What we know as the bottom of the North Sea was once a fertile plain occupied by hunter-gatherers – until a mega-tsunami wiped it off the map 8500 years ago

Doggerland: wish you were here (Image: Morgan Scheweitzer)

From the Victorian pier at Cromer on the east coast of England, the North Sea looks bleak and uninviting. But nip back 10,000 years – the blink of an eye in geological time – and it is a very different sight. At the dawn of the Mesolithic, as the last ice age was coming to an end, sea levels were significantly lower than today and Britain was connected to mainland Europe by a fertile plain stretching as far as Denmark. Welcome to Doggerland, named after the submerged sandbank familiar to anyone who has ever tuned in to the poetic counsel of the UK Shipping Forecast.

Long considered a featureless land bridge, Doggerland has recently been revealed as a prehistoric paradise of marshes, lakes, rivers – and people. In 2008, University of Bradford archaeologist Vincent Gaffney and colleagues used seismic survey data gathered by a Norwegian oil company to reconstruct this lost world beneath the North Sea. The result is a map covering 23,000 square kilometres – an area roughly the size of Wales.

Top of the list for the discerning time-traveller, Gaffney says, is a ride over the Outer Silver Pit Lake, now a depression in the floor of the North Sea. Fed by the river Thames to the east and the Rhine to the west, this is where Doggerland’s people congregate to fish, hunt and gather berries. “This was prime real estate for hunter-gatherers,” says Gaffney. Today, North Sea trawlers occasionally dredge up traces of these people from the seabed – a spear point fashioned from deer bone, for example. But not much …