The lost world of ‘Britain’s Atlantis’ has been unearthed, as artefacts from the sunken nation Doggerland are featured in an exhibition after 10,000 years.
Geological surveys have suggested the ancient nation, which was believed to have been flooded by rising sea levels around 6500 BCE, stretched from what is now the east coast of Great Britain, to the Netherlands.
Evidence of human inhabitation of the territory was first discovered in 1931, when the trawler Colinda dredged up a lump of peat containing a spear point.
An army of archaeologists have scoured the Dutch coastline for artefacts and fossils in the many years that have followed, with their finds, many of which were made on manmade dutch beaches, building the beginning of the new exhibition.
Several of the tools and weapons on display were also found along the British coast.
Named Doggerland: Lost World in the North Sea, the exhibition is open to visitors at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (National Museum of Antiquities) in Leiden, southern Holland.
It features more than 200 objects, such as fossils like petrified hyena droppings and mammoth molars, a deer bone in which an arrowhead is embedded and a fragment of a skull of a young male Neanderthal.
Evidence of human skull remains suggested they had their flesh purposefully removed; which is thought to have been due to an ancient burial ritual.
According to reports from the Guardian , other incredible artefacts in the exhibition include a 50,000-year-old flint tool.
The tool, which had a handle made from birch tarpitch, was discovered in 2016 by Willy van Wingerden, a nurse.
It has helped revolutionise the understanding of Neanderthals, originally thought to be brutish and simplistic, as a civilisation capable of particular and complex tasks.
A sketch in the exhibition imagines this sharp tool was used as a razer, to shave one’s head.
Climate change at the end of the last ice age is believed to have been a driving factor in Doggerland’s disappearance.
As ice started to melt, a huge sub-sea landslide near Norway’s coast was thought to have prompted a Tsunami so big it drowned Doggerland and its inhabitants.
Dr Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof, assistant curator of the museum’s prehistory department said: "There was a period when Doggerland was dry and incredibly rich, a wonderful place for hunter gatherers.
"It was not some edge of the earth, or land bridge to the UK. It was really the heart of Europe. There are lessons to be learned.”
Doctor van der Vaart-Verschoof said the story of Doggerland showed how destructive climate change could be.
"The climate change we see today is manmade but the effects could be just as devastating as the changes seen all those years ago,” she said.
A virtual tour of Doggerland: Lost World in the North Sea is available to view until the end of October, on Rijksmuseum van Oudheden’s YouTube channel .
