The project has been funded by the prestigious €2.5 million Advanced Research Grant from the European Research Council.

A landscape, about the size of Ireland, which was lost to sea after the last ice age will be digitally constructed under a new project by researchers at University of Bradford.

The project has received funding from one of Europe’s premier research grants. The multi-disciplinary ‘Doggerland’ reconstruction project will have involvement of experts from multiple fields including archaeology, molecular biology and computer science.

The landscape was lost after the last ice age and was covered by water due to rising sea levels and as of now it is currently beneath the North Sea.

Reconstruction of the landscape isn’t the only objective of the project as the team of experts will also be using modern genetics and computing technologies to digitally repopulate this ancient country to monitor its development over the course of 5000 years to gain insight about and clues to the transition of our ancestors from hunter-gatherers to farmers.

The project intends to transform our understanding how humans lived in this area from around 10,000 BC until it was flooded at the end of the last ice age around 7,500 years ago.

The project has been funded by the prestigious €2.5 million Advanced Research Grant from the European Research Council.

Professor Vince Gaffney, Anniversary Chair in Landscape Archaeology at the University of Bradford explains that Doggerland is one of the lands which was once populated, but have since been lost to the sea. Though scientists are aware of ancient climatic change and the changes in sea levels, there is much less information about the Doggerlands as far as its human life is concerned.

The professors adds that Doggerland holds unique and important information about early human life in Europe and with the availability of the right tools to investigate their life, researchers will be able to get a glimpse of what life was all about during those times.

Using remote sending data sets collected by energy companies, researchers will be generating a detailed 3D map of the land. The map will enable them to detail the rivers, lakes, hills and coastlines in a country, which had previously been a heartland of human occupation in Europe.

Researchers will also be recoving core sediment samples from selected areas of the landscape using specialist ships. One of the things that researchers will be doing will be to extract millions of fragments of ancient DNA from plants and animals that occupied Europe’s ancient coastal plains.

Researchers believe that the cold waters would have provided a cooler environment for DNA to be preserved and they believe that using latest state of the art genetic research tools, they will be able to garner a unique view of how society and environment evolved during a period of catastrophic climate change and in a prehistoric country that had previously been lost to science and history.

The data from seismic mapping and sedimentary DNA, along with conventional environmental analysis, will be combined within computer simulations, using a technique called ‘agent-based modelling, that will build a comprehensive picture showing the dynamic interaction between the environment and the animals and plants that inhabit it throughout the period – around 5000 years.

“This project is exciting not only because of what it will reveal about Doggerland, but because it gives us a whole new way of approaching the massive areas of land that were populated by humans but which now lie beneath the sea. This project will develop technologies and methodologies that archaeologists around the world can use to explore similar landscapes including those around the Americas and in South East Asia,” adds Professor Gaffney.