Doggerland

• 1. Introduction

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  Doggerland now lies beneath the southern North Sea, and in 1931 the fishing trawler Colinda hauled a piece of it to the surface. The trawler was working near Ower Bank, 25 miles east of Norfolk, when it brought up a lump of peat. Inside the peat sat a barbed antler point, 8.5 inches long, that may once have served as a harpoon or fish spear. It dated from somewhere between 10,000 and 4,000 BCE, when this stretch of seabed was tundra. A hunter's tool had come up from beneath the waves.

  What was the country that once stood here, and how far did it stretch? Who lived on it, and what did they eat? What drowned it, and did a wave from Norway finish the job? And how can anyone map a land that nobody can walk across?

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• 2. Before The Sea

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  For much of the Pleistocene, Great Britain was a peninsula of Europe, tied to the continent by a massive chalk ridge called the Weald-Artois Anticline across the Strait of Dover. That changed during the Anglian stage, about 450,000 years ago, when an ice sheet filled much of the North Sea. In the southern part, a huge lake pooled against the ice, fed by the Rhine, the Scheldt and the Thames. Its catastrophic overflow carved a channel through the chalk ridge. The result was the Channel River, which carried the combined waters of all three rivers to the Atlantic.

  Exactly when Britain became a true island is still argued. The breach probably made isolation possible whenever sea level was high. Some scientists think the final break waited for a second ice-dammed lake to overflow, during the MIS8 or MIS6 glaciations, around 340,000 or 240,000 years ago. Kim Cohen and Marc Hijma instead date the ridge's final destruction to the severe Saalian Glaciation. It peaked around 160,000 years ago and ended with another meltwater lake around 130,000 years ago.

  The Hook of Holland marks one end of a watershed that, after the first main Ice Age, seems to have run east from East Anglia and then southeast, instead of across the Strait of Dover. That is what the contours of the present seabed suggest. The Seine, Thames, Meuse, Scheldt and Rhine joined and flowed west along the Channel as one broad, slow river. During the Last Glacial Maximum, ice covered the North Sea and much of the British Isles, and sea level sat about 120 m lower than today. By around 12,000 BCE, Britain, the North Sea floor and the English Channel formed a single expanse of low-lying tundra.

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• 3. Wetlands And Woodland

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  Around 10,000 BCE, the north-facing coast of Doggerland was a fringe of lagoons, saltmarshes, mudflats and beaches. Behind it lay inland streams, rivers, marshes and lakes. Dense woodland covered the hills and valleys beyond the water. The wetlands and lakes drew waterfowl and other game, so this may have been the most prosperous hunting, fowling and fishing ground in Europe during the Mesolithic. It supported a large share of the continent's Mesolithic population.

  A three-dimensional seismic survey run by Birmingham's North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project revealed one extensive river system. It drained the southeastern part of the Dogger Bank hill area into the east end of a lake called the Outer Silver Pit. Researchers named it the Shotton River, after the Birmingham geologist Frederick William Shotton. Above the river, they found a system of dunes that they called The Spines.

  Rising above all of this wet ground was the upland of the Dogger Bank, which would go under later than the rest of the country.

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• 4. Two Mesolithic Cultures

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  The Maglemosian culture, which first appeared in the north between 9,000 and 6,000 BCE, was the first of two groups that mainly occupied Doggerland. Its people made microliths, axes and other tools from stone and bone. A barbed point of red deer antler, found in peat on the seabed, matches Maglemosian technique and style. That find and others like it anchor the case that people really lived here, and they show what their world was like.

  The Kongemose culture followed, existing between 6,000 and 5,200 BCE. By its start, Doggerland was almost gone, shrunk from a broad land bridge to a few low-lying islands. People had to change their way of life to suit the new world. Kitchen middens, which are heaps of discarded food remains, and fishing tools left by later groups such as the Ertebølle culture record that shift.

  Nearly all the evidence of human habitation here dates to the Mesolithic, though a few finds reach back much further.

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• 5. Older Visitors

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  A Neanderthal skull fragment more than 40,000 years old was recovered from material dredged from the Middeldiep, about 10 miles off the coast of Zeeland. It went on display in Leiden in 2009. In 2019, a flint flake partly covered in birch bark tar, dredged up off the Dutch coast, gave researchers valuable insight into Neanderthal technology and cognitive evolution. Aggregate dredging off Norfolk produced another internationally significant find, an early Middle Palaeolithic assemblage linked to a floodplain deposit of the drowned Palaeo-Yare river system.

  Mammoths and lions are among the animals that vessels have dragged up from the seabed, along with a few prehistoric tools and weapons. In 2012, beachcombers found ancient artefacts in sediment dredged from the sea bottom 13 km offshore and spread on a Dutch beach as a coastal protection measure.

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• 6. The Water Returns

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  Between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, rising seas swallowed Doggerland. It first broke up into a series of low-lying islands and then submerged completely. As the ice melted at the end of the last glacial period, the land also tilted in an isostatic adjustment, because the huge weight of ice was lessening.

  By 9000 BCE, a large tidal bay had gradually formed between eastern England and the Dogger Bank. Sea level then rose rapidly, turning the Dogger Bank into an island and physically disconnecting Britain from the continent. That separation was complete by around 6500 BCE. The Dogger Bank itself stayed an island until at least 5000 BCE.

  Dutch fishermen of the 17th century gave the bank its name, after their fishing boats called doggers. Doggerland later took its name from the bank. A single wave from Norway may have hastened the end, though scientists disagree about how much.

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• 7. The Storegga Wave

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  About 8,200 years ago, an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway, known as the Storegga Slide, generated a tsunami. Its effect on Doggerland is controversial. One hypothesis, dated to around 6200 BCE, says the wave flooded much of the remaining coastal land. By that account, the tsunami had a "catastrophic impact on the contemporary coastal Mesolithic population", and in cultural terms "the Mesolithic there goes its own way". Up to a quarter of Britain's Mesolithic population may have lost their lives.

  A study published in 2014 suggested that only low-lying islands remained when the slide struck. It still supported the view that the area was abandoned at about the same time as the tsunamis.

  A rival view holds that the tsunami devastated Doggerland and then ebbed back into the sea. Later, according to this idea, Lake Agassiz in North America burst. The fresh water it released raised sea levels over about two years, flooding much of Doggerland and making Great Britain an island. Broken shells are distributed differently in the lower-lying and higher parts of the area, which suggests that some land survived the tsunami.

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• 8. Mapping A Drowned World

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  In 1913, Clement Reid studied plant remains brought up from the Dogger Bank, and animal remains and worked flints from the Neolithic had also been found. In 1915, the anatomist Sir Arthur Keith discussed the area's archaeological potential in his book The Antiquity of Man. The existence of the lost land had been established by the late 19th century.

  In the 1990s, Bryony Coles renewed interest and gave the region its name, "after the great banks in the southern North Sea". She produced speculative maps. She also recognised that the current relief of the seabed is not a sound guide to the topography of Doggerland.

  Between 2003 and 2007, a University of Birmingham team led by Vince Gaffney and Ken Thomson mapped around 23000 sq km of the Early Holocene landscape. They worked from seismic data supplied by Petroleum Geo-Services. The results were published as a technical monograph and as a popular book.

  In 2012, universities including Birmingham, St Andrews, Dundee and Aberdeen displayed their findings at the Royal Society summer exhibition in London. Richard Bates of St Andrews said: "We have speculated for years on the lost land's existence from bones dredged by fishermen all over the North Sea." He credited recent work with oil companies for letting the team model its plants and animals, picture its people and understand events such as the rising sea and a devastating tsunami.

  Since 2015, the University of Bradford's Europe's Lost Frontiers project has kept mapping the prehistoric landscapes and used the data to direct extensive coring of marine palaeochannels. The sediment cores yield sedimentary DNA and conventional environmental data for a major computational model of how people colonised the submerged landscape. In 2019, scientists from Bradford and Ghent University found a hammerstone flint on the seabed 25 miles off Cromer, Norfolk, at a depth of 32 m. It could point to prehistoric settlements.

  In March 2010, it was reported that the area's archaeological importance could affect the future development of offshore wind farms. Channel 4's Time Team had already devoted a 2007 episode to the subject, called Britain's Drowned World. Today, international teams are running a two-year investigation with new and traditional techniques, aiming to show how hunter-gatherers became farmers.

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