Doggerland 5/7

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germanicfolc
October 30, 2009

Doggerland is a name given by archaeologists and geologists to the former landmass in the southern North Sea that connected the island of Great Britain to mainland Europe during and after the last Ice Age. Geological surveys have suggested that Doggerland was a large area of dry land that stretched from Britain's east coast across to the present coast of the Netherlands and the western coasts of Germany and Denmark. The land was likely a rich habitat with human habitation in the Mesolithic period.

The archaeological potential of the area was first discovered in 1931, when a commercial trawler operating near the sandbank and shipping hazard known as the Dogger Bank (from dogge, an old Dutch word for fishing boat) dragged up an antler used as a harpoon. Later vessels have dragged up mammoth and lion remains, among other remains of land animals, as well as small numbers of prehistoric tools and weapons which were used by the region's inhabitants.

During the Devensian glaciation around 10,000 years ago, when the North Sea and almost all of the British Isles were covered with glacial ice, the sea level was about 120 metres (390 ft) lower than it is today. Much of the North Sea and English Channel was an expanse of low-lying tundra, extending around 12,000 BCE as far as the modern northern point of Scotland.

Evidence including the contours of the present seabed shows that after the first main Ice Age the watershed between North Sea drainage and English Channel drainage extended east from East Anglia then southeast to the Hook of Holland, not across the Strait of Dover, and that the Thames, Meuse, Scheldt and Rhine rivers joined and flowed along the English Channel dry bed as a wide slow river which at times flowed far before reaching the Atlantic Ocean.

It is generally thought that as sea levels gradually rose after the end of the last glacial period of the current ice age, Doggerland became submerged beneath the North Sea, cutting off what was previously the British peninsula from the European mainland by around 6500 BCE. The Dogger Bank, which had been an upland area of Doggerland, is believed to have remained as an island until at least 5000 BCE.

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