A prehistoric landscape is that which is beforeour history. But in this case it is very, very different. These landscapes are ar associated with the mislithic. They are about nine and a half thousand to about four thousand b c. Now during that period, the whole of the land, the world changed. The shape of the world changing. At the beginning, the last longest and most successful economic period in our innn in human history. It's a big hole in the polu mint of a the archaeology of europe,. which we do not know about, and we need to.
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