The story
At the Last Glacial Maximum the North Sea floor was dry land, and Britain was joined to continental Europe by a plain archaeologists call Doggerland, after the Dogger Bank. As the ice sheets melted, the sea rose and gradually flooded it. By about 8,500 years ago much of it was marsh and islands, and by about 6,000 BCE Britain was cut off from the continent. Around 8,150 years ago the Storegga landslide off Norway triggered a tsunami that struck the coast and may have hit what remained of the lowland.
The land was once a rich hunting and fishing country of lakes, rivers and marsh, with a population of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. The first sign came in 1931, when the trawler Colinda dragged up a barbed antler point from the Leman and Ower bank, later dated to about 11,000 years ago. Since then fishing nets have brought up mammoth bones, tools and other remains, and seismic surveys by teams such as Vincent Gaffney's have mapped river valleys and lakes under the sea. The archaeologist Bryony Coles gave the name Doggerland in 1998. The story is a close-up example of how coasts retreat when seas rise.
Why it mattered
- Doggerland shows how rising seas swallow human homelands, as ancient peoples lost their hunting grounds.
- Its flooding made Britain an island, shaping the later history of the British Isles.
- Seabed mapping of Doggerland has made underwater archaeology a major field.
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