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John Tomanio and Amanda Hobbs, NGM Staff
Art: Alexander Maleev. Sources: Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney, and Benjamin Gearey, University of Birmingham, U.K.8000 B.C.: After retreating inland from a storm, a group of hunter-gatherers in Doggerland return to find their camp flooded. Eventually there would be no dry land to come back to.
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Photograph by Robert Clark, at the Toulouse Museum, France
Murdered, then buried together in a grave festooned with antlers, two women from a Mesolithic cemetery on Téviec Island in Brittany, France, pay witness to a violent age. The shrinking of territories due to sea-level rise may have brought neighboring populations into conflict.
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Archaeologist Lisa Snape-Kennedy traces footprints of a crane at Goldcliff, Wales. Now rare in Britain, cranes would have been a valuable food source for Mesolithic people here and in Doggerland to the east.
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At the end of the last ice age, Britain formed the northwestern corner of an icy continent. Warming climate exposed a vast continental shelf for humans to inhabit. Further warming and rising seas gradually flooded low-lying lands, and the above footprint.
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Photograph by Robert Clark, at the Museum of Antiquities, Leiden, Netherlands
Bone and antler arrowheads, recovered from the North Sea off the Dutch coast, pay witness to a way of life now long submerged.
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At home in The Hague, amateur archaeologist Jan Glimmerveen displays some of the fossil bones and tools that he has received over the years from fishermen who trawl the North Sea. Such artifacts are all that is left of the lost world of Doggerland.
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At Vedbaek in coastal Denmark, an elderly man was laid to rest on a bed of antlers, two flint knives at his side. Known as the “old hunter,” he is one of 22 burials discovered in the 1970s in a Mesolithic cemetery beneath the parking lot of an elementary school.
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Near the Welsh village of Goldcliff, the remains of a prehistoric oak rise from the mud of the Severn estuary at low tide. Mesolithic forests in northern Europe would have gradually died as saltwater rose through the water table. Humans could move to higher elevations—until the sea swallowed those places too.
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Armed with a bucket—an essential tool of the archaeologist working intertidal sites—Lisa Snape-Kennedy scans the sediments for traces of Mesolithic life. Layers of silt that form the ridges in the Severn estuary basin were deposited annually, making it possible to determine what season of the year the ancients occupied the site.
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Out in the estuary at an exceptionally low tide, archaeologist Jennifer Foster takes a mold of a beautifully preserved Mesolithic footprint revealed when tides removed overlying sediments. The return of the tide and a rough sea could wash the footprint away.
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Foster holds a stone found at the Goldcliff site. The fractures suggest that at some point the stone was exposed to heat from a cooking fire—evidence that ancient humans once occupied this place, if only temporarily.
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As the tide recedes, lead archaeologist Martin Bell of the University of Reading rushes to expose a footprint. With one of the world’s largest tidal ranges, the Severn estuary allows a mere two hours to work before the sea returns at Goldcliff.
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Members of the Goldcliff archaeological team unfold a plastic sheet etched in black with the footprints of Mesolithic people, deer, and cranes. Red tracings mark the edges of annual sediment bands.
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