Doggerland: Lost to the Waves of Time by Louise Bedford

The year is 1931 and 25 miles off the Norfolk coast Colinda, a British fishing vessel, is trawling the seabed 120 feet below. The archaeological potential of this unassuming area of sea had been previously suggested. However, in this very net, a discovery is scooped up which is going to revolutionise interest in this lost prehistoric landscape. The net was reeled in and among the contents was a large block of peat, not much use to fishermen. Pilgrim Lockwood, the ship’s Skipper, went to break it up with his shovel so it could be chucked back overboard, however, it sounded different. The piece of peat was broken up and inside something peculiar was found - some sort of ancient harpoon fashioned from bone or antler at about 8.5 inches long. The so-called ‘Colinda harpoon’ was examined by experts at the British Museum, who determined that it dated to the Mesolithic. The Mesolithic is the middle of the Stone Age, roughly occurring between 9,600 BCE and 4,000 BCE in Britain. During this time, Britain was continuously occupied by hunter-gatherer populations. The big question about the harpoon was how it ended up at the bottom of the sea. The answer was even more shocking; the following year pollen analysis on peat from similar areas discovered that despite it now being at the bottom of the sea the peat had formed in freshwater environments, so this harpoon had been lost on land, not in the sea. It had been suggested that the sea level was much lower in the past with evidence of ‘sunken forests’ appearing on beaches, for example, at Pett Level in Sussex. Yet the ‘Colinda harpoon’ was the catalytic evidence for this landscape that connected Britain to mainland Europe.

Doggerland is now believed to have been a large stretch of land connecting the east coast of Britain to the Netherlands, Germany and the Jutland peninsula of Denmark. The name ‘Doggerland’ was first coined by Bryony Coles in 1999 after Dogger Bank, a sandbank in a shallow part of the North Sea, which itself was named after 17th-century Dutch fishing boats called ‘doggers’. It would have been a very rich habitat due to the warming climate marking the start of the Mesolithic. In Britain, the previously arctic conditions changed to be rich forests. Doggerland itself was believed to be a grassy plain with a wide range of animals from woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, reindeer, horses, aurochs and potentially many more. Before Homo Sapiens occupied Doggerland, another hominin had been there first. In 2001, a boat off the coast of the Netherlands discovered a Neanderthal skull fragment. This Neanderthal has since been named ‘Krijn’ and is the oldest Dutch Neanderthal, believed to have lived around 50,000-70,000 years ago in Doggerland. Research into Doggerland is very exciting and continues to this day so who knows what other discoveries are yet to be made.

It is widely believed that with the warming temperatures ice from the last ice age began melting and Doggerland slowly flooded. By 6,500 BCE it is believed the British peninsula was cut off and Britain was now an island but Dogger Bank remained an island up until 5,000 BCE. Another more recent theory on Doggerland’s final submersion is that it was caused by a tsunami around 6,200 BCE. One of the main causation theories is a series of undersea earthquakes off the coast of modern Norway weakened a slope of seabed causing it to slide. Some models claim the waves reached up to 25 metres high off the Shetland coast! Several sand deposits from this tsunami have been identified in various locations, including up to 80 km inland. For the mesolithic communities in the path of the wave, this would have undoubtedly been catastrophic. Yet, it is difficult to interpret the effect this had on other Mesolithic people and more research is being explored. While the Storegga Slide would have likely flooded Doggerland and Dogger Bank, this is probably not the final ‘death’ of Doggerland. It likely continuously became more and more submerged over time with the rising sea levels. When you are next looking out over the North Sea cast your mind back to 10,000 years ago and think of how different this landscape looked and imagine the prehistoric world which may still be preserved underneath the waves.