Stone Age Atlantis

Satellite view of Northwest Europe - showing Britain as an Island (the land that once joined Britain to the rest of Europe has been destroyed by a tsunami)

Melting ice, rising seas and a huge tsunami heads for the coast. These are not headlines from the twenty first century. But they are stories from prehistory. Today, we worry about the effects of global warming, but humans have lived though eras of extreme climate change before. During the Middle Stone Age, the world's seas were rising far more rapidly than today.

Today on Far Future Horizons we present the story of a vanished kingdom - a Stone Age Atlantis.

In Stone Age times Northern Europe was a wonderful place to live where people pioneered a new advanced culture. But these were also times of frenzied climate change when the seas were rising and drowning huge swards of land.

Doggerland was an area of land, now lying beneath the southern North Sea, that connected Great Britain to mainland Europe during and after the last Ice Age. It was then gradually flooded by rising sea levels around 6,500 or 6,200 BC.

 
In today’s video feature we investigate the story of a lost world of the Stone Age. In Northern Europe, an area the size of California disappeared under the waves. 

Map showing hypothetical extent of Doggerland (c. 8,000 BC), which provided a land bridge between Great Britain and continental Europe

This documentary features the archaeologists who are now reconstructing this lost land and have given it a name - Doggerland.

 Stone Age Atlantis is available on DVD from National Geographic's online store.

Stone Age Atlantis

Copyright Disclaimer

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.