In 1931, a trawler fishing in the North Sea off Norfolk hauled up a lump of peat containing a prehistoric spear or harpoon made from an antler dating back 9,000 years, to the end of the last ice age. This was the first evidence that prehistoric people had lived in a land now submerged under the sea.
Now the Europe’s Lost Frontiers project, using seismic data from oil and gas exploration, has built up a 3D picture of this long-lost landscape, with rivers, lakes, hills and valleys, stretching from present-day eastern England to north-west Europe.
In the last ice age this was permafrost tundra like northern Siberia today and Britain was a peninsula of north-west Europe. But as the climate warmed, the land thawed and was colonised by plants, trees and people.
This was Doggerland, believed to be densely populated by stone age standards, with thousands of people, some of them living in settlements. These ancient people were probably flexible enough to move on as sea levels rose and flooded coasts and valleys.
But Doggerland completely vanished under the sea about 7,500 years ago, and the fate of the people living there remains a mystery. Now the fate of Doggerland serves as a warning of rising sea levels in present times, driven on by man-made climate change.
