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Look at a map of today’s Europe and
its northern epicenters of population
and commerce: London, Paris, Amsterdam,
Copenhagen. Now consider that these hubs
were once hinterland, mere fringes of an
expanse rich in conifer forests, meadows,
rivers and wetlands, all of it teeming with
game. Prehistoric travelers could have
walked from what’s now central Europe
to northern Scotland without even seeing
a coastline.
As the massive glaciers and ice sheets
of the last ice age began melting about
18,000 years ago, rising seas inundated
this world. The North Sea was born.
The submerged landmass, stretching
between the coasts of today’s British Isles,
Scandinavia, Germany and France, is known
as Doggerland. It’s named for Dogger Bank,
a productive fishing area on its northern
edge. The bank was likely the last area of
Doggerland to be flooded as sea levels rose
by nearly 400 feet over a 12,000-year span.
“Doggerland is one of the most important
pieces of landscape now submerged,”
says University of York archaeologist Geoff
Bailey who, while not directly involved in
current Doggerland research, has followed
his colleagues’ work with enthusiasm. “We
know fauna [was] there by the ton.... It
was a fantastic landscape with freshwater
lakes and an abundance of food, immensely
productive.”
Today, fishing boats crisscrossing
the North Sea occasionally harvest
clues to the lost land: mammoth tusks,
weapons, tools and even skull frag-
ments of humans and Neanderthals.
During a period when humans were
expanding north and agriculture was
replacing hunting and foraging, Doggerland
was a crossroads for different cultures.
It also appears to have had some kind of
trade network.
For example, researchers have traced
stone artifacts found all over Europe back to
now-submerged rock outcrops, suggesting
that the material was transported by humans
throughout and beyond Doggerland.
“You would have had a landscape that
would have facilitated communication and
cultural exchange between what now are
separate bits of land,” Bailey says.
Europe’s Lost Frontiers, a five-year project
that will wrap up in 2020, has been exploringDoggerland on an unprecedented fine scale,
mapping extinct rivers and identifying areas
where human habitation was most likely.
Multiple core samples are being analyzed
to re-create lost paleoenvironments.
For example, a 2017 report by part of
the Lost Frontiers team, published by the
Micropaleontological Society, described
multiple species of beetle in a Doggerland
core. Based on the insects’ habitat and
preferred food, and pollen also retrieved from
the sample, the site may have been wood-
land, with large herbivores present — one
of the beetle species found fed on their dung.
The core sample hinted at how the site
changed over time, from a forest of Scots
pine and hazel to one of oak and some elm.
Ultimately, the presence of microorganisms
that thrive in brackish water are witness
to the landscape’s inundation. DGemma Tarlach is senior editor at Discover.Doggerland: The
Lost Crossroads
6,000-plus years ago
What is now the North Sea was land
during much of prehistory. (See the map
on page 54 for full extent.) As the last
glacial retreat began some 18,000 years
ago, water slowly inundated this area,
known as Doggerland. Rising sea levels
shrank the area first to a peninsula
(below, top) then an island (below,
bottom) before flooding it completely.Source: “Doggerland: A speculative survey,”
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, vol. 64, 1998A mammoth skull caught in a Dutch
skipper’s fishing net (above) and a
13,500-year-old decorated bison bone
(below) retrieved from the North
Sea provide evidence that these
animals resided there at a time
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