and then stopping at the present, but attempting to guess what's going to happen next. Then an analysis for the Council of British Archaeology and for the European Archaeological Association and the European Marine Board Strategic Friends. This was my nowcast for Jollsoc in 1998. It's a prediction or rather a plotting of the increase in age of sites over the years. It starts in the 18th and 19th century finding classical towns submerged in the Mediterranean and then goes into prehistoric sites deeper and deeper and finding older material back to a Shirley and Hand axis and so on in Table Bay. And obviously this is going to come to a stop. I mean, once we found material in the early Paleolithic, the curve doesn't go on into millions of years. So the curve itself plots what's happened in the past, shows that the age, all the ages are periods within which tools can be found and then comes to a stop. If we look at increase in depth, you get the same sort of phenomenon. The curve continues from the 18th and 19th century deeper and deeper to 50 to 100 meters and then comes to a stop. And obviously we're not going to go off the edge of the shelf. So the absolute maximum is going to be about 130 meters. Mark Twain said that prediction is a dangerous game, particularly about the future. And this is one of my most adventurous attempts to make predictions for submarine prehistoric archaeology. In 2010, I gave a paper to the Council of British Archaeology and I plotted a curve which goes on the Y axis from date from 1900 to 2015. And this is the number of sites, prehistoric sites on the sea floor which has been discovered on a long scale, so 100,000, 10,000. You can see that by 2050, I predicted over 10,000 sites would be known and that in just after 2000, I've got over a thousand sites, which is probably about right. But I don't really know why I put this strange bend in the curve. A straight line through there would really have fitted quite well. Nevertheless, it does show that the increase in number of sites should continue on a long curve, at least for a few more years to come, 10,000 sites, possibly more. For the European Archaeology Association, I did a table of benefits in 2009 actually before Splashcos. This isn't a prediction as such, but it's a list of all the different subjects which 169 agencies said were of interest to them in studying submarine or offshore prehistory. And it shows that we have an enormous resource base of skills and capabilities which could be deployed in Splashcos and future research. There's a key factor which has become clear to me in the last few years about the change in hominin adaptability and intelligence as it might be applied to water crossing. There's always been some doubt about pre-modern, pre-Sapiens human beings being able to cross large water masses because they wouldn't be able to communicate, collaborate, plan the building of boats and rafts, or even plan the number of people working together simply to swim as a group. But what's become clear in the last few years is that modern homo sapiens genetics includes DNA components from Denisovans, Deanderthals, and other unnamed species which have interbred through interagression with successive waves of migrants from Africa. The proposed unique genetic mutation which produced super intellectual homo sapiens therefore may not be necessary in order to explain the ability which is needed to plan water crossing. If we look at the genetics, I apologize for the mixture of this slide a bit. It is a fundamental research paper by Omar Gokumen on the crossover integration of genetics which actually has a much better graphic in the economies on October the 3rd of 2020. But what it shows is the crossover of genes between the various subspecies of human beings going back 100,000 years or more. And to my mind this suggests that pre-homo sapiens are quite likely to have had much more sophisticated ability in planning executive function and so on. If these different species had been so different that they could not breed and produce fertile offspring which themselves were seen as potential mates then this sort of development would not have occurred. The different species must have recognized each other as being very closely related. To develop this idea even further been a very very interesting paper by Dylan Gaffney on Pleistocene water crossings and adaptive flexibility and effectively it's pre-homo sapiens. I found this paper a real revolution and a relevation which shows that the potential for crossing water channels more than 30, 40, 50,000 years ago is really quite high. Paradoxically this means that the crossing into Australia or into the Australian Papua New Guinea landmass and the crossing of Beringia into the Americas are not really the greatest challenge. Some of the most interesting research now involves the diffusion in the islands of Wallacea and even the crossing from the Middle East across the South Aegean and into Northern Europe by pre-sapiens subspecies. I'm going to show you a graph which arose from discussions about the rate at which human intelligence technology and coordination might increase through time. And it's a graph which was worked out by my son Peter Fleming and I hope other people in the audience may sometimes have to rely on the next generation or to do programming for them. Later you'll be able to download the graph if you want to by using the QR plot here. I'm going to show you the graph in the next slide. This curve arises because of a conversation I had with Geoff Bailey some years ago, tried to suggest whether there was a law of technological growth which could be extended from the paralytic to the modern period. What I was concerned with was the idea of a graph which had a doubling time of capability of perhaps half a million years or more in the paralytic. And that that doubling time reduced by some constant factor so that it got shorter and shorter until you got to something like Moore's law with a doubling time in two or three years. Peter worked on this and came to the conclusion that the best way to represent it was a family of curves based on the reciprocal of X, one over X. And you can see here roughly speaking what the curve looks like in a general way and the way it tails away this is time going back into the past year. And as you can see as we come up the future it gets faster and faster until it's asymptotic to the present. But one can vary the key constants here which determine the shape of the curve so that you can make it steeper or you can make the rate of curve into the past so that it enables you to model a system where people are still quite clever back in the paralytic. Or you can adjust it that way so that it looks as if people are going to cut off quite early in the paralytic and don't have many skills before that. The tangent has been put on here which you can also play with because it shows how dangerous and misleading it is to look backwards down the curve and project it quite steeply into the past. Which gives the appearance that people were really not very clever quite a short time ago. Anna Beertal addressed the first item here talking about the Neanderthal material from the North Sea. And I should add that the Dutch dredging onto the beach supply has produced many Neanderthal bones completely out of context but at least confirming that there are more out in the North Sea. On item two Finlay and Ben Sharada produced an excellent paper and what I'm hoping in the medium term is that the rate of processing can speed up to the point that one could take multiple cores and develop radiance around sites much more quickly and focus in on the source of key DNA. If we look at item three the acoustic resonance of blades is something that's been studied by several research groups now in Denmark and the USA. I know the technique has not been proven but if it works it's really going to be quite a breakthrough. In item four the pre-Sapiens expansion in the islands of Wallacea and around the Sundar arc are really absolutely fundamental and if we can establish that pre-Sapiens seafaring was already active it will confirm some of the ideas of Robert McNaughton who's been treated as something of a maverick up to this point. In item five Jeff Bailey has been very keen in promoting the submergence of shell mittens and if more of these could be found underwater it would be a great advance. Item six has been terrific progress in North Australia both Helen Farr and Jonathan Benjamin separately who've reported on major projects there and I'm a great enthusiast for this as I was involved in surveys of the Kuta Mantra Shoals in the 1980s. Not surprisingly item seven has attracted most of the papers and has been reports by Kenneth Hardinger, Tal Pex, Walker Tal, Cottrell, Momba, Gaffney, Bino, Tissart and so on. All describing phenomenal advances in our understanding of the prehistoric archeology of all the sea areas around the British Isles. The submerged analysis on the global scale Jeff Bailey has touched on this is fundamental now because the continental shelf of the entire world was occupied by Hermosapiens and as I pointed out above the pre-Sapiens exploration of Southeast Asia is particularly important. And item nine and Harris and Bat described the social research and again I hope that the increased speed of work and quick analysis will enable more rapid gradient analysis across critical sites. Item 10, the computer models. There's all sorts of ways that this could go, but Merger tried to tell have shown the potential for improvements here and I'm sure there's going to be massive advance in the next few years. Institutional collaboration is something that Jeff Bailey and I have discussed at several meetings and Jeff has pointed out several times that the different disciplines, the representatives tend to stay within their comfort zones. I know this sounds a bit critical, but people tend to come from different institutions for different disciplines, attend and listen most intently to papers on the subject they already know and then go back to their home base. They don't spend enough time studying disciplines of which they're not familiar. Item 12, new courses and institutes is something which we hope to come out of splash costs. I think that economic problems of recent years have made that problematic, but I hope that meetings like today's will help promote the commitment of institutions to setting up courses which will endure in future. Item 13, Jeff referred to migration along the north coast of the Mediterranean, the near the thick, and there's been quite a few papers in the published academic literature of this subject. The paralytic occupation of the southern Aegean is something that Dmitri Sakalario has been looking at and his archaeological colleagues in Greece. The resolution of the crossing of the southern Red Sea is something which will take time. Both the evidence from our land and the evidence from the sea will gradually accumulate to establish whether a crossing really did occur there or not. Item 16, this isn't something which is the responsibility of our community, but the range of studies of skull type, hearing ability, speech analysis, social structure and so on, of presapiens, hominins, all supports the idea that there could have been a competence in seafaring, both building collaborative crossing of sea channels and so on, more than 50,000 years ago. And item 17 is somewhat the same, but there have been several papers recently, not only Gafnis on the social dynamics of water crossing. What did people have to do to collaborate to get a sufficient number of people onto the far side to create a stable and continuing population? There's been very little discussion of automatic underwater vehicles at this meeting, but they do have terrific potential for surveying in a very boring and monotonous way on a closely spaced grid close to the sea floor in such a way that might reveal anthropogenic materials of a prehistoric nature. And finally, although it may be completely chance, there's the potential for discovering of early rafts, log boots and so on, which would help us understand the crossings and marine exploitation of resources in prehistoric time. I hope that this list gives you some ideas of the potential for growth in the future, and I hope you will all be involved in the most efficient and successful research in those areas. Thank you very much for listening.