If we were to sample the Dogger
Bank SAC a few thousand years ago, we would be better off doing it by foot than
on a ship. At that time, the area was dry land and formed a larger landmass
which connected Great Britain to Europe known as Doggerland.
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Map showing
hypothetical extent of Doggerland (c. 8,000 BCE), which provided a land bridge
between Great Britain and continental Europe (© Max Naylor)
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The landscape would have looked
very different from the extensive mass of water we see today; mammoths would be
roaming through the tundra, and we might have encountered some humans running
after lions with stone spears!
After the last Ice Age, around 8000
BCE, the north-facing coastal area of Doggerland had a coastline of lagoons,
saltmarshes, mudflats, and beaches, and inland streams and rivers and marshes,
and sometimes lakes. The archaeologists studying the site think that this was
probably a rich habitat with human habitation and may have been the richest
hunting, fowling and fishing ground in Europe in the Mesolithic period!
The Dogger Bank itself, an upland
area of Doggerland, is believed to have remained as an island until at least
5000 BCE. After the end of the final glacial period of the last ice age, rising
sea levels gradually reduced it to low-lying islands before its final
abandonment, perhaps following a megatsunami caused by the Storegga slide – a
submarine landslide off the coast of Norway. Nowadays the shallowest tip of
Dogger Bank is below 20 meters of water. It is still a very rich fishing ground
mainly for flat fish and sandeel.
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| A piece of peat with holes made by bivalves retrieved from the Dogger Bank seabed (A. Cunha, JNCC) |
Some fishing vessels operating in
the area today still occasionally drag up remains of mammoth, lion and other
land animals, and even small numbers of prehistoric tools and weapons. This
prompted the team to be on the look out for any suspicious objects while going through
the benthic samples retrieved from the seafloor, in the hope of
finding some interesting archaeology.
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| Fragments of peat retrieved from the Dogger Bank seabed (A. Cunha, JNCC) |
Until now we haven’t been that
lucky, although we have been finding little fragments of what we think could be
pieces of peat, charcoal and even fossilized trees (although no one on board is
an archaeologist!). Maybe we are being too creative but it is exciting to think
that we are actually floating over such an amazing place.
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| Unidentified fragments, possibly charcoal pieces... (A. Cunha, JNCC) |
