Since fisherman began beam trawling in the North Sea they have been bringing up preserved bones and artefacts from a sunken world that is now covered by water. Archaelogists have named this ancient landscape Doggerland after the Dogger Bank, a glacial moraine deposited during the Pleistocene that would have formed a highland in the low-lying plain that now lies submerged.

The existence of a land bridge between Britain and the Continent has long been known but the recent work by Vince Gaffney, Simon Fitch, and the late Ken Thomson has revealed in detail a hitherto unknown Mesolithic landscape. Using seismic survey data which outline sediment layers below the sea bed the team from the University of Birmingham have mapped 23,000 square kilometres of Doggerland, or, to put it into Britain’s preferred measurement for spatial context, an area the size of Wales.

10,000 years ago Britain was not an island but a remote corner of north-west Europe connected to the modern continent by a low lying landscape of wooded valleys, gently rolling hills, marshes, and lagoons. The Thames and Rhine rivers formed a confluence that fed into the Channel River, and Mesolithic man would have been able to walk from modern day East Anglia to Denmark and the Netherlands. By Mesolithic standards Doggerland, teeming with wildlife and rich in marine and freshwater resources, was a paradise.