Doggerland: the drowned country under the North Sea

This site treats Atlantis as a literary problem, because that is what it is. Doggerland is the opposite case: a genuine drowned landmass, populated, mapped in increasing detail, and established beyond argument.

At the end of the last glaciation, sea levels were far lower. Britain was not an island. The area now covered by the southern North Sea was land — river valleys, marsh, woodland and lakes, connecting East Anglia to what is now the Netherlands and Denmark.

How we know

Fishing trawlers. For over a century, boats working the Dogger Bank and surrounding grounds have brought up mammoth and rhinoceros bone, antler, and worked flint from their nets.

In 1931 a trawler recovered a barbed antler point — a hunting weapon — from a mass of peat. That object established that the seabed had been not just dry but inhabited.

Since then, seismic survey data collected by the oil and gas industry has been reanalysed to map the buried landscape. River channels, coastlines, hills and lake basins have been reconstructed across thousands of square kilometres.

What happened to it

Two things, over different timescales.

Gradual inundation as ice sheets melted and sea levels rose, drowning the lowest ground first and progressively shrinking the habitable area over thousands of years.

And, around 6200 BC, the Storegga slide — an enormous submarine landslip off the Norwegian coast that generated a tsunami. Deposits from it have been identified in eastern Scotland and around the North Sea. Whatever remained of Doggerland at that point would have been struck hard.

What the Storegga tsunami left behind

The evidence for it is physical and it is findable on land.

A distinctive sand layer, deposited by a single high-energy event, has been identified at coastal and inland sites around the North Sea — in eastern Scotland, in Norway, in the Shetlands, and in cores taken from the seabed.

It sits within peat and sediment sequences that can be dated, which places the event at around 6200 BC and ties it to the submarine slide off Norway.

What has been recovered

Beyond the 1931 antler point, the material includes mammoth and woolly rhinoceros bone, aurochs and red deer remains, worked flint, and fragments of human bone. Some has been radiocarbon dated and some has yielded ancient DNA. The finds come up in fishing nets and in aggregate dredged for construction, which means much of the record has passed through a gravel plant.

The people

Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, the same populations known from sites in Britain and northern Europe. Not a lost civilisation — no cities, no monuments, no agriculture. Small mobile groups in what was, by the standards of the period, unusually rich country.

That is the honest and more affecting version. What was lost was not a technology. It was somewhere people lived, for millennia, and then could not.