Doggerland - The Civilization Beneath the Waves

Science Fridays

      Many people have never heard about Doggerland.  Even though I only learned of it within the last couple of years, scientists have known about Doggerland since about 1931.  What Doggerland is, or rather was, was a large landmass in what is now the North Sea, between the coasts of England, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands.  For thousands of years people lived and traveled in Doggerland, and then it eventually sank beneath the sea. 
      The knowledge of this land mass began when fishing trawlers began to pull up giant bones with their nets.  These bones included mammoth, reindeer, horses, and other animals common at the end of the last glacial maximum.  The fishermen who pulled up the first bones thought they had found dinosaur bones (or so they hoped), but they were quickly identified as belonging to mammoths.  It was when the trawlers started pulling up Mesolithic and Neolithic tools and artifacts, that an interest in studying this region really took off. 
      They wrote off the first finds of tools as a fluke, attributed to a sunken boat or something.  As more and more finds came in, from all over the area, they knew that this was not because of sunken boats.  Since then they have found evidence of villages beneath the waves, and have even found fossilized foot prints made in the mud flats as people crossed back and forth.  

                                 A map showing the extent of Doggerland

      England and even Ireland were not always islands.  At one time they were part of great peninsula jutting out of north west Europe.  Previous to the last glacial maximum hunter gatherers roamed there along with the animals they hunted.  During glacial maximum the whole region was under a thick sheet of ice (this was during the time that the Solutreans were hemmed into the south west coast of France).  During the Boller Interstadial Warming Period (when the ice age was over - the technical terms for some of these things are just nuts) animals and the people who hunted them once again populated this peninsula.  During this warming period, as the ice melted some of the lower lying lands became marshy (this is when some of the fossilized foot prints were made).  This warming period is the same time that the Natufians, in Israel and the whole Fertile Crescent discovered the wild cereal grains, and altered the course of mankind forever. 
      To get a more complete global view of things, this is also the same time that groups of people from Asia, and specifically from Siberia migrated across Beringia and into North America, and joined the Solutreans who had been living there in isolation for about five thousand years (as you see it's all connected - again and again, and again).  Now before you get an image in your head of a bunch of light skinned people with feathers stuck in various shades of brown, light brown, red, and blonde hair with big bushy beards, dressed in animal skins and a stone spear in hand, running around in Europe, DON'T.  That genetic mutation (diminished pigment of hair, eyes, and skin) hadn't happened yet.  It didn't occur till some thousands of years later in western Siberia - the same place that some of the Asians came from, who migrated to North America (one specific group of people still there today speaks a language recognizably related to Athabaskan [Dene, Tlingit, Chinook, Athabaskan, Navaho, Apache, and others), and they still live in Tipis).  This was also the same time that people from the hunter-gatherer Jomon culture of ancient Japan walked back across to China, and elsewhere, and some wandered all the way along to the west coast of North and South America.  Also very important to human history and development, wherever these Jomon people went they took their invention of ceramics with them.  Globally, this was a very active period in history.  

                      An artist's conception of life on the coast of Doggerland

      This warming period lasted a few thousand years, and was followed by what is called the Younger Dryas.  The Younger Dryas was a time when the ice sheets returned, which in turn caused massive droughts in warmer locations, such as in the Fertile Crescent.  Doggerland was not completely covered this time, but the climate there was still pretty harsh.  During the Younger Dryas the people who were collecting wild grains in Eastern Asia, Meso-America, and the Fertile Crescent were forced to either starve, return to nomadic life (and still starve), or move to the river valleys with their grains and basically invent farming.  
      The Younger Dryas lasted about 1500 years, and was followed by the final warming period.  The glacial sheets began their slow melt, and grasses and trees returned to north west Europe.  Doggerland, and the British Hills were rich in wildlife and edible plants and berries.  The lower lying areas became marshy again, but life in the Dogger Hills was high and dry, and life there was abundant.  In about 7000 to 6000 BC, due to overcrowding (from a population bloom, due in turn from a large, ready supply of food) farmers from the Fertile Crescent began to wander into Europe and build scattered colonies of farming communities.  They walked all the way to what became the Orkney Islands (then they were just the Orkney Hills), and into Doggerland, specifically the Dogger Hills.  These immigrants also brought with them that wonderful Jomon invention of ceramics. 

                             Doggerland very slowly sank beneath the waves.


      The Ice sheets continued their slow melt.  In about 6200 BC a massive underwater landslide occurred off the coast of Norway releasing a huge tidal wave that washed over much of Doggerland.  The devastation and loss of life would have been tremendous.  Only the Dogger hills would have been safe.  People bounced back though.  Eventually, as the ice continued to melt the Dogger Hills became Dogger Island.  A few hundred to a thousand or so years later, Dogger Island finally washed underneath the rising waves.  The remaining inhabitants of Dogger Island would have climbed into their skin boats (or curraghs) with whatever possessions and livestock they could take with them and sailed away to start life anew somewhere else.  Dogger Island became the Dogger Banks.  Today the Dogger Banks are only about 50 feet under the water.  

                             Eventually all the was left was Dogger Island.

               Map showing the present location of the Dogger Banks outlined in red

      Scientists researching Doggerland are using sonar, satellites, and other resonance imaging to get a clearer picture of this lost land.  They have found ancient riverbeds, and lakes.  The Rhine River used to flow into the Thames, and then flow out of the western end of the English Channel.  The Baltic Sea used to flow into the Baltic River, and around and between the northern part of Denmark and the southern end of Norway and Sweden, and out towards Scotland.  
      As trawlers continue to scoop up more artifacts, they turn these in (and often get paid for their finds) to the researchers.  The more they study this mysterious sunken civilization, the less mysterious it becomes, and a clearer picture emerges.  
      Another point of note concerning this is that as Doggerland was sinking beneath the waves, so also were the land masses that became both the Canary Islands and the Azores Islands respectively.  The extreme trauma of these related events became the real life basis and the first installment for the Atlantis Legend.  The final real life event that was the final installment for the story was the volcanic explosion of Santorin, many thousands of years later.  But we will save this for a different post.