Some time ago I posted an item about Doggerland which is not, as you might imagine, a theme park devoted to outdoor sexual activities, but an area now submerged beneath the North Sea that connected Great Britain to continental Europe during and after the last glacial period.
About 12,000 years ago at the start of the Holocene Era, it is thought that the area now covered by the North Sea looked something like this:
(Picture credit: this website). Obviously the cities marked on the map were not there at the time! Britain was connected to the European mainland, although much of the land mass was under glaciers. At the end of the last ice age the glaciers retreated, sea levels rose and the area once covered by Doggerland was submerged. It is thought that this happened around 8500 years ago. Great Britain has been separated from the continent by less than 10,000 years.
Doggerland gets its name from the Dogger Bank, a huge sandbank off the North-Eastern coast of England which is thought to be a glacial moraine left behind by the retreating ice sheet. The Dogger bank lies about 60 miles from the coast, and is about 60 miles wide by 100 miles long. The water is quite shallow – typically 20 metres deep – and is a well-known fishing area. Its name derives from old Dutch fishing vessels called doggers who specialised in catching cod. Modern fishing boats trawlers operating at the Dogger Bank frequently bring up bits of ancient animals (including mammoth and rhinoceros) as well as prehistoric human artefacts, showing that the area was at one time inhabited.
As I wrote in my old post
I don’t think anybody knows exactly how long it took Doggerland to become submerged, but it may well have involved one or more catastrophic flooding events.
Well, by way of a sort of update here is a short video that suggests that the archaeological and geological clues indicate that the end of Doggerland was associated with one particularly huge event.
In the Dark 