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Stone Age settlement found under the sea in Denmark

(apnews.com)
198 points isaacfrond | 7 comments | 29 Aug 25 07:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.724s | source | bottom
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jorisboris ◴[02 Sep 25 06:43 UTC] No.45099826[source]▶
Every time I read an article like this I end up in a rabbit hole of reading about ice ages, sea level changes, and how the human evolved throughout it. It’s mind boggling that only 20000 years ago the sea level was 120 meters lower and much of Northern Europe was covered in ice
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1. iamflimflam1 ◴[02 Sep 25 08:25 UTC] No.45100417[source]▶
I wonder how rapidly the change occurred - were the people aware of it happening? Did they have people saying “don’t listen to Yarg! These recent floods are just normal weather…”
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2. simonh ◴[02 Sep 25 08:45 UTC] No.45100531[source]▶
It was a relatively sedate 2m per century a lot of the time, but there was one catastrophic Tsunami event called the Storegga Slide around 6200 BC that would have been pretty dramatic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide

3. jorisboris ◴[02 Sep 25 11:02 UTC] No.45101389[source]▶
At that time time they were still hunter gatherers. So they might have been aware of their surroundings, but I presume not as much if they would have been a sedentary community.

The first communities started to settle more or less after the ice age ended, the sea level had risen and the planet had a more pleasant climate around 10000 years ago (source: I'm not a professional on this topic, just summarising what chatgpt tells me)

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4. skeezyboy ◴[02 Sep 25 11:24 UTC] No.45101579[source]▶
similar doomsday predictions were made and went unfulfilled im sure, much like modern times
5. alentred ◴[02 Sep 25 12:38 UTC] No.45102322[source]▶
My uneducated guess is: probably not before writing was invented. Populations where nomadic, changes were likely slow and life expectancy was much shorter. With no record keeping it is unlikely they had means to notice the changes.
6. dpassens ◴[02 Sep 25 13:42 UTC] No.45103006[source]▶
Given that cultures on all (at the time) inhabited continents have flood myths, it seems very safe to say that they were aware of it.
7. dpassens ◴[02 Sep 25 13:46 UTC] No.45103056[source]▶
Why would hunter/gatherer cultures be less aware of their surroundings? They depend on them a lot more; need to know where to move next to find good food sources for the current season. Plus, it's not like these people haven't had sacred spaces that they visited, which requires knowing how to get there from wherever you currently are.