New book brings a submerged world to life

The lost world of British hunter-gatherers is brought to life in a new book published this week. Professor Vince Gaffney and colleagues from the University of Birmingham uncovers the incredible history of Doggerland a country now sunk beneath the North Sea which once linked the Yorkshire coast with a stretch of Continental Europe from Denmark to Normandy. 6000 years ago this lost world was inhabited by a thriving community of Mesolithic hunter-gathers living and hunting, just as they did in many other areas of northern Europe. The book describes how the Birmingham team used oil industry technology to scan the seabed, gathering millions of data points across 23,000km² of the North Sea. This allowed them to reconstruct the old land surface, now submerged beneath metres of marine sediment and tens of metres of sea water. Professor Gaffney comments: "Doggerland is in many ways an archaeological treasure trove: a Mesolithic landscape that is incredibly well preserved thanks to the changing climate. The challenge for us was to find a way to uncover the detail so it is useful.