Back to the Mesolithic Age calendar
The people who were living in what we know as England had probably been there for several thousands of years now. They had
walked there from Europe because there was land connecting us. You can see this in the picture. We call it Doggerland. Many people, rather than move even further
west, had chosen to live on this piece of land which was, by this time, about the size Wales is today. Because it was lowland, it was marshy with rivers and lakes.
It was good for hunting and fishing and a good place to live in those days.
But since 10,000BC sea levels had been rising and bits of Doggerland would have disappeared. My map shows how much was probably left in about 6,500BC. The grey area was where land had been in 18,000BC when the ice age was at its coldest. The light blue patch, called the Dogger Bank, is a sandbank which stills exists under the North Sea. You can hear it mentioned in shipping weather forecasts. Some parts of it are only 15 metres below sea level.
Sea levels continued to rise, slowly, but in about 6,200BC there was a massive landslide, underwater, off the west coast of Norway. About 300 kilometres of an iceberg slid
deeper into the sea and experts reckon this caused a massive tsunami or tidal wave. Tsunami is a hard word to pronounce so I'll help you. It is said like Sue na me. It's a Japanese word and there are lots of tsunamis around Japan and in the Pacific Ocean. Looks like another visit to an atlas.
A tsunami is really a series of great big waves and people reckon that by the time these waves reached the coast of England they may have been about 6 metres high. It would have caused panic on the coast but on Doggerland the effect was even more serious. Doggerland was already a low lying landmass and it is very likely that in a short space of time this tsunami wave actually covered the whole area. Unlike the gentle rising of sea levels this would have been sudden and catastrophic. Many lives would have been lost as no one would have had any warning and, in any case, there was no high ground on which
to escape the sudden rising water.
What is certain is that from this point in time, the people who had walked beyond Doggerland, those that were now in England, lived on an island. They were
completely surrounded by water and the only way they could leave that island was by boat.
Forward to 4500BC
