The Legend of Doggerland Lives On
Hailed as ‘Britain’s Atlantis,’ an ancient land at the bottom of the North Sea is drawing new attention. Doggerland: Lost World in the North Sea, a currently running (fall, 2021) exhibition at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, Holland, includes more than 200 objects intended to reveal life destroyed 8200 years ago by a tsunami. An army of amateur archaeologists has been scouring the Dutch coastline for evidence of Doggerland for years, but after long denying that such a thing might be possible, most of mainstream academia now appears to support the idea. Indeed, according Guardian reporter Daniel Boffey, writing in August, 2021, Doggerland was imagined by H.G. Wells, and others, over a century ago.
According to science reporter Frank Joseph, writing in Atlantis Rising #96 (November/December, 2012), ice age harpoons, fish prongs, possible burial sites, and fossilized remains belonging to large mammals—many of them, such as mammoths, giant reindeer, and cave lions, now extinct, have been found. Joseph cited Dr. Richard Bates from the Department of Earth Sciences at St Andrews University, “We have found many artifacts and submerged features that are very difficult to explain by natural causes, such as mounds surrounded by ditches.” Bates concedes that he was once skeptical of such evidence.
Doggerland, Britain’s Daily Mail reported, was a huge area of dry land that, between 18,000 BC and 5,500 BC, stretched from Scotland to Denmark before slowly submerging. Remains of the drowned world were uncovered in the ’90s by oil company divers. With a population of tens of thousands, Doggerland could once, it is speculated, have been the ‘real heartland’ of Europe.
As long ago as 1913, Clement Reid, a British paleo-biologist, was the first scientist to conclude that an enormous island, greater in area than some modern European nations, once lay between Scotland and the Netherlands. Animal and plant remains brought up from Dogger Bank and along its fringe, was clear evidence, he thought, of formerly inhabited terrain. In The Antiquity of Man, author Arthur Keith, described in 1911 worked flints of Neolithic origins in the area, and predicted great finds to come. His prophecy came true in 1931 when a lump of peat containing a very ancient harpoon was brought up. But it took seismic survey data from 1990s petrochemical explorations to finally elevate interest in the bottom of the North Sea to archaeological significance. Popular interest in Doggerland took off, in 2009, when the forty-thousand-year-old fragment of a Neanderthal skull was brought up.
In Joseph’s view these discoveries corroborate the work of Mary Settegast, a Columbia University scholar, who, back in the 1980s, proposed a similar location for Atlantis. Settegast wondered if the region could possibly be what Plato had in mind for a sunken land that went down in roughly 10,000 BC. An ancient ‘Mesolithic Mediterranean’ conflict, Settegast thought, might have been behind the sinking of Plato’s island continent, but a search for vanished and forgotten cultures would be more useful, she believed, than hunting for a sunken continent. For Plato’s war of the Greeks versus the Atlanteans, Settegast substituted a mysterious European culture whose tool industries were known as ‘tanged’ arrowheads and which appear around 10,000 BC, in Paleolithic Europe at just about the time of the decline of Magdalenian culture. The Magdalenians–seafaring folk, who may have tamed horses–Settegast supposed, corresponded to the Poseidon-worshipping, and horse-riding, Atlanteans.
