Doggerland Never Made Sense — Until They Found Something That Predates Every Civilization On Earth

Doggerland Never Made Sense — Until They Found Something That Predates Every Civilization On Earth Under the North Sea, between Britain and Europe, there is a country. Not a wreck site, a country, two hundred and sixty thousand square kilometres of hills and river valleys and forest, larger than the UK, and people lived on it for around three hundred thousand years. In this one I go through what has come up and what has not, because that gap is the real story. A trawler called the Colinda pulled up a lump of freshwater peat in nineteen thirty one with a barbed antler spear point sealed inside it, and both details matter, because freshwater peat only forms on dry land and an object inside it went in while the ground was still above water. Then in two thousand and nine a skull fragment dredged off the Dutch coast turned out to be Neanderthal, which blew up the idea that this was a Mesolithic hunting ground and pushed the occupation back across multiple hominin species. I also go through Storegga, the Norwegian landslide the size of Scotland, which every documentary calls the death blow and which Vincent Gaffney's seismic work says was not, because higher ground survived it as an archipelago for possibly centuries afterwards. His Bradford team has now mapped a hundred and eighty eight thousand square kilometres of seabed and turned AI loose on it looking for settlements. So far, almost nothing. No dwellings, no hearths, no burials, no Mesolithic human remains at all. The land is there in extraordinary detail. The people are still missing.