Doggerland

Until the middle Pleistocene, Great Britain was joined to the European mainland by the Weald–Artois Anticline, a chalk ridge crossing what is now the Strait of Dover. About 450,000 years ago an ice sheet dammed a proglacial lake in the southern North Sea; its catastrophic overflow carved a channel through the ridge, probably creating the potential for Britain to become separated from the continent during high sea levels, though the timing of the final break remains disputed. During the Last Glacial Maximum, the North Sea and much of the British Isles lay under glacial ice and sea level stood about 120 metres lower than today; as the climate warmed, around 12,000 BCE Britain and much of what is now the North Sea and English Channel formed an expanse of low-lying tundra. By around 10,000 BCE this land had a coastline of lagoons, saltmarshes, mudflats and beaches, with inland rivers, streams and lakes, and may have been Europe's most prosperous hunting, fowling and fishing ground of the Mesolithic.

The area was occupied from around 9,000 to 6,000 BCE by the Maglemosian culture, identified by microliths, axes and other stone and bone tools, including a barbed antler point recovered from peat on the seabed.

As the ice melted, sea levels rose and the land tilted upward in isostatic adjustment as the weight of ice lessened. A tidal bay is thought to have formed gradually between eastern England and the Dogger Bank by 9000 BCE, followed by a rapid sea level rise that turned the Dogger Bank into an island and cut Britain off from the continent by around 6500 BCE; the island survived until at least 5000 BCE. One hypothesis holds that around 6200 BCE a tsunami generated by the Storegga Slide, a submarine landslide off Norway, flooded much of the remaining coastal land, with up to an estimated quarter of Mesolithic Britons killed; a 2014 study suggested only low-lying islands remained by then, while still supporting the view that the area was abandoned around the same period. The tsunami's role in Doggerland's disappearance is disputed: another view holds the Storegga wave ebbed back into the sea, and it was instead the bursting of North America's Lake Agassiz, releasing fresh water that raised sea levels over about two years, that finally drowned the remaining land and made Britain an island. Through this transition the Maglemosian culture was succeeded by the Kongemose culture, which existed from about 6,000 to 5,200 BCE as Doggerland likely shrank from an expansive land bridge to scattered islands; the culture that followed on the drowning landscape, evidenced by kitchen middens and fishing tools, was the Ertebølle culture.

The existence of a former landscape beneath the southern North Sea was established in the late 19th century, when plant remains dredged from the Dogger Bank were studied; Clement Reid examined further material in 1913, and anatomist Arthur Keith discussed the area's archaeological potential in his 1915 book The Antiquity of Man. In 1931 the trawler Colinda hauled up a lump of peat near the Ower Bank, east of Norfolk, containing a barbed antler point about 220mm long, dated to between 10,000 and 4,000 BCE, when the area was tundra. Interest revived in the 1990s when Bryony Coles named the submerged region "Doggerland" and produced speculative maps of its extent.

Between 2003 and 2007 a University of Birmingham team led by Vince Gaffney and Ken Thomson used seismic survey data provided by an oil and gas company to map around 23,000 square kilometres of the early Holocene landscape, naming features such as the dune system "the Spines" and a river system "the Shotton River," after Birmingham geologist Frederick William Shotton. A Neanderthal skull fragment more than 40,000 years old, dredged off Zeeland, was exhibited in Leiden in 2009, and in 2019 researchers recovered a flint flake partly coated in birch bark tar offering evidence of Neanderthal technology. In 2010 the area's potential archaeological importance was reported to have implications for the planning of North Sea offshore wind farms. Since 2015 the University of Bradford's Europe's Lost Frontiers project has continued mapping the submerged landscape and coring marine sediment for ancient DNA, and in 2019 a team from Bradford and Ghent University recovered a hammerstone flint from the seabed off Cromer, Norfolk, which could point to further prehistoric settlement.