BRITAIN wasn’t always an island. At the end of the last Ice Age, it was a cold peninsula tundra on the edge of Europe.
As the world warmed, this stretch of land grew flowers and forests, becoming home to animals and even hunter-gather communities of hominids, our ancient human ancestors.
“The area south of the Dogger Banks to Denmark was essentially dry land,” archaeologist Vincent Gaffney, who is exploring these lost lands, told The Sun.
“Entire cultures can live there without us even noticing.”
But further warming over the next 10,000 to 13,000 years led to rising seas, flooding these vast low-lying areas which once connected the UK with Northern Europe.
The people who once lived there retreated to the mainland, building communities on the East Anglian coasts where fossilised hominin footprints have since been discovered.
“Very different societies may exist in [submerged areas], which we have never explored globally,” he said.
Their homes, and histories, remain up to 120ft beneath the surface of the southern North Sea.
The hominid communities that once thrived on Doggerland – which disintegrated at first into a series of islands before disappearing completely – would not have packed up and left suddenly, explains Gaffney.
“Within generations or even a lifetime, [the water] may not have appeared so fast,” he says.
“But mythologies build up. They would have known, I suspect, that their ancestors had worked out or hunted out at sea.
“It would have been a myth, probably an ancestral myth, that they were pushed back.”
[bc_video account_id=”5067014667001″ application_id=”” aspect_ratio=”16:9″ autoplay=”” caption=”Ancient Tomb Discovery Reveals Stunning Tang Dynasty Murals” embed=”in-page” experience_id=”” height=”100%” language_detection=”” max_height=”360px” max_width=”640px” min_width=”0px” mute=”” padding_top=”56%” picture_in_picture=”” player_id=”default” playlist_id=”” playsinline=”” sizing=”responsive” video_id=”6359558285112″ video_ids=”” width=”640px”]This search for secrets all started in 2004, when Gaffney got hold of 6,000 square metres worth of underwater seismic data from oilfield services firm Petroleum Geoservices.
It was one of the largest archaeological projects to ever be carried out, according to Gaffney.
“We were gradually building up a map of the land, but that’s all it was,” he says.
“It’s rivers, coastlines, hills, valleys, but not much else.”
Then in 2014, Gaffney and his team put in a grant to access survey ships, so they could collect samples from these long-lost valleys and rivers.
“As you go out at sea, you’re going backwards in time,” he explains.
“We’re able to get cores of sediment, which would get dating material out of [plant] DNA, such as pollen.”
Theories of a lost world originated decades before, when the so-called Colinda harpoon was dredged up by a fishing trawler in 1931.
The barbed-edge tool, made of bone or antler, was uncovered amongst peat that had formed in a freshwater environment – not a marine one.
This meant that whoever had lost the harpoon had done so while walking across land.
Archaeologists believe there could be ancient buildings, hunting weapons, fossilised plants and animals, like red deer, wild boar and elk, on the seabed.
But a deep-sea excavation is unlikely in “any serious form”, says Gaffney, due to it being so difficult to pull off at such depths.
The hunt for Britain’s ‘Atlantis’ took Gaffney and his team to an ancient estuary mouth about 20km off the East Anglian coast in 2019.
[quote credit=”Vincent Gaffney”]As you go out at sea, you’re going backwards in time[/quote]“Estuaries are where hunter-gatherers love to be,” he says.
“You’ve got water, marshes, birds, fish, you name it – prime hunter-gatherer real estate.
“We took a dredge, because we knew we could get at sediments, and we pulled up one single flint.
“That was the first worked artifact that had been directly prospected in any deep water globally.”
Gaffney’s team, in collaboration with groups in Denmark and Germany, were later awarded a €13million grant in 2023 to continue the search.
Gaffney, and his team at the University of Bradford, were given a €8.4million (£7million) slice of that.
Researchers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to build simulations of where these lost communities might have once lived.
This helps teams figure out where they might find signs of ancient settlements, to better direct the ships for sampling.
Alongside Doggerland, Gaffney wants to explore the Baltic Sea, where it is relatively shallow.
“They have lots of settlements,” says Gaffney. “They also have preserved forests, submarine forests.”
He added: “Since the end of the last Ice Age, we’ve lost globally an area about the size of North America.”
