You must imagine the place as a paradise. Lakes lapping gently in the marshes, rivers winding their course through lusch landscapes of grasses and bushes. Food was a-plenty: the waters teemed with fish, birds nested in the reeds, berrybushes covered the banks. Archaeologists surmise that, until about 8,000 years ago, thousands of humans must have lived on what is today the bottom of the North Sea.

Geoscientists have now resurrected their long-gone land. At last year's summer meeting of the British Royal Society in London, they presented an Atlas of Doggerland, the sunken world between Britain and continental Europe of 7,500 years ago.

The land was considerably larger than had been believed and shown in books until now: it spread all the way up to Northern Scotland, from where it connected Denmark with the British Isles, and to the South, one could have walk across the Channel from France to Ireland. In the distance, the steep, abrupt cliffs of today's Britain would have towered into the sky.



But our ancestors would have found the thriving Doggerland much more appealing. "It was the true heart of Europe," says Richard Bates, a geochemist at St Andrews University in Scotland. Hundreds of finds of stone tools, harpoons and human bones are evidence of the history of teeming life on today's North Sea grounds. Pollen deposits in the mud tell us much about the plant life.