Around 12.000 years ago, as the last major ice age was reaching its end, the area between Britain and Europe looked very different compared to how it does today. Instead of the North Sea, the area was a series of gently sloping hills, marshland, heavily wooded valleys and swampy lagoons. This area is known today as Doggerland.
Doggerland was a populated region and archaeologists say that hunter-gatherer communities fished, hunted and gathered food such as hazelnuts and berries.
But over the millennia, as sea level rose with the ice sheets melting, together with the land flexing down due to isostatic rebound, Doggerland would begin to shrink before completely disappearing sometime between 3,000 and 5,000 BC, around the time when major Neolithic structures began to appear on the British landscape.
Before its demise and when the land was still populated, Doggerland also felt the full force of what some call a megatsunami, triggered by the geological event known as the Storegga Slide. This underwater landslip that occurred in 6200 BC sent an almighty tsunami crashing into Doggerland, and even reached the coasts of Britain and mainland Europe, evidence of which is seen today in soil samples.
It wasn’t the end of Doggerland though, but for the humans living there it may have marked the beginning of the end and would have caused many people to leave the fertile lowlands and travel to higher, safer ground.
In this video, I analyse the lost land of Doggerland, the story so far, and I show how I think the survivors could be responsible for the the birth of the Neolithic era of Britain.
All images are taken from Google Images for educational purposes only.