Page 12 - ModernParadiseFLIPBOOKcomplete

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a tsunami occurred, thought to have been triggered by a vast undersea landslide at

Storrega off the coast of Norway. The deluge inundated the connecting peninsular
which eventually became completely submerged and the prehistoric foragers who
lived here became the first offshore islanders. Bryony Coles, a University of Exeter
archaeologist, named the submerged territory Doggerland in the 1990’s after the
th
Dogger Bank, which was in turn named after 17 century “dogger” fishing boats. The
inundation also created the Narrow Channel (later called the English Channel, or in
French La Manche, from the Celtic for channel or canal). The British Isles now had
their present shape.

H.G. Wells had speculated about the existence of a possible Doggerland, but it was
only confirmed by archaeologists at the University of Birmingham using seismic
reflection data gathered by the offshore oil and gas industry at a cost of hundreds of
millions of dollars. They used it to map the surviving prehistoric landscapes beneath
the North Sea silts. Hills, rivers, streams, estuaries, lakes and marshes can now be
identified. About 60% has been mapped.

No settlements have yet been identified on the new sea bed – no Atlantis as some
newspapers hopefully called it - but artefacts have been found. In 1931 a trawler
dredged up a lump of peat containing a spear point. The dredging of material from
the seas to create man-made beaches to help protect the modern coastline, has
uncovered a treasure-trove of once-inaccessible artefacts from a world which had
been inhabited for a million years by modern humans, Neanderthals and even older
hominids. The wide, open grassy plains of Doggerland were an ideal grazing ground
for large herds of animals such as reindeer who were prey for the cave lions, sabre-

toothed cats, cave hyenas and wolves, among others. An army of amateur
archaeologists scoured the Dutch coastline for artefacts and fossils, and found more
than 200 objects, ranging from hand axes, a deer bone in which an arrowhead is
embedded, fossils such as petrified hyena droppings and mammoth molars, a
fragment of a skull of a young male Neanderthal, and a 50,000-year-old flint tool with
a handle made from birch tarpitch,. Other finds include 75 Neanderthal stone

tools and animal remains from off the coast of East Anglia, both dating to the Middle
Palaeolithic – some 50,000 to 300,000 years ago.

The significance of Doggerland is far-reaching. It wasn’t a land-bridge, more the size
an entire prehistoric European country. Some archaeologists describe it as “the
heartland of north-west Europe”. Such submerged territories lost to the oceans,
which include similar landscapes around the Americas, are the only once-inhabited
but unexplored lands remaining on Earth. Professor Geoff Bailey, at the University of
York, calls them “the last frontiers of geographical and archaeological exploration”.

Archaeologists have had to develop revolutionary techniques. These include mapping