What Happened to the Lost World Beneath the Sea? Ice Age Australia

What happened to the lost world beneath the sea? In this history documentary we travel back to Ice Age Australia, when sea levels were around 120 metres lower and a vast drowned land, the Northwest Shelf of Sahul, stretched far out from today's coastline. Fourteen metres down, off the Murujuga coast (Dampier Archipelago) in Western Australia, archaeologists and divers found stone tools on the seafloor: the first confirmed underwater archaeological sites on Australia's continental shelf. Twenty thousand years ago this was not sea at all. It was a country larger than Japan, with rivers, the Malita inland sea, freshwater lakes, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. This Ice Age documentary follows the story of the drowned landscapes of ancient Australia: • Sahul, the Ice Age continent that joined Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania • The first people of Australia and their crossing from Southeast Asia • Murujuga rock art: one of the largest collections of petroglyphs in the world • Sea level rise at the end of the last Ice Age and Meltwater Pulse 1A • How Aboriginal oral traditions may remember the rising sea (Sea Country) • Underwater archaeology: how scientists search for lost settlements on the seafloor • What the drowned land of Sahul can still tell us today A documentary about ancient history, prehistoric Australia, archaeology, lost worlds and one of the oldest living cultures on Earth, based on new research published in Quaternary Science Reviews (14 October 2026, Deep History of Sea Country project) and earlier work by Flinders University, Griffith University and the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation. Watch to the end: what would you want remembered if the sea took your home? CHAPTERS 0:00 Fourteen metres down 1:37 The Crossing 3:30 The Lost Country 5:51 Murujuga 7:34 The Rising Sea 9:19 Inland 11:02 Memory 12:46 The Search 14:57 Still There 16:41 What would you want remembered? Sources and image credits are listed in the pinned comment / below. #IceAge #Archaeology #Documentary #Australia #LostWorld #AncientHistory TAGS lost world beneath the sea, what happened to the lost world, ice age, drowned landscapes, Sahul, Northwest Shelf, Murujuga, Dampier Archipelago, underwater archaeology, ice age Australia, sea level rise, Meltwater Pulse 1A, Aboriginal history, Sea Country, rock art, petroglyphs, documentary, lost world, Malita inland sea, Kasih Norman, Jonathan Benjamin, Flinders University, Griffith University PINNED COMMENT If the sea slowly rose over the place you call home — what's the one thing you'd want people to remember about it, ten thousand years from now? I read every comment. (Full source list and credits in the description.)