Doggerland was an area of land, now lying beneath the southern North Sea,
that connected Great Britain to mainland Europe during and after the last Ice
Age. It was then gradually flooded by rising sea levels around 6,500-6,200
BCE. Geological surveys have suggested that it stretched from Britain's east
coast to the Netherlands and the western coasts of Germany and the peninsula of
Jutland. It was probably a rich habitat with human habitation in the Mesolithic
period, although rising sea levels gradually reduced it to low-lying
islands before its final destruction, perhaps following a tsunami caused by
the Storegga Slide. The archaeological potential of the area
had first been discussed in the early 20th century, but interest intensified
in 1931 when a commercial trawler operating between the sandbanks and
shipping hazards of the Leman Bank and Ower Bank east of the Wash dragged up a
barbed antler point that dated to a time when the area was tundra. Vessels have
dragged up remains of mammoth, lion and other land animals, and small numbers of
prehistoric tools and weapons. Formation
Until the middle Pleistocene, Britain was a peninsula off Europe, connected by
a massive chalk anticline, the Weald–Artois Anticline across the
Straits of Dover. During the Anglian glaciation, approximately 450,000 years
ago, an ice sheet filled much of the North Sea, with a large proglacial lake
in the southern part fed by the Rhine, Scheldt and Thames river systems. The
catastrophic overflow of this lake carved a channel through the anticline,
leading to the formation of the Channel River, which carried the combined
Scheldt and Thames rivers into the Atlantic. It probably created the
potential for Britain to become isolated from the continent during periods of
high sea level, although some scientists argue that the final break did not occur
until a second ice-dammed lake overflowed during the MIS8 or MIS6
glaciations, around 340,000 or 240,000 years ago.
During the most recent glaciation, the Last Glacial Maximum that ended in this
area around 18,000 years ago, the North Sea and almost all of the British Isles
were covered with glacial ice and the sea level was about 120 m lower than it
is today. After that the climate became warmer and during the Late Glacial
Maximum much of the North Sea and English Channel was an expanse of
low-lying tundra, around 12,000 BC extending to the modern northern point
of Scotland. Evidence including the contours of the
present seabed shows that after the first main Ice Age, the watershed
between the North Sea and the English Channel extended east from East Anglia
then south-east to the Hook of Holland rather than across the Strait of Dover
and that the Thames, Meuse, Scheldt and Rhine joined and flowed along the
English Channel dry bed as a wide slow river that flowed far before reaching
the Atlantic Ocean. At about 8000 BC the north-facing coastal area of Doggerland
had a coastline of lagoons, saltmarshes, mudflats and beaches as well as inland
streams, rivers, marshes and sometimes lakes. It may have been the richest
hunting, fowling and fishing ground in Europe in the Mesolithic period.
One big river system found by 3D seismic survey was the 'Shotton River', which
drained the south-east part of the Dogger Bank hill area into the east end
of the Outer Silver Pit lake. It is named after Birmingham geologist
Frederick William Shotton. Disappearance
As the thick ice sheet gradually melted away, at the end of the last glacial
period of the current ice age, sea levels rose and the land began to raise
and sink as an isostatic adjustment to the gradual removal of the huge weight
of ice. Doggerland eventually became submerged beneath the North Sea, cutting
off what was previously the British peninsula from the European mainland by
around 6500 BC. The Dogger Bank, an upland area of Doggerland, is believed
to have remained as an island until at least 5000 BC. Before it flooded
completely, Doggerland was a wide undulating plain containing complex
meandering river systems, with associated channels and lakes. Key
stages are now believed to include the gradual evolution of a large tidal
embayment between eastern England and Dogger Bank by 7000 BC and rapid sea
level rise thereafter, leading to the Dogger Bank becoming an island and Great
Britain being finally physically disconnected from the continent.
A recent hypothesis is that much of the remaining coastal land, already much
reduced in size from the original land area, was flooded by a megatsunami
around 6200 BC caused by a submarine landslide off the coast of Norway known
as the Storegga Slide. This theory suggests "that the Storegga Slide
tsunami would have had a catastrophic impact on the contemporary coastal
Mesolithic population. [...] Following the Storegga Slide tsunami, it appears,
Britain finally became separated from the continent and in cultural terms, the
Mesolithic there goes its own way." A study published in 2014 suggested that
the only remaining parts of Doggerland at the time of the Storegga Slide were
low-lying islands, but supported the view that the area was abandoned at
about the same time as the tsunamis. Another version is that the Storegga
Slide tsunami devastated Doggerland but ebbed back into the sea and that later
the bursting of Lake Agassiz released so much fresh water to the world ocean that
sea level over about two years rose enough to permanently flood much of
Doggerland and make Britain into an island.
Discovery and investigation by archaeologists
The remains of plants brought to the surface from Dogger Bank had been
studied as early as 1913 by paleobiologist Clement Reid and the
remains of animals and worked flints from the Neolithic period had been found
around the fringes of the area. In his book The Antiquity of Man, published in
1915, anatomist Sir Arthur Keith had discussed the archaeological potential
of the area. In 1931, the trawler Colinda hauled up a lump of peat whilst
fishing near the Ower Bank, 40 kilometres east of Norfolk. The peat was
found to contain a barbed antler point, possibly used as a harpoon or fish
spear, 220 millimetres long, later identified to date from between 4,000
and 10,000 BCE, when the area was tundra. The tool was exhibited in the
Castle Museum in Norwich. Interest in the area was reinvigorated
in the 1990s by the work of Professor Bryony Coles, who named the area
"Doggerland" and produced a series of speculative maps of the area. Although
she recognised that the current relief of the southern North Sea seabed is not
a sound guide to the topography of Doggerland, the topography of the area
has more recently begun to be reconstructed more authoritatively using
seismic survey data obtained through petroleum exploration surveys.
A skull fragment of a Neanderthal, dated at over 40,000 years old, was recovered
from material dredged from the Middeldiep, a region of the North Sea
some 16 kilometres off the coast of Zeeland, and was exhibited in Leiden in
2009. In March 2010 it was reported that recognition of the potential
archaeological importance of the area could affect the future development of
offshore wind farms in the North Sea. In July 2012, the results of a
fifteen-year study of Doggerland by the universities of St Andrews, Dundee and
Aberdeen, including artefacts and analysis of survey results, were
displayed at the Royal Academy in London. Richard Bates of St Andrews
University said: "We have speculated for years on the
lost land's existence from bones dredged by fishermen all over the North Sea, but
it's only since working with oil companies in the last few years that we
have been able to re-create what this lost land looked like....We have now
been able to model its flora and fauna, build up a picture of the ancient people
that lived there and begin to understand some of the dramatic events that
subsequently changed the land, including the sea rising and a devastating
tsunami." In Sept 2015, archaeologists at the
University of Bradford announced a major project to chart Doggerland in 3D, and
to make extensive studies of DNA taken from deep sea core samples collected in
the area. In popular culture
The "Mammoth Journey" episode of the BBC television programme Walking with Beasts
is partly set on the dry bed of the southern North Sea.
The area featured in the "Britain's Drowned World" episode of the Channel 4
Time Team documentary series. The first chapter of Edward Rutherfurd's
novel Sarum describes the flooding of Doggerland.
The legend "The Cormorants of Utrøst" describes a sunken land in the Norwegian
Sea. Science fiction author Stephen Baxter's
Northland trilogy is set in an alternative timeline in which Doggerland
is never inundated. The land of Cimmeria featured in the
works of Robert E. Howard is situated in the areas of the North Sea and the
British Isles. The opening song of Ian Anderson's 2014
album, Homo Erraticus, is titled "Doggerland," and provides a first
person narrative from the point of view of the prehistoric people who might have
lived there. The H. G. Wells story "A Story of the
Stone Age" is set in Doggerland. See also
Brittia Maglemosian culture
Outburst flood Sundaland — contemporary Southeast Asian
land mass Viking Bergen Island
Weald–Artois Anticline References
Further reading The Rediscovery of Doggerland, by
Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch & David Smith, Council for British Archaeology,
2009, ISBN 1-902771-77-X Doggerland: a Speculative Survey, by
B.J. Coles, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 64 1998 pp 45–81.
Mapping Doggerland: The Mesolithic Landscapes of the Southern North Sea, V.
Gaffney, K. Thomson and S. Fitch, 2007, Archaeopress.
Discussed in depth in chapters 2-4 in Before Scotland: The Story of Scotland
Before History, Alistair Moffat, 2005, Thames & Hudson Inc. ISBN
978-0-500-05133-7 Spinney, Laura. Robert Clark; Alexander
Maleev. "The Lost World of Doggerland". National Geographic 222: 132–143.
Retrieved 30 November 2012. External links
"The moment Britain became an island", Megan Lane, BBC News, 15 February 2011
"North Sea Paleolandscapes", Institute for Archaeology and Antiquity,
University of Birmingham "North Sea Prehistory Research and
Management Framework 2009", English Heritage, 2009
"The Doggerland project", Professor Bryony Coles, University of Exeter.
Includes hypothesised map of Doggerland in the early Holocene.
CGI images of a Mesolithic camp beside the Shotton River
"Das rekonstruierte Doggerland", computer generated images of a
Doggerland landscape, 19 August 2008, Der Spiegel
"Hidden Doggerland underworld uncovered in North Sea", BBC News, 3 July 2012