A small cavity behind the brow bone is believed to be a scar from a harmless subcutaneous tumour that would have been visible as a lump above his eye. Manmade beaches constructed from material dredged from the sea as part of efforts to protect the modern coastline from the impact of the climate crisis have provided a trove of once-inaccessible treasures from a world inhabited for a million years by modern humans, Neanderthals and even older hominids known has Homo antecessor.
Pretty much the entire toolkit that would have been used has been found by amateur archaeologists. One such find is a 50,year-old flint tool that has a handle made from birch tarpitch.
Discovered in by Willy van Wingerden, a nurse, it has helped update the understanding of Neanderthals — once thought to be brutish and simplistic — as capable of precise and complex multi-staged tasks. Doggerland went silent, its population being fish and kemp now instead of deer and humans. The area remained forgotten for almost 80 centuries until archaeologists started figuring out its past.
In the early s, not much was known about Doggerland. Some geologists believed it had been recently a landmass, but nothing was known of the people who lived there. Join the ZME newsletter for amazing science news, features, and exclusive scoops.
More than 40, subscribers can't be wrong. In , palaeobiologist Clement Reid recovered remains of animals and worked flints from the Neolithic period around the fringes of the area. Two years later, anatomist Sir Arthur Keith discussed the archaeological potential of the area in his book The Antiquity of Man.
In , the trawler Colinda hauled up a lump of peat whilst fishing near the Ower Bank, 40 kilometres 25 mi east of Norfolk. The peat was found to contain a barbed antler point, possibly used as a harpoon or fish spear, millimetres 8. Since then, archaeologists have recovered remains of a mammoth, lion and other land animals, and small numbers of prehistoric tools and weapons. A skull fragment of a Neanderthal, dated at over 40, years old was also found.
Surprisingly, the oil industry came to the help of archaeologists and geologists studying the area. Geologists were able to reconstruct a digital model of nearly 46, square kilometers 18, square miles of what Doggerland looked like before it was flooded. We have now been able to model its flora and fauna, build up a picture of the ancient people that lived there and begin to understand some of the dramatic events that subsequently changed the land, including the sea rising and a devastating tsunami.
Divers off the eastern coast of England have also come across an ancient forest, exposed by a massive storm that dissipated the seafloor sand that covered it. Of course, carrying detailed archaeological surveys is very difficult underwater, and knowing where to look is also challenging.
However, researchers from the UK and Belgium are currently on a mission mapping the water subsurface, creating a detailed map of what was once Doggerland, viewing its former hills, plains, and even river valleys.
Correlating these results with the recovered artefacts, the team will look at the most likely places to host artefacts and will focus their search there. In addition, sediment taken from the cores will be analyzed for traces of DNA and other environmental cues, offering an indication as to how the now-submerged landscape was colonized. The story of the Mesolithic people and their home is a cautionary tale for us. Marine experts, scientists and archaeologists have spent the past 15 years meticulously mapping thousands of kilometres under water in the hope of unearthing lost prehistoric tribes.
On Wednesday a crew of British and Belgian scientists set off on their voyage across the North Sea to reconstruct the ancient Mesolithic landscape hidden beneath the waves for 7, years. The area was submerged when thousands of cubic miles of sub-Arctic ice started to melt and sea levels began to rise. The ancient country, known as Doggerland, which could once have had great plains with rich soils, formed an important land bridge between Britain and northern Europe.
It was long believed to have been hit by catastrophic flooding. Using seabed mapping data the team plans to produce a 3D chart revealing the rivers, lakes, hills and coastlines of the country. Specialist survey ships will take core sediment samples from selected areas to extract millions of fragments of DNA from the buried plants and animals. This will be a real first. That would be new knowledge of what is really a lost continent.
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