Doggerland: The Real Lost Land Beneath the North Sea
The lost land under the North Sea that once joined Britain to Europe, home to Stone Age hunters until the sea rose over it.
Doggerland is the landmass that once joined Britain to mainland Europe where the southern North Sea is now. Rising seas at the end of the Ice Age drowned it, and it was underwater by about 6000 BCE.
Doggerland is the name archaeologists give to the landmass that once connected Britain to mainland Europe, where the southern North Sea is today. At the end of the last Ice Age, sea levels were much lower because so much water was locked in ice sheets, and a wide plain of rivers, marshes, lakes and hills stretched from eastern England to the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.
As the ice melted, the sea rose steadily and ate away at this land. By around 7000 BCE much of it was gone, leaving an island around the higher ground of Dogger Bank. Around 6150 BCE the Storegga Slide, a huge underwater landslide off Norway, sent a tsunami across the North Sea. Within a few more centuries the last of Doggerland was underwater, and Britain became an island.
People lived there. In 1931 the trawler Colinda dredged up a barbed antler point from the Leman and Ower bank, later dated to the Mesolithic. North Sea fishermen and dredging operations have brought up mammoth bones, tools and even a fragment of a Neanderthal skull. The archaeologist Bryony Coles named the region in 1998, and projects led by Vince Gaffney have mapped its buried rivers from seismic survey data.
Doggerland is a real, documented lost land, not a legend. Its slow drowning, and the sudden shock of the Storegga tsunami, show how rising seas at the end of the Ice Age could erase whole landscapes within human memory. Researchers now recover ancient DNA from seabed sediments to reconstruct its forests and wildlife, and some compare its loss to the future threat of sea level rise.
Fishermen hauling nets in the North Sea have pulled up Stone Age harpoons and mammoth bones from what was once dry land.
Doggerland was submerged over thousands of years by rising seas, with the tsunami as one episode; it was a landscape of hunter-gatherers, not a lost city or advanced culture.
