Doggerland, the Lost Land Beneath the North Sea
Doggerland, the low-lying plain that once connected Britain to continental Europe, shown at its greatest extent before rising seas submerged it.
For most of human prehistory, Britain was not an island at all: a broad plain of rivers, marshes, and hunting grounds — now called Doggerland — connected it to what is now the Netherlands and Denmark, and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived and moved across this land freely. As the last Ice Age ended and glaciers melted, sea levels rose gradually over thousands of years, until a catastrophic final blow came around 6200 BC: a massive underwater landslide off Norway, the Storegga Slide, sent a tsunami across the North Sea that likely drowned the last remnants of Doggerland and any people still living there. Trawlers today still occasionally dredge up mammoth bones, ancient antler tools, and ash from prehistoric hearths from the seabed, fragments of a vanished world.
CC BY-SA 3.0 — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
