Vince is working in the mesolithic, that most recent period of exposure. So somewhere around 809 hundred thousand years are the deposits that i'm looking for. And at this point erte the landscapes, again, were exposed. So you could have walked from britain over to the coast of holland. Er. But pursuing the human, rachel bine humans, or the stone age men and women and and so on, how far do you get with your diving discoveries and the tools that youre obutit on earth? Well, actually, so i set the the opposite end to vince. I'm working at just under a million years or so.
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