Most of my work is adactually on dogga bank, on this high and unfortunately, there's very little surface sediments that could have retained any evidence of what happened to people as as the level rows. And so what we're what we're finding are just very thin veneers of sand there with no artifacts remaining at all. So fo, from the research that i'm doing, we see the landscape where possibly people thrived. Certainly there was the vegetation there, the streams, the channels, but we don't see anything after the landscape flooded. It's also, i think, quite interesting when you think about these questions in terms of how people would have responded to this
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