Doggerland

Doggerland formed to the sea rise after Weichseleiszeit a contiguous land mass between the British Isles and continental Europe that has been inhabited for several thousand years by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.

Name

The sunken land was named after the Dogger Bank, a vast shoal in the North Sea, about 100 kilometers off the British east coast and 125 to 150 kilometers from the Danish west coast.

Topography

The Doggerland called, about 23,000 square kilometer area was in the southern North Sea and joined the then continental Europe - the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark - with the east coast of Great Britain.

At the beginning of the Pleistocene and before the Weichsel glaciation, the Rhine flowed north of the Dogger Bank in the Atlantic, as some 65 million years old sediments ( silt ) suggest from the Cenozoic in East Anglia. It is therefore assumed that the European main watershed of the River Thames, the Seine, the Maas and the Rhine was in a shared bed in the then dry Channel flow into the Atlantic.

During the Weichselian enormous quantities of water in the ice of the glaciers were tied: The sea level was caused regression of up to 120 meters deep and the coast lines were drawn around 600 kilometers north than today around 12,000 years ago. Large parts of the North Sea were dry. At the end of the Weichsel ice age sea level was about 60 meters below the present sea level. The coast was still north of the Dogger Bank. The southern North Sea was dry land, the British Isles and mainland Europe formed a contiguous land mass.

In the following millennia, the water rose, this increase in speed decreased over time. Years ago, about 9850-7100 parts of the Elbe glacial valley were flooded. The southern part of the North Sea - between the Dogger Bank and the Channel - was a lake, into which the rivers and northern European glaciers drained. As in the Mesolithic eroded by about 6500 BC, the chalk rock connection between Dover ( Weald ) and Calais ( Pas -de- Calais ), the waters of this fresh water lake drained away through the English Channel into the Atlantic. The sea level continued to rise, so that Britain about 5000 BC to the island. The Wadden Sea was formed about the same period, and in the subsequent period alternated phases stronger water -level rise ( transgression ) with water reduction ( regression).

These changes were triggered the collapse of the North American ice sheet, the then most extensive ice sheet in the northern hemisphere. This contributed to the beginning of the Mittelholozäns to a rapid rise in sea level of about 120 meters (compared to the minimum level of the Ice Age ) at. With that, on the one hand the flooding of coastal areas further along and ultimately, today's coastlines formed from ( Flanders transgression, Dunkirk transgression ). Secondly, some side of the Atlantic basin were flooded and marginal seas so. By 5000 BC ( perhaps even earlier), the Danish islands and the UK were separated from the European continent; a process which vonstattenging by a series of devastating storm surges.

The University of Birmingham as part of the research project Mapping Doggerland by Vince Gaffney and his colleagues of the Visual and Spatial Technology Centre ( VISTA ) simulated a flat land mass of 23,000 square kilometers in a computer model, with an extensive network of rivers, a large number of small lakes and a central freshwater inland sea. The data for the project provided the Norwegian company Petroleum Geo-Services ASA (PGS ); their core business is the geophysical survey of the seabed. Among the numerous rivers located 10 m marked under the silt of the Dogger Bank by Fred Shotton ( 1906-1990 ) named Shotton River and the large inland lake Outer Silver Pit, which mutated into a huge delta system of several rivers and later as today emerging valley at the bottom of the North Sea.

At the summer meeting of the British Royal Society in 2012, an atlas of Doggerland was presented. This documented according to Richard Bates, a geochemist at the University of St. Andrews, that the country was significantly larger than expected from the previous lesson.

Archeology

Since the North Sea is systematically fished with trawls, repeatedly bones of land animals are caught. The British palaeobotanist Clement Reid (1853-1916) began in the late 19th century to investigate the unusual findings systematically. Even earlier had reports for attention ensured that at a spring tide to near old tree stumps in the mud at low tide came to the coast of England to the fore. They were not called until the 20th century when the British "Noah's forests " and gave to all sorts of speculations. In September 1931 fishermen found in their nets a large piece of turf, which surrendered a 21.6 cm long prehistoric bone harpoon with ornate decorations, whose formation is estimated according to C14 dating to around 11740 BC.

Published in 1998, Bryony J. Coles, a lecturer at the Faculty of Archaeology, University of Exeter, the first results of his research and initiated the Doggerland Project. This encourages further interdisciplinary exploration of the sunken land part: focuses on the evaluation of geological investigations in the North Sea and other data and their interpretation in terms of the cultural and historical development of the northern European population of the Upper Palaeolithic to the Neolithic. A first result is the above-mentioned computer model of Doggerland, the next step is to prepare a targeted archaeological investigation of potential residential places respectively sites.

In August 2011, the German Federal Government awarded a contract for the systematic archaeological survey of the North Sea, outside the 12-mile zone, to the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven, since numerous archaeological sites are threatened by planned construction projects.

Cultural-historical importance

For the people of the Middle Stone Age, the Dogger Bank formed a straight 90 m high elongated elevation; the European continent still largely recovered from the retreating ice sheets, so that the area of ​​land for human settlement in the Mesolithic could have provided optimal conditions until 8,000 years ago. The warming up of the climate of the Holocene the tundra vegetation of the Ice Age gave way increasingly to a forest cover through birch and pine. The tundra vegetation moved its belt to the north. Previous research suggests a land mass which was inhabited until about 8,000 years ago according scattered archaeological finds of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.

The taiga -like landscape offered in the Mesolithic optimal living conditions for animals and plants, with a rich food supply, especially in and along the many rivers and the large inland probably intensive fishing. The people in Central Europe lived during the Mesolithic largely on the hunt for prey rather than on individual herds as in the Paleolithic, as well as plant foods. The living behavior was characterized well from existing reduced mobility with increasing concentration of seasonal living quarters on coastal waters and along watercourses, as well as more complex and more hierarchical social structures. Doggerland disappeared about 8,000 years ago: First, the bank salted meadows were always moist until they were completely under water and had to find new habitats the Mesolithic inhabitants. With the retreat of ice age glaciers increased the sea, the land lifted up, the habitable area shrank the one hand, on the other hand gave the ice sheets new country free.

Reception

A mammoth undertaking, part five of the BBC documentary The heirs of the dinosaurs, is partially located on the dry lying North Sea, as the result of Britain's Drowned World archeology documentation Time Team on Channel 4