Britain's Atlantis

Archaeologists are set to uncover the secrets of lost civilisation known as Britain’s Atlantis.

17:53 02 September 2015

Archaeologists are researching an area on the North Sea known as Dogger, believed to be the home of ancient Stone Age tribes whose homes were washed away more than 7,000 years ago. The mysterious civilisation came to an end when melting ice caps caused sea levels to rise across the world.

 

Archaeologists from a number of top British universities have now teamed up to uncover the stories of ill-fated residents of Dogger.

 

Professor Vince Gaffney of the University of Bradford, said: "As conditions got warmer, there was a period of just a few thousand years when large areas of Europe’s continental shelf were recolonized by Stone Age humans," he said.

 

"Warmer temperatures melted vast quantities of ice which caused very substantial sea level rise which in turn gradually drowned the most populated parts of the newly recolonized land.

"Because these areas of continental shelf became sea, they have been inaccessible to archaeologists until now."

 

"This project will access new data at a scale never previously attempted," Professor Gaffney added.

 

"Novel mapping, DNA extraction and computer modelling representing people, animals and even individual plants will generate a model of how Doggerland was colonised and eventually lost to the sea.

 

“A dramatic, and previously lost, period of human prehistory will begin to emerge from the seismic traces, fragments of DNA and snippets of computer code that will form the primary data of this innovative archaeological project.”