Blurs

Imagine that humanity disappeared tomorrow. Not gradually. Not even after centuries of decline. Just gone. The cities would remain. For a while. Buildings would eventually collapse. Roads would crack. Vehicles would rust away. Power stations would ultimately fail. Forests would reclaim abandoned suburbs. A few thousand years would pass. Then tens of thousands. Eventually, most obvious evidence of our civilisation would disappear. Some traces would remain; fragments of concrete, unusual concentrations of metals, plastic residues, deep mines, artificial radioactive signatures. Now imagine something much more difficult. What if an industrial civilisation had existed on Earth millions of years before humans? What if it had risen, flourished and disappeared long before our ancestors were capable of building cities? Would we know? Or could an entire technological species vanish so completely that modern science would mistake its planet for one that had never hosted anything more advanced tha...

For most of human history, the coastline has not been where it is today. That simple fact has enormous consequences. During the height of the last Ice Age, vast quantities of water were locked away in continental ice sheets.  Global sea level was roughly 120 metres lower than today. Where there is now ocean, there was once land. Not barren land. Grasslands. Forests. River valleys. Wetlands. Coastal plains. And, almost certainly, people. As the great ice sheets melted, the oceans rose and progressively swallowed enormous areas of this ancient landscape. Much of it has never been systematically explored. That raises an extraordinary possibility: Could some of the most important chapters of human prehistory now be sitting beneath the sea? The missing land During the Last Glacial Maximum, roughly 26,000–21,000 years ago, sea level was dramatically lower than today. The continental shelves were exposed. Britain wasn't an island in the form we know it today. The North Sea contained an en...