Doggerland

Where the southern North Sea lies today, there was once dry land. During the last Ice Age so much water was locked up in ice sheets that the sea stood about 120 to 130 m lower than it does now, and Britain was joined to the rest of Europe by a wide, low country of rivers, marshes, lagoons and woods. Archaeologists call it Doggerland. People lived there for thousands of years, until the rising sea swallowed it between about 10 000 and 7 000 years ago.

A lost landscape

Doggerland was not a narrow bridge but a whole country, with lagoons, saltmarshes, mudflats, beaches, rivers and lakes. It was probably a rich place to hunt, fowl and fish. Among its inhabitants were Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the culture archaeologists call the Maglemosian.

Its shape has been recovered from below the seabed. Between 2003 and 2007 researchers at the University of Birmingham used seismic surveys to map about 23 000 square kilometres of buried landscape, tracing old river valleys and coastlines under the sediment. Since 2015 the Europe’s Lost Frontiers project has drilled dozens of cores along one of those valleys, nicknamed the Southern River.

Gifts from the trawlers

The North Sea has been giving up Doggerland’s past for a long time. In 1931 the trawler Colinda hauled up a lump of peat from near the Ower Bank, about 40 km off the coast of Norfolk, with a barbed antler point 220 mm long inside it. A fragment of a Neanderthal skull more than 40 000 years old was dredged from the seabed off Zeeland in the Netherlands. The bones of mammoths, lions and rhinoceroses have come up too, and in 2019 a flint hammerstone was recovered from 32 m below the surface off Cromer.

Forests earlier than thought

In 2026 a team analysed ancient DNA from 252 samples taken from 41 cores along the Southern River. They found that oak, elm and hazel were growing in southern Doggerland more than 16 000 years ago, thousands of years earlier than expected, and that lime trees appeared there about 2 000 years earlier than any record from mainland Britain. A relative of the walnut, Pterocarya, survived far longer than anyone had thought. The researchers suggest that Doggerland sheltered trees through the end of the Ice Age and could have supported people much earlier than believed.

The sea comes in

As the ice melted, the sea crept back, and the drowning was gradual. A 2026 study of one core found the moment freshwater silts gave way to salty marine clay, dated to around 10 200 years ago. A tidal bay already separated eastern England from the Dogger Bank by about 9000 BC, and Britain became an island by about 6500 BC.

Around 6200 BC a huge undersea landslide off Norway, the Storegga Slide, sent a tsunami across the North Sea. Its deposits are found up to 29 km inland in Scotland, and one estimate suggests it may have killed up to a quarter of Britain’s Mesolithic population. But it did not finish Doggerland off. Parts of the land survived above water until about 7 000 years ago, possibly including an island on the Dogger Bank.

Today the Dogger Bank is a sandbank of about 17 600 square kilometres, 15 to 36 m below the surface. The land around it is buried under sediment and water, and offshore wind farms are being built above it.