Science - 31 January 2020

SCIENCE sciencemag.org 31 JANUARY 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6477 499

NEWS

O

n a clear, windy autumn afternoon

last October, Willy van Wingerden

spent a few free hours before

work walking by the sea not far

from the Dutch town of Monster.

Here, in 2013, the cheerful nurse

found her first woolly mammoth

tooth. She has since plucked more

than 500 ancient artifacts from

the broad, windswept beach known as the

Zandmotor, or “sand engine.” She has found

Neanderthal tools made of river cobbles,

bone fishhooks, and human remains thou-

sands of years old. Once, she plucked a

tar-covered Neanderthal tool from the wa-

ter’s edge, earning a co-author credit in the

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci-

ences (PNAS) a few months ago.

“Sun, wind, rain, snow—I’m here 5 or

6 days a week,” she says. “I find something

every day, almost.”

Van Wingerden’s favorite beachcombing

spot is no ordinary stretch of sand. Nearly

half a kilometer wide, the beach is made

of material dredged from the sea bottom

13 kilometers offshore and dumped on the

existing beach in 2012. It’s a €70 million

experimental coastal protection measure,

its sands designed to spread over time to

shield the Dutch coast from sea-level rise.

And the endeavor has made 21 million

cubic meters of Stone Age soil accessible

to archaeologists.

That soil preserves traces of a lost world.

During the last ice age, sea levels were

70 meters lower, and what is now the

North Sea between Great Britain and the

Netherlands was a rich lowland, home to

modern humans, Neanderthals, and even

Aided by dedicated amateurs and new methods, scientists reconstruct

a now-submerged ancient landscape—and the people who lived there

By Andrew Curry,in Monster, the Netherlands; Photography by Manon Bruininga

EUROPE’S LOST FRONTIER

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A sharp-eyed collector

spotted this translucent

flint blade—crafted by

hunter-gatherers about

8000 years ago—on

a Dutch beach.

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