Doggerland Phenomena: What You Know about Doggerland

In the distant past, the continents were not so separate. The southern portion of the globe was at one time occupied by a "supercontinent" dubbed "Gondwana" or "Gondwanaland" that existed 600 million years ago. The mass included present-day South America, Africa, Arabia, Madagascar, India, Australia, and Antarctica. The term "supercontinent" was coined by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, an expert on the Alps who helped lay the basis for the study of paleography and tectonics. The...
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In the distant past, the continents were not so separate. The southern portion of the globe was at one time occupied by a "supercontinent" dubbed "Gondwana" or "Gondwanaland" that existed 600 million years ago. The mass included present-day South America, Africa, Arabia, Madagascar, India, Australia, and Antarctica. The term "supercontinent" was coined by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, an expert on the Alps who helped lay the basis for the study of paleography and tectonics. The latter was to replace the "drifting continent" theory with "the study of the architecture of the earth's outer rocky shell." In the late Paleozoic Age between 254 to 544 million years in the past, a global supercontinent commonly known as Pangea included the entire masses of Gondwana, Eurasia, and North America as the two northern continents collided.

Among the most significant water displacement phenomena in the Western world was Doggerland on the northern European continent. The notable inundation occurred in both a steady and eruptive fashion covering a vast stretch of former tundra, a land bridge between today's British Isles and the European continent. The event brought about the modern English Channel and an expanded North Sea, and unlike the early supercontinents, the inundation of Doggerland took place after the appearance of people. Incrementally submerged since roughly 18,000 years ago as the climate warmed, the patch of sea between Britain and Europe is the subject of much recent scientific scrutiny. Several fields are participating in the inquiry as to how and why the inundation took place, and the nature of the peoples that settled there. This encompasses earliest man to Neanderthals and on through the Mesolithic prototype of the modern European.

The sunken plain that has commonly been dubbed Doggerland is based on its highest point, a now submerged island ridge called Dogger Bank. The name has been associated for several centuries with Dutch fishing vessels called Doggers. These two-masted craft fished the area for cod over hundreds of years. Where the island ridge once sat above the water as the last portion to be submerged, the prominent sand bank is now regarded as both a shipping hazard and treasure trove of potential research.

By the time Doggerland had disappeared under the seas, the people who remained, the first Britons, were from the European continent and the Atlantic seaboard, maybe even northern Africa. There was a sudden influx of people from Gaul to Britainn across the channel around 24000 BCE. They were metal workers and perhaps attracted to the newly-discovered copper mine in northern Wales at Great Orme. A complete shoulder cape, dated as having been made in 1500 BCE, was discovered in a burial mound in a field called Bryn yr Ellyllon ("Fairies' Hill") in Mold in Flintshire in Wales in 1833. It had been fashioned from a single gold nugget, weighed 650 grams, and was covered with intricate designs. It had obviously been worn by an important person of slight stature during some kind of ritual practice. However, it seems these people did not stay in Wales very long, or at least not long enough to leave much of a genetic mark.