ENVIRONMENT × PEOPLING

The Drowning of Doggerland

~8,150 years ago

Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Northgrippian

Between Britain and Denmark, under the North Sea, lies a drowned country: Doggerland, a plain of rivers and marshes that Mesolithic people hunted for millennia as the melting ice sheets slowly raised the water around them. Around 8,150 years ago, a gigantic submarine landslide off Norway, the Storegga slide, sent a tsunami across what remained; whether it was the killing blow or a blow to a land already dying of sea-level rise is actively argued from cores and seismic maps.

Why it matters

Whole homelands of the human story are under water: the coasts our species followed out of Africa, the shelves of Sundaland and Beringia, and this European Atlantis, now surveyed by the tools of the oil industry turned archaeological. Doggerland is the most vivid reminder that postglacial sea-level rise redrew the map beneath living communities, on timescales people could see, a chapter with obvious modern echoes.

Dating & uncertainty

The Storegga submarine landslide off Norway sent its tsunami across the North Sea around 8,150 years ago, within the same window as the 8.2 ka cold event. Whether the wave 'ended' Doggerland is debated: new southern North Sea evidence suggests locally buffered impacts, and some argue rapid sea-level rise had already done most of the drowning, with final islands persisting for centuries.

Sources

  1. Walker et al. (2020), Antiquity · A great wave: the Storegga tsunami and the end of Doggerland?doi:10.15184/aqy.2020.49
  2. Weninger et al. (2008), Documenta Praehistorica · The catastrophic final flooding of Doggerland by the Storegga Slide tsunamidoi:10.4312/dp.35.1
  3. Gaffney et al. (2020), Geosciences · Multi-proxy characterisation of the Storegga tsunami and its impact on the early Holocene landscapes of the southern North Seadoi:10.3390/geosciences10070270

Our species’ history as one day

23:22:4437 min 15 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day

See it on the timeline