The Real “Lost World” (ca. 6000 BC)
Researchers from the University of Birmingham have recently made the astonishing discovery of what may be an entire, prehistoric “lost country”, hidden underneath the UK’s North Sea. It appears that at the end of the last ice age, over 8000 years ago, rising water levels literally swallowed what may amount to an area of around 23,000 square kilometers – an area that is currently a part of the North Sea’s seabed.
The research team believes that this find could serve as a warning for the devastating impact of climate change on human populations, since these people would have lost their land as the rising water levels crept across the low-lying plains. Although the majority of the landscape’s change would have been gradual, some warmer years likely saw a rapid shift in the amount of land available to these people – a terrifying concept for hunter-gatherer populations that relied on their land to survive.
Professor Vince Gaffney, chair in Landscape Archaeology and Geomatics at the University, has surmised that as early as 10,000 BC, hunter-gatherers were living on the land in the middle of North Sea, but it was only 4000 years later – by 6000 BC – that Britain had fully become an island. Global temperatures and water levels rose, forcing people off the land and onto higher ground, namely the area that is modern-day Britain.
“It would be a mistake to think that these people were unsophisticated or without culture,” said Gaffney, “they would have had names for the rivers and hills and spiritual associations – it would have been a catastrophic loss.” Prehistoric groups often lived together in family units, and based on the previous evidence from other prehistoric groups in Britain, these people probably lived in small, thatched huts and hunted animals such as deer and rabbit for food.
University of Birmingham researchers are currently attempting to map the physical features of the seabed’s geological landscape, in hopes that it will shed further light on the specific locations of these underwater sites that might yield further evidence for how these people lived – and also hopefully avoid further destruction of the sites. Quoted as being the “best preserved prehistoric landscape in Europe”, it is likely that underwater excavations will be mounted in the future, to try and learn more about the people that lived in this enormous stretch of lost world.
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