ENVIRONMENT × PEOPLING

The Drowning of Doggerland

~8,150 years ago

Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Northgrippian

Between Britain and Denmark, under the North Sea, lies a drowned country: Doggerland, a plain of rivers, marshes and woods that Mesolithic people hunted for millennia while meltwater from the retreating ice sheets raised the sea around them. Around 8,150 years ago, a gigantic submarine landslide off Norway, the Storegga slide, sent a tsunami across what remained; whether it delivered the killing blow, or struck a land already dying of sea-level rise, is still argued from cores and seismic maps.

Why it matters

Whole homelands of the human story are under water: the coasts our species followed out of Africa, the shelves of Sundaland and Beringia, and this European Atlantis, now mapped by the seismic tools of an oil industry turned archaeological. Doggerland shows, more vividly than anywhere, that postglacial sea-level rise redrew the map beneath living communities, on a timescale they could feel; the modern echo needs no underlining.

Dating & uncertainty

The Storegga submarine landslide off Norway drove a tsunami across the North Sea around 8,150 years ago, within the same window as the 8.2 ka cold event. Whether the wave 'ended' Doggerland is debated: fresh evidence from the southern North Sea points to impacts buffered by local woodland and topography, and some argue that rapid sea-level rise had already done most of the drowning, with the last islands holding on for centuries.

Sources

1. Walker et al. (2020), Antiquity · A great wave: the Storegga tsunami and the end of Doggerland?doi:10.15184/aqy.2020.49
2. Weninger et al. (2008), Documenta Praehistorica · The catastrophic final flooding of Doggerland by the Storegga Slide tsunamidoi:10.4312/dp.35.1
3. Gaffney et al. (2020), Geosciences · Multi-proxy characterisation of the Storegga tsunami and its impact on the early Holocene landscapes of the southern North Seadoi:10.3390/geosciences10070270

Our species’ history as one day

23:22:4437 min 15 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day