The lost world of Doggerland as it may have looked 10,000 years ago;



The retreat of the the polar ice caps and subsequent rise in sea levels flooded the North Sea plain.

Article about Doggerland;

Doggerland

Time Team had a special programme about Doggerland a while back;

I enjoyed that Trike.

Somewhere upstairs, carefully wrapped up and stored in a box along with piles of other fossils, I've got a complete mammoth molar, which was dredged up by a fishing boat from close to the Dogger Bank off East Anglia. I'll see if I can locate it and post a pic.

I watched the Time Team video last night, very interesting. Great that you have a mammoth fossil, Meles, and from under the North Sea !!!

Mammoths;

Triceratops,

thanks for the link but the first URL seems not to work. I tried in the search box of "Nature" with "doggerbank" and it gives only two hits en not your link...
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080709/full/454151a.html?s=news_rss
Kind regards and with esteem,
Paul.

Paul, I had problems posting the link originally, now it's gone. Have changed it for a wiki article.

T.

I was recently reading H.G. Wells’ A Story of the Stone Age. Written in 1897 it was one of the first works to popularise the concept that the British Isles were not always islands but once formed a peninsular off the north-west coast of Europe. Wells writes:

'This story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea. In that remote age the valley which runs along the foot of the Downs did not exist, and the south of Surrey was a range of hills, fir-clad on the middle slopes, and snow-capped for the better part of the year. The cores of its summits still remain as Leith Hill, and Pitch Hill, and Hindhead. On the lower slopes of the range, below the grassy spaces where the wild horses grazed, were forests of yew and sweet-chestnut and elm, and the thickets and dark places hid the grizzly bear and the hyæna, and the grey apes clambered through the branches. And still lower amidst the woodland and marsh and open grass along the Wey did this little drama play itself out to the end that I have to tell. Fifty thousand years ago it was, fifty thousand years—if the reckoning of geologists is correct.'

As the opening paragraph suggests, the story isn’t set on Doggerland itself but ‘rather amidst the woodland and marsh and open grass along the Wey’. It begs the question as to why Wells even mentions the ‘wide and level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea’ at all other than, perhaps, as a sort of literary hook. The parochialism of the story should, of course, be evident in the phrase 'from France (as we call it now) to England' rather than 'from France to England (as we call them now)'. In the story, our hero Ugh-lomi becomes the first man to ride a horse by dropping down onto its back from the branch of a tree and then holding onto its neck and mane for dear life as it charges off. This event Wells tells us occurred (appropriately) on ‘the very grassy downs that fall northward nowadays from the Epsom Stand’.

The Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (antiquities) in Leyden is currently running an exhibition on Doggerland:  

Rijksmuseum - Doggerland (Dutch language)

Rijksmuseum - Doggerland (English language)

This is another Doggerland video: