Researchers Find Submerged Lost World

Map shows the size of the land mass named Doggerland.

For decades, archaeologists and scientists have believed a land bridge connected Britain with the rest of Europe, but now say a sizeable land mass joined the two until about 10,000 years ago.

For now, they’re calling the new land Doggerland, named after the Dogger Bank, a large sandbank in the North Sea. Indications are that Doggerland was an ideal environment for Mesolithic people, complete with fertile plains and majestic rivers. Rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age consumed Doggerland and turned Britain into an island. Scientists want to determine whether the land mass sank gradually - as has been presumed until recently - or if a sudden geological upheaval could have caused sea water to suddenly submerge the large area.

Archaeologists and other researchers were able to determine the likely size and shorelines of Doggerland through use of seismic information Petroleum Geo-Services, a Norwegian oil company, loaned to them, as well as with computer modeling based on geological information.

For over a century, fishing boats have been finding prehistoric artifacts in the North Sea. Much of the material – such as bones of wooly mammoths - date from the Palaeolithic age that ended 10,000 years ago. But other recovered artifacts are from the later Mesolithic period. “Now we’ll be able to position these archaeological finds within the landscape to understand their meaning,” says Hans Peeters of the National Service for Archaeology in the Netherlands.

Here is a complete article on the new Doggerland findings from Nature News.