Vince: Can you give the listeners some idea of what the environment was like over afew thousand years? Between nine thousand and five thousand is a big ask, but can you have a go? I can have a go a. So again, as vince mentioned, we would have started off with tundra. And so in any east of valleys, you might have had temporary lakes forming nice, quiet areas. But then the ice move further away, the global temperature starts to warm up, and you start to get swamp plants coming in. You'uld have got braided channels and river systems coming with plants and animals starting to flourish along thais animals, and then the human
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the people, plants and animals once living on land now under the North Sea, now called Doggerland after Dogger Bank, inhabited up to c7000BC or roughly 3000 years before the beginnings of Stonehenge. There are traces of this landscape at low tide, such as the tree stumps at Redcar (above); yet more is being learned from diving and seismic surveys which are building a picture of an ideal environment for humans to hunt and gather, with rivers and wooded hills. Rising seas submerged this land as glaciers melted, and the people and animals who lived there moved to higher ground, with the coasts of modern-day Britain on one side and Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium and France on the other.
With
Vince Gaffney
Anniversary Professor of Landscape Archaeology at the University of Bradford
Carol Cotterill
Marine Geoscientist at the British Geological Survey
And
Rachel Bynoe
Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Southampton
Producer: Simon Tillotson