User:Hans Adler/Sandbox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Doggerland was the part of the European landmass between Great Britain, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands that gradually became submerged under the North Sea in the time since the last glacial period.[1][2] The drowning of this vast populated area was caused by rising sea levels, at a rate comparable to that predicted for the next 100 years as a result of global warming.[3][4] Some elevated areas of Doggerland can still be observed as islands and shoals, most notably the Orkney and Shetland Islands and the Dogger Bank[2]. A related phenomenon is the occasional discovery of "Noah's woods" along the British coast: peat deposits complete with stumps of woodland trees.[5][6]
When the glaciers finally receded at the end of the last ice age, the British Isles were still connected to the mainland. The River Thames and the River Rhine both contributed to the huge Channel River, which would eventually become the English Channel.[7][1][2] The River Elbe flowed west of Jutland through the Elbe Urstromtal – a huge glacial valley whose northern part is now submerged under the German Bight and filled with sediment. The Elbe estuary probably opened into the Norwegian Trench between Doggerland and Scandinavia.[1][2] With slowly rising sea levels, Doggerland's northern coastline moved south until around the 6th millennium BCE only a number of islands remained and Great Britain was separated from the continent. At the start of the 4th millennium, when the sea-levels became constant, the last big islands in the southern North Sea had disappeared, and the modern topography had been developed.[2]
Humans in Europe survived the Last Glacial Maximum in refuges in the southern part of the continent and recolonised it afterwards, beginning in the Bølling/Allerød period.[8] They reached Doggerland as mesolithic hunter-gatherers coming from inland Europe.[2] Part of our knowledge about Doggerland comes from accidental finds by commercial trawlers, e.g. prehistoric tools[9] or bones of extinct (mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, Irish elk, aurochs, steppe wisent) or extant (bear, wolf, reindeer, red deer, horse, beaver, walrus) animal species.[5] More recently, Doggerland has become an area of systematic research by archaeologists and geologists.[9]