Doggerland: Lost World under the North Sea 9464261137, 9789464261134

Table of contents :
Following in their footsteps, but choosing my own path
Foreword
First encounters
Part 1
DOGGERLAND
A lost world rediscovered
Ice, rivers, sea and spectacle: Geological variation in a drowned landscape
Mapping a drowning land
Part 2
DOGGERLAND EARLY INHABITANTS
Stepping into Britain: Happisburgh and the first humans in northern Europe
Citizen science and the submerged Palaeolithic landscapes in the North Sea
Rachel Bynoe
Krijn: Face to face with Doggerland’s first Neanderthal
Neanderthals in the cold ‘North Sea Serengeti’
Neanderthal treasures
Modern humans at the end of the ice age
The oldest art: Ice age Expressionism
Animals of the mammoth steppe
Part 3
Drowning DOGGERLAND
Animals after the ice age
Jørn Zeiler
Hunter-gatherers in a rich wetland
A lucky shot? A red deer in the crosshairs
Marcel Niekus
A thousand hunts: Barbed points from Doggerland
Garry Momber
Bouldnor Cliff: A drowned prehistoric site emerging from the seabed
Rotterdam-Yangtze Harbour: Excavating at 20 metres deep
The North Sea as Highway: Neolithic argonauts and prehistoric trade
Part 4
DOGGERLANDinvestigated
Tracing people: Secrets of bones and teeth unravelled
Points of animal and human bone: Sorting with collagen
Europe’s Lost Frontiers: Mapping the landscape
On course to the Brown Bank: Research in the North Sea
Part 5
DOGGERLANDtoday
Collecting Doggerland
Searching the coast and making finds: what then?
The North Sea: The busiest sea in the world
Future for Doggerland? Collect, research and protect
Thinking of Doggerland: A vanished landscape remembered
Afterword
Further reading
Blank Page

Citation preview

Lost World under the North Sea

This popular-science book tells the story of one of the most important, but least known major archaeological sites in Europe: Doggerland. Few people know that the beaches along the North Sea lie on the edge of a vast lost world. A prehistoric landscape that documents almost a million years of human habitation and lay dry for most of that time. Doggerland is where early hominids left the first footprints in northern Europe, more than 900,000 years ago. Later, for hundreds of thousands of years, it was the scene of ice ages. A world of woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses, horses and reindeer and the successful Neanderthals who hunted them, including Krijn: the first Neanderthal from Doggerland. At the end of the last Ice Age, the first modern humans also left their traces here, including the famous Leman-and-OwerBanks spearhead – the first documented Doggerland find – and some of the oldest art in the region. With the onset of the Holocene, our current era, Doggerland’s inhabitants were increasingly confronted with climate change and rising sea levels, just as we are today. The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived in a rich, but constantly changing world – to which they successfully adapted. Ongoing submergence and a huge tsunami around 6150 BC marked the beginning of the end. A few centuries later, the last islands disappeared under the waves and with them the story of Doggerland was lost in time. This book brings this vanished world back to the surface.

ISBN 978-94-6426-113-4 ISBN: 978-94-6426-113-4

9 789464 261134

Doggerland Lost World under the North Sea

Doggerland

Doggerland Lost World under the North Sea

edited by: Luc Amkreutz & Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof

Doggerland

Doggerland Lost World under the North Sea

edited by: Luc Amkreutz & Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof

Colophon This publication is based in large part on a Dutch volume that appeared on the occasion of the exhibition Doggerland. Verdwenen wereld in de Noordzee, from 15 June until 31 October 2021 at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden; RMO) in Leiden and which travelled on to various locations in the Netherlands. The articles were written by a team of researchers, specialists and collectors. © 2022 National Museum of Antiquities and individual authors Editors Luc Amkreutz & Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof Design Sidestone Press Cover based on exhibition campaign design by Studio Berry Slok, Amsterdam Photography Robbert Jan Looman/National Museum of Antiquities (unless otherwise stated); part opening photographs beaches: Karsten Wentink. Translation Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof (the Overdressed Archeologist) Cover Front: Palaeolithic scraper (background) and handaxe (foreground). Back: Big stormy ocean wave. Blue water background (Ivan Kurmyshov | stock.adobe.com) and Leman-and-Ower-Banks point (after Clark, J.G.D., 1932. The Mesolithic Age in Britain. Cambridge University Press), 115 (appendix VII). With thanks to The exhibition Doggerland. Verdwenen wereld in de Noordzee and the accompanying publication could be realised thanks to the support of the Mondriaan Fund, the Mr. and Mrs. Postma-Bosch Fund, the Cultural Heritage Agency, the Province of South Holland and many scientific institutes, archaeologists, amateur archaeologists and palaeontologists, beachcombers and Doggerland enthusiasts. The National Museum of Antiquities is supported by the Vriendenloterij. Published by Sidestone Press, Leiden www.sidestone.com ISBN 978-94-6426-113-4 (softcover) ISBN 978-94-6426-114-1 (hardcover) ISBN 978-94-6428-115-8 (PDF e-book)

Contents

Foreword7 Vince Gaffney

First encounters

9

Leendert Louwe Kooijmans

Following in their footsteps, but choosing my own path

11

Leo Verhart

PART 1 DOGGERLAND A lost world rediscovered

17

Luc Amkreutz

Ice, rivers, sea and spectacle: Geological variation in a drowned landscape

31

Kim Cohen & Marc Hijma

Mapping a drowning land

37

Olav Odé, Luc Amkreutz, Kim Cohen & Marc Hijma

PART 2 DOGGERLAND EARLY INHABITANTS Stepping into Britain: Happisburgh and the first humans in northern Europe

45

Nick Ashton

Citizen science and the submerged Palaeolithic landscapes in the North Sea

52

Rachel Bynoe

Krijn: Face to face with Doggerland’s first Neanderthal Luc Amkreutz & Luc Anthonis

55

Neanderthals in the cold ‘North Sea Serengeti’

59

Marcel Niekus & Dimitri de Loecker

Neanderthal treasures

67

Marcel Niekus, Dimitri de Loecker & Luc Amkreutz

Modern humans at the end of the ice age

75

Luc Amkreutz & Marcel Niekus

The oldest art: Ice age Expressionism

83

Luc Amkreutz, Marcel Niekus & Jan Glimmerveen

Animals of the mammoth steppe

87

Dick Mol, Bram Langeveld & Jørn Zeiler

PART 3 DROWNING DOGGERLAND Animals after the ice age

94

Jørn Zeiler

Hunter-gatherers in a rich wetland

97

Luc Amkreutz & Marcel Niekus

A lucky shot? A red deer in the crosshairs

106

Marcel Niekus

A thousand hunts: Barbed points from Doggerland

109

Merel Spithoven

Bouldnor Cliff: A drowned prehistoric site emerging from the seabed

113

Garry Momber

Rotterdam-Yangtze Harbour: Excavating at 20 metres deep

119

Dimitri Schiltmans

The North Sea as Highway: Neolithic argonauts and prehistoric trade

123

Luc Amkreutz & Jan Glimmerveen

PART 4 DOGGERLAND INVESTIGATED Tracing people: Secrets of bones and teeth unravelled

131

Eveline Altena, Lisette Kootker, Bjørn Smit & Paul Storm

Points of animal and human bone: Sorting with collagen

139

Joannes Dekker, Virginie Sinet-Mathiot, Alexander Verpoorte, Marie Soressi & Frido Welker

Europe’s Lost Frontiers: Mapping the landscape 

143

Vince Gaffney & Simon Fitch

On course to the Brown Bank: Research in the North Sea Tine Missiaen & Ruth Plets

149

PART 5 DOGGERLAND TODAY Collecting Doggerland

157

Luc Amkreutz & Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof, with contributions by Willy van Wingerden, Ivan van Marrewijk, Emma Louise Wyn Jones, Hester Loeff, Kommer Tanis, Darren Nicholas, Joanne Leonard, Meinbert Gozewijn van Soest, Patrick Ouwehand, Renate Wolthuis, Kees van Hooijdonk, Mirjam Kruizinga & Cèdric Heins

Searching the coast and making finds: what then?

179

Luc Amkreutz, Rachel Bynoe, Bjørn Smit & Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof

The North Sea: The busiest sea in the world

185

Luc Amkreutz & Stichting de Noordzee

Future for Doggerland? Collect, research and protect

187

Hans Peeters & Bjørn Smit

Thinking of Doggerland: A vanished landscape remembered

193

Luc Amkreutz & Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof

Afterword201 Hans Peeters

Further reading

205

Chronology208

Vince Gaffney

FOREWORD

Spiderweb-like patterns made by marine bryozoa (calcareous skeletons) on a large piece of natural flint, fished up off the coast of South Holland in 2013.

Until quite recently, the existence of an unexplored, prehistoric landscape straddling the coastal plains of the world’s continents was frequently viewed as little more than a historical curiosity. Although the fact that large areas of seabed might contain unparalleled evidence for prehistoric settlement had been appreciated by archaeologists for more than a century, the technical challenges of working in such environments ensured that our understanding of these lands remained, at best, sketchy. This situation has changed dramatically. Over the past two decades a trickle of archaeological activity associated with inundated landscapes has become a flood of data and public interest. The Dutch National Museum of Antiquities’ 2021 exhibition and publication, Doggerland: verdwenen wereld in de Noordzee (Doggerland. Lost World under the North Sea) are landmarks reflecting the success of such research, but also the depth of public engagement with the archaeology of marine palaeolandscapes, as well as the larger issues of climate change and societal response to rising sea levels. The nature and impact of large-scale environmental change, exhibited through the archaeology of Doggerland, is represented superbly in this publication. The plants, animals and archaeological correlates of the societies who lived in these lands are described and illustrated in a manner that will be invaluable to the specialist and intriguing to a general reader. The central role of science and technology in the study of these inaccessible lands is made clear, and, of equal importance, this publication recognises the value of those archaeological enthusiasts whose keen eyes have recovered so many important artefacts from the beaches of Northwest Europe. As with farmers on land, the support of those who live by or work on the North Sea, in the fishing, energy or aggregate industries, ensures that important evidence which could have been lost, is recovered, recorded and studied. More than 80 years ago, the archaeologist Grahame Clarke noted that, “it would be possible to take comfort from the fact that such cultures might not have existed were it not eminently probable that they not only existed, but flourished under conditions more favourable than those obtaining inland”. This publication demonstrates to its readers that the evidence for Doggerland is not only incontrovertible, but that archaeology now has

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the capacity to research those landscapes previously regarded as inaccessible. Beyond this, however, the current publication is also a clarion call for future action. This excellent volume makes it clear that archaeologists from the countries surrounding the North Sea are now actively pursuing research on their continental shelves. However, in contrast to nearshore sites including the Yangtze Harbour and Bouldnor Cliff, both described in this publication, no confirmed archaeological settlement or evidence for in situ activity has been located beyond the nearshore or at depths greater than 20 metres. Consequently, much of the North Sea still remains terra incognita. Given the evidence for excellent organic preservation in many locations of the North Sea, this lack of settlement sites suggests that much work remains to be done. It may also be true that, in some areas of the North Sea, the opportunity to undertake exploration may be time-limited by the expansion of marine windfarms across the European coastal shelf. Green energy generation is, of course, vital if we are to meet our decarbonisation goals. Archaeologists and developers must treat such developments as an opportunity to work together. If that is realised, it will be possible to locate the evidence for prehistoric settlement that must exist in the deeper waters of the southern North Sea. It should be clear from this volume that much has been achieved in the North Sea, but that the opportunity for future exploration and discovery still remains. It, moreover, is fitting that we may recover dramatic evidence of the loss of Doggerland whilst confronting the contemporary challenges of anthropogenic climate change and sea level rise.

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

Leendert Louwe Kooijmans

FIRST ENCOUNTERS It was in 1966, a few months after my appointment as curator Prehistory at the Dutch National Museum of Anti­ quities, that I met Gerhard Kortenbout van der Sluijs, colleague at the Dutch National Museum of Geology and Mineralogy and curator of Pleistocene Mammals. In harbour towns like Goeree, he had been collecting bones from the North Sea in large numbers from fishers for several years. They were neatly sorted and stored in an attic at the museum on the Hooglandse Kerkgracht, where many of the chests of drawers were bulging with bones. ‘Bout’, as he was called, came to me with axes made from bovine bones, because they did not fit in the collection area of Geology, but belonged in our collection. It soon became clear that the axes could not be from the ice age but had to be younger, as similar pieces had only been found at Mesolithic camps in Denmark and northern Germany. Amidst all that ice age material they were not, as first thought, made from bones of the steppe wisent but of aurochs and belonged to the small component of Holocene bones. This typological comparison provided a dating in the Early Mesolithic, geologically in the Boreal, in absolute years about 10,000 years old. Fortunately, the find spot was accurately recorded by fishers: between the Brown Bank and the Deep Channel west of it, at a depth between 35 and 45 metres. According to the then new sea level curve of S. Jelgersma, the transgression (rising) of the North Sea must have occurred at the same time and have driven the people away. We can imagine where the tools came from, by comparing them to locations on dry land, such as Hohen Viecheln in Mecklenburg. Of course, we must take into account that the fishers only collected the large bones. In all likelihood, this was a site on the edge of a stream valley or lake, where the axes became embedded in clay or peat together with lots of other material. Erosion of the seabed may have washed away later sea sand and so they came to the surface, within reach of the fishing nets. The axes were a real eye opener and a solid testimony to the inhabitants of the drained North Sea basin, shortly before it was flooded by the rising sea at the end of the last ice age: a first sign of life after the Leman-and-Ower-Banks antler spearhead over 50 years earlier, in 1931.

9

In the new Dutch Archaeology Gallery of the National Museum of Antiquities, which was opened by Queen Juliana on the museum’s 150th anniversary in 1968, North Sea tools were a new element. I wrote a large article about it with beautiful drawings by John Caspers, the museum’s artist, not in our own series Oudheidkundige Mededelingen but, at the request of the director, in the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands series Berichten van de Rijksdienst voor het Oudheidkundig Bodem­onderzoek. When the article had gone to press, new spectacular finds from the same period were made on the newly raised Maasvlakte  1: barbed points made from bone and antler. Fortunately, these could still be given a place in the article. Many more would follow and more axes came from the North Sea. The Brown Bank turned out to be only the beginning of our new acquaintance.

The publication Mesolithic Bone and Antler Implements from the North Sea and from the Netherlands from 1971 by Leendert Louwe Kooij­mans with one of the finds described by him.

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

Leo Verhart

FOLLOWING IN THEIR FOOTSTEPS, BUT CHOOSING MY OWN PATH It was a wonderful opportunity that I got. In 1977, I was appointed field technician at the National Museum of Antiquities and for years I was personally trained by Leendert Louwe Kooijmans during our excavations and subsequent finds processing. I went to university and of course gratefully made use of all the knowledge that I had acquired, but I also wanted to go my own way and decided to specialise in the Mesolithic. The choice quickly fell on barbed bone and antler points. After the first points that Leendert just managed to include in his article, increasing numbers were reported to the museum in the mid-1980s. I was still working there, as I was studying part-time. It was an exciting time. I went to see all those amateur archaeologists who had picked up the points along the Nieuwe Waterweg, at Maasvlakte  1 and from the beaches at Oostvoorne, Hoek van Holland, Monster and Zandvoort. Without them, I would have been empty-handed. Sometimes someone had only one, but often more and some even had over a hundred. During the day and in the evening I went to see them, had coffee, talked with them and soon the ice was broken. They were curious what I could tell them and I wanted to take the points to the museum to document them. That took quite a while, because there turned out to be almost 500 of them. It was also an exciting time because the first computers had arrived. At the institute, in the evenings, I was allowed to enter all the data into a database from which all kinds of tables and graphs could be generated. I remember the machine not being very user-friendly, but after a while I had a thick thesis to graduate on. The main conclusions of the study were that the points were about 9000 years old and that two specific groups could be distinguished: small and large ones. The

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Leo Verhart with some large replica points and the conference proceedings Man and Sea in the Mesolithic (1995); (Leo Verhart).

large ones probably had to do with lost fishing and hunting gear and the small points were possibly used for bird hunting. In order to understand the context, I  had also researched points in the rest of Europe. This showed that the small points were a phenomenon unique to the Dutch North Sea area. An additional result was that with the points from the Netherlands and Europe we were able to create a picture of the size and scope of cultural groups through time. There was a lot of interest in this and I had the opportunity to speak and write about this subject at many conferences. Meanwhile, I tried to acquire collections for the museum, but in this I was less successful. My research had shown that these were no ordinary finds and that drove up the asking price. Fortunately, this situation changed and now many points are on display in the museum’s showcases. Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg, for the number of registered specimens is now approaching 2000.

Further reading: Mesolithic Barbed Points and other Implements from Europoort, The Netherlands by L.B.M. Verhart (1988), published in Oudheidkundige Mededelingen Rijksmuseum van Oudheden Leiden 68: 145‑194.

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

Leo Verhart’s documentation on display at the Doggerland exhibition with the first reported Dutch barbed bone point made from a metatarsal bone, found by Adrie de Vries in 1971 on Maasvlakte 1, Rotterdam (13.5 cm; c. 9000‑6000 BC; Karsten Wentink).

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

Part 1

DOGGERLAND Not so long ago, Britain and the Netherlands were linked by a fertile valley criss-crossed by rivers. During the ice ages, this area was often a cold steppe landscape where Neanderthals lived among reindeer, horses and mammoths. About 8000 years ago, after centuries of rising sea levels following the last ice age, this area was permanently swallowed by the waves. The North Sea came into being. The once fertile land was covered under metres of clay, sand and sea. Off our coast, beneath the grey waves, lies an immense undiscovered landscape: Doggerland. This ‘Atlantis of the North Sea’ is unknown to many, but it is one of the most important archaeological sites in Europe, which thanks to new research is slowly resurfacing more and more.

25 June 2020, Monster It is scorching hot, and those who have the day off are seeking refreshment in the shade or by the sea. After the corona crisis of recent months, a little relaxation outside is very welcome. With towels and umbrellas, the sun worshippers settle down on the beach. The first tourists have arrived and the water is refreshing. It is hazy and in the distance to the south, an industrial landscape of cranes, masts and containers vibrating in the warm air juts out into the sea: the port of Rotterdam with the new Maasvlakte  2, one of the most important transport hubs in the world. A new piece of land built with sea sand. To the north, the coastline curves seaward as well. Here, the constructed Zandmotor will independently reinforce our coastline. A solitary steel camera mast stands in the middle and oversees the surroundings like a watchful eye. I have just come from there. I plop down in the warm sand, tired. Apart from some beautiful shells and an indefinable piece of fossilised bone, my walk has not yielded much. When I close my eyes I can hear the waves, children playing, a dog in the distance and a squawking seagull. I wonder what my beach companions are thinking... “nice beach, nice sea, on the other side is England, look a sailing ship!” Do they know that the North Sea has only been there for a short while? That where the waves break now, mammoths and large herds of reindeer used to walk along the banks of the ancient Rhine and Meuse into a wide valley? That Neanderthals used to camp here between the towels and that the lights of ships in the distance were the lights of our ancestors’ campfires for thousands of years? I doubt it. I close my eyes again and hear the surf. The tide is going out. I do not notice that 30  metres away a slender bone arrowhead rolls through the waves on the beach. Last shot at a red deer in the autumn of 7991  BC, its jagged barbs look like they were made yesterday.

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

A freshly washed up barbed point on the beach (Rick van Bragt).

Luc Amkreutz

A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED Most of us would not know that one of the most important archaeological and palaeontological sites in the world is located off the Dutch and British coasts. Where there is now sea, it has been mostly dry for the last million years. You could walk from the Netherlands to England through a shallow valley where the great forerunners of the Rhine, Meuse, Seine and Thames combined to form a mighty river. Large grazing animals like mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, but also herds of reindeer, horses and steppe wisents used to roam along the rivers during the ice ages. The yellowbrown, herb-rich landscape and the vegetation along the banks provided a rich food source, also for hunters and scavengers, such as wolves, bears, the sabre-toothed cat and hyenas. And for us, humankind. More than 900,000 years ago the first hominids followed the coastal plains and reached northern Europe and present-day England through this area. Later, for millennia this area was the hunting ground of the Neanderthal, our evolutionary relative who lives on in the DNA of many. Hundreds of thousands of times they hunted here, camped, made tools and lived their lives. At least twice they saw an ice age coming and moved away, before the worst of the cold snap made the area uninhabitable. After the last ice age they did not come back. We did. Modern humans, who arrived in southern Europe 45,000 years ago, graced the North Sea area only with short stays until it got too cold. After the last ice age and with the warming of the climate in the Holocene 11,650  years ago, our present geological era, we stayed here for good. The landscape was rich, forests returned with birch and fir and later deciduous trees such as beech and oak. Hunting now focused on forest animals that are still hunted today, such as red deer, wild boar and roe deer. The landscape was not static. Due to natural climate change, more and more ice melted further north and slowly but surely the North Sea basin filled up. In front of the advancing coastline, beaches, creeks and salt marshes arose. Fish, sea birds, sea mammals and shellfish were rich sources of food. Further inland, the

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rising groundwater created an enormous freshwater marsh with rivers and lakes. The higher areas such as dunes and sand ridges, including the Brown Bank and the Dogger Bank, were good places to live. The latter gave the area its name: Doggerland. The area offered the hunter-gatherers an abundant life with game, waterfowl, plenty of fish such as pike and eel and a wide range of vegetable resources. But it would not last. Slowly but surely Doggerland drowned, sometimes gradually, sometimes quickly, but always changing. The inhabitants experienced that change. The place where grandfather hunted was the place where you now retrieved a full fish trap and the place of the ancestors then was the place of the waves now, beyond the beach. At the end of the 7th millennium BC events far away put an end to Doggerland. The breakthrough of an ice lake in presentday Canada and a tsunami off the coast of Norway gave the final push to what was left of the land. The sea level rise due to melting ice continued slowly for another 2000 years or so until the line of dunes closed with the precursors of today’s beaches. At least, for the time being.

Discovery A vast area of more than 200,000 square kilometres between the beaches of today’s Low Countries and the coast of England, Scotland, Norway and Denmark was submerged under the waves some 8000 years ago. It was not always so extensive and at times there was also water. In the warmer interglacials, the periods between the ice ages, there was a sea and during the coldest peaks an ice lake formed that broke through the chalk bridge at Calais in an impressive way on two occasions. But, during the last million years, it was mostly dry: a disappeared land in the heart of Europe, a rich area with impressive rivers, lots of wildlife and in all that unspoilt vastness, small groups of people, wandering hunter-gatherers, for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet the memory of this landscape, of this world, has disappeared. Our modern Western society usually looks no further back than a few centuries when the North Sea was the starting point for discovery and economic gain and an important source of food through fishing. It is fishing that, particularly in the 19th  century, provided the first indications of a drowned world. The oyster fishery on the English east coast and the emergence of trawlers in the deep waters not only yielded fish but also bycatch in the form of bones of extinct animals such as mammoths and fragments of peat with plant remains from the seabed. These ‘bonken’, as they were called on the Dutch side, were a hazard to nets and were usually thrown overboard. They did not correspond to the Christian concept of an unchanging, created world, at most to something from before the Biblical Flood. The same applied to the groups of tree trunks that emerged at low tide on the English coasts with the remains of bears, wolves and beavers among them. These ‘Noah’s woods’ under the sea sand had to predate this biblical calamity. The publication of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) allowed a scientific environment to emerge at end of the 19th  century that accommodated the enormous age depth of the earth and the development of humans and other animals as a species. The understanding that present and past geological processes and patterns were similar led to a more dynamic view of landscape and climate and the gradual realisation that the world beneath the North Sea was prehistoric in age. On the English side, the work of geologist Clement Reid was an

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

Map showing the geographic position of primary (sea) and secondary (beaches/gravel processing yards) archaeological sites and finds discussed in this book (background map of present-day by Olav Odé).

Replace with map that has UK sites? Palaeolithic site/find

Present-day capital city

Mesolithic site/find

Secondary locations, yielding Palaeolithic/Mesolithic finds)

Neolithic site/find

Starr Carr

Dogger Bank

Humber

North Sea

Leman and Ower Banks Cromer Bacton Happisburgh

Area 240 Pakefield

Brown Bank

Ouse

Amsterdam

The Netherlands De Zandmotor

Eurogeul

England

Maasvlakte/Europoort Rhine Rotterdam port

Yangtze harbour

Clacton

Meuse Middeldiep Westkapelle

Thames

Colijnsplaat/Roomport/Onrust Yerseke

London

Brussels

Boxgrove

Pett Levels

Belgium

Bouldnor Cliff

Seine

France

A lost world rediscovered

19

Fossil stump of a drowned forest of at least 6000 years old at Pett Level in Sussex, England (M.J. Thomas).

important link, being in fact the first study of this drowned world. In his Submerged Forests (1913), a study of the drowned forests along the English coast, he concludes that they extend beyond the lowest tide and that “nothing but a change of sea level will account for its present position”. On the basis of the bones that came to the surface in the open sea near the Dogger Bank and the depths at which they were found, he deduced that these were deposits of chronologically far apart periods: there was an ice age fauna with animals such as woolly mammoth and rhinoceros, horse and bison, and a later fauna with deer and beaver. The younger finds seemed to come from an intact, covered landscape. Using bathymetric (depth) data, Reid reconstructed a first map of the drowned ‘North Sea Land’ with the possible routes of rivers such as the Rhine and Thames. He also examined the peat from the Dogger Bank to interpret the natural environment. Reid struggled with the fact that he could not date the forests and deposits absolutely and was in the dark about their precise age and development and thus about the human inhabitants who must have been there. He realised that it was only a matter of time before artefacts would be found that would shed light on the matter. In his opinion, the Dogger Bank area was one of the most likely locations.

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

Less than 20 years later, that time had come. In 1931, a chunk of peat fell onto the deck of the fishing boat Colinda. Before throwing it overboard, a crew member hit something hard with a shovel. The skipper broke open the chunk and discovered an over 21-centimetre-long antler ‘harpoon’. Beautifully crafted with barbs and incisions that facilitated its attachment to a shaft. The piece was found some 40 kilometres off the Norfolk coast, at the Leman and Ower Banks, south of the Dogger Bank. It is the first documented find of a prehistoric artefact, a man-made tool, from the North Sea. The British Museum identified the find as a Mesolithic harpoon and related to the Danish Maglemose Culture. As they already had two specimens, it came into the collection of the Castle Museum in Norwich via Muir Evans, a Cambridge biologist. Evans suspected that the North Sea landscape formed a connection, but saw it mainly as a large marsh through which people travelled but did not stay. It was the famous English archaeologist Grahame Clark who realised the importance of the find and published it in his book The Mesolithic Age in Britain (1932), noting that the peat of the site would be investigated by pollen analysis. It is obvious that Clark prioritized the connection between landscapes, climate and finds. The peat indicated a freshwater marsh and not a marine environment. It followed that hunting gear was part of the habitation of a vanished wetland rather than a coastal passage. The awareness of a vast preserved landscape was now slowly dawning. The find gave an impetus to Clark’s Mesolithic habitation research on the English east coast. Additional peat finds, for example from the Dogger Bank and the Dutch coast, gave further substance to the successive Holocene climatic phases, from temperate with pine forests to warm with deciduous forests, and the progressive drowning of the North Sea area. Clark regarded the evidence from the North Sea as crucial to understanding early prehistoric settlement in Northwest Europe. In his book The Mesolithic Settlement of northern Europe (1936) he writes:

“The important fact, which has been sadly missed in many archaeological speculations, is that the entire coastal culture […] has been lost for the whole extent of mainland now submerged. It would be possible to take comfort from the fact that such cultures might not have existed, were it not eminently probable that they not only existed, but flourished under conditions more favourable inland.”

The Leman-and-Ower-Banks antler spearhead recovered from the North Sea in 1931 (21.6 cm; 11,900-11,300 BC; Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery).

A lost world rediscovered

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Clark emphasises the importance of the coastal and wetland landscapes of the North Sea and conjectures that they have been intensively inhabited. At the same time, he expresses frustration that the area remained largely inaccessible. On the Dutch side of the Channel there is also a long history of research into the drowned North Sea landscapes and its inhabitants. This concerned first of all the bones of the now extinct ice age fauna: the Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen (Zeeland Society of Sciences) already devoted attention to this at the end of the 19th century. Especially pathologist Jan Cornelis de Man (1818-1909) assembled an extensive collection of Pleistocene mammal bones from the Oosterschelde, Westerschelde and North Sea. The search for mussel seed (young mussels) in the Westerschelde produced even more fossils. There were also bycatches from trawling and after the Second World War from beam trawling. The Dutch National Museum of Geology and Mineralogy (part of Naturalis since 1990) and professors Frans Florschütz and Isaäk Martinus van der Vlerk, authors of the well-known Dutch book Nederland in het IJstijdvak (The Netherlands during the ice age) also showed interest. Their relationships with fishers

Beam trawling, where the net is dragged along the seabed and fossils and archaeological finds end up in the nets as well as fish (Hans Wildschut).

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

were intensive and were continued from 1965 onwards by Gerhard Kortenbout van der Sluijs, who systematically acquired bones until the 1980s through the Laboratorium voor Visserij (Fishery Laboratory) in IJmuiden. As a result, Naturalis now has the largest collection of mammoth bones in the world. Later, it was mainly private collectors, some of them fishers themselves, who made contacts in the harbours and sometimes had a ship equipped to hunt for fossils. They often made sure that scientifically interesting pieces found their way to universities and museums, had pieces dated and published results. Many enthusiasts and collectors joined the Dutch Association for the Study of Pleistocene Mammals (Werkgroep voor Pleistocene Zoogdieren; WPZ), where finds from the North Sea occupy an important place.

The first overview It was the 1971 publication Mesolithic Bone and Antler Implements from the North Sea and from the Netherlands by Leendert Louwe Kooijmans, former curator of prehistory at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities, which supplied a first overview of what the North Sea had to offer. There are 24 Mesolithic finds, nine of which come from the North Sea, especially from the Brown Bank, and some from the Europoort area of Maasvlakte  1 and Colijns­plaat. These include an impressive pick made from an aurochs bone and a perforated stone hammer intended as a digging stick weight, as well as spearheads and arrowheads, axes, chisels, antler cuffs, and bone, antler and tooth waste pieces from processing. Innovative in this research was the European comparison and correlation of finds to the geological context of the drowning North Sea landscape. This was done by linking dated corings with peat and finds and their depth to the relative curve of sea level rise. The rising water table created peat in a swampy environment and thus mapped the sea level rise and indirectly also the finds. Due to the limited number of radiocarbon-dates available, it remained a rough indication. Never­theless, after the discovery of the Leman-and-Ower-Banks spear­ head, the study represents the first contextual approach to prehistoric North Sea archaeology. Importantly, Louwe Kooijmans considered the area archaeologically as long-term and intensively inhabited. The Mesolithic material culture could be compared to that of, for example, the Danish Maglemose Culture, but it also had something uniquely its own that belonged to the southern North Sea. Because of the many finds of Pleistocene fauna, it was clear that much older finds could also be expected. The chance that these would end up in a fishing net and be recognised was of course extremely small. In the 1980s, the sparse discoveries came from the beaches of Cadzand, Texel and Vlieland, among others, where Pleistocene material washed ashore. The full potential of North Sea archaeology was once again emphasised when dozens of barbed points were found on Maasvlakte  1. The sand for this extension to the port of Rotterdam came from the Europoort area and from the location of Oostvoorn Lake to the south of the port area. Some of the points were radiocarbon-dated, confirming their Mesolithic age. The many finds, including other bone and antler tools, were brought to light by active amateur archaeologists who built up often impressive collections and shared their knowledge and finds with scientists. The study Mesolithic Barbed Points and other Implements from Europoort by curator Leo Verhart is the most important account of the more than 400 finds known at the time.

A lost world rediscovered

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Towards Doggerland At the end of the 20th century, there was much evidence of the rich prehistoric past of the North Sea region. At that time, fishing for fossils took off and richer sites, such as the Brown Bank and the Eurogeul, came increasingly into view. In addition, there was a wealth of geological data available, from the Dutch National Geological Survey (Rijks Geologische Dienst) and increasingly from exploratory drilling by the oil and gas industry. Yet this did not lead to more attention for what is in fact the largest undiscovered prehistoric ‘site’ in Europe. An important reason is that on land it is easier to get a grip on the context of finds and the stratigraphy of habitation. Furthermore, the often rough waters with poor visibility did not invite diving research, although it is not impossible. The North Sea finds were often seen as ‘out of context’. For the archaeologists, it was the inaccessibility that led to an indifferent attitude, despite the demonstrable good preservation of finds. That finds came from there and that the area must have been inhabited since the ice ages was known, but was mostly seen as confirmation of what we knew from the land. The immense area itself was often seen as just a ‘landbridge’, which provided a good explanation for similar finds on both sides of the Channel. Ultimately, therefore, something had to change in our archaeological mindset in order to see the area, its inhabitants and their material culture in a different light. Essential was the publication in 1998 of Doggerland: a Speculative Survey by Bryony Coles. This scientific article gives an overview of the known finds and sites in the North Sea and presents a series of maps that graphically show the huge landmass that existed at the end of the last ice age – around 18,000 years ago – and then disappeared over several thousand years. Perhaps the most important thing about the publication is that Coles named the area Doggerland, after the large Dogger Bank that was once the last remnant of this vanished world. That was also her specific aim:

“Archaeologists tend to refer to the land that once existed between Britain and the continent as a landbridge. It was, however, as habitable as neighbouring regions, and here called Doggerland to emphasise its availability for settlement by prehistoric peoples.” The strength of Coles’ approach lies in the fact that she recreated an existing, living landscape, in which ice age vegetation changed into woodland and then slowly but surely became wetland. A landscape that was inhabited for many centuries by groups of people who had contacts and perhaps roamed in what is now land, but at the same time, and especially, inhabited this North Sea area. The discovery of a piece of flint in a coring for oil roughly between present-day Shetland and Norway, with which her story opens, also emphasises that this area was of immense size. The name Doggerland has become commonplace. It refers primarily to the post­ glacial landscape after the last ice age until the final drowning in the 6th millennium BC. Meanwhile, ‘Doggerland’ is also used for the older phase, alongside ‘North Sea Land’ and ‘Rhine-Thames Land’, to refer to the entire period of settlement. Coles’ publication put a lost landscape back on the map and gave a face to a vanished world. This reap­ praisal formed an important basis for future research.

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

Construction of the Zandmotor with a trailing suction hopper dredger. In the background, the port of Rotterdam, with Maasvlakte 2 (beeldbank. rws.nl, Rijkswaterstaat/ Joop van Houdt).

New finds, new land, new discoveries The renewed interest in Doggerland coincided with an ever-increasing intensification of the use of the North Sea as a route for shipping and the ports of Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg; as a ‘nursery’ for wind farms; as an ‘underwater mine’ for increasingly professional fishing and especially for the extraction of sand, gravel, shells and drilling for oil and gas. The North  Sea has become one of the most intensively used and traversed seas in the world. This results in tensions for the environment and the ecological balance on, around and in the water. Interference with the seabed is a threat to prehistoric sites, which are often intact. At the same time, all these interventions and developments offer opportunities to shed new light on Doggerland. In 2001 Vince Gaffney and Simon Fitch of Bradford University asked the British petroleum industry if they could use their seis­mic data to investigate whether the Holocene Mesolithic land­scapes predicted by Coles could actually be mapped. The very valuable survey data was focused on much deeper geological layers, but it was precisely the upper  metres of the seabed that proved to contain a wealth of information for archaeol­ogists. By making 23,000 square kilo­metres of data available, an area slightly smaller than Belgium, a Holocene land­scape could be studied in detail. Rivers, creeks, hills, lakes and plains were reshaped. The North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project was born.

A lost world rediscovered

25

Crates with finds of ice age fauna after a fishing campaign off the coast of South Holland in 2013 (Luc Amkreutz).

In the following years, drilling data, seismic and sonar surveys would also further map the Pleistocene development in this area. From the Netherlands, the work of the former National Geological Service and institutes such as TNO, Deltares and Utrecht University is important. Research by Kim Cohen and Marc Hijma, among others, provides important insights into the Early, Middle and Late Pleistocene landscapes and the chances of finding settlement remains. This is interesting in light of the many faunal remains, but also because the evidence for these sites is becoming more and more conclusive. In 2001, for example, ‘the first Neanderthal in the Netherlands’ (and Doggerland) was found at a shell grit company in Yerseke and published and presented in 2009. In 2007, the discovery of no fewer than 33 handaxes and other tools on a wharf in Vlissingen led to the discovery of a well-preserved Palaeolithic landscape on the banks of a 250,000 year old river plain, now some 11 kilometres off the coast of present-day Norfolk. Beam trawling also yielded some discoveries, including human remains and tools made of bone and antler. But it was mainly the beach finds that contributed to the increase in knowledge. The rise in sea level and erosion of the Dutch coast mean that Rijkswaterstaat needs an average of 7 million cubic  metres of sand every year to reinforce the coastal defences. Most of this sand is extracted from pits about 10 kilometres off the Dutch coast and sprayed on land. Two major infrastructure projects, the Zandmotor at Ter Heijde and the expansion of the Port of Rotterdam with Maasvlakte 2, are also ‘built’ with sea sand.

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

The beaches and especially the two sites mentioned above have become well-known places where fossils and archaeological finds are discovered every day. Because the sand and finds are sucked up, small material is also discovered. Apart from the many Pleistocene mega and micro fauna, this includes artefacts made by Neanderthals and modern humans. In 2016, for example, an amateur archaeologist found a flint flake with birch pitch that turned out to be 50,000 years old and represents one of only five similar finds (from three sites) in Europe. The Holocene material has yielded, besides small flint tools, almost 2000 bone and antler points and human skeletal material that provides important new insights through ancient DNA and stable isotope research. It is clear that these new insights directly relate to these economic interventions in the North Sea. At the same time, the nature of the finds and the survey of the extraction sites indicate that intact prehistoric sites with a high degree of preservation of organic material such as wood, bone, antler, tooth, food waste and human remains will disappear in the mouths of trawlers and the holds of gravel and shell dredgers. Sites that are rare on the mainland are often buried deep. The potential of these sites can be seen in the few underwater investigations that have taken place at the North Sea edges, such as the excavation of a Mesolithic dune in the Yangtze Harbour (Rotterdam) and the spectacular wooden finds, including canoe fragments and pieces of net, from the English Mesolithic site of Bouldnor Cliff.

Future under water The drowned landscapes of Doggerland are without doubt the largest and most important prehistoric site in Europe. They contain information about the earliest colonisation of northern Europe almost a million  years ago and about the way in which our ice age relatives, the Neanderthals, managed to adapt to changing climatic conditions and changing landscapes. The North Sea is also the hunting ground and habitat of the early modern humans at the end of the last ice age and of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in the Holocene. The latter had to cope with a sharp rise in sea level in a few centuries, which changed their living environment and eventually caused it to drown. It is evident that this area holds many answers about human interaction with climate change. For these periods, the strength of this drowned world lies in the high probability that sites have been preserved intact and that the excellent oxygen-poor conditions under water have led to good organic preservation, allowing research methods such as radiocarbon-dating and ancient DNA research to be fully exploited. In order to make optimal use of this prehistoric treasure chest, it is necessary to further combine the finds on the beaches and the data from the sea. The many collectors who report their finds play a crucial role in this. By creating a new geological and landscape context for individual finds and searching for intact underwater sites, we can further and better map this area and its past. The recent study in which the Flanders Marine Institute and the Europe’s Lost Frontiers project collaborate to carry out exploratory research at the Brown Bank is a good example. It is only a matter of time before the first underwater sites are found there. At the same time, it is important to focus on protection now. In 2009 and again in 2019, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands drew up a research and management agenda for prehistoric landscapes and archaeology in the North Sea. It is now important to come to workable agreements and processes with ‘the

A lost world rediscovered

27

industry’ in the European context so that parts of this heritage can be effectively protected. It is hoped that the many high-profile discoveries covered in this book will contribute to that result.

This book The impetus for this book was the exhibition Doggerland. Lost World in the North Sea, which opened in June 2021 in the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities. It was the first exhibition to take the world of Doggerland as its subject and offer insight into a vanished landscape that was first inhabited almost a million years ago. The exhibition took you on a journey through time, as does this book. After a geological introduction that outlines the landscape framework and climatic changes, the Pleistocene world is covered with the first settlers, Neanderthals and the earliest indications of modern humans. The second part focuses on the Holocene, in which the climate is warming and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers live in a dynamic wetland environment and were confronted with major landscape changes. The book continues with several examples of recent and new research, and also gives a voice to the collectors actively searching the Dutch and British coasts. It concludes with a reflection on the North Sea in its present state from an archaeological and heritage perspective.

(below) Display case with Mesolithic bone and antler finds; (right) two handaxes from Meulmeester’s collection from Vlissingen/ Great-Yarmouth on display at the Doggerland exhibition at the National Museum of Antiquities (Karsten Wentink).

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

A lost world rediscovered

29

Rough cockle (Acantho­cardia tuberculata) found by Luc Amkreutz in 2019 on the Zandmotor, Ter Heijde. This marine shell (c. 5 cm) is typical of the penultimate interglacial period, the Eemian (125,000-110,000 years ago), when the sea was some way inland. This species is no longer found in the North Sea.

Kim Cohen & Marc Hijma

ICE, RIVERS, SEA AND SPECTACLE: GEOLOGICAL VARIATION IN A DROWNED LANDSCAPE Everyone in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom knows the North Sea, from beach days, but sometimes also from the ferry or from the aeroplane window. Because of the many news items about human influence on our climate, everyone is by now familiar with the fact that the sea level can rise when the world climate warms up – not as in daily high tides, but a continuous rising for a longer period of time. But changing sea levels and shorelines are of all times. After the last ice age, hunter-gatherers had to deal with sea level rise due to natural warming. That time (from 16,000 to 6000 years ago) is the subject of a large part of this book. Before that time, in the first part of the last ice age (100,000-50,000 years ago), Neanderthals had to deal with sea level fall. The more ice ages we count back in the sediments that form the North Sea floor, the more large fluctuations of the water level in the North Sea we recognise in history. The average sea level in the last million years has been around -55  metres. For the North Sea, which is currently around 50 metres deep over large areas, this meant alternating between drying up and filling up again. So the current situation is actually very exceptional. Most of the time, the North Sea was largely dry and formed a large, flat area with many rivers: the Rhine-Thames Land. The North Sea always drained relatively gradually during successive ice ages, because ice caps freeze slowly during an ice age. The refilling went relatively fast in

31

For the North Sea, another big difference with today is that until 500,000 years ago, the chalk cliffs of Dover and Calais were still connected to each other. In those days you could always walk from France to England, even when the sea level was high. A series of major, severe ice ages, especially the cold maxima of 450,000  and

Pine woods, continental climate

Interglacials

sea level above -50 m

Current sea level

sea level above -50 m

Current sea leve

Deciduous forests and wetlands Steppe / tundra Polar desert / ice cover

sea level below -50 m

Indications of human presence

Cromerian

pen sea and coastal areas

ne woods, continental climate

Open sea and coastal areas

Interglacials

Major ice ages of the last 500,000 years

Timeline of global climate history and sea level changes. Recorded in deep sea sediments (oxygen isotope graph). Representation of the many changes of landscapes in our regions in the same period (recorded in land and coastal sediments, indicative; graphic redesigned by Malou Osendarp based on work by authors).

Glacials

critical phases, because when the world warms up and there is still a lot of old ice, it melts away fast. That could make the world ocean fill up to 20 metres per thousand years in a few pulses of rising sea levels. The periods of warming after an ice age therefore show the most spectacular changes, when the sea drowns and archives the landscapes used by plants, animals and early humans. The changing sea levels echo the global alter­nating cold and warm climate periods (glacials and interglacials, respectively). The regularity of their alter­ nation is caused by periodic variations in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, the angle of the Earth’s axis to the orbit of the Earth, and the rotation of the Earth’s axis in that angle. Added together, cyclical variations in the distribution of solar radiation on Earth result in seasons, monsoons and polar summers and winters, and ice ages. The Earth’s climate reacts in an amplified way to the cooling and warming trends. In the last million years, the Earth’s conditions had become so favourable for periodic ice formation in northern Europe and Canada that the sea level dropped significantly, in the most severe ice age phases to more than 120 metres below the present level.

1.000.000 years ago

Holstein

eppe / tundra

olar desert / ice cover

sea level below -50 m

Glacials

eciduous forests and wetlands

dications of human presence

1.000.000 years ago

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First major ice ages

DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

700,000 years ago

Elsterian

400,000 years ago

160,000 years ago, are held responsible for the destruction of this land bridge. We call these periods the Elsterian and the Saalian (and for Britain: Wolstonian and Devensian). The disappearance of the landbridge represented a major geographical change in possibilities for the dispersion of flora, fauna and early humans – just as it represented a major change in the flow directions of rivers during ice ages and the possibility of the sea penetrating the area afterwards. The start of the breakthrough of the chalk bridge in the Elsterian must have been spectacular. In this ice age, the land ice cover reached the northern part of the Netherlands for the first time and the expanding ice sheets of Scandinavia and Britain collided in the middle of the North Sea. As the Franco-English chalk bridge was still intact, a large lake formed between the ice and this bridge, into which meltwater rivers flowed and in which the ice cap calved into large icebergs. Fed by meltwater and the rivers, the lake quickly filled up, sloshed and spilled over the chalk bridge, forming a large waterfall. The ice lake continued to drain like this for a few thousand years, causing the waterfall to move backwards to the north and eventually erode into a wide gorge. This is the explanation for the sudden appearance of a water connection between the English Channel and the North Sea, and the great contrasts in river courses and biogeography (species distribution), before and after this ice age. At the end of the Saalian, this spectacle occurred again. Once more, colliding ice sheets in the North Sea blocked the northern drainage. Now, the ice moved even further south and formed the moraines of the central Netherlands. Remnants of these lateral moraines are also found in the North Sea floor in a meandering line that eventually comes ashore in England. Between the Netherlands and England another lake arose, now probably with its southern shore at the Belgian-Dutch border. There were still some ridges formed by old, hard marine clays. The earlier meltwater erosion in the Elsterian had not reached that far north yet. In addition, the area had been pushed up a little during this ice age by a waterbed effect: neighbouring ice sheets were so large and heavy that they made the earth’s crust contract locally (Scandinavia) and bulge in a ring around it (the Belgian-French-British part of the North Sea). But erosion by meltwater from the lake would break down this barrier. The outlet of the North Sea became deeper still.

Holsteinian Eemian

nian

Penultimate ice age

Saalian Elsterian

Holocene

Penultimate ice age

Last ice age

Weichselian 400,000 years ago

100,000 years ago

Holocene

Eemian

Saalian

Now

Last ice age

Weichselian 100,000 years ago

Now

Ice, rivers, sea and spectacle

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The Eemian and the last ice age (125,000 to 25,000 years ago) The cold of the Saalian was followed by a very warm interglacial period, which we call the Eemian. In the 20th century, it could be said that the Eemian was up to 1.5 °C warmer than in our time. Today’s global warming has significantly reduced the difference. The North Sea is thought to have been 5 to 6  metres higher than it is today for some 4000 years. The eastern coastline of the North Sea was far inland near Amersfoort. This peak in sea level was reached around 120,000 years ago. After that, the sea level would gradually and oscillatingly drop back to tens of metres lower, to drop further to values below -50 metres from 70,000 years ago. It was the time of the great plains of the Rhine and Thames, of large migrating herds with the Neanderthal in their wake. The coastline of the North Sea had receded to the south and north and the rivers had lengthened considerably. Wide rivers flowed across the North Sea floor. The Rhine, Meuse and Thames came together here. During spring floods this part of the North Sea was marshy. In the course of the summer it warmed up and the area dried out somewhat. Winters could be severe. Rather than staying behind in Rhine-Thames Land, it was better for humans to stay further along the river in caves in the cliffs near Dover, along the Somme, near Maastricht or along the Rhine between Bonn and Düsseldorf (the Neanderthal valley is situated there), especially if there was a lot of flint to be found there as well. The existence of a large river course, mainly the Rhine, flowing into the North Sea area from the south-east and leaving it via the Dover Strait, seems to have been very important for the use of the area by humans and animals at this time. It is the landscape explanation for the spectacular number of fossil finds in the area from this period. Around 30,000 years ago it started to get really cold in the already not very warm area. An unfriendly tundra landscape developed, with long, cold, windy winters and short summers. There was little vegetation and a lot of loose material, ideal conditions for a lot of local drift, and over large parts of the area a blanket of sand and loess was deposited. Under this layer, beautiful sites have been preserved in France, the Netherlands and Belgium. Neanderthal fossils and flint tools from the North Sea are probably also preserved under this cover. The colder it got, the more important the big river crossing the area became. In the tundra next to the river the ground froze deeply and permanently and in winters the river froze too, but every spring it thawed again and the cold ground flooded with warmer water and plant growth could survive a bit better. For the fauna in the coldest phases of the ice age (especially between 30,000 and 22,000 years), the Rhine-Meuse-Thames river was an oasis in the polar desert.

The end of the last ice age (25,000 to 8000 years ago) From 25,000 years ago, the ice caps began to recede and the sea rose again. It was very low, 125 metres lower than today, but 10,000 years later it was already around 60 metres lower. It is the beginning of the Holocene, the warm period we live in now. The sea rose at an average rate of 1  metre per  century and more or less continued to do so until 8000  years ago. However, some fluctuations in speed have been observed, called pulses. The latest – and for the southern North Sea area the most

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

important – is  a pulse that started  8450  years ago. The melting of the land ice on Canada had created a huge ice lake in the border area with the United States, in the middle of that continent (the former lake is called Lake Agassiz). When a critical chunk of land ice in Hudson Bay melted, these lakes suddenly emptied, most likely in two stages. This led to a sea level jump of some 4 metres within 200 years, from -19 to -15 metres, in the North Sea region. When the jump had yet to begin, a large part of the Rhine-Thames area was already under water. All seabed deeper than -20/-25 metres had been flooded, and the intrusion of the sea from the north – around the Dogger Bank along England and Denmark – and from the south – through the Strait of Dover into the Thames Valley and Rhine-Meuse Valley – was about to reconnect the Channel and North Sea. The sea level rise accelerated the process and isolated the shallow Dogger Bank from the mainland. How was the steady drowning of the land and encroachment of the sea experienced by the people of Doggerland? Against the hills of the Dogger Bank the coastline shifted at a rate of 25  metres per year. Near Rotterdam, in the Rhine-Meuse valley, where the land is much flatter, the change was much faster, averaging 100 metres per year. But it can be even more spectacular: during the peak of the sea level rise, the coastline near Rotterdam shifted almost 30 kilometres inland within a few decades. After this phase, tranquility had not yet returned to the North Sea region. Around 8150 years ago, a huge undersea landslide took place off the coast of Norway (which has been called the Storegga Slide). This caused a major tsunami in the North Sea area. On the Shetland Islands the wave reached a height of 20 metres (frontal) and in Scotland it reached at least 5 metres (lateral). The Dogger Bank will also have been hit. The southern North Sea was shallower so the tsunami’s first breaker line was at a substantial distance off the southern coastline and lost part of its energy. What remained was a secondary wave of several metres high that rolled into the southern coastal marshes and estuaries. Due to the lack of rock-enclosed bays, the tsunami will not have reached as high a level. But the inhabitants will certainly have noticed it. For Leiden and Rotterdam we can imagine a wall of brown water spectacularly sweeping away reed beds and eventually colliding with and being absorbed by the marsh forests of North Brabant and the Green Heart of the Netherlands, only to wash back again.

Epilogue (8000 to present day) The wasteland that the tsunami left behind in the coastal zone (more than 11 metres below the current delta surface) was immediately accessible again for humans and animals, but was increasingly flooded and after several centuries would be drowned and buried by the coast and the delta. As of 6000  years ago, the Netherlands still had 5 metres of relative sea level rise to go. The speed had slowed down to a background value of centimetres per century and the cause was no longer the melting of ice caps and consequent rise of water, but the sinking of land (subsidence), which occurred at far more moderate pace. Only in the course of the 20th century did the sea level rise pick up again and approach the rates as Doggerland knew them, albeit now not due to natural but to human-induced climate change. Perhaps the consequences are more comparable than the causes, but past results do not guarantee future performance.

Ice, rivers, sea and spectacle

35

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

Olav Odé, Luc Amkreutz, Kim Cohen & Marc Hijma

MAPPING A DROWNING LAND It is sometimes difficult to imagine the lost world of Doggerland in prehistoric times. Specialists see much more in their dot-maps of finds, log diagrams of corings and interfering stacks of black and white waves in seismograms than a museum visitor or the general public. Geological maps, too, can come across as abstract. With the help and skills of illustrator Olav Odé, we have tried to make an easier-to-read image of past landscapes, mimicking a kind of satellite photo. We selected four map images of characteristic moments in the million years of Doggerland’s formation, and provide a series of the drowning North Sea area in the last 15,000  years, when Doggerland disappears. The knowledge and insights behind such maps are constantly changing and in order to create the map images, large blank spots had to be filled in. The map images for prehistoric situations on the following pages are therefore also snapshots of the current understanding of the forming and drowning. We hope they will contribute to the experience of the time depth of the North Sea, and help one to imagine the impressive landscape and climate changes the area and its inhabitants have undergone. The map series connects to the geological introduction of the previous chapter. The content of the maps is based on various publications (see Further reading), by Kim Cohen and Marc Hijma among others.

Patinated flakes from Dutch beaches (c. 300,000‑ 40,000 years old).

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The southern North Sea region from 1,000,000 to 50,000 years ago: the birth of Doggerland

c. 950,000-800,000 years ago Northwest Europe in the Early Pleistocene. A striking feature is the wide landbridge between mainland Europe and present-day Britain. The coastal plains and river valleys provided ideal routes for early hominids to travel to northern Europe. The red dot shows the site of Happisburgh.

c. 470,000-420,000 years ago Northwest Europe in the Middle Pleistocene at the time of the Elsterian. A large closed ice cap is visible, as well as the enormous ice lake that was created for a short time when the large rivers could no longer drain northwards. Around 450,000 years ago, the limestone formations between Dover and Calais were eroded by escaping meltwater. During the coldest periods, there was no human habitation in Northwest Europe.

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

c. 125,000-110,000 years ago The southern North Sea region at the time of the last interglacial, the Eemian. The inland coastline up to Amersfoort is striking. The warmer conditions created a forested environment. Hippos swam in the great rivers.

c. 70,000-50,000 years ago The southern North Sea area in the middle of the last ice age, the early Middle Weichselian. The North Sea plain is a grassy and herb-rich steppe tundra through which the great rivers Rhine, Meuse and Thames drain southwards to the English Channel. Great herds of reindeer, horses and mammoths passed through this area, as did their hunters, including our relatives the Neanderthals.

Mapping a drowning land

39

The southern North Sea region from 14,000 to 8000 years ago: the disappearance of Doggerland

c. 14,000 years ago Melting British and Scandinavian ice sheets with icebergs along the Norwegian coast.

c. 13,000 years ago The British ice cap has melted. The climate warms up in the BøllingAllerød interstadial. c. 12,900 years ago Eruption of Laacher See volcano (bottom right).

c. 12,000 years ago Return of the cold, tundra and reindeer with the Younger Dryas period. Windblown sand dunes next to river valleys, ash cover of Laacher See eruption fall out (grey).

c. 11,000 years ago The Holocene begins. There is a sharp rise in temperature in the Preboreal period. The North Sea basin fills up to the Dogger Bank. A landscape with meandering rivers and birch and pine forest arose.

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c. 10,000 years ago Boreal forests of pine, hazel and oak formed. Sea has established between Ireland and Great Britain. Sea level is rising 70 centimetres per century.

c. 9250 years ago Sea levels continue to rise in the Boreal. Dogger Bank becomes an island. Both from the south and the north, the North Sea continues to flood.

c. 8500 years ago Wetlands develop and there are peat bogs along the coasts. At the transition to the Atlantic, Britain’s land link to the continent disappears. Temperatures rise above current levels. Sea level rise slows down somewhat, but around 6450 BC it swells again when Lake Agassiz empties into the Atlantic Ocean. Dogger Island becomes smaller.

c. 8000 years ago After the 6450 BC pulse, sea level rise slows down definitively. Around 6150 BC these coasts are hit by the Storegga tsunami. From this point onwards, tidal flats begin to form. Continued sea level rise puts an end to Doggerland after 5800 BC.

Mapping a drowning land

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Part 2

DOGGERLAND EARLY INHABITANTS The first hominids came to the North Sea region more than 900,000 years ago. Footprints left behind by a small group of early ancestors, probably Homo antecessor, in the wet river clay near Happisburgh in England form the very first clues. More is known about the Neanderthals who called Doggerland or Rhine-Thames Land home for hundreds of thousands of years. These hominids, like Krijn – Doggerland’s first Neanderthal, made clever tools including the iconic handaxe and mastered complex techniques such as making birch pitch. Only later, around 14,000 years ago, did modern humans definitively enter the area and the way of life at the end of the ice age changed. All Doggerland inhabitants shared the vast landscape with an enormously rich fauna, including impressive animals such as the mammoth.

Footprints of nearly a million years old in the clay of an ancient estuary at Happisburgh Site 3 in May 2013 (Simon Parfitt).

Nick Ashton

STEPPING INTO BRITAIN: HAPPISBURGH AND THE FIRST HUMANS IN NORTHERN EUROPE In May 2013, there was a remarkable discovery at Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast of Britain. Ancient estuary sediments had been scoured by the sea to reveal early human footprints almost a million years old. They were quickly photographed and recorded between the tides before the sea washed them completely away. Analysis of the footprints shows a small family group heading south along the edge of the estuary, perhaps pausing to seek out game.

Excavation The discovery was part of a larger fieldwork project at Happisburgh, where simple flint tools, bones, and other animal and plant remains had been recovered during excavation of the river and estuary sediments. Together they paint a picture of a small group of people living in a wide grassland valley surrounded by coniferous forest. The valley was teeming with herds of deer, horse, mammoth and rhinoceros, which were preyed on by hyena and no doubt other large carnivores. Beetle remains include species that prefer cool winters, indicating that average January temperatures were several degrees lower than East Anglia today. As for the river, it includes stones that originate in central and south-east England. Brought down by the river, they show that it was a very early course of the Thames, flowing over 100 kilometres to the north of its present valley through London.

45

Molar of an early mammoth species, the southern mammoth (Mammuthus meridionalis), from the site of Happisburgh (Pathways to Ancient Britain Project).

An early date for the site is confirmed by mammal remains, such as an extinct giant elk (Cervalces latifrons) and an early form of mammoth (Mammuthus meridionalis), indicating an age between 1,000,000 and 800,000  years ago. Refinement in dating comes from pollen, which shows the replacement of deciduous woodland by coniferous forest. The change suggests that the climate was beginning to cool from a warm interglacial towards a cold glacial period, part of one of the many peaks and valleys in climate over the last million years. Two of the likely candidates are the peaks at 950,000 and 850,000 years ago. For the people, continued cooling climate would have meant retreating further south, or more likely extinction as conditions became too tough to survive.

Pakefield Until 2010 it was thought that the oldest site at 700,000  years ago was Pakefield, some 50  kilometres to the south of Happisburgh. The small assemblage of simple flint flakes with animal and plant remains was recovered from eroding river and floodplain sediments exposed on the current coast. But unlike Happisburgh, the environmental remains at Pakefield suggested a ‘Mediterranean’ type environment. Professor Wil Roebroeks nicknamed it ‘Cromer del Sol’ after the seaside town. When discovered, it was argued that early humans only moved into northern Europe when conditions were similar to southern Europe, and then retreated back to the south, when the climate deteriorated. But the evidence from Happisburgh turned this theory on its head; humans were perhaps expanding into northern Europe as climate warmed, but also staying as climate cooled, well beyond their ‘comfort zone’.

Oldest site As the oldest site in northern Europe, the evidence from Happisburgh prompts many questions about how early humans survived the long, cold winters. Did they have clothing or shelters? Did they make fire? Were they seasonal hunters, retreating south in winter? Or perhaps they were physically adapted with additional fat and thicker body hair? Indeed, did they hunt or scavenge, and could they compete with hyenas

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Excavation of Happisburgh Site 3 in 2010. Note the eroding cliff (Path­ways to Ancient Britain Project).

stepping into britain

47

and other large carnivores for meat and hides? And the biggest question of all – who were they? It seems likely that the first humans in northern Europe were not simply summer residents; critical to this debate is the evidence of children’s footprints at Happisburgh. Although seasoned hunters might have been physically able to trek 1000  kilometres north to summer hunting grounds, this distance would have been beyond the capabilities of family groups. So, as winter residents how did they cope? There is a general principle that more northerly latitudes have more dispersed resources and the shorter growing season leads to greater dependency on meat. A major obstacle would have been other carnivores, not only hyena but also wolf, lion and the large sabretoothed cat, homotherium. Without the speed, agility and powerful jaws of other predators, humans would have required organisation, weaponry and skill to compete as hunters. An easier option might have been scavenging, using tell-tail signs such as circling vultures to target game and scare off competitors. But even if sufficient meat was left, the hides would have been ripped to shreds, making them useless for clothing and shelter. Being a proficient hunter would have brought many advantages. So far, we have no evidence of hunting, although occupying the herd-rich grasslands of the river valleys would have optimised the chances of encountering game. It is also significant that both Happis­burgh and Pake­field were situated close to the rich resources of estuaries and the coast. Diet could have been supple­mented by seaweed, shellfish and other marine foods, particularly over the long, winter months. What­ever the difficulties, it is likely that they survived for several generations as flint tools have been recovered from sediments that built up over centuries or longer. The low number of tools, compared to much larger, later sites – only 80 at Happisburgh and 32 at Pakefield – hints at small, dispersed groups of people. The current evidence suggests that they were pioneer populations, who ultimately struggled to survive in the difficult conditions of Northwest Europe.

Pioneer Man But who were they, and where did they come from? There are remarkably few human fossils from this period and none from Britain or northern Europe. The nearest site with such evidence is Atapuerca in northern Spain. Extensive excavations in the complex of limestone

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

Some flint tools from Happisburgh, including a flake and a chopper-like tool (scale 1:2; c. 950,000850,000 years old; Craig Williams).

Simple flint tools from Happisburgh Site 3 (left tool 7.2 cm; Pathways to Ancient Britain Project).

caves have recovered the bones and teeth of a species called Homo antecessor, or ‘Pioneer Man’, who is the best guess for the people responsible for the stone tools and footprints at Happisburgh. Humans by this time were fully upright and bipedal, and other than differences in facial appearance and slightly smaller brains, would have looked similar to us. The bones from Atapuerca suggest average males stood at 1.73 metres and average females at 1.68 metres, which corresponds with the estimates of stature from the larger footprints at Happisburgh. It is easy to envisage the Iberian hominids extending their range into western France and then Britain. Importantly, western routes would have benefited from the mild Atlantic weather and from the wider range of food resources found in the estuaries and coastal plains. Britain was still a peninsula of Northwest Europe and the estuaries of East Anglia would have been easy to reach and familiar territories in which to expand. As the footprints emerge from the sea, they also remind us of what might lie beyond. Happisburgh was on one of the many estuaries that would have flowed into the North Sea along the coast that stretched from Britain round to Belgium and the Netherlands. But remnants of these estuaries and former river courses now lie buried under metres of water and seabed sands. Hints of the former landscapes come from coring and dredging with the discovery of many fossils of mammoth and rhinoceros, and sometimes stone tools. We can imagine that there were a number of small groups of Homo antecessor occupying the estuaries that flowed into the North Sea. As a series of pioneering attempts, it seems that Homo antecessor struggled to maintain a foothold in northern Europe. By contrast, there is growing evidence of a raft of advantages enjoyed by people at 500,000  years ago. By now humans had evolved into Homo heidelbergensis and early Neanderthals. Debates are ongoing as to how these species relate and whether they evolved from Homo antecessor. But one thing is clear, human brains had grown to almost modern levels. The main growth was in the neocortex, or memory bank, of the brain. It is thought that improved memory supported the integration of larger groups with better social cohesion. An important benefit would have been the maintenance of knowledge with more likelihood of faithfully learning from past practice. With improved communication came better cooperation, which was essential for becoming proficient hunters.

stepping into britain

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A diver takes samples from the Cromer Forest Bed at Happisburgh (Rachel Bynoe).

By 500,000  years ago, humans were at the top of the food chain as shown at Boxgrove in southern England. Here, bones show butchery cutmarks from flint tools, but overlain by hyena gnaw marks – the humans were first to the kill. Hunting is evident from a horse scapula with a puncture wound from a spear. New stone tools – handaxes – were ideal for butchery and could be carried around, easily resharpened and ready for action. Survival of non-stone tools is rare, but at Clacton in eastern England we get the tapered tip of a wooden spear from 400,000 years ago. And excavations at Schöningen in Germany have revealed a remarkable array of wooden and bone tools, including several spears, over 2  metres long, carefully fashioned from spruce some 300,000 years ago. We also see the beginnings of the use of fire with preserved hearths at Beeches Pit in East Anglia and Menez Dregan in Brittany, both dating to around 400,000 years ago. Fire brought many advantages, including warmth, protection and an increase in the range of edible foods through cooking. But it also provided a hub after day­light hours, strengthening social bonds, encouraging communication, language and perhaps story-telling. By 500,000  years ago, humans had the tools, equipment, techniques and social organisation that were required for effective survival in Northwest Europe. From this time, we see an expansion in the number of sites and, if the number of artefacts is a guide, more sustained occupation. Cyclical downturns in climate still pushed populations south, but resilience in the system enabled people to return as climate warmed. From the first steps at Happisburgh almost a million years ago, it had taken several thousand years to develop and discover sustainable ways of living in the north.

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

Pine cone from Happisburgh Site 3 (3.4 cm; c. 950,000-850,000 years old; Pathways to Ancient Britain Project).

stepping into britain

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Citizen Science and the submerged Palaeolithic landscapes in the North Sea Rachel Bynoe

Humans have been living at these

local enthusiasts carefully combing

northerly latitudes for nearly a million

the beaches.

years, as attested by Happisburgh

Happisburgh is best known for its

Site 3, on the coast of Norfolk,

earliest site, Happisburgh Site 3, and

Great Britain, where they inhabited

the associated footprints, reported

environments colder than at present.

by Nick Ashton elsewhere in this

For the majority of this time the North

book. In addition to this site, however,

Sea has been dry land, stretching

recent years have seen hundreds

from Britain to the coast of Europe,

of stone tools and the remains of

providing a rich array of resources for

Pleistocene mammalian species such

our early ancestors to utilise. Yet many

as mammoths, rhinos and giant deer,

questions remain about how and why

being found and recorded by locals

they were here; did these lowland

on the beaches. Where they originally

environments provide a unique

come from, is unclear, but analysis

attraction that helped them to survive

of where and when they were found

the harsh seasonal conditions?

indicates that some of them derive

Answering these questions is not straightforward, as the evidence now

from deposits now underwater. An ongoing project is using the

lies beneath tens of metres of murky

information from these finds, in

water, and often then beneath layers

partnership with the collectors who

of sand and younger deposits. Several

are discovering them, to locate new

areas along the coast, however, are

archaeological sites underwater using

starting to provide glimpses into

a combination of seabed mapping

these landscapes and the humans

(geophysics) and scuba diving. So

that once inhabited them, all of which

far, four new locations have been

are being brought to light by the

identified and are being analysed to

52

Flint tools from Happisburgh Site 3 (left flint 3.2 cm; c. 950,000-850,000 years old; Pathways to Ancient Britain Project).

inform us about past environments,

Linking the two projects is the

and several new areas of ancient river

element of Citizen Science: the finds

courses (often a key landscape focus

reported from Bacton are also coming

for humans seeking resources) have

from an enthusiastic group of local

been located using the geophysics.

collectors who are working with

The results of this project will provide

archaeologists to record this important

further insights into the environments

assemblage. With the current – and

and occupation of early hominids at

ever increasing – numbers of stone

Happisburgh, as well as helping us

tools, this assemblage is poised

to develop ways that we work with

to be one of the largest Levallois

submerged, fragmentary deposits of

assemblages known in Britain.

considerable age. Several kilometres to the north of

These two projects, along with the Middle Palaeolithic site of Area 240

Happisburgh, a sandscaping scheme at

to the south and similar underwater

Bacton has used sands from offshore

finds from the seabed off Clacton,

to replenish the beach. Immediately

show two things. First, they attest

on emplacement, these sands started

to the great potential of submerged

to yield a rich assemblage of (Middle

landscapes for adding significantly

Palaeolithic) Levallois stone tools. As at

to our understanding of the

Happis­burgh, these stone tools derive

Palaeolithic occupation of northern

from a previously terrestrial landscape

Europe; and, second, they highlight

that is now under the North Sea and

the importance of collaborations

demonstrate occupation of these

between professional archaeologists

landscapes by Palaeolithic hominids

and the growing numbers of highly

several thousand years later than those

motivated collectors to finally bring

living at Happisburgh.

these submerged landscapes to light.

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54 DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA Reconstruction of Krijn (Kennis & Kennis/RMO).

Luc Amkreutz & Luc Anthonis

KRIJN: FACE TO FACE WITH DOGGERLAND’S FIRST NEANDERTHAL The most spectacular find from the North Sea is without a doubt the skull fragment of a Neanderthal, who was given the typical Zeeland name ‘Krijn’ after the place where it was found. The small piece with the characteristic thick eyebrow ridge was discovered at the beginning of this century and is so far the only Neanderthal fossil from Doggerland. The piece of bone provided a wealth of information and gave a face to the Stone Age of the North Sea. In 2001, the fossil was sucked up by a shell suction dredger off the coast of Zeeland and then brought ashore at a processing plant in Yerseke, where shells are processed into cat grit or insulation material. On site, a group of amateur palaeontologists searched for fossils and artefacts. The piece ended up in the junk boxes of an enthusiastic searcher, Luc Anthonis, to be identified later. After a few years, Mark Bosselaers – curator of the Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen (Zeeland Society of Sciences) – discovered the piece and the suspicion arose that this might not just be ‘a Pleistocene mammal’. Confirmation followed thanks to research at the Koninklijk Belgisch Instituut voor Natuurwetenschappen (Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences) by Patrick Semal. A thorough analysis was then carried out at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, by archaeologist Wil Roebroeks, evolutionary anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin and colleagues. Skull fragment of Doggerland’s first Neanderthal. The cavity caused by a subcutaneous tumour is clearly visible behind the thick eyebrow ridge (9.5 cm; Erik de Goederen/RMO).

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The skull fragment with the characteristic thick Neanderthal eyebrow ridge in profile (Erik de Goederen/RMO).

A young man The fossil (9.5 × 6  cm) is the right part of the frontal bone (Os frontale). It is clear that there is a heavy eyebrow ridge that makes a sharp angle at the side of the head. This is typical of Neanderthals. In order to rule out the possibility that it was a different species, the piece was accurately measured morphometrically in 3D at the Max Planck Institute. The features were then compared with the measurements of complete skulls of earlier hominids, recent modern humans, modern humans from the Early Palaeolithic and Neanderthals. The results showed that it is 3000 times more likely that this is a Neanderthal fossil than any other hominid and that the shape of the skull strongly resembles those of La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1 and La Ferrassie. Furthermore, the partially closed sutures of the skull indicate a young adult and the large eyebrow ridge hints at a male.

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Some Middle Palaeolithic flint artefacts, including a small handaxe, a semifinished handaxe, a scraper and a Levallois flake, from the extraction area of the skull fragment (handaxe centre c. 7 cm).

Unfortunately, ancient DNA analysis to determine sex, for example, was not possible, but there was enough collagen for stable isotope analysis of nitrogen and carbon. Both are informative about diet and position in the food chain. As one ‘climbs’ in the food chain, the values for carbon become less negative and those for nitrogen positive. In this way an aquatic (fish and aquatic fauna) versus a terrestrial (land animals) diet can be distinguished and a true carnivore from an omnivore. The analysis indicated a carnivore, with few plant or marine resources. A fairly typical Neanderthal profile, with (large) game forming an important part of the menu. Remarkable was a small cavity (8 × 5 × 5 milli­metres) behind the eyebrow ridge. Palaeo­ pathological exami­ nation showed that this was the result of a sub­cutaneous,

Krijn

57

slowly growing tumour, a so-called intradiploic epidermoid cyst. This was already present in the embryonic stage and was slowly destroying the bone material. It is not unlikely that this Neanderthal suffered from it, and that it was visible as a tumour on the forehead. Dizziness, headaches and balance problems are among the possible symptoms, but it would not have killed him. It is the first time such a condition has been found in a Neanderthal and it points once more to the similarities in the development of Neanderthal and modern humans.

Hunting along the shore The piece comes from the Zeeland Banks, a formation of parallel (sand) banks off the Zeeland coast. The reworked layers date from different periods and the fossils can be roughly divided into an early Pleistocene fauna with for example southern mammoth (Mammuthus meridionalis) and mastodon, and a larger Late Pleistocene group of fossils with mammoth steppe inhabitants, such as the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). In terms of fossilisation rate, the piece fits well with the youngest group which dates between 90,000 and 35,000 years ago. This is supported by the fact that contemporary Middle Palaeolithic artefacts were collected in the same period, which most probably also came from the site ‘Middeldiep’, including handaxes and Levallois flakes. After the discovery, additional geological investigations were carried out. It showed that the deposits, in which the fragment was found, belong to the wide Rhine-Meuse flood plain and date from between 50,000 and 30,000  years ago. It places our Neanderthal in a cold landscape just before the peak of the last ice age. He was on the south bank of the braiding stream in a landscape with plenty of food. The mighty river must have been the route along which large herds of herbivores moved. Perhaps a confrontation with these large mammals proved fatal to him. Research shows that young Neanderthal males regularly have bone fractures similar to those of modern rodeo cowboys: an adventurous existence.

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

Marcel Niekus & Dimitri de Loecker

NEANDERTHALS IN THE COLD ‘NORTH SEA SERENGETI’ The last 800,000 years have seen frequent global warming and cooling. The Neanderthals and their predecessors were confronted with these changes during the Palaeolithic and managed to survive in the North Sea basin for hundreds of thousands of years. The position and minute movement of the earth’s axis and its orbit around the sun combined to produce periodic ice age cycles, each lasting about 100,000 years. During the Pleistocene (geological period of the ice ages) the repeating ice age cycles constantly changed the Palaeolithic landscapes. This resulted in gaining and losing land mass, shifting and destruction of river systems, erosion and sedimentation, changes in fauna and flora composition and constant economic and social adjustments of the human population. During extremely cold periods (ice ages or glacials) in the northern hemisphere an enormous amount of water was stored as land ice. The sea level dropped dramatically and the present-day North Sea was replaced by a wide ‘palaeo river system’ carrying water from the Thames, Solent, Seine, Somme, Meuse, Rhine and several smaller rivers. The floodplains of braided river systems were dominated by exposed gravel banks. Further north, the southern North Sea was replaced by an arid landscape with lakes and various river systems criss-crossing the region. These landscapes were rich habitats for large herds of grazing mammals. The warm interglacials often lasted only about 15,000 years. Then the sea returned to levels similar to today’s and the remains of the Channel river systems drowned. Each cycle thus changed the sea level considerably and thus also the North Sea palaeo-landscapes. Climate fluctuations also occurred during the ice ages and habitation in the North Sea basin and surrounding areas was possible in more moderate periods.

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The North Sea as an archaeological treasure trove Hominids also roamed this North Sea landscape. We know this, among other things, from the spectacular discovery of Krijn – the only Neanderthal fossil from the North Sea so far. Flint artefacts are regularly fished out of the North Sea and deposited on the beaches. While these finds give a picture of life in the flooded ancient landscapes, the contextual information – ‘the geological envelope’ – is mostly missing, although it can be reconstructed to some extent on the basis of geological research in the sand extraction areas. In part, comparisons rely on data from archaeo­logical excavations on the mainland, usually associated with river terraces, raised beaches, caves and sometimes lake deposits. It is clear, however, that crucial evidence for various stages of Doggerland’s earliest habitation is preserved in the flooded North Sea sediments. As an archaeological archive, the North Sea is of great importance for questions concerning the life of Neanderthals. If we try to (re)construct the dry glacial North Sea landscapes, we get a preliminary picture of a rich biotope in which Neanderthals survived by hunting and gathering. This landscape, also called the mammoth steppe, spread over a large part of northern Eurasia. The ground was permanently frozen and temperatures were generally low. Except for a few birches and willows, the landscape was virtually treeless and grasses and herbs dominated. This is why it is often compared to today’s tundra. Because the North Sea Plain was situated at moderate latitude it received a lot of sunlight and very productive grasslands developed. These were perhaps most similar to a cold version of the present-day Serengeti in Tanzania. This attractive landscape acted as a magnet for herds of large grazing animals. Besides horses, bison, aurochs and reindeer, giant deer, woolly rhinos and mammoths roamed there. The banks of the braiding river systems in the North Sea basin were attractive places to get food, fresh water and raw materials. It was also these river valleys that formed natural migration routes for both people and animals. Large herbivores in turn provided rich prey for hunters and scavengers such as wolves, hyenas and cave lions. At the top of the food chain were Neanderthals, who were technologically successfully adapted to a wide range of extreme environments. From numerous (terrestrial)

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

Some flint tools from the North Sea typical of the Middle Palaeolithic: classic Levallois core (coll. Walter Langendoen), more or less heart-shaped handaxe (coll. René Nieuwland), elongated Mousterian point (coll. Walter Langendoen), Keilmesser with tranchet flake (coll. Erwin van der Lee), ‘mini-handaxe’ or Fäustel (coll. Sibo van Maren) and Quina type scraper (coll. A. and E.J. van Duijn) (scale 1:2; Lykke Johansen).

Flint flake found by Martijn de Waard in 2016 on the beach at Camperduin, Schoorl (6.2 cm; c. 300,000‑50,000 years old).

Neanderthals in the cold ‘North Sea Serengeti’

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European excavations, finds and experiments, we know that Neanderthals were masters of many high-tech processes. For example, they had the know-how to turn birch bark into glue, as a spectacular find from the Zandmotor shows. This birch pitch was used to haft carefully selected and manufactured spearheads, but it also served for simple household tools. Fire was made by striking sparks with a piece of pyrite against a flint artefact. Apart from the chemical tricks mentioned earlier, Neanderthals were also able to carve a perfectly balanced throwing spear from a piece of strong wood. Their technical knowledge of how to manipulate and make good use of the various items, as well as good cooperation, enabled Neanderthal groups to survive well in different environments: from the cold, open and windy mammoth steppe to the more wooded interglacial environments with open river valleys. Perhaps it was precisely these habitats, with their diversity of natural resources (flint, fresh water, fuel for fire and plant and animal food), which attracted the mobile and well-equipped Neanderthals. Long-term patterns, both in the extraction of resources and in the specific use of particular sites and techniques, make it clear that knowledge was passed on from generation to generation. Perhaps we should see the spatial archaeological record of the Neanderthal sites excavated as fossilised ‘foraging paths’ in the landscape, which remained in use for a very long time. From a landscape point of view, the North Sea basin is a small part of a much larger glacial whole, a cold river landscape that was submerged by the melting of the ice sheets quite recently (c. 10,000 years ago). North Sea geological survey and find provenance data indicate that characteristic Neanderthal tools, including handaxes, points, scrapers, hammers and cores, come from sites similar to those on the mainland and the British Isles. The foraging paths thus ran through the wide (Channel) river valley into England.

Neanderthals in the Netherlands In the Netherlands, there are no traces of the earliest colonisation of Northwest Europe. Flint artefacts from a suction pit near Woerden are probably 400,000 years old, while just across the border in a quarry in Belgium, artefacts of around 450,000 years old have been found. Older finds are certainly to be expected, for example at the bottom of the North Sea. One of the oldest and best preserved traces of Neanderthal occupation in the Netherlands can be found near Maastricht (Belvédère quarry). The meticulous excavations there show that Neanderthals visited the valley of the Meuse episodically some 250,000  years ago. After their visit, the traces they left behind were quickly covered by fine-grained Meuse sediment. The many excavation surfaces from the 1980s are actually small ‘viewing windows’ that provide insight into the technological and spatial behaviour of Neanderthals. The traces mainly consist of flint tools and processing waste. They are small encampments where all kinds of activities took place. In sand and gravel pits in the central part of the Netherlands, we find flint artefacts from roughly the same period, but these have been washed away and incorporated into gravelly river deposits, mainly from the Rhine, which extend into the North Sea basin. A small number of artefacts from Maasvlakte  2, including a handaxe and a point, and possibly from the Zandmotor, date from this early phase of the Middle Palaeolithic.

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Flint Middle Palaeolithic handaxe (biface subcordiforme) found by Mirjam Kruizinga on Maasvlakte 2 (scale 1:1; c. 80,000‑50,000 years old; Frans de Vries/Toonbeeld).

French connection and eastern influences Most of the flint artefacts from Maasvlakte  2, the Zandmotor and other reclamations date from later phases of the Middle Palaeolithic, i.e. after the land ice cover in the Saalian period some 130,000  years ago. Thanks to the many enthusiastic collectors, we now know of hundreds of artefacts from this period from Maasvlakte  2. These include a dozen handaxes, the classic Neanderthal tool. Apart from one specimen made of Wommersom quartzite, they are all made of locally collected flint from river deposits. Most handaxes are quite small, sometimes not more than 4 to 5 centimetres long, and usually heart-shaped. This type fits in well with a phase of the Mousterian, the so-called Moustérien de tradition acheuléenne, dated between about 80,000 and 50,000 years ago. A number of small handaxes are carelessly made and show all kinds of working errors. Perhaps they were made by apprentice flintworkers, i.e. Neanderthal children. From about the same time come a number of double-edged backed knives which we call Keilmesser; like handaxes these were multipurpose tools (‘Swiss Army Knives’). The Mousterian handaxes show a more southern influence, while the Keilmesser have a more eastern distribution. Apparently, the southern half of our country and the North Sea basin was an area where groups of Neanderthals with different ‘cultural’ backgrounds passed through and perhaps met each other. Other tools are also found, including scrapers (for skin and wood working), elongated backed blades which we appropriately call ‘backed knives’, and

Neanderthals in the cold ‘North Sea Serengeti’

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various types of points which will have served as spearheads. We distinguish, among others, Mousterian and Levallois points. The latter are made with the Levallois technique, a way of working stone by which, through extensive preparation of a flint nodule, as large a flake as possible could be made with circumferentially sharp edges. This technique is characteristic of Neanderthals of the Middle Palaeolithic and shows careful planning. The largest category of artefacts is that of flint working waste: flakes, blades and cores. Some tools will have been used directly in the hand, others were encased in birch pitch, but this only survives under very exceptional circumstances, as the Zandmotor find shows.

Swan song of the Neanderthal In the Netherlands, we know of several dozen finds which can be attributed to the so-called Blattspitzengruppen (Leaf-shaped Points Group) (c. 50,000-40,000 years ago), made by the last Neanderthals in Northwest Europe. This technological complex shows a development from double-sidedly worked Mauern type Blattspitzen to those of the Jerzmanowice type, which are partly bifacially (double-sidedly) worked. This development may have been influenced by the first groups of modern humans who entered southeastern Europe about 45,000  years ago and spread over much of the continent in the following 5000 years until only modern humans remained and Neanderthals went extinct. This fascinating period is also represented. From Maasvlakte 2 we know at least one Mauern type Blattspitze and possibly also a fragment of a Jerzmanowice point. We know very little about the habitation of the first groups of modern humans in our region. A small number of artefacts probably date from the Aurignacian or Gravettian periods, but it is clear that occupation was marginal. The most northern sites so far are in the Belgian Ardennes, the German Rhineland and Great Britain. Only after the last part of the Pleniglacial, an extremely cold period between 27,000 and 14,500 years ago during which no settlement was possible, did the first pioneers move north again towards Doggerland.

Further reading: Out of the North Sea: the Zeeland Ridges Neandertal by J.-J. Hublin, D. Weston, Ph. Gunz, M. Richards, W. Roebroeks, J. Glimmerveen & L. Anthonis (2009), published in Journal of Human Evolution 57: 777‑785.

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The Happisburgh handaxe (c. 500,000 years old; Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery).

Neanderthals in the cold ‘North Sea Serengeti’

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Marcel Niekus, Dimitri de Loecker & Luc Amkreutz

NEANDERTHAL TREASURES

Neanderthals have long since ceased to be seen as the club-wielding brutes they once were thought to be. We now know that they were perfectly capable of surviving in ice age Europe for many millennia. In addition to their powerful bodies, they made use of their intelligence. Their knowledge of the environment and of hunting techniques, but also their extensive contact networks and technical know-how came in handy.

Birch pitch: a small find with a big story

A Neanderthal uses a flint knife hafted in pitch to shave another’s head, while in the background a pitch oven glows (Kelvin Wilson).

It came as a big surprise when Willy van Wingerden picked up an intriguing object on the Zandmotor in 2016: a flint flake encased in a clump of black, tar-like material. It soon became clear that this was a very special find. Flint tools with a base of organic material – birch pitch was likely – can be counted on one hand. Because most finds from the Zandmotor could be attributed to the Mesolithic, it was thought safe to assume that this piece was no more than about 10,000 years old. When the radiocarbon-dating of a small sample of the black material – chemical analysis showed that it was indeed birch pitch – became known, the tool proved to be much older, around 50,000 years! The tool was left behind in the North Sea basin by Neanderthals during the last ice age, in a relatively cooler period when the mammoth steppe was their hunting ground. Because of its great importance – only four similar finds are known from Europe – a team of specialists examined it in detail. Apart from the radiocarbon-dating and chemical analysis, micro CT scans were performed, which turned the find inside out, as it were, and the flint was examined for traces of use. Scans show that the pitch had been folded around the simple flake in its soft state, creating a kind of ergonomic handle opposite the working edge of the flake. Unfortunately, no traces of use have been preserved, so we do not know what the flake was used for. The high tech research has made it clear that a complex method, probably involving some kind of oven, was used to produce the birch pitch. Neanderthals spent many hours collecting enough firewood and birch bark to produce only a small amount

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of pitch, and this in the harsh conditions of the Middle Pleniglacial, in an almost treeless landscape. Investment in complex technology was vital to the survival of small groups of Neanderthals at the edge of their range. The find, although small and unspectacular in appearance, fits the picture of Neanderthals as successful humans who managed to survive in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years and makes it clear that well-preserved camps with organic remains lie at the bottom of the North Sea. The image of Neanderthals is usually based on finds from southern areas, but in the Netherlands we now also have a top find from this period!

A shiny handaxe Handaxes are bifacially (two-sided) worked artefacts with a pointed tip, cutting edges and a usually rounded, unworked base. They could be used for a wide range of activities, such as cutting meat, planing wood and even making fire. Because of their versatility, they are sometimes referred to as the ‘Swiss Army Knives’ of the Palaeolithic. We currently know of a dozen of these tools from the Maasvlakte, almost exclusively more or less heart-shaped specimens which we attribute to the Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition, a late phase of the Middle Palaeolithic around 50,000 years ago (the Middle Pleniglacial of the last ice age, the Weichselian). Most handaxes are made of flint, which was abundant in the Meuse-Rhine area, but there is one exception. In 2016, Remco Mouthaan from Spijkenisse, one of the regular searchers at the Maasvlakte, found a 7.6-centimetre-long handaxe made of a special kind of stone: Wommersom quartzite. This material, also known as Grès Quartzite de Wommersom, is a fine-grained quartzite with flaking properties similar to flint. The colour of Wommersom quartzite varies from light grey to greyish-brown and is characterised by yellowish patches and larger, glistening grains of quartz under oblique light. The source of this raw material is located at the Steenberg, a low hill near the village of Wommersom in Flemish Brabant (Belgium). During the Middle and Late Mesolithic, the raw material was used on a large scale for making tools. Artefacts from this period can be found in an area of over 80,000 square kilometres: from the Paris Basin to Flevoland and from Rotterdam to the German Rhine area. Neanderthals also used this material, albeit

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Flint knife in a handle of birch pitch. Found by Willy van Wingerden in 2016 on the Zandmotor at Ter Heijde (3.9 cm; c. 50,000 years old; RMO/ Frans de Vries/Toonbeeld).

Wommersom quartzite handaxe (biface subcordiforme) made from a flake, found by Remco Mouthaan (scale 1:1; Frans de Vries/Toonbeeld).

sporadically. In total, we currently know of about 20  artefacts made from this material dating to the Middle Palaeolithic, two of which are from the Netherlands: a scraper from quarry L’Ortye near Stein in Limburg and the handaxe discussed here. The distance between the Steenberg and the sand extraction area for Maasvlakte  2, where the handaxe originated, is about 160 to 175 kilometres. This is an exceptionally long transport distance for a Neanderthal tool. Distances of up to 20  kilometres are common, but longer transports are rare. This almost always concerns larger flakes and blades from which tools could be made (‘semi-finished products’) or ready-made tools. Perhaps the handaxe from Maasvlakte 2 started its journey from the Steenberg as a large flake and during its trek to the North Sea basin (the area of discovery) was reworked into a handaxe. In its final stage of use, the edge was retouched into a scraper, after which the tool was discarded. The regular reworking, maintenance, repair and reuse of tools is in keeping with the concept of curated technology, and underlines the versatile and flexible application of handaxes. This was indispensable in circumstances where you had to rely on your personal toolkit. Mouthaan’s handaxe is a fine example of the high mobility of Neanderthals and the great distances they covered.

From dozens of handaxes to a drowned site Due to projects such as Maasvlakte  2 and the Zandmotor, many Palaeolithic and Mesolithic flint artefacts and faunal remains are currently being found on Dutch beaches. These finds give an idea of the inhabitants of the ancient flooded North Sea landscapes, but usually the exact origin and the contextual information are missing. This was completely different with the spectacular discovery of 88 Middle Palaeo­ lithic flint artefacts, including many handaxes, and about 130 faunal remains. They were discovered between December 2007 and March 2008 by amateur archaeologist Jan Meulmeester from Middelburg in gravel heaps at the site of a sand and gravel processing plant in Vlissingen. By linking the find data to the GPS trackplot of the dredging vessel, it was possible to attribute them to a small zone (c. 3.5 × 1 kilometres) within dredging concession area ‘Area 240’. This commercial sand and gravel dredging area is located in the North Sea, about 13 kilometres off the coast of Great Yarmouth (Norfolk, Great Britain). After the discovery was reported to the official authorities,

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Selection of the 33 flint handaxes, most of which were found by Jan Meulmeester in Vlissingen near a gravel processing plant. They come from Area 240 off the coast of Great Yarmouth, Norfolk (handaxe bottom right 11.8 cm; c. 250,000‑200,000 years old).

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Arrow: flint hand­axe among the gravel at the processing plant in Vlissingen, the Netherlands (Jan Meulmeester).

the dredging company moved its activities to other areas within Area 240 and the find spot was temporarily protected from further destruction. This provided a unique opportunity to further investigate a Palaeolithic site, tens of metres below present sea level and with strong tidal currents and poor visibility. Between 2008 and 2013 a multidisciplinary team carried out a major research programme, both fieldwork and analyses. On the one hand, the research focused on the search for (in situ) presence of further artefacts. On the other hand, it led to a detailed study of the geological and geomorphological context of the finds and a proper reconstruction of the palaeo-landscapes within Area 240. The Area 240 flint assemblage comprises 33 handaxes, 47 complete and fragmented flakes (including 13 tools) and eight cores. The typical Middle Palaeolithic Levallois technique dominates in the flakes and cores. The handaxes are remarkably homogeneous in shape, with cordiform (heart-shaped) and sub-cordiform types dominating. The flint used is rather fine-grained and has been collected mainly from river deposits (gravel banks). Some pieces are quite fresh, especially the handaxes, others are more patinated and a number of rolled pieces seem to come from a river context. There are therefore several mixed deposits in the Area 240 find group, a so-called palimpsest,

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with possibly older Acheulean and younger Mousterian elements. It is possible that this is a river sequence of a site with both finer and coarse-grained sediments, such as gravel with intermediate fine sand layers. The field inspection also included the scanning (geophysical methods) and sampling of the seabed, and a detailed dating programme was initiated. After com­ pletion of the field­work, commercial gravel extraction continued. Dredging loads were monitored, which eventually yielded 36 new artefacts, including three handaxes that match well with the original Area 240 assemblage. From the research results obtained, the following can be concluded. Area  240 contains the sediments of the Palaeo-Yare river valley. The area is dominated by flood­ plains and gully fills located near the banks of a wide river channel. The sedi­ments were deposited in a cold estuarine environment and date back to the glacial period, about 250,000 to 200,000  years ago. Possibly the Middle Palaeo­ lithic artefacts were recovered from these floodplain sediments. The dated samples and the character of the sediments give a suitable age for the artefacts and explain the different mentioned taphonomic environments (primary context, eroding surfaces and secondary river context), within the sediment deposit. During the warm Eemian interglacial, the area drowned as the sea level rose. During the Weich­selian glacial, the river channel was reactivated, incised and filled with estuarine deposits. Just before the landscape was finally flooded, about 8000 years ago, an Early Holocene (shallow) meandering and partly filled in river channel developed into a (mudflat) marsh. The transition from the Early to the Middle Palaeolithic is traditionally characterised by the emergence of Levallois knapping techniques from about 300,000  years ago. However, a number of Northwest European sites suggest that Levallois and Acheulean handaxe technologies co-existed around 300,000-250,000 years ago. It can therefore be assumed that, in Pleistocene terms, the different Area 240 technologies (artefacts) are contemporaneous. Evidently, the Middle Palaeolithic Area 240 finds, or rather the ‘geological envelope’ in which they were ‘wrapped’, survived several phases of ice age and marine trans­ gression well. The assumption that drowned prehistoric sites at northern latitudes were destroyed by these factors is thus disproved.

Further reading: Middle Palaeolithic complex technology and a Neandertal tar-backed tool from the Dutch North Sea by M.J.L.Th. Niekus, P.R.B. Kozowyk, G.H.J. Langejans, D.J.M. Ngan-Tillard, H. van Keulen, J. van der Plicht, K.M. Cohen, W. van Wingerden, B. van Os, B.I. Smit, L.W.S.W. Amkreutz, L. Johansen, A. Verbaas & G.L. Dusseldorp (2019), published in PNAS 116(44), 22081‑22087 and Een bijzondere vuistbijl uit de Noordzee gevonden op Maasvlakte 2 bij Rotterdam by M.l.J.L.Th. Niekus, L.W.S.W. Amkreutz, L. Johansen & D. Stapert (2017), published in Grondboor and Hamer 5/6, 162‑169.

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Flint bifacial (worked on two sides) scraper with orangebrown patina found at Castricum by Erik Machiels in 2015 (8.1 cm; c. 80,000‑50,000 years old).

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Luc Amkreutz & Marcel Niekus

MODERN HUMANS AT THE END OF THE ICE AGE About 45,000 years ago, modern humans permanently entered south-eastern Europe and after a few thousand years reached our region. It remains unclear whether the last Neanderthals encountered the first modern humans here. What is clear is that between 45,000 and 40,000 years ago, when Neanderthals died out, both species were present in Europe. Around 27,000 years ago an extremely cold period started, the Last Glacial Maximum of the Weichselian. The ice advanced and in front of it lay a cold polar desert. It became too cold for human habitation in northern Europe and the vast plain of Doggerland was deserted. It is striking that archaeological remains of modern humans from the last ice age are scarce compared to finds of Neanderthals and artefacts from the present period, the Holocene.

Early pioneers

Skull fragment of the oldest anatomically modern human in the Netherlands (c. 13,000 years old).

The oldest remains of modern humans (Homo sapiens) around the North Sea region date back to the Upper Palaeolithic, from the Aurignacian and Gravettian periods, which in our region are known from the Belgian Ardennes and the German Rhineland. In England an approximately 35,000-year-old mandible from Kents Cavern in Devon dates to this period. Famous is the 33,000 years old Red lady of Paviland, found in 1823 in a cave in South Wales: the oldest preserved burial in the United Kingdom. The body was buried with seashell necklaces and mammoth ivory pendants and bracelets, which long led to it being labelled a woman. It turned out to be a male. The body was rubbed with red ochre. Interestingly, the diet indicated a significant contribution of fish, whereas the cave was located many tens of  kilometres inland at the time. It is remarkable that the tools show a resemblance to Aurignacian tools that we know from the mainland. Doggerland must therefore have formed an important connection. It is conceivable that the migration of large reindeer herds along the mighty Channel River

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played an important role in the highly mobile community of these early huntergatherers. From the Netherlands and the North Sea region, we do not yet know of any convincing finds of these early modern people. On Maasvlakte 2 and the Zandmotor a few flint artefacts have been found that fit in well with this period, but unambiguous pieces, such as a strangled blade from the Aurignacian or a Font Robert point from the Gravettian, are still missing.

Roaming reindeer hunters For more than 12,000 years the cold was too intense for human habitation in the North Sea region and it was only around 15,000 years ago that our ancestors returned. It were the reindeer hunters of the Magdalenian, who made magnificent ice age art in the caves of southern France and Spain, who recolonised the northern area. In our regions we know these groups from the loess area of Limburg, the Eifel and Ardennes and further south from the Paris Basin. In the Netherlands there is no convincing evidence for their artistic expression, but significant are the engravings of people and animals on schist plaques from Andernach and Gönnersdorf in the Rhineland Eifel and Chaleux in the Ardennes. Further north we find the somewhat later hunter-gatherers of the Hamburg and Creswell Cultures who are considered to be related to the Magdalenian and occur on the sandy soils of the northern Netherlands, northern Germany, Denmark, southern Sweden and Poland. There is also a site known from Scotland near Howburn. The Creswellian is mainly known from the United Kingdom, but also in the Netherlands there are some sites of this culture. In Creswell Crags, a deep, narrow limestone ravine in Derbyshire, the most northern Palaeolithic cave art of Europe has been found, dating from 15,000 to 13,000 years ago, with engravings of a red deer. The different groups, also called cultures or traditions, are distinguished mainly on the basis of the way in which they manufactured and designed their tools and especially arrowheads. The exact boundaries of these ‘techno-complexes’ are unclear, as is the extent to which they were fundamentally different groups. What is clear is that the cultural zones converged in the North Sea basin. Because the sea level was 70 to 80 metres lower then, the coasts must have been far north and far into the Channel. The plains with rivers and migration routes for reindeer, the grassy and herb-rich steppe for large grazers and the nutrient-rich and diverse coastal zones and estuaries will have been attractive for settlement. The regional variation in this period suggests that the North Sea region played an important role as a (seasonal) migration route or long-term settlement area.

Havelte point (Hamburg culture) found on Vlieland by Michael Horn (scale 2:1; Marten de Leeuw/ Groninger Museum).

Research must show to what extent climate changes at the tail end of the ice age, with colder and warmer periods, played a role in the dispersal of people. Some researchers suggest that the base camps of these cultures were located in the North Sea basin, but archaeological evidence directly from the North Sea is scarce. Apart from a possible Aurignacian-style blade from Maasvlakte 2, we know of a Havelte point from a late phase of the Hamburg Culture from Vlieland and an encampment from more or less the same period from Texel. Both finds are the most northern artefacts of the Hamburg Culture in the Netherlands. Other flint finds on the Wadden Islands and along the North Sea beaches and some pieces of bone and antler with traces of butchering or working may also date to the Upper Palaeolithic, but require further investigation, such as for example a c. 15-centimetre-long thin patinated blade in the collection of the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities.

Elk hunters, artists and the oldest anatomically modern human in the Netherlands After a short cold period, the climate warmed up considerably between 14,000 and 13,000 years ago in a period that we call the Allerød interstadial. Temperatures rose to almost current levels. The mighty herds of reindeer moved northwards, where the landscape remained open and grassy. In our regions, forest vegetation with birch, coniferous trees and shrubs such as juniper developed alongside open grassland. Further south, the number of deciduous trees such as oak and hazel increased. The North Sea basin will also have become partly forested. The human inhabitants would have hunted and lived in a different way, if they did not follow the reindeer herds to the north. They focused on a partially new range of species, including red deer, wild boar, aurochs, elk, horse and beaver, but also geese and fish such as pike. In northern Germany, the hunter-gatherers of this period are called ‘elk hunters’. We actually know them as the Federmesser-Gruppen or Federmesser Culture (formerly called the Tjonger Culture) after their flint arrowheads which resemble the pen-shaped knives used to sharpen writing feathers a few centuries ago. Sites can be found from Great Britain to the Ukraine and from Denmark to northern France. The huge North Sea basin, where the sea level is about 60 metres lower, was part of this. From the diversity of sites we know that there are shorter and longer inhabited encampments, possibly larger aggregation sites, small hunting camps and flint processing sites. The Federmesser hunters were mobile, but returned to certain parts of the landscape with the seasons. Some large lakes in the North Sea area may have been important sites for larger groups in addition to the coastal zone. Also for this period, archaeological evidence from the North Sea remains limited. Some finds are known from the Holland and Zeeland beaches, such as a Kremser point from Maasvlakte 2 and some burins and scrapers from Cadzand. The very first (1931) documented prehistoric find from the North Sea, the beautiful Leman-and-OwerBanks barbed point, turned out to be from this period after radiocarbon-dating (11,90011,300 BC) and not, as was long thought, from the Mesolithic. Another impressive find was recovered a few  years ago south of the Brown Bank: a 13,500 years old piece of metatarsal bone from a bison or aurochs with a remarkable zigzag decoration. Finally, in 2013, south of the Eurogeul, a parietal bone (Os parietale) from a human was brought up by the fishing boat Scheveningen 18. A radiocarbon-dating indicated

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Reconstruction of Mesolithic Cheddar Man found in Gough’s cave in Somerset (c. 9000-7000 BC). Ancient DNA analysis indicates that this person probably had a dark skin tone and blue eyes (reconstruction and photo Kennis & Kennis).

an age of around 13,000 years. Additional research made it likely that it concerned an adult, probably a female. Traces of a healed condition on the skull fragment suggest that this person may have suffered from anaemia or vitamin  C or  D deficiency in childhood. Stable isotope studies indicated that meat was a very important part of this person’s diet. They will not have looked ‘Dutch/English/northern European’ by any means. Recent ancient DNA research, among others on the skeleton of the British Cheddar Man, provided genetic evidence that our ancestors had a dark skin tone and blue eyes. To date, this skull fragment is the oldest modern human in the Netherlands.

The Big Bang The Federmesser hunters lived in a landscape that we would recognise and perhaps describe as pleasant. However, their happiness was short-lived. At the end of the Allerød, a major natural disaster occurred. A devastating volcanic eruption took place some 12,900 years ago in the German Vulkaneifel region, roughly 24 kilometres northwest of Koblenz. The power of the Laacher See volcano eruption was immense and

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Some flint tools from the North Sea typical for the Upper Palaeolithic: fragment of a blade with dorsal, flat retouche (coll. Patrick Ouwehand), possibly tanged point of Ahrensburg type (coll. Caroline de Ruijter), Kremser point (coll. Wendy Lamme), atypical Mousterian point with ventral thinning retouches (coll. Walter Langendoen) and double-sided burin (coll. Wendy Lamme) (scale 1:1; Lykke Johansen).

can be compared to the 1991 eruption of the Philippine Pinatubo. Research has shown that the first eruptions took place in early summer and that not a tree was left standing up to 4 kilometres from the epicentre. An aweinspiring plume of smoke  40  kilometres high towered over the landscape and a huge cloud of magma and ash, a pyroclastic flow, thundered down like a destructive tidal wave. Up to 60-metre-thick layers of tephra, material that falls from the sky during a volcanic eruption, have been found near the crater. Researchers suspect that all life in an area of up to 50  kilometres around the volcano disappeared. The volcano would have remained active for weeks or months. The huge tephra cloud, possibly 16 cubic kilo­ metres in size, dammed part of the Rhine, creating a lake of at least 140 square kilometres, which then violently broke through the dam. The volcano’s ash has been docu­mented over an area of 300,000 square kilo­ metres, from France to Poland and from northern Italy to Sweden, making it a great temporal marker in the soil. Pumice fragments from the Laacher See are also found in the soil of Doggerland. This resulted in several years of cold summers and a disrupted ecology. For the Federmesser hunters living in the vicinity, the consequences were much more far-reaching. Research shows that they disappeared. Possibly the North Sea basin, among other areas, was a good new refuge. The Bromme Culture in southern Scandinavia, which we must date to a late phase of the Allerød and the beginning of the Younger Dryas, probably developed from the Federmesser Culture, possibly in response to the eruption.

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The Big Freeze After the Laacher See eruption, the Federmesser Culture was not long-lived. About a hundred years later, around 13,070 years ago, the ice age seems to return in full force during the Younger Dryas period; at least for a thousand years. In English literature, this period is known as The Big Freeze and rightly so: in the space of barely a decade, temperatures in northern Europe plummeted by up to 15 °C! In Great Britain the average annual temperature drops to -5 °C during this period. Ice caps and glaciers expand and an arctic, cold and dry climate returns. The constant westerly winds blow up large quantities of sand and loess from the North Sea floor, which are deposited further inland in thick layers. Within a short time the forests disappeared and an open tundra-like landscape with the namesake plant Dryas octopetala emerged, where the herds of reindeer from the north felt perfectly at home. It has never been so cold since.

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The Laacher See is now a lovely crater lake, resulting from one of the largest volcanic eruptions in Europe, which took place around 12,900 years ago (Florian Sauer).

In the tundra-like environment we soon see groups of hunter-gatherers appearing, who have armed themselves with bows and arrows to focus entirely on the large herds of reindeer: the Ahrensburg Culture. Sites of this culture or tradition, which seems to be rooted in the Bromme Culture, are known from Denmark, northern Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. In Great Britain and northern France, because of differences in material culture, people speak of the Long Blade Industry, presumably a regional variant of the Ahrensburg Culture. It is striking that once again the North Sea area is the place where the different culture zones meet. It is likely that these were highly mobile communities because of their focus on reindeer hunting. Ethnographic sources from recent circumpolar hunter-gatherers indicate that their hunting grounds could cover many hundreds of kilometres. Researchers have suggested that there may have been a seasonal model in which the Ardennes was a summer settlement and the lowlands of the Low Countries, northern Germany and the North Sea region were the winter hunting grounds. Again, rivers would have been the main migration routes. In this vast area the coast is some 50 metres lower and the coastal zone again constitutes an interesting ecological niche. Concrete finds of the Ahrensburg Culture from the North Sea basin are rare, as are those of previous periods. From Maasvlakte 2, however, we know of a dozen tools, such as burins and a large fragment of a point, which can be easily ascribed to the Ahrensburg Culture. Some fragments of bone or antler points also fit into a late phase of this culture, around the transition to the Mesolithic.

Empty but not deserted For the millennia around the Last Glacial Maximum, some 20,000  years ago, the North Sea region was uninhabitable for a long time. Later on, it was quite possible to wander around in it, or to stay there for a longer period of time. The presence of broadly contemporary sites and culture groups in Great Britain and on the continent provide convincing evidence for this. The scarcity of finds from the North Sea region itself is probably related to the small-scale, highly-mobile societies and a material culture that has left few traces. There are estimates that only 800 to 900 people lived on Dutch territory during the Allerød. More important, however, are the conditions under which material has been preserved. Survival chances are higher when finds become embedded in sediments like peat and clay relatively quickly and are thus protected against sea level rise. The pattern of preservation in relation to habitation is irregular and depends on where fishing is done or the soil is exploited. Possibly this set of variables is less favourable for the Upper Palaeolithic. The period of occupation was much shorter than that of Neanderthals and rapid sedimentary cover mostly occurred in the later Holocene. Doggerland in this period would slowly but surely become our North Sea due to the ongoing sea level rise.

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Luc Amkreutz, Marcel Niekus & Jan Glimmerveen

THE OLDEST ART: ICE AGE EXPRESSIONISM In February 2004, bones were fished up southwest of the Brown Bank. Nowadays that happens quite often. In those days they usually ended up at North Sea Fossils in Urk, where they search carefully for specimens with scientific value. Between the ‘normal’ mammoth molars and other bone fragments from ice age fauna, Albert Hoekman discovered a striking fragment of metatarsal bone; the piece was clearly decorated. The unusual find ended up in the collection of Jan Glimmerveen, who had it radiocarbondated. This revealed that it was not a Mesolithic piece as expected, but a find from the last ice age!

A metatarsal with decoration

A shaman of the Federmesser Culture performs a dance with drum and decorated staff (Kelvin Wilson).

Although it is not known exactly where the find was made, there are clearly Pleistocene sediments present in the area concerned. The radiocarbon-dating (calibrated) indicates an age between 13,480 and 13,285 years ago, in the period we call the Allerød interstadial, a warmer climatic phase at the end of the last ice age. The piece can therefore be attributed to the Federmesser Culture. The bone is a fragment of the right metatarsus of probably a bison or aurochs. The bone is unfortunately split lengthwise, and one of the ends is missing (the distal part). The bone has longitudinal surfaces, probably created by scraping with flint and then polishing. Five facets have been preserved. On each of these, a flint burin was used to make a continuous zigzag decoration consisting of V-shaped grooves stacked in three rows. There are about 20 to 21 of these stacked chevrons per surviving row. It is clear that the decoration must have run all the way round, as the beginnings of subsequent rows are visible on the fracture edges. It is striking that the first few pairs of chevrons seem to have been executed rather neatly, and that it gets a little untidy thereafter. This may be due to the tool becoming blunt, the position in the hand or because someone else finished the decoration. Another reason, of course, could be that the attention of the carver waned.

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The decorated metatarsal bone of an aurochs or bison. Note the flat facets on which the V-shaped decoration has been applied. The shiny layer is due to the conservation of the piece (16.4 cm; c. 13,480-13,285 years old).

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Objects with a ritual role? The find is very special. Not only are there hardly any Late Upper Palaeolithic finds from the North Sea region, but from the Federmesser Culture as a whole we know very few decorated artefacts. The North Sea piece is part of a select group of only five finds with the same kind of decoration of blocks or rows of zigzags. The most famous piece is the decorated mandible of a horse which was found in Kendrick’s Cave in Wales and is now preserved in the British Museum. It seems that this piece did not have a utilitarian function, but may have had a symbolic, ritualistic role. There are also indications that the engravings on the original white bone were coloured with red ochre. The other finds concern a piece of deer antler from Conty in northern France, a piece of elk antler from Rusinowo in Poland with an anthropomorphic figure engraved on it, and a piece from Denmark. None of these finds seem to have been intended as a functional tool, such as an antler axe or a hunting weapon. Engravings are also known from the Federmesser Culture in the cortex (outside layer) of flint artefacts. A famous find is the Linne stone, a hammer stone with a triangular decoration, filled in with hatching. The piece was found in 1997 during an excavation by the National Museum of Antiquities of a Federmesser Culture encampment in Limburg. Besides these abstract decorations, we know of only a few examples of figurative art, including an amber figurine of an elk from Weitsche (northern Germany).

Long distance art The decorations and ‘art objects’ of the Allerød are in stark contrast to the previous period. The naturalistic figurative art of the Magdalenian, of mammoths, horses, wisents, reindeer and humans, which we know so well from the French caves, is a high point of ice age expression. In our regions, we know this art mainly from engravings on schist plaques in the Eifel and the Ardennes, but these too are im­pressive. This blooming period seems to end in the Allerød. The hunter-gatherers of the Federmesser Culture chose a different way of expression and possibly other objects to apply it to. Their art, as far as is preserved, seems to be very different: abstract and geometric. It seems to be an ice age variant of Expressionism. The reason for this change remains unknown. It is conceivable that this ‘artistic’ shift is related to the changes in climate that characterise the warmer Allerød interstadial, and the forests and fauna that return with it. This different world may have required different communication as well as different social organisation and mobility. These modes of expression seem to be similar over long distances and thus point to intensive networks connecting these mobile societies. The ‘oldest art’ from the North Sea seems to confirm that a large part of Northwest Europe was a coherent cultural area during this period.

The oldest art

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Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus; Kelvin Wilson).

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

Dick Mol, Bram Langeveld & Jørn Zeiler

ANIMALS OF THE MAMMOTH STEPPE If we go back in time some 100,000 to 30,000 years, the North Sea region looks very different from today: it was dry land. Due to the thick land ice, the sea level is much lower. Vegetation conquered the former sea floor and animals soon followed. The North Sea floor is a sloping, almost treeless, grassy plain with a rich vegetation of herbs and flowers, where mammoths live. When people think of an ice age, they immediately think of snow and ice. But there was no thick layer of snow and ice all over the world. The land ice was limited to the northern parts of North America and Northwest Europe. On the contrary, south of these it was remarkably dry. Low temperatures and low relative strength of the sun, together with the land ice and topography, caused drought. The cold, the drought and the huge herds of large mammals that lived there allowed for a unique ecosystem to develop that is nowhere to be found anymore: the mammoth steppe. We know the vegetation of the mammoth steppe from research on fossil pollen in fished up peat lumps and fossil molars of herbivores. It is striking that pollen from trees is (almost) completely absent, that grasses dominate and that very diverse pollen from herbaceous plants occur. It gives a picture of a treeless steppe with grasses, herbs and flowers.

Cave hyena (Crocuta spelaea; Kelvin Wilson).

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The mammoth steppe is sometimes confused with the tundra that can be found in large parts of Siberia today. But a tundra is much wetter. Few plants grow there and large grazers cannot live in. The mammoth steppe covered about two-thirds of the earth’s circumference and lay in a wide swathe from Ireland and Britain in the west, over the dry North Sea via the Netherlands, Europe, Siberia, over the dry Bering Strait via Alaska to Canada. It was the domain of woolly mammoths and their contemporaries: the mammoth fauna. Neanderthals and our distant ancestors also lived here. That which is now the North Sea floor was part of this enormous mammoth steppe. The Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt rivers flowed into the area from the east, and the Thames from the west. These rivers carried gravel, sand and clay and deposited thick layers of sediments. Bones of mammals living in the area could also end up in these river sediments and thus be preserved as fossils.

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A fished up mammoth skull is brought ashore (Frits van der Vossen).

Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius; Kelvin Wilson).

The North Sea: palaeontological treasure trove The North Sea has been fished for centuries. For a long time, the beam trawl was used for this purpose. These are large, heavy nets on both sides of the ship. A long steel beam holds the net open and at both ends there are ‘shoes’ that slide over the seabed. Heavy chains flank the net opening and are pulled through the seabed. Flatfish, such as sole and turbot, are nudged by the chains, which make them swim up and into the nets. But the heavy chains also hit other objects that can end up in the nets. These include dumped refrigerators, large stones and... fossils. Mammoth bones, tusks, molars and even skulls! Thanks to close cooperation between fishers, fossil collectors and palaeontologists, many of these fossils have been preserved and ended up in private and museum collections in recent decades. Apart from fishing, intensive sand replenishment and large-scale infrastructural projects such as Maasvlakte 2 and the Zandmotor (21 million cubic metres of sand) are important locations where fossils are found by now hundreds of serious private collectors. Pieces are preserved and documented and there is an intensive cooperation with the scientific community. .

Animals of the mammoth steppe

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The mammoth fauna Through scientific research of the fished up and collected fossils we know that Doggerland must have been a paradise for mammoth fauna. These were large animals such as woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses, steppe wisents, wild horses, giant deer, reindeer and predators such as cave lions, wolves and cave hyenas. Their bones are often found perfectly preserved. From the small finds that wash up on beaches, we know that arctic foxes, hares, rodents and birds such as willow grouse also lived there. These remains usually literally slip through the net. Fossils from the North Sea have also refined our knowledge. A good example is the mandible of a sabretoothed cat. This unique fossil was fished up by a beam trawler in the southern North Sea in 2000. The jaw, only slightly damaged, could be unmistakably identified by the low jaw joint and the shape of the present molars and tooth sockets. A number of radiocarbon-dates showed that it is only 28,000  years old. This was astonishing, because it was always thought that the sabre-toothed cat had become extinct in Europe over 300,000  years ago. The many finds make the North Sea one of the most important sites for ice age fossils in the world.

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The bone catch from an expedition in the North Sea with cutter GO 33 (René Bleuanus).

Mandible of a sabre-toothed cat (Homotherium latidens) from the bottom of the North Sea (c. 28,000 years old; 16.5 cm; Natural History Museum Rotterdam).

Animals of the mammoth steppe

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Part 3

DROWNING DOGGERLAND After the last ice age and especially in the Holocene, Doggerland was drowning. The landscape changed, and so did the habitat and way of life of the people who lived there during the Mesolithic. Reindeer made way for forest animals, which changed hunting methods – as evidenced by the iconic Doggerland spearheads and arrowheads that have been found almost 2000 times on Dutch beaches. The hunter-gatherers saw their world being transformed by natural processes. In a period of 4000 years, a millennia-old land the size of Great Britain disappeared under the waves...

Animals after the ice age Jørn Zeiler

When the last ice age ended

Early and Middle Mesolithic

around 10,000 years ago, the

camp (c. 8500-6500 BC), with

landscape changed dramatically.

numerous remains of mammals,

The rise in temperature made

birds and fish. These, together

it possible for trees to spread

with geological data and plant

northwards again. The open

remains, provide a unique insight

steppes became more and more

into the landscape, vegetation

overgrown. At the same time,

and fauna of that time. It was a

the North Sea basin began to fill

wetland: a landscape of open

up with melting ice, causing the

water, marshes and swamp

landscape to slowly but surely

forests, creeks and dunes, where

drown. The mammoth steppe

red deer, roe deer, wild boar,

and its fauna disappeared.

otters and beavers lived. Among

Mammoths, woolly rhinos and

the birds, we can see species of

reindeer were replaced by

open water and marshes such as

aurochs, red deer, roe deer, elk,

mallard, bittern, coot and water

wild boars, otters and beavers.

rail, as well as ‘forest birds’ such

This change can be seen first

as woodcock, wood pigeon,

of all in the bones and beach

hawk and blackbird. Finally, we

finds, but also in the material

catch a glimpse of the fish fauna,

that came to light in 2011 during

with perch, pike, bream, eel,

an underwater excavation near

salmon and sturgeon.

Maasvlakte 2, the so-called

It is the type of landscape

Yangtze Harbour. This excavation

that continues to define the

revealed the remains of an

appearance of the western part

Antler cuff and chisel made of the tooth of a wild boar, found by O.M. Hombroek in the 1960s on Maasvlakte 1 (6 cm and 4.3 cm; c. 9000‑6000 BC).

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of the Netherlands for a long

around 5000-4500 BC, that

time after the North Sea basin

we first encounter them

has filled up, and that we find,

again, especially in Flevoland,

among other places, in Neolithic

near Almere-Hoge Vaart and

Swifterbant, where people lived

Swifterbant, where horse

on river dunes and river banks.

bones were found during

Although people at that time

archaeological excavations.

have already become acquainted

We do not have hard evidence

with cattle breeding and

that these are wild horses, as

arable farming, and this partly

the bones do not show it. But

provides for their living needs,

it is likely because, as far as we

they continue to use the rich

know now, the first horses were

natural resources for a long time.

domesticated in the Eurasian

Red deer, wild boar, aurochs,

steppe (Ukraine, southwest

beavers and otters were hunted,

Russia and Kazakhstan) only

sturgeon, pike and catfish were

about 6000 years ago.

fished, and birds – especially ducks – were also hunted. It is striking that this new landscape was also home to a number of horses. The wild horse disappears with the mammoth fauna from the area that now forms the North Sea. It was not until the Holocene,

Wild boar (Sus scrofa; Kelvin Wilson).

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Geröllkeule (digging stick weight) made of a blue-grey quartzite with white quartz, fished up around 1970 at the Brown Bank. Clearly visible is the (double-conical) perforation in which the digging stick was fixed (11.6 cm; c. 9000-6000 BC).

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Luc Amkreutz & Marcel Niekus

HUNTER-GATHERERS IN A RICH WETLAND At the end of the last ice age, the sea level was about 120 metres lower than it is today. A vast plain stretching as far as Scotland and Norway formed one of the largest and richest areas in Europe. Mighty rivers such as the Rhine, Meuse and Thames joined together to form a great channel river which flowed into the Atlantic Ocean near Brittany. At the beginning of the Holocene, some 11,700 years ago, the climate stabilised and the area was drowned due to melting ice caps. The sea level was 85 metres lower and would rise 60 metres within 3000 years. That is on average 2 metres per century (compared to 20 centimetres in the 20th century). Especially in the 7th millennium BC there was an acceleration and the remains of Doggerland were plagued by a Norwegian tsunami and an accelerated sea level rise. At the beginning of the 6th millennium it disappeared under water for good. Climate warming and sea level rise led to changes in vegetation and fauna, as well as to an ever-changing relationship between land and water. In the early part of the Holocene, the Boreal, there is a cold-loving, taiga-like environment with pine, birch, juniper, cyper grasses, blueberries and herbs. Animals such as elk, brown bear and red deer populate the forests, and the rivers, along which willows and alders grow, must have been rich in salmon and trout. From 7000 BC, in the Atlantic period, deciduous forest vegetation with oak, lime, ash and elm takes over. Besides berry-bearing shrubs, hazelnut trees are of particular importance as a nutritious supplement to the Mesolithic diet. Inland, the rivers, streams and lakes are the richest environments, but there is also the dynamic coastline. Here one could fish for salt and brackish water fish, hunt for seals, spot beached whales and look for shellfish and molluscs. The coastal zone with its tidal landscape of mudflats and salt marshes also offered many nutritious plants as well as shorebirds and their eggs. It is note­worthy that the hunter-gatherers liked to stay in the extensive wetlands, the freshwater marshes created by the rising water table in the coastal hinterland. Ethnographic sources show these areas to be very (food) rich. Apart from game, fish such as pike, eel and sturgeon supplemented the diet, as

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did the abundance of water and migratory birds such as ducks, geese and swans. Waternuts and seeds of yellow and white water lily supplemented the plant food. The many trees, such as lime, were suitable for making canoes and paddles, willow and dogwood lent themselves to the weaving of traps and reeds made an ideal ground and hut cover. These areas combined the best of both worlds. In this dynamic landscape, the higher points were the best and driest places to settle. This was true for the high ridges, such as the 30-metre-high Dogger Bank and the Brown Bank (with a current peak at 16 metres below sea  level), but also for the many smaller sand dunes that were blown up in the last ice age and on which the encampment in the Yangtze Harbour was located. Importantly, the Mesolithic inhabitants of the North Sea region lived in a dynamic and changing landscape, where the unpredictability of the water was the only predictable thing. They saw that landscape change, certainly at the level of generations. Not only

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Some archaeological finds from the area of the Brown Bank, North Sea. Two bone socketed adzes, bone working waste, stone axe, large pick on aurochs radius, perforated antler axe (scale 1:2; Henk de Lorm).

the relationship between land and sea, between wet and dry, but also the changes in food sources, hunting grounds, waterways and contact networks. Today we see such changes as negative, but for our ancestors they were opportunities and in most cases normal. The land was a living thing.

Cultural setting Like their predecessors at the end of the last ice age, the Mesolithic inhabitants of the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Great Britain and the North Sea region lived by hunting, fishing and gathering. Instead of a nomadic existence on the open steppe tundra, they lived in a more forested environment with a high biodiversity. There they travelled in small family groups, making the best use of what nature offered at the rhythm of the seasons. Combining different landscape zones with different food sources was important. At set times of the year, groups would come together to exchange stories, food, tools and marriage partners. As the landscape changed, so did the toolkit. Flint working became more refined and small flint knives and arrowheads (microliths) were used in composite tools, like arrows and spears. The material changes in the small arrowheads are the basis for a rough tripartite division of the Mesolithic into an early phase (9100-7600  BC) with simple micro­liths, a middle phase (7600-6450 BC) with mainly triangular microliths and points with surface retouch (in the southern half of the Netherlands and neighbouring areas) and a late phase (6450-5300 BC) dominated by trapezoidal arrowheads. In the course of the Mesolithic, two ‘cultural areas’ emerged. A northwestern group, north of the IJssel-Vecht river basin, is more related to the northern European (Maglemose/ Kongemose) hunter-gatherers. South of this, the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt (RMS) group arose, more related to the western European hunter-gatherers (Sauveterre/ Tardenosien). We do not know whether this division also continued in the North Sea basin. It is possible that groups of hunter-gatherers with an ‘RMS signature’ originated from Great Britain and the North Sea basin and were forced by the rising water levels to seek higher grounds. Between 6500 and 5000  BC the differences between north and south seem to largely disappear. Flint artefacts, together with charcoal and burnt hazelnut shells, are often an indication of encampments in the higher sand and loess

A a metatarsal bone of a beaver from the Early Holocene with cutmarks, found at Maasvlakte 2 by Marc Simmelink (9.7 cm; Marc Simmelink) and a beaver (Castor fiber; Kelvin Wilson).

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areas. Food was prepared in hearths, and excavations in the north of the Nether­lands often yield pit fires, the exact function of which is not known. Camps were often located on elevations or ridges near watercourses, lakes and fens: ideal places to hunt, fish and gather resources. Sometimes finds, such as the nearly 10,000-year-old dugout canoe from Pesse, show how rich that world must have been. A real eye-opener was the excavation in 1997 of two encampments on so-called donken, higher dunes in a marshy environment, near Hardinxveld. The fast covering by layers of peat and clay ensured the excellent preservation of an encampment of hunter-gatherers between 5500 and 5000 BC. Apart from the discovery of one of the oldest inhumation burials in the Netherlands, a female nick-named ‘Trijntje’, and a dog burial, the site yielded a wealth of information due to the many tools made of bone, wood and antler, including paddles, a bow and a 5.5-metre-long canoe made of lime, as well as pieces of nets and fish traps. The food remains underlined the richness of the fish and bird-rich wetland environment in the Meuse and Rhine delta region. Especially pike was frequently on the menu. Remarkable were the many otters and beavers that were probably hunted for their pelts. Vegetable food included waternuts and seeds of the cattail. By comparing different seasonal resources such as migrating birds and certain fish, the researchers concluded that the encampments were mainly used in winter and early spring, for many years. The sites, buried more than 5 metres deep, offer a rare glimpse into the richness of Mesolithic life, where organic remains give colour to the past. Another striking example is the famous site of Star Carr in northern Yorkshire on the edges of Lake Flixton dating to roughly 9000 BC. The wealth of evidence uncovered there for seasonal habitation, wide-ranging hunting and gathering activities, wood, bone and antler working, including barbed points and antler ‘frontlets’, and even ritual activity testify to the richness of Mesolithic life in these watery environments. Both sites may serve as a model for a large part of the habitation in the North Sea basin.

Bone fish hook found by Bram Langeveld in 2011 on Hoek van Holland beach (5.1 cm; 9000‑6000 BC).

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Perforated pick made from an aurochs’ right radius bone (Bos primigenius) fished up by the KW 106 in 1968 at the Brown Bank, North Sea (30.4 cm; c. 9000‑6000 BC).

Hunter-gatherers in a rich wetland

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Mesolithic Doggerland It is clear that the Mesolithic inhabitants of Doggerland made the most of the watery landscape. In the colder Boreal part of the Holocene, the rivers and coasts were important routes along which the area was inhabited and ‘the other side’, presentday Britain, could be reached. Rivers, lakes and streams continued to provide the best settlement sites, while in the course of the Holocene the dynamic coastal landscape and especially the freshwater marshes beyond offered fertile but dynamic settlement sites. Nowadays, we can take an imagenary trip along different sites. Already in the 1970s Louwe Kooijmans presented an overview of Mesolithic finds from the North Sea. Most of these came from the Brown Bank, a 35-kilometre-long ridge located about 80  kilometres west of IJmuiden. The wealth of material culture is striking: perforated antler axes, bone picks and socketed adzes, bone and antler arrowheads and spearheads, perforated stone tools (so-called Geröll­­keule), fish hooks, tool manufacturing waste and, of course, butchery waste. Also striking is the find of a 20-centimetre-long ‘core axe’, with counterparts in the Danish Maglemose Culture. The Dogger Bank itself produced fewer finds, but the supply route to Rotterdam harbour, the 57-kilometre-long and 23-metre-deep Eurogeul, is also rich in finds, although much of it comes from disturbed contexts. The Zeeland ridges off the coast of Zeeland are another site rich in finds. The targeted fishing campaigns from the 1980s onwards added many finds, including antler axes with the wooden shaft still in place. Another special area is ‘De Stekels’, southwest of the Brown Bank, where more than a hundred artefacts and many human remains of predominantly Early Holocene, Boreal age have been unearthed. The latter are very well preserved and come from a relatively small area: is this perhaps a cemetery?

Large flint core axe, fished up by the cutter GO 28 Op hoop van zegen in the winter of 1988-1989 near the Brown Bank. The axe was found between the lumps of clay on deck by A. Wolters (20 cm; c. 9000-6000 BC).

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Flint scraper (coll. Jelle Venema), A-point (microlithic point with a retouched edge; coll. Donny Chrispijn) and core axe (coll. Martijn Leichtenberg); bone and antler points from Maasvlakte 1 (the fifth piece from the left still shows the impressions of binding to the arrowshaft) (scale 1:1; Leo Verhart & Lykke Johansen).

Mesolithic on the beach Nowadays, most Mesolithic finds in the Netherlands are made on beaches, which is not so strange considering the 7 million cubic  metres of sand extracted annually for coastal reinforcements, mostly from extraction pits 10-20  kilometres off the coast. You can discover finds anywhere. Mesolithic artefacts have been found on the beaches of the Wadden Islands, especially Vlieland and Texel. Finds are also known from North Holland, but the richest are the South Holland beaches. Zandvoort, Katwijk, Scheveningen, Monster and Hoek van Holland yielded flint artefacts, but also an antler axe, a bone awl and human skeletal material. However, it is mainly the Zandmotor, the artificial coastal reinforcement between Kijkduin and Ter Heijde, which has yielded numerous finds. They come from more than 21 million cubic metres of sand extracted from the sea. It concerns flint processing waste, such as flakes, blades and cores, but also scrapers, arrowheads and small core axes. In addition, there are tools made of bone and antler, such as large and small points, awls and needles, pieces of bone and antler with cutmarks and a large fish hook. Human remains, often skull fragments (some with cutmarks!), are found quite often.

Hunter-gatherers in a rich wetland

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Near Rotterdam, the expansion of the harbour (Maasvlakte 1 and 2) has yielded many finds since the 1970s: bone and antler points, antler axes, butchery and manufacture waste and again human material. More than 2000 bone and points are known by now. Further south, Mesolithic material is found in Zeeland, for instance near Cadzand.

A new world The now many thousands of finds are an important source of information. They make it possible to show connections and differences with the higher hinterland on both sides. The many tools made of bone and antler offer a wealth of material we do not know from elsewhere. Together with the waste they provide an insight into how sobjects were made, and by dating them we can get a better grip on the drowning history of the area. The small points seem to be specific to the Dutch delta region and offer a glimpse into regional cultural traditions with their own form and material choices. Material technical research on pitch and bone material, among others, provides further depth. The lithic material is now the largest find category. Here too, there are insights into the use of raw materials – a few pieces of Wommersom quartzite must have come directly from central Belgium – and there is evidence of both northern and southern flint, often moved by rivers. Typologically, the Early and Middle Mesolithic are well represented, but Late Mesolithic artefacts are also found on the Zandmotor, such as trapezoids. Perhaps this is related to the drowning of the

Mesolithic human skull fragment with cutmarks, found on the Zandmotor in 2012 by Henk Slegten.

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Fragment of a large antler axe. Clearly visible are the marine calcareous skeletons on the outside. The piece was fished by the OD 50 in 2013 south of the Eurogeul, North Sea (19 cm; c. 6000 BC).

area? Bones with cutmarks and characteristic fractures offer a view on the spectrum of hunted animals and possibly trapping for furs and pelts. Of particular value is the Mesolithic human material. Modern techniques like ancient DNA and isotope research shed new light on provenance and population characteristics, while physical anthropological research offers insights into many aspects of a relatively unknown but sizeable population of hunter-gatherers. How special these finds are is also shown by the discovery of cutmarks on some human skull fragments. It is probably a small glimpse of a burial ritual. Also special are some rare pieces of jewellery: beads of amber or a perforated tooth of a wild boar. The potential of the Mesolithic finds and the drowned sites should not be underestimated. It is hoped that further research will provide more insight into the vast undiscovered and dynamic landscape that was home to hundreds of generations of hunter-gatherers for more than 4000 years.

Hunter-gatherers in a rich wetland

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A lucky shot? A red deer in the crosshairs Marcel Niekus

During the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic,

Chrispijn found on the beach of his

groups of hunter-gatherers lived

hometown Hoek van Holland in 2016:

largely from hunting; during cooler

a bone fragment with a small piece of

periods with tundra-like landscapes

flint sticking out. Research shows that

they mainly hunted migrating game

it is a fragment of the right mandible

such as reindeer, and during warmer

of an adult or nearly adult red deer.

periods with dense forestation they

Considering the position of the flint in

hunted resident game such as red deer,

the bone, the animal must have been

roe deer and aurochs. Although we

shot from the front. A small sample of

know that there was a lot of hunting

the bone was radiocarbon-dated, but

in these periods, direct evidence of

unfortunately this did not yield any

this is very scarce. We do find remains

results due to the lack of collagen.

of hunted game, such as bones with

We know red deer primarily from the

traces of cutting and butchering, and

Holocene and a date in the Mesolithic is

(parts of) hunting tools. The latter

most plausible, partly because the flint

include bone and antler points, but

is rather small. Because the flint is firmly

also flint inserts (microliths) of arrows,

embedded in the bone, at first it was

of which several have been found on

not easy to see what kind of projectile

the raised beaches of Maasvlakte 2

it was. A microlithic point as we know

and the Zandmotor. The most direct

it from the Mesolithic was obvious.

indications of hunting are arrowheads

The surprise was great, however, when

or spearheads embedded in animal

micro CT scans showed that it was not

bones, but such finds are extremely

a retouched point, but a simple blade,

rare. An arrow or spear has to hit a bone

an elongated flint piece that we usually

just right and get stuck in it too. And

refer to as waste. Apparently, Mesolithic

this ‘lucky shot’ is exactly what Donny

hunters sometimes used ‘ordinary’

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blades as projectile points, and this find shows that there is not always a one-to-one relationship between tool types, which archaeologists define on

Fragment of the mandible of a red deer with an embedded flint ‘arrowhead’ (Frans de Vries/Toonbeeld).

the basis of shape and retouch, and the activity carried out. That it was an effective hunting weapon is also shown by the fact that the CT scan revealed another small fragment of flint in the mandible. Apparently, the force of the shot was so great that a piece of the ‘arrowhead’ broke off during the impact and penetrated deep into the jaw. Whether the animal survived the attack is unclear; there seems to have been some bone growth after the impact, but specialists are still divided on this.

Red deer (Cervus elaphus; Kelvin Wilson).

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Merel Spithoven

A THOUSAND HUNTS: BARBED POINTS FROM DOGGERLAND

(right) Some small and large points (arrowheads and spearheads) made of bone and antler. Note the different types of barbs (largest point 14.4 cm; c. 9000-6000 BC); (left) a Mesolithic hunter, armed with a (type Holmegaard) bow and arrow. Note also the socketed adze hanging over his shoulder (Kelvin Wilson)

Almost 2000 bone and antler points – tips from hunting weapons – have been found on the beaches of South Holland: Rockanje, Maasvlakte 1 and 2, Hoek van Holland and the Zandmotor. The points are found here because the beaches are filled with sand from archaeologically rich sand extraction areas in the North Sea. These are located off the coast of South Holland and cover only a small part of Doggerland. In addition, some points further inland have been found where, for example, North Sea sand was used for building. The points are one of the most numerous Doggerland finds and formed an important part of the hunter-gatherer toolkit.

Changing landscape The points date from the time of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived in Doggerland from about 11,000  years ago. This is based on radiocarbon-dating and typo-chronological comparisons. At this time Doggerland was a rapidly changing landscape due to rising temperatures and sea levels. The steppe tundra of the last ice age gradually changed into a Boreal landscape. Flora, fauna and people adapted. Doggerland became a more forested area with mainly pine, hazel and birch. Hunting, now of resident and migratory species, was one of the most important strategies for obtaining food. Predominantly red deer, elk, wild boar, horses, aurochs and various species of fish and birds were popular prey.

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Production process and design Hunted game provided the raw material for points production: bone and antler. In addition, cast-off antlers could be collected. Bone was more often used as a raw material. Some flint points have also been found, but these form a separate find category and are not discussed here. To make the points, the groove-andsplinter technique was usually employed, in which flint tools were used to cut strips of bone and antler from the parent material. The semi-finished products were then ground on all sides to create the shape of a point. A (sand)stone with loose sand and water could be used for this. We can still see this part of the production process on many points in the form of long grooves from tip to base. Finally, a flint blade was used to cut barbs. Variation between the different points is mainly visible in the shape of the barbs and in the size of the complete point. The barbs are usually incised in one direction, but cross-shaped incisions and combinations are also possible. With the cross-shaped cuts, the barbs are often longer due to the deeper incisions. The design choices influenced the effectiveness of the final hunting tool in aspects such as accuracy, penetration, strength of the shaft, durability and wound size. For example, a wider point will not penetrate as deeply, but will leave a larger wound and the barbs help the point stick better in the target.

Small and large points After producing the point, it was hafted with (plant) fibres and (birch) pitch or tar. The bindings were attached just below or in the lowest barb. The latter probably ensured an even stronger attachment. The shaft could be that of an arrow, a spear or, very rarely, a harpoon. In general, there are larger and smaller points, the dividing line being approximately 88.5 millimetres. Smaller points were probably used as arrowheads and larger ones as spearheads. The small points are better suited as arrowheads because of their smaller size and weight. At least 800 of the studied points are small, which may indicate the importance of bow and arrow hunting. It is striking that the small points, compared to points from other European areas, are very small and seem to form a separate (southern) ‘Doggerland’ group.

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Barbed bone point found on the beach of Maas­vlakte 2 (coll. Henk Houtgraaf). The binding materials at the base of the point are still clearly visible and probably consist of (birch) pitch and plant fibres. (5 cm; c. 9000-6000 BC; Merel Spithoven).

Much used, much lost Traces of use show that the small points have often been used, repaired and renewed. This can be deduced, among other things, from a smooth, shiny and rounded surface, especially on the tip. These traces of use are the result of frequent friction with soft materials, such as fur and flesh, during a shot. Also, barbs are often (partly) broken off and impact fractures have occurred. If possible, points were repaired or renewed, for example by re-sharpening the point, visible through new grooves in the already smooth surface. Another characteristic are the superficial barbs that were created by grinding, for example when they were broken off or when the point was rejuvenated. Most of the points were probably used until they were no longer effective or repairable and then discarded. In addition, many will have been lost during the hunt because the animal fled or the arrow was not found. Most of the small points, of which hundreds have been found, were thus used intensively. From this we can deduce that hunting, probably with bow and arrow, must have been an important activity in Mesolithic Doggerland. The large-scale use may have been a reaction to the changing landscape. We know from isotope research that from the Late Upper Palaeolithic onwards the diet of the inhabitants of Doggerland changed. The emphasis may have shifted to (fresh)water animals, using bows and arrows and fishing spears, in addition to nets, traps and hooks to hunt fish, waterfowl, otters and beavers.

Ambassador of Mesolithic Doggerland The points are an archaeologically interesting find category. It is remarkable that almost 2000 have been found and that more are added every year. They are a source of information. They tell us about food supply, technology and the use of resources. The points show that hunting was one of the most important subsistence strategies. They also bring Mesolithic people into focus. Choices were made about the use of certain raw materials, the design of the points and their reuse. This sheds light on the Doggerland people and offers a glimpse into the daily lives of our ancestors. As such, these artefacts are one of the main ambassadors of this drowned landscape.

Barbed bone point found on the beach at Rockanje (coll. Peter Soeters). Two reworked barbs are visible near the tip (scale 8:1; c. 90006000 BC; Merel Spithoven).

A thousand hunts

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Garry Momber

BOULDNOR CLIFF: A DROWNED PREHISTORIC SITE EMERGING FROM THE SEABED Until recently, archaeologists thought that archaeological sites of the people who lived in the low-lying areas and along the ancient coasts after the last ice age would have been lost or would be too difficult to find, but the discovery of an 8000-year-old site under 11 metres of water, in the Solent (southern England) has demonstrated that significant remains can survive. The archaeological site of Bouldnor Cliff in the western Solent is one of Great Britain’s most important and informative Mesolithic occupation sites. It has produced some of the best preserved and most extensive collections of organic artefacts in the country. The site is part of a drowned forest that stretches for a kilometre. It has the remains of trees embedded within a thick layer of peat, being an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation or organic matter.

Threats to the submerged landscape A diver tags a Bouldnor Cliff platform for recovery (Maritime Archaeology Trust).

The submerged landscape survives because it was covered with estuarine, mud flat sediments as sea level rose from 8000 to 5000 years ago. It was then protected and if undisturbed, it could have remained in an oxygen rich environment that would have preserved it for many thousands of years. Unfortunately, due to changes to the coastline, the area is now being eroded. This is removing all the protective silts to reveal the ancient land surface below.

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Mesolithic Bouldnor Cliff The 8000-year-old occupation site lay on the edge of a flood plain with plenty of fresh water. Pollen evidence from the site and sedimentary, ancient DNA has identified a range of wild grasses, with many wetland plant species. The woodland trees including oak, poplar, apple, beech and alder were detected while the DNA of aurochs (a large wild cow), canis (dog or wolf ), deer, grouse and rodents reveal the local wildlife. A very surprising find, however, was the DNA of domesticated einkorn. This is a grain that was not known to grow in Great Britain until it was introduced 2000 years later. Therefore, it must have been brought to the site from elsewhere. This was most probably from further east in Europe, from which it would have travelled along the river systems and along the edge of the lowlands that still connected Great Britain with mainland Europe. Accordingly, the discovery of log boat remains on the site should come as no surprise. The archaeological evidence at Bouldnor Cliff is spread between two different sites. One of the sites consists of thousands of burnt and worked flints plus an aurochs metatarsal bone, all of which were eroding from the edge of a submerged and buried sandbank. This indicates tool preparation and probably cooking near a slow running waterway. One of the tools was a complete tranchet adze that was used for wood working. The second site is dominated by the remains of worked wood. Such organic material is very rare in sites of such antiquity as organic material would normally have decayed. At Bouldnor Cliff the preservation of wood

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A diver collects finds. In the foreground is a flint tranchet adze (Maritime Archaeology Trust).

Flint tranchet adze from Bouldnor Cliff (11.9 cm; c. 8000-5000 years old; Maritime Archaeology Trust).

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Wooden platforms

Location of boat building -11 m

Tree stumps within peat land surface

Lobster pot

-12.5 m

Exposed tree stump 5m

Photomosaic model of the eroding edge of the submerged land-surface at Bouldnor Cliff (Maritime Archaeology Trust).

has been so good that tool marks made by adzes and axes can still be seen on many timbers. One of the largest pieces found at the site is the remains of an oak timber which bears the marks of having been the base of a large hollowed out oak tree. The timber and the associated technology is characteristic of the Neolithic, over 2000 years later, while the accompanying artefacts demonstrate woodworking. This included super-heated flints that would have been used to carbonise the wood, charcoal, burnt wood and string. Analysis of the archaeological evidence indicates that a large oak tree was being trimmed, charred and the middle was chopped out to form a log boat. The evidence remains fragmentary, but analysis has demonstrated that it could not be anything else. This makes it the oldest boat building site in the world. Other remains include the bases of four wooden posts and a series of wooden platforms. These were constructed from the offcuts of bark and sapwood produced when trees are being trimmed. The pieces were cut to a similar shape and size, being flat on one side and rounded on the other. These were organized in layers that would have produced solid platforms in the wetland landscape. In 2019, a structure consisting of over 60 pieces of timber was discovered and excavated. It was recorded as a 3D photomosaic following recovery. This form of timber reuse is a new discovery and provides an insight into specific cultural occupation practices.

Near neighbours The archaeological discoveries of structures including platforms and posts, plus the activity areas, suggest a site of importance where people invested a great deal of time and energy. It has also opened a window into a culture of which we know very little. The number and configuration of features so far discovered is not sufficient to conclude that there was a substantial, permanent structure on site but a great deal has already been lost to erosion. The repurposing of the trimmed offcuts to make platforms shows the occupants could be resourceful and adaptable, but not that they were necessarily laying the foundations for long term settlement. More significantly, however, the range of discoveries show the group, or groups that visited the site, had far reaching connections

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3D photomosaic of Mesolithic wooden platform from Bouldnor Cliff. View 3D model at: https://sketchfab.com/ maritimearchaeologytrust (Maritime Archaeology Trust).

to mainland Europe. These links showed a relationship between the occupants of the Solent and the continental landmass before the North Sea was formed and both landmasses became separated.

Coastal change As the sea rose and the landscape flooded 8000 years ago, the people of the Mesolithic world were forced to retreat upslope. The remains on the site at Bouldnor Cliff was abandoned and it was then covered by over 7 metres of alluvial sediments. The material provides an archive that was laid down over a fixed period of time. Examination of minerals and organics within the matrix of material can provide information about the changing environment and vegetation through time. The results tell us about the extent and speed of sea level rise in the past, as well as changes within the environment. Today, the deposits that protected the site are being eroded away. As dateable artefacts are exposed for the first time since they were buried, their age can indicate the length of time a coastline was previously stable. This can show new areas of erosion. Research into Bouldnor Cliff continues, sponsored in part by the Maritime Archaeology Trust. At the moment, it is mainly an emergency survey, trying to document and recover the remains and artefacts exposed by erosion in time.

Further reading: Mesolithic occupation at Bouldnor Cliff and the submerged prehistoric landscapes of the Solent by G. Momber, D. Tomalin, R. Scaife, J. Satchell & J. Gillespie (2011).

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Dimitri Schiltmans

ROTTERDAMYANGTZE HARBOUR: EXCAVATING AT 20 METRES DEEP On the Dutch ‘edge’ of Doggerland, Mesolithic sites can be found similar to the English Bouldnor Cliff. One of these has now been ‘excavated’. Between 2008 and 2013, the Port of Rotterdam commissioned the construction of Maasvlakte  2. For this, the Yangtze Harbour on Maasvlakte 1 (Rotterdam) had to be deepened and extended to accommodate even larger ships. The bottom of the harbour was dredged to a depth of 22 metres and an extension to Maasvlakte  2 was constructed on the northwest side of the harbour. This way, the Yangtze Harbour became the entrance channel of the new port area. The new Yangtze channel encompassed an enormous area of some 3.5 kilometres long and 600  metres wide. The construction works would destroy any archaeological remains from prehistoric times. Therefore, further investigation was required.

Discovery

Impression of the ‘excavation’ in the Yangtze Harbour with the help of the dredging pontoon Triton (Bjørn Smit/RCE).

Prior to the construction of Maasvlakte  2, desk-based assesment was carried out, which revealed that river dune deposits from the Early Holocene could be present in the subsoil. These wind-blown river dunes have traditionally been considered very promising sites for the discovery of prehistoric encampments, tools and food remains, for example. This was the reason for carrying out a systematic (geo)archaeological survey in the Yangtze Harbour between 2009 and 2011. Step by step, data were collected and the area was zoomed in on further. First, old soil corings and probes (cone penetration tests), with which, among others, the resistance of the different soil layers is measured, were examined more closely. This made it possible to reconstruct the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene landscape. Based on this, it was determined where archaeological remains could be expected.

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The sampling of the river dune sand ultimately yielded 316 big bags (Dimitri Schiltmans/Archeologie Rotterdam).

After this, actual fieldwork was carried out in the Yangtze Harbour. From a ship, new soil corings were made in the harbour floor in a number of places. In addition, seismic surveys were carried out to map the subsurface. In the end, the cores, which were carefully sampled in a laboratory, actually contained river dune deposits at a depth of about 20 metres. As expected, the top of the dune had been eroded by later sea flooding, but the base was intact and covered by clay and peat. Even better was the fact that in the sieved samples fragments of charcoal, flint flakes and (burnt) bone were found. The first convincing evidence that people had actually been there!

Excavating from a pontoon The results were sufficient reason to actually carry out an excavation in the northwestern part of the Yangtze Harbour at the end of 2011. As such an investigation at this depth had never been carried out before anywhere in the world, various brainstorming sessions preceded. The dredging pontoon Triton was chosen. Because of the pioneering nature of the project, it was decided to start digging at those places where archaeological remains had actually been found in the soil corings. The underwater excavation started with the removal of an uninteresting part of the subsoil. Next, a grabber was used to take 2 × 5 metre chunks of river dune sand at

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a depth of 20 metres. In layers of 20 centimetres, the digging went deeper and deeper. After the grabber had been used to take a soil sample, an archaeologist on the ship checked it for river dune sand. The sand was placed in a container, and from there an excavator filled two big bags. In this manner 316 big bags were collected which were brought ashore every evening and delivered to the sieving stations. Here the sand was sieved and the residues dried and packed. At the archaeology department of the municipality of Rotterdam, archaeologists and volunteers spent several months sifting through all the sieve residues, looking for archaeological remains such as charcoal, bone, flint, wood, seeds and stone.

Results of the investigation Thanks to research by geologists from Deltares, TNO Geological Survey of the Nether­ lands and Utrecht University, among others, a very detailed picture of land­scape develop­ment in the Early Holocene in the western part of the Netherlands has emerged. In addition, tens of thousands of archaeological finds were eventually collected from the sieved sand, while only a relatively small part of the site was excavated. The finds showed that groups of hunter-gatherers regularly visited the river dune in the Yangtze Harbour between c. 8400 and 6500  BC. The large numbers of flint flakes, blades and cores show that flint was worked to make tools like scrapers, points, burins and drills. During the research fragments of Wommersom quartzite, originating from the Tienen area in Belgium, were also found. This indicates contacts and exchange over  large distances. The collected bones show that the huntergatherers hunted red deer, roe deer, wild boar and fur animals, such as otter and beaver, among others. But also polecat, weasel and wildcat may have been hunted. As for birds, especially ducks were popular. Furthermore, fishing was important, which is proven by the many fish remains of pike, perch, carp, salmon, eel, Atlantic sturgeon, spotted ray and turbot. Finally, the macrobotanical research provided a wealth of information on plant food. The use of starchy tubers and roots was demonstrated. Waternuts, hazelnuts and acorns provided the necessary vegetable fats. Starch may also have been obtained from the processed seeds of yellow squash. Oil was probably extracted from the seeds of red dogwood. Another possibly important food source was formed by fruits and berries of, for example, hawthorn and wild apple. Young shoots and leaves of many herbaceous plants could be eaten as vegetables. Between 6500 and 6250  BC the area changed dramatically and the landscape drowned in a very short time. The sea level continued to rise and the river dune in the Yangtze Harbour disappeared under water for good.

To conclude The research in the Yangtze Harbour is very special. Nowhere else in the world has such a systematic (geo)archaeological investigation been carried out underwater at such an exceptional depth, actually finding and excavating a concentration of Mesolithic remains. Thanks to the enthusiasm of the many specialists involved, a new path in underwater archaeology has been opened up, unreachable sites are made accessible and our knowledge of the Mesolithic world is enriched.

Rotterdam-Yangtze Harbour

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The gigantic Storrega landshift off the coast of Norway. It caused a massive tsunami and will also have (temporarily) affected the last inhabitants of Doggerland. Data: bathymetry EMODnet 2018, topography NOAA 2009. Software: MapInfo Pro (Merle Muru, University of Tartu/ University of Bradford).

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Luc Amkreutz & Jan Glimmerveen

THE NORTH SEA AS HIGHWAY: NEOLITHIC ARGONAUTS AND PREHISTORIC TRADE The enormous Storrega landslide, which occurred off the coast of Norway around 6150 BC, marked the beginning of the end for the occupation of Doggerland. The surge and flooding had catastrophic consequences further south for the Mesolithic inhabitants, but were also short-lived. The landscape changed, but recovered, as did probably the habitation. In the end it was the continuous and now rapid rise of the sea level, triggered by the melting of the Canadian land ice, and the breakthrough of the water from ice lakes via Hudson Bay, which put an end to the habitation of the North Sea basin. The sea level would continue to rise for many centuries before the Dutch coastline was again extended seaward by beach ridges in the 4th millennium BC. The sea became sea again. Meanwhile, the Mesolithic was coming to an end. Around 9500 BC, in the Near East, in an area known as the Fertile Crescent, stretching from the Mediterranean across southeastern Turkey to the Persian Gulf, the wild precursors of some agricultural crops, such as emmer and einkorn and sheep, goats, cattle and pigs were domesticated. Within a few millennia and by two routes, this new way of life spread over large parts of Europe through migration and adoption. The first agricultural society in our regions was the Linearbandkeramik Culture around 5300 BC, which settled on the loess soil sof Limburg, and also in the coastal zone of northern France. In the Delta regions of the Low Countries, the indigenous Mesolithic inhabitants adopted more and more elements of farming in the course of the 5th millennium. The people of the Swifterbant Culture and its successors continued to hunt and gather for a long time and often also led a mobile, non-sedentary existence. The heirs of the Linearbandkeramik Culture in the sand and loess areas of the Low Countries were the Rössen Culture and, from the second half of the 5th millennium onwards, the Michelsberg Culture, within which

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a clear hunter-gatherer influence is genetically evident. It is these Middle Neolithic groups from which we see the first clear evidence of trade and transport along the coast and across the sea towards Britain.

Rare clues Finds that unambiguously point to Neolithic maritime expeditions are limited but convincing. In the first place, this concerns a number of polished flint axes. Two were fished up from the ‘Kolenboot’, southwest of the Brown Bank (coll. Jan Glimmerveen). The axes measure 29.5 and 19 centimetres respectively. The first specimen is the largest of its kind in the Low Countries. Both pieces have a bright orange-brown colour, caused by being embedded in a peaty environment with a high iron content. Damage at the edges shows a dark grey to blue colour: flint from the Lixhe-Lanaye chalk deposits from the Maastrichtian (c. 70 million years ago). The large axe is of the Flintoval type and can be ascribed to the Middle Neolithic, more specifically to the Michelsberg Culture between 4400 and 3500 BC. It is very well possible that this piece was made from material from the flint mine of Rijckholt-Sint-Geertruid where underground extraction of flint took place from the second half of the 5th millennium onwards. At least two more axes of this type are known (coll. Kommer Tanis and Klaas Post), also orange patinated and quite large. The smaller axe is of the Buren type and may be characteristic of the later Vlaardingen Culture (3400-2600 BC) in the western Netherlands. The fact that both axes were found at approximately the same location and possibly differ in age by several centuries points to the consistency of this route south of the Brown Bank. Other Neo­lithic finds include a hard stone axe and two polished volcanic tuff axes from the Dogger Bank. There are also a number of fished up axes and antler cuffs that are probably Neolithic or later in date, such as a cuff with an oval haft found off the coast of Zeeland. When more pieces are dated in the future, this number will increase.

The interior of the Dover Boat shows the technical ingenuity of the Bronze Age boat builders (Dover Museum & Bronze Age Boat Gallery).

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Two polished Neolithic flint axes from the North Sea (right axe 29.5 cm; c. 4500-2500 BC; coll. Jan Glimmerveen).

The North Sea as Highway

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Land in sight? One of the youngest Mesolithic finds, from the Dogger Bank, is a bone or antler tool from around 6050 BC. The question remains what happened shortly afterwards and what the North Sea landscape looked like in the 6th millennium. The conventional approach is that the shallowest parts of the southern North Sea and Dogger Bank drowned around 5800 BC, but we must be cautious. Current bathymetry (sea floor elevation) needs to be understood in relation to sea level rise in a specific regional area for sufficient detail. After the separation of Dogger Bank and the jump in sea level rise in the second half of the 7th millennium, there were probably a few ever-shrinking islands in the southern North Sea. It remains unclear when the last pieces of land finally disappeared under the waves, but it is possible that at low tide they were still discernible for a long time. This throws an interesting light on the Middle Neolithic flint axes. It is unlikely that they were left behind on small islands en route to ‘the other side’, modern-day Britain, but it is not implausible that the last remnants of land provided a perhaps logical navigation route. Researchers Duncan Garrow and Frazer Sturt stress the importance of anomalous currents around these higher elements in the shallow North Sea. Climate data further indicate a higher probability of storms between 4500 and 3500 BC. Fixed routes were thus of great importance to maritime navigation. Ethnography shows that this kind of knowledge can exist for many centuries and is part of myths and stories that are passed on: oral traditions. So it is not impossible that stories, memories and knowledge of Doggerland still existed in the Neolithic.

Neolithic Argonauts The size of two of the flint axes is exceptional and in that respect it is perhaps not strange to see them as offerings at a place that marked the right passage, where it was shallow and where there may have been a memory of the land that once lay there. The orange-brown colour of some axes suggests embedding in a peaty environment. Alternatively, they may have been thrown overboard or sunk with the vessel. In any case, the Neolithic in Britain became established on the transition to the 4th millennium. It is still unclear to what extent routes via the English Channel or the North Sea opposite the Low Countries formed the most important crossing, but the aforementioned flint axes, together with the occurrence of specific pottery, the so-called Middle Neolithic carinated bowl tradition, form an important indication for contacts across the North Sea just after 4000 BC. Ancient DNA evidence shows that around 2500 BC (boat) migrants of the Late Neolithic Bell Beaker Culture almost completely replaced the genetic profile in Britain. The North Sea became less of a barrier and more of a conductor for interaction and exchange.

Bronze Age highway What these movements over sea looked like and what kind of vessels were used remains unclear. It is plausible that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were already able to travel along the coast and over small distances at sea in seaworthy vessels, for example canoes with outriggers. This is evidenced by the interwovenness of the Mesolithic groups in the Baltic region and, for example, by island-hopping in the Hebrides. More definite evidence is provided by a find from the Middle Bronze Age near Dover, the so-called Dover Boat (1575-1520 BC). This is a vessel made of oak planks

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The bronze hoard of Voorhout found in 1907 with 18 axes and a chisel from different places of origin (c. 18 cm; c. 1600-1400 BC).

sewn with yew withies and waterproofed with moss. The boat was possibly 15 metres long and about 2 metres wide and could accommodate several oarsmen. It is unclear whether it could also be sailed. The investment in this kind of vessel indicates that there was effective movement along the coast and across the sea. This is particularly evident in the evidence of intensive trade, for example in copper from Wales and Ireland and the scarce tin from Devon, Cornwall and Brittany. A good example is a bronze hoard – 18 bronze axes and a chisel – from the dunes near Voorhout, dating from 1600-1400 BC. Some objects seem to be typologically related to southern England, others to Wales and northern France. The metal composition of some pieces also points to copper from the Great Orme mine in Wales. The spectacular group of six uniform giant Plougrescant-Ommerschans swords (1500-1350 BC), with two sites in Great Britain (Oxborough and Rudham in Norfolk) and four on the continent (Plougrescant and Beaune in France, Ommerschans and Jutphaas in the Netherlands) also points to maritime transport. Trade and interaction in the Bronze Age was undeniably large-scale and intensive. The Langdon Bay ‘cargo find’ (1300-1100  BC) of 182 swords, rapiers, daggers, knives, handles, axes, chisels and other objects found some 500  metres out­side Dover Harbour also shows this. As yet, it is unclear where exactly the most frequent crossing was made. Possibly towards the estuary of the Meuse and Rhine rivers, but it is also possible that British material reached our region further south, via the French coast or inland. It is obvious that the Bronze Age marks the beginning of the intensive trade across the North Sea. This trade would determine the course of history in the following centuries, for Europe and far beyond. With 260,000 ship movements per year in the Dutch part alone, the North Sea is now one of the busiest seas in the world. Its economic importance cannot be underestimated, but it is also good to know how it all began.

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Part 4

DOGGERLAND INVESTIGATED Doggerland lies hidden beneath the North Sea, but small reminders of this vanished land wash up on our beaches: animal and human bones, tools and weapons made of bone and antler, flint tools and more. Thanks to scientific techniques, great stories can still be told. Not only can we enrich our understanding of people in the past by studying objects made of bone, antler or stone, new scientific techniques can also teach us a lot about ‘invisible elements’ through ancient DNA and isotope analysis, often directly from people themselves. The drowned landscape is also coming back into view through coring and new scanning techniques at sea. Doggerland is resurfacing.

A human molar is sampled for analysis (Lisette Kootker).

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Eveline Altena, Lisette Kootker, Bjørn Smit & Paul Storm

TRACING PEOPLE: SECRETS OF BONES AND TEETH UNRAVELLED

Skeletal fragments of Mesolithic people from the North Sea are regularly en­ countered among the prehistoric finds collected by beachcombers and recovered in fishnets. These are of great importance because our knowledge of this part of prehistory in the Netherlands, and even in Europe, is very limited. In the Dutch and British soil, human remains from this era are rarely preserved or are in poor condition. Mesolithic human remains from the North Sea, however, are often in remarkably good condition and form an important source of information about the Mesolithic in Northwest Europe. In the first place, looking with the naked eye – studying the morphology of bones – provides a great insight into the people who used to live in Doggerl­and. In addition, bones and teeth contain a lot of invisible information. This requires access to complex laboratory equipment, which originates from the fields of biology and earth sciences. Bones and teeth are composed of different building blocks, such as the chemical elements carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, calcium and strontium. The different forms of a chemical element are called isotopes. In addition, bones also contain DNA molecules. DNA is like a manual for how to make all the building blocks of your body, how to assemble the kit and how to make it grow and develop. Invisible building blocks and a manual that provides a means to unravel some of the secrets of the people of Doggerland.

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Morphological research: robust jaws and a changing diet Depending on the condition of the human bone fragment and the techniques used, morphological examination – looking at the shape, characteristics and distinctive features – can tell us something about biological aspects such as sex, age at death, injuries and diseases. Male skulls, for example, are often larger and heavier and have more pronounced muscle attachments and curvatures, such as the arches of the eyebrows. Growth-related developments, such as the eruption of decideous (milk) teeth and later permanent teeth, cause the composition of the dentition and the shape of the teeth to change continuously. This provides information on age at death. When the change of teeth is complete, one can use dental wear to estimate age, although this method is less accurate. Not only trauma and certain diseases can affect the shape of bone, but also deliberate (cultural) deformations. For example, the skull may be deformed by head binding in growing individuals, or as a result of a heavy blow. Research so far has shown that two Mesolithic mandibles from the North Sea are remarkably robust and contain large molars. These are features that contribute to the fact that the face of these two hunter-gatherers probably projected further forward than that of recent people; at least they did not suffer from a lack of space in their mouths, as is the case today. A clear indication of this is the so-called retromolar gap (space between the wisdom tooth and the part of the jaw that projects vertically upwards; shown in the photo below behind the back molar). This extra space shows that there was enough room and that there will have been no need for braces.

Robust Mesolithic human mandible fragment, fished out of the southern North Sea by the SL 27 in 1994 (11.2 cm; c. 6300 BC; Paul Storm).

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3D scan image of a fragment of a Mesolithic human mandible, found on the beach of Hoek van Holland. Various morphological aspects are clearly visible (Paul Storm).

This fits in with a globally observed trend of decreasing robustness of human skulls during and after the last ice age. This phenomenon has been attributed by scientists to several factors, including the transition from a Mesolithic huntergatherer to a Neolithic farmer existence. In fact, for several decades, there has been a notion that the cultural transition to agriculture may have had biological evolutionary effects on the shape of the human skull. Possibly, the shift to softer food changed the selection for large teeth. The farming lifestyle of ground grain and cooked food in earthenware pots led to a less challenging diet: powerful jaws and large molars are not needed to swallow porridge. The final size of the jaw also depends on the pressure during growth. If this is less, as is the case with porridge-eating children, the jaw may not grow as large – which can lead to insufficient space for the teeth. This so-called dental crowding can cause health problems, such as caries (cavities). In the past, this may have led to a selection in favour of smaller teeth. Mesolithic bone material forms an important source for investigating these developments.

Doggerland DNA: it survives! Besides looking at the shape and appearance of skeletal elements, we can also obtain information by looking inside the bone, for example at the DNA. At the moment, ancient DNA research has just started on human bones from the North Sea. Via these small ‘building blocks’, a lot can be learned about the former inhabitants of Doggerland. You get your DNA from your parents. For most DNA you get a copy from your mother and a copy from your father, but some DNA you only get from your mother and some DNA is only present in males and therefore only passed on by the father. Because of all that personal information in our DNA and the different ways it is passed from parents to children, it can answer a lot of questions about the person you are studying, but also about their ancestors and the community in which they lived. This is very useful in the case of human remains from the North Sea. We usually find only small pieces of bone, often without any clue about how the person lived. Possibilities for morphological research, as described above, are therefore typically very limited.

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However, it is still quite a challenge to examine the DNA of these people. They died thousands of years ago and, like their bodies, their DNA has largely decayed. If any DNA survived at all, it is often very little and the originally long molecules have broken down into very short pieces. This means that we have to use special methods to examine the DNA that remains. In the last ten years or so, equipment has become available that is sensitive enough to read the little DNA in bones as old as those from Doggerland. During the laboratory research, strict measures are taken to ensure that this DNA from the bones does not get mixed up with that of others, such as the researchers. It was very exciting to see whether there would be any DNA left in the Doggerland bones, which can be more than 10,000 years old. Up to now, 25 of them were examined and miraculously, over 70% of the bones were found to contain just enough DNA for examination. There are many questions that we hope to solve with the DNA of Doggerland people. First of all, we would like to know what the sex of each deceased was, so that we can see what the morphological differences were between females and males. We are also very curious to know how big the group of people was over time, and whether we can distinguish separate communities within the Doggerland area that lived in different places. The more

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In an archaeological DNA laboratory, all kinds of measures are taken to ensure that no DNA of others ends up on the bones and teeth that are being examined. Therefore, the researchers wear a special suit with face mask and gloves. (Eveline Altena/LUMC).

variation there is in the DNA, the more people there were in a group; and the more genetically similar the groups are, the more contact there was between them. DNA also tells us something about how people may have looked. The first people in Europe came from Africa and their skin, hair and eyes were dark. Research on the remains of hunter-gatherers who lived around the same time as the Doggerland people, but who were found in other areas, indicates that characteristics of that dark appearance were still very much present, depending on the region where they lived. By examining the DNA of the Doggerland people, we can understand how these features, as well as others, changed over time and why. We can therefore follow how humans gradually adapted to the European environment and which groups of people from elsewhere, with their own genetic variation, moved to other places.

Diet in Doggerland: what isotopes reveal One of the most important questions in archaeology is what people in the past ate. For example, research is done into which animals hunter-gatherers caught and which plants they collected. Researchers also look at what crops the first farmers grew, when they started drinking milk and making cheese. To find out what the Doggerland diet was, archaeologists have to use different pieces of the puzzle. The animal bones retrieved from the beach provide some information. In theory, of course, these animals could have been hunted and eaten, but we would like to know more precisely and see whether there are any preferences. Direct evidence of hunting comes from traces of butchery and cutmarks on bone fragments. Despite the fact that many thousands of bones have been found, bones with unmistakable traces of slaughtering or cutting are rare. What we also have to remember is that a large part of the bones come from Pleistocene ice age animals (like mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave lion, hyena etc.) which lived much longer ago, when only small groups of Neanderthals roamed around Doggerland. For the Early Holocene, the number of animal bones is smaller, but there seems to be a higher population density. An example is the numerous bone and antler points found on the beaches. These implements were specifically used for hunting. Animal bones with traces of butchering and cutting from the Holocene (for example roe deer, red deer and boar) are more common, but still relatively rare. The bone material partly shows which animal species were eaten. However, because of the special conditions under which they were found (fishnet finds or finds from sand excavations in the North Sea), archaeological evidence for small animals and especially fish is often lacking. Fortunately, there is another way to investigate the diet of the Doggerland people, namely through the building blocks in their bodies. The ratio of the different forms (isotopes) of the building blocks carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) varies between the different groups of animals living on land, in the sea or in freshwater, and according to their position in the food chain. By analysing these building blocks in bones, it is possible to determine whether a person has a more terrestrial (based on land animals), aquatic (based on freshwater animals) or marine (based on marine animals) ‘signal’. This means that a person’s diet consisted mainly of animals such as wild boar and red deer, or of waterfowl, freshwater fish, otters and beavers, or of mainly marine fish. Although we cannot determine whether someone has eaten a roe deer or a red deer, we can distinguish between a menu with a lot of fish and a menu with a lot of meat. This difference is an important research topic for the habitation of Doggerland.

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Since the landscape was constantly changing and eventually ‘drowned’, this raises the question of how the people who lived there adapted their way of life and diet to the gradual changes in environment and surroundings. Because the finds are made along the beaches and because Doggerland is now sea, it is often thought that the Doggerland people were historically ‘coastal people’ and depended largely on a (marine) coastal environment for their diet. To gain insight into this, the ratio (δ) of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) was determined a few years ago from about 30 Mesolithic human bone fragments, taken from beaches or fished up from the North Sea. These values were then compared to reference data in a graph. Here, carbon isotope values are on the x-axis and nitrogen isotope values on the y-axis. For the diet of the Doggerland people, who lived in a temperate zone, a number of rules of thumb apply: a person who has eaten mainly food from plants and animals that live on land will be found at the bottom left of the graph (δ 13C low and δ 15N low), a person who has eaten mainly food from the sea will be found at the top right of the graph (δ 13C high and δ 15N high) and a person who has eaten mainly food from a freshwater environment (lakes and rivers) will be found at the top left of the graph (δ 13C low and δ 15N high). The image on the opposite page shows the Doggerland people data. We see that the majority of the data points are in the upper left-hand corner. This distribution indicates that the diet of these inhabitants was mainly influenced by food from a freshwater environment. Remarkably, no obvious marine signal is observed, which indicates that we should not consider these Doggerland people as coastal dwellers with a diet rich in seafood. Through geological research we know that the former Doggerland was cut by the downstream parts of the Rhine and Meuse. It is therefore likely that the Mesolithic inhabitants of Doggerland lived in a landscape of rivers, streams and lakes. As the landscape increasingly drowned, a huge freshwater wetland developed behind the coast. From knowledge gained from archaeological research on land and from biological studies, we know that these landscapes were very rich in diverse flora and fauna. So it seems that the Mesolithic people of Doggerland made ample use of these wetter conditions and adapted to them over time. A typical meal may have consisted of a combination of different animals and plants: pikeperch fillet first, followed by venison steak on a bed of spearmint with waternut. Isotope research does not only allow us to investigate the diet. By looking at the proportions of the different isotopes of the element oxygen (O), which we can extract from the tooth enamel of, for example, a red deer, we can investigate in which season the animal was killed and whether, for example, there was a preference for red deer or another species per season. Human tooth enamel enables us to reveal other hidden information. Hidden in our enamel is a special building block: the chemical element strontium (Sr). Like the aforementioned elements, strontium is absorbed into our bodies from our food. Strontium is hidden in the geological subsoil and the ratio of two different forms of strontium, 87Sr and 86Sr, is unique to the composition and age of that geology. When the geological subsoil weathers into a soil and plants start growing on it, they absorb the strontium from the subsoil into their leaves. And when humans or animals eat the plants, that same strontium is absorbed in a more or less unchanged form (in the ratio 87Sr/86Sr) and incorporated into our bones and tooth enamel as we grow.

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δ13C (‰ ) Schematic illustration of isotope ratios indicative of different diet types (based on Richards 2019 and Van der Plicht et al. 2016).

δ13C (‰ ) Results of the isotope study (red dots) shown on the standard isotope ratios of different diets (based on Richards 2019 and Van der Plicht et al. 2016).

Although our first permanent molars do not erupt until we are about six years old, the enamel of these teeth is formed from birth until roughly three years of age. Thus, the strontium from the food that we eat during our first three years of life is locked up in this molar. Since the 87Sr/86Sr ratio is unique to specific geological formations, by analysing the ratio in a person’s first permanent molar, we can investigate where (which geological formation) they spent the first three years of their life. If we repeat this analysis for the second molar and the third or wisdom tooth, we can even reconstruct an entire life history from birth to about the 16th year of life. With this, the question can be answered whether the Doggerland people mainly stayed in one place, or for example migrated with the animals, moving over large distances and between different geological units.

The future: so much is still possible! By examining both isotopes and DNA and combining them with morphological research, it is possible to unravel the extraordinary history of humans in Doggerland and their personal story. Where did they come from, how did they travel, what did they look like and what was on their menu: meat, fish or a combination of both? Extraordinary information, which can often be gleaned from just a piece of bone or a single tooth! The building blocks mentioned in this chapter are invisible to the naked eye, but in archaeological research they are of great importance nowadays. The application of isotope and ancient DNA research has pushed back the frontiers of human and animal skeleton research. We can now ask and answer new questions. Thus, every year the bones tell a more interesting and fascinating story. At the time of writing, only limited isotope and ancient DNA research has been applied to the human and animal remains from Doggerland, but we know that this will be of unprecedented scope and detail for Europe. We are therefore on the threshold of a new adventure. Who knows what we will be able to tell in a few years time.

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Joannes Dekker, Virginie Sinet-Mathiot, Alexander Verpoorte, Marie Soressi & Frido Welker

POINTS OF ANIMAL AND HUMAN BONE: SORTING WITH COLLAGEN Of the thousands of bones that wash up on the Dutch coast, only a small part can be visually identified by species. Fragmentation and taphonomic processes often destroy any external features that might be used for this purpose. The same applies to worked bones, such as bone and antler points. This is a pity, because especially for these and other rare artefacts, it is interesting to know from which species they were made. This tells us something about the choices people made in the past, for example whether they randomly used what was available. Recently, a new technique has been developed that can identify the animal species of bones in a different way: ZooMS. Application of this technique to Doggerland points has already yielded an intriguing discovery: some points turned out to be made of a very special material.

How does ZooMS work?

Barbed bone and antler points found on Dutch beaches.

ZooMS stands for Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry and identifies animal species based on differences in the collagen molecule structure in bones. Collagen is the most common protein in bone and gives it its strength. It is also found in skin, hair, antlers, teeth and connective tissue. Collagen preserves very well through time, better than DNA. It has even been found in fossils of 3.4 million years old. This makes it very suitable as an identification method, but how can collagen be used to identify the species of a bone? Proteins, such as collagen, consist of a series of amino acids. The order of this sequence is determined by the DNA of an animal. Consequently, differences in DNA also lead to differences in the amino acid order of the protein, and therefore the collagen molecule will be built differently between species. To identify the exact

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Schematic overview of the ZooMS method (Jan Dekker & Virginie Sinet-Mathiot).

structure of collagen, we use an enzyme, trypsin, to cut the molecule into pieces at specific places. The mass of these pieces varies between species. By measuring the mass of all the cut pieces, we create a ‘fingerprint’, and it is possible to determine which species the collagen comes from. Previous research has shown that ZooMS is a very reliable method and is usually able to identify a bone at the genus (species group) level.

Sampling: a necessary evil? ZooMS normally requires sampling of the bone. Although very small, less than half a grain of rice, one would rather not take samples of complete tools. Recently, therefore, non-destructive methods have been developed. One way is to put the bone in a ‘membrane box’. When you close the box with a bone in it, the bone is completely encapsulated by the membrane. The close contact creates a static electric force. This phenomenon is called contact electrification. Geckos use it to run up walls. This most likely causes miniscule amounts of collagen to cling to the membrane. We can then analyse these without damaging the bone. The effectiveness of this method was tested by comparing destructive protocols on ten Mesolithic points. With the destructive protocols, the species used could be traced in 90% of the cases. This is comparable to other

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Two points from Doggerland, made from human bone. They were found on the Zandmotor and Maasvlakte 1 by Willy van Wingerden and Gideon de Jong (scale 1:1; c. 7000-6000 BC).

A membrane box with a large barbed point (Merel Spithoven).

research and confirms the suitability of ZooMS as an identification technique. The membrane box protocol managed to identify the point in two out of ten cases, which confirms that there are possibilities to use ZooMS without destructive sampling.

A remarkable discovery Of the nine identified points, seven appeared to be made of red deer or elk. Because the collagen molecule of these two species is very similar, ZooMS sometimes cannot distinguish between these two deer species. The last two points turned out to be made of an unexpected material: human bone! The discovery of using human bone material is extraordinary. There are some other examples of the use of human bone in history, but it is not common and few examples are known of its use for projectile points. Further research will show whether the use of human bone was more widespread or whether our results are incidental. The wider application of ZooMS will enable archaeologists to identify previously ‘unreadable’ bones. Thanks to current developments, this will soon be possible without taking samples. As a result, important questions about the behaviour of people in the past, such as their preference for specific animal species, can be investigated on a large scale.

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Doggerland c. 16,000 years ago. The location of the Southern River is marked with a red star (Europe’s Lost Frontiers).

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Vince Gaffney & Simon Fitch

EUROPE’S LOST FRONTIERS: MAPPING THE LANDSCAPE In 2015 the European Research Council (ERC) funded an international, collaborative research programme Europe’s Lost Frontiers. Led by the University of Bradford (Great Britain) the project was designed to investigate Doggerland; the prehistoric landscape which now lies beneath the North Sea. These lands would have been a heartland of human occupation and were central to the process of re-settlement and colonisation of Northwest Europe after the retreat of the great ice sheets, and when sea levels rose between c.  18,000-5500  BC. These vast plains hold a unique and largely unexplored record of habitation and environment linked to climate change over millennia. Buried beneath metres of seawater and marine sediments, these lands had remained almost entirely unexplored by archaeologists. The project brings together experts from the fields of archaeology, geophysics, molecular biology and computer simulation to explore these enigmatic landscapes. Together, the project team is studying how the communities of the great plains reacted to climate change and the encroaching sea, as well as seeking clues to how these communities responded to the introduction of farming and the decline of hunter-gatherer society (c. 10,000-5500  BC). In doing so, the project study area incorporates a significant portion of the former area of Doggerland and includes roughly the area from northern England across to Denmark in the north, and down to the Dover Strait in the south; approximately 190,000 square kilometres.

Where to look? Arguably, the biggest challenge in the archaeological exploration of Doggerland, is knowing where to look. Without prior knowledge of the submerged landscape,

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looking for traces of human settlement within such large areas would be akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Chance finds from offshore areas do exist; the result of fishing, aggregate extraction and other offshore industrial development, including the construction of extensive windfarms. However, such discoveries are infrequent and rarely have any associated information regarding their actual origin. The project has a series of goals and methodologies that aim to assist archaeologists in exploring these inaccessible landscapes in a manner never previously achieved. Initially, researchers sought alternative routes to reconstruct the landscape and its environ­ment, and to assess how this changed over time and in response to sea level rise. With such information, researchers can integrate reconstructed land­scapes with settle­ment models for early societies and predict those areas that provide the best chances of locating evidence of human activity. Finally, the team sought to select areas which may be explored in detail. These rare sites not only have to possess a high probability of containing evidence for occupation; they also need to provide the conditions that allow those traces to be preserved following inundation and must be accessible to archaeological investigation despite burial under later sediments.

Deposits in 3D In order to locate such exceptional areas, the project used geophysical data collected by industry and through dedicated survey expeditions, to create a 3D model of the deposits which contain the lost landscape. Seismic reflection survey provides this information. This technology utilises acoustic energy which passes through underlying deposits but is reflected back at boundaries including old ground surfaces, or the channels of ancient rivers, now buried deep below the seabed. The time taken to record a reflection can be converted into an approximate depth and the continuous record generates a profile through the Earth’s surface, and with it an image of the buried, prehistoric landscape. The resolution and depth of penetration of an acoustic source is generally dictated by the wavelength of the acoustic source. High frequency sources give the best resolution and detail, but the signal weakens as it passes through underlying geology. Consequently, surveyors have to choose between high frequency sources that give good resolution but relatively shallow penetration, and low frequency sources which give good penetration but poor resolution. A wide range of landscape features have been identified during mapping including rivers, lakes, estuaries and deltas; as well as massive wetlands. The results of this work provided the team with maps of a prehistoric landscape, over an area of c. 45,000 square kilometres, buried deep below the southern North Sea.

Drilling for Doggerland Using the maps provided by seismic analysis, the project team devised a large-scale coring plan to extract sediment for analysis from significant landscape features within the study area. Two river systems were selected for this purpose. The first, unnamed palaeo-river flowed from the British mainland into the Outer Silver Pit – a submarine valley which originated as a great lake before sea levels rose. The second, smaller valley, known as the Southern River, was located only 30 kilometres offshore and roughly parallel to the Norfolk coast. Priority for study was given to those areas that seemed to provide a complex sequence of sediments and potential evidence for sea level rise. These sequences were most likely to provide environmental evidence

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3D scan of a hammerstone from the Southern River (scale 1:1; Europe’s Lost Frontiers).

for landscape change and clues to human responses to these. A smaller number of cores were also taken on top of the Dogger Bank, and these may represent some of the last flooded parts of the North Sea basin. Over a hundred core samples have been taken by the project from a series of survey expeditions. The cores have generated a considerable amount of scientific information. Radiocarbon and OSL-dating, isotopic and geochemical analyses, sedimentological studies, archaeomagnetic and palynological profiling, archaeobotanical and palaeo­ entomological reconstructions, and innovative sedimentary DNA (sedaDNA) techniques, have all been used to extract the most information possible from these small, but invaluable, samples of sediment and peat. Together these data have provided detailed evidence for the nature of the landscape, the vegetation that grew there and, in some cases, the animals that lived within the landscape. See the illustration of core ELF003 as an example of such a core, showing a cross-section through

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Core ELF003 and associated seismic line. The boundaries between different sediments and environments found in the core are reflected in the geophysical image (Europe’s Lost Frontiers).

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Key A. B. C. D. E. F. G.

G Modern marine sands Outer estuarine sands and silts Organic rich layer (reeds) Inner estuarine silts and sands River silts and sands Coarse river sand Glacial clay (Late Pleistocene)

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a prehistoric river channel and a core taken to examine the sediment sequence as the North Sea silts up during inundation. Occasionally, the project has also found dramatic evidence for catastrophic natural events linked to climate change. One core provided evidence for the Storegga tsunami. Roughly 8150 years ago, a submarine landslide off the western coast of southern Norway generated the largest known tsunami in Holocene history. Evidence of the impact of the wave created by the landslip can be seen across western Scandinavia, northeastern Britain, Denmark, the Faroes and as far away as Greenland. Until now, there has been no evidence for the Storegga event in the southern North Sea. One core collected not far from the Southern River has provided the first evidence for the impact of this wave on the east coast of prehistoric Britain. Here, the impact of the tsunami resulted in a large deposit of stones and broken shells sandwiched between laminated estuarine sediments. Remarkably, analyses of the sediments indicate that the deposits result from three major waves hitting land and retreating. All the data from the project’s cores have been used within computer models to refine and improve our understanding of sea level change over time. The data from the seismic mapping, sedimentary DNA and palaeo-environmental analysis have now been integrated with the evolving landscape to create dynamic models of the changing geomorphology and ecology of Doggerland from the beginning of the Holocene, around 10,000 BC until its eventual total inundation around 5500 BC. In an ambitious departure from conventional approaches, the intention is to use complexity system models to investigate the dynamic interaction between the environment and those resource rich locations, such as estuaries, lakes and wetlands, that would have been attractive to Mesolithic occupation. In combination with existing archaeological knowledge, these locations are now being tested as potential locations of human occupation within the submerged landscape.

Testing at sea In May 2019, the Belgian research vessel Belgica undertook an expedition to test these models, along with researchers from Europe’s Lost Frontiers, the Flanders Marine Institute, the Dutch TNO and Ghent University. One of the areas surveyed was also located near the estuary of the Southern River. Cores from the channel suggested this was an active watercourse roughly 8830 years ago. Dredging here retrieved several prehistoric worked flakes. Although this material is still under study, the assemblage includes a broken hammer stone. The recovery of finds currently represents the only early archaeological material recovered from the deeper areas of the North Sea through a programme of landscape prospection. The results of recent research demonstrate that our knowledge of the submerged prehistoric landscapes of the southern North Sea has increased very considerably. Some  20  years ago, most archaeologists believed that these submerged lands were entirely inaccessible to researchers. Today we can map inundated, prehistoric landscapes that are as large as many European countries. With the most recent research, carried out by Europe’s Lost Frontiers, archaeologists are now able to predict areas of potential past human activity, and even where settlements may be located, and to prospect these with an enhanced likelihood of success. This has been a massive achievement following years of dedicated research by archaeologists and scientists from around Europe, and we can now look forward to exploring these lost lands further and revealing their secrets.

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Tine Missiaen & Ruth Plets

ON COURSE TO THE BROWN BANK: RESEARCH IN THE NORTH SEA The Brown Bank is a 30-kilometre-long sand ridge, situated halfway between the Dutch and British coast, about 200 kilometres south of the Dogger Bank. The whole area is characterised by a series of long, north-south oriented sand ridges and gullies. The Brown Bank itself rises some 20 metres above the surrounding seabed, which is on average 30 metres deep. Although the Brown Bank is now reasonably stable in a marine environment, the area has an eventful history behind it. Sediments under the sandbanks bear witness to periods when the sea level was much lower, rivers flowed, estuaries took shape and the area was dry. About 10,000 years ago when sea levels started to rapidly rise again, the North Sea gradually penetrated the area and waves and tides eroded the sediments and reworked them into the sand ridges we know today. However, much of the ancient drowned landscapes remains. Researchers at work on RV Simon Stevin: cores are taken to investigate the stratigraphy of the seabed. In the Brown Bank project, this was mainly to map buried peat (Flanders Marine Institute).

Archeologically interesting The Brown Bank is a well-known area among sea fishers. Apart from fish, bones of all kinds of extinct prehistoric land animals end up in the nets: especially Pleistocene fossils of mammoths, wild horses and elk. In addition, there are indications of human habitation, especially from the Mesolithic: bones and antlers clearly worked with sharp tools, as well as some of the stone tools themselves (all between  13,500 and 9000 years old). These and other finds from the Dutch part of the North Sea, in combination with our renewed knowledge of Mesolithic Doggerland itself, make it very likely that our ancestors hunted, wandered and lived in the area of the Brown Bank.

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Map showing the location of the Brown Bank and data collected in 2018 and 2019 on board RV Belgica and RV Simon Stevin (bathymetric background data provided via EMODnet Bathymetry Consortium (2016): EMODnet Digital Bathymetry (DTM)).

However, the search for prehistoric habitation at the bottom of the sea is like looking for a needle in a haystack. We do not know exactly where the archaeological finds and the (worked) bone material were collected, because in practice fishers drag their nets over a large area. Most of the material is found in the gullies next to the sand ridge. This indicates that it is buried in a soil layer of the drowned landscape that is now being eroded under water. The big challenge is to identify and map this layer before erosion removes everything. So far, no concrete traces of Mesolithic camps or settlements have been found in the entire Doggerland landscape, but the Brown Bank is the ideal candidate to change that. The area of the Brown Bank covers almost 1300  square  kilometres, the deeper parts of the gullies can reach a depth of 60 metres, the water can be very cold and the currents treacherous; it is impossible to explore this entire area with divers. Therefore, it is essential that, as a first step, large-scale archaeological research is carried out using marine scientific techniques on board well-equipped research vessels.

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RV Simon Stevin: the Flemish multidisciplinary research vessel (Flanders Marine Institute).

New research The first step in the search for this widespread, drowned Meso­ lithic landscape is to map the different deposits buried under the seabed and to determine which of these were formed in a terrestrial environment, before the quest for the archaeological material can begin. In 2018, the Anglo-Belgian-Dutch research project Deep History: Revealing the palaeo-landscape of the southern North Sea started (a  consortium formed by University of Bradford, the Flanders Marine Institute, Ghent University and the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research). In April 2018, the research vessel RV Belgica went on towards the Brown Bank to map the seabed and under­ lying sediments using acoustic techniques. By using different sound sources simultaneously, a picture could be formed of what is located deep under the sandbanks (up to approximately 100  metres under the sea floor), and the most recent deposits could be studied in unprecedented detail. During the May 2019 survey, these acoustic data were further supplemented and dredging was carried out in areas where possible peat layers are

On course to the Brown Bank

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surfacing. Such peat surfaces can only form on land, away from saltwater influence, and thus give a good indication for prehistoric land surfaces. In September 2019, the research vessel RV Simon Stevin was deployed to take short sediment cores at welldefined locations. Such cores can take soil samples up to 3 metres below the seabed and provide information on landscape changes over the last 10,000 years. The many hundreds of square  kilometres of acoustic data show a dynamically buried landscape that was crosscut by rivers and subjected to ice, wind and water activity before being swallowed by the North Sea. Several peat layers were mapped and successfully sampled thanks to the dredged material and sediment cores. One of the peat layers has been dated and appears to be just under 10,000 years old. This fits with the age of the worked bone material fished out around the Brown Bank and shows that we are approaching the discovery of the archaeologically important layer. The dredged material contained peat blocks, wood, charcoal and unprocessed flints. These discoveries show that the prehistoric organic material is well preserved in the area, giving us a good chance to discover intact archaeological sites.

What will the future bring? All data are currently being combined and studied in detail to create maps showing where peat layers formed, where rivers flowed, where higher or lower areas were in the landscape, and where this drowned landscape is now eroding. This should allow us to predict where in the landscape Mesolithic people were likely to settle (usually on sand dunes near water and fens), and where the archaeological material is easily accessible. Further surveys at sea are already planned to investigate such areas in more detail, and to map the first in situ Mesolithic site in Doggerland.

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Bone socketed adze made from the metatarsal of a bovine animal, fished up by the GO 14 in 2004 off the English Banks, North Sea (13.6 cm; c. 9000‑6000 BC).

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Part 5

DOGGERLAND TODAY Doggerland may be under water, but it is far from forgotten. Every day, enthusiastic collectors comb the beaches for finds from our past. Fishers keep finding fossil bones in their nets, and research boats regularly go out into the North Sea to investigate the drowned landscape. The more we learn about Doggerland, the more it begins to infiltrate our world today. Doggerland inspires and we find it more and more often in popular media and products. Finally, Doggerland has some wise lessons for us about our changing world and how we should deal with it.

A Mesolithic blade found by Cèdric Heins on Maasvlakte 2 (Frans de Winter).

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Luc Amkreutz & Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof

COLLECTING DOGGERLAND

The many discoveries discussed in this book were almost all accidental. That does not mean that they were made by chance. They are the result of the perseverance of many dedicated searchers and collectors. These amateur archaeologists and palaeontologists devote many hours to their collection in a professional manner. This of course concerns the preservation, documentation, registration and publication of their finds, often in close cooperation with universities and museums, but also the thousands of hours spent on the beaches, in all kinds of weather and often without result. Without their efforts we could not tell these tales. The stories in this chapter are from a small group of collectors, but they represent all of them! A large number of searchers cooperate enthusiastically with researchers and regularly donate finds or make pieces available for study. Unfortunately, we cannot name them all here. With the knowledge that we are forgetting people, for which we apologise, we would like to mention a number of persons and groups who have contributed in an important way to the formation of a national collection of prehistory from the North Sea, housed at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities and various occasions of research and display: the Dutch Association for the Study of Pleistocene Mammals (Werkgroep voor Pleistocene Zoogdieren; WPZ), the family of Jan Hendriks and Adrie de Vries and the collectors Kees van Hooij­donk, Charlie Schouwenburg, Bram Langeveld, Kommer Tanis, Theo Lambrechts, Greg Harkema, Niels van Steijn, Klaas Post, Albert Hoekman, Dick Mol, Dick Duineveld, North Sea Fossils, Willy van Wingerden, Peter Wiesenhaan, Hester Loeff, Luc Anthonis, Jan Meulmeester, Donny Chrispijn, Jan Glimmerveen, Karsten Wentink, Mrs Gossen, Mrs Speleers, Mrs Zwennes, Mrs Hogervorst-Planken, Mrs Quist, Mrs Schutte, Mrs Boon, Mr Lausberg, Mr Wolters, Mr Van der Ham, Mr De Waard, Mr Hogervorst and Mr Machiels, the late Mr De Graaf, Peter, Aiden and Chase Pronk and the RMO Postma-Bosch Fund for prehistoric North Sea archaeology. They and many others: thank you!

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From hyena to world-famous pitch Willy van Wingerden Born on: 17 April 1961 Living in: Honselersdijk, the Netherlands Profession: healthcare provider Collecting since: 2013

I am a Westlander in heart and soul. Since 2013 I have been under the spell of the Zandmotor and the remarkable finds that resurrect Doggerland from oblivion. I will never forget the find of 1 November 2015. The conditions were superb; far too warm in fact for the time of year. It was my father’s birthday, and I was thinking of him. Of how cold it always was on his birthday. Looking out over the sea, 5  metres to my left, little children in bathing costumes, playing in the sea. Fishers at 5 metres to my right. As I stood with my bare feet in the sea, which was still warm, I thought about climate change. I was dressed in a camisole, because the weather was really summery and I was quite hot. As I stood there I looked to the left and to the right, and then to the left again... Suddenly I spotted the jawbone – just washed ashore – and I had a small heart attack. It was fantastic! At first I didn’t know what it was. Someone suggested lion, but when I got home I looked into the literature and saw that the jaw was from a hyena. The four molars and the wear and tear caused by chewing on bones proved to be characteristic of hyenas. I was very happy and very proud that this happened to me. But it did not stop there. I could not have predicted what other spectacular things would come my way. Six months later, I found something that made archaeologist Marcel Niekus break out in a cold sweat! “Put a wet cloth around it and touch it as little as possible,” he said. “We have to study this!” The result of that examination was astounding. The small piece of flint with black encrustation turned out not to be 10,000 years old, but 50,000 years old! The now world-famous pitch artefact is a top find, museum-worthy and an important North Sea discovery for the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities. What an honour!

A freshly found flint (Willy van Wingerden).

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Willy with the hyena jawbone on Maas­vlakte 2 (Frans de Winter).

The thrill of searching... and finding! Ivan van Marrewijk Born on: 4 September 2000 Living in: Kwintsheul, the Netherlands Occupation: e  mployee/stock filler at Albert Heijn supermarket  Study: social work Haagse Hogeschool Collecting since: 2014

Since I was 13 years old, I have been actively collecting fossils and artefacts from the Dutch beaches (Zandmotor, Maasvlakte  2 and Hoek van Holland). I walk on the Zandmotor about twice a week. For me, searching is fun, because you never know what you’ll find. Sometimes you walk on the beach for days on end, through all kinds of weather, and you find nothing and then one day you suddenly have a full bag. I also like the feeling that you can hold an artefact, that someone made 10,000 years ago (or more), for the first time in thousands of years. For example, that someone had made a beautiful knife to strip the skin off a freshly caught mammoth, then threw the piece away, after which the North Sea fills up and the piece lay on the seabed for thousands of years. And then the piece is sucked up from the seabed and deposited on the Zandmotor, where you pick it up again.

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Ivan on the beach of the Zandmotor with a barbed point that he found (Frans de Winter).

My collection consists of all kinds of animals, from mice to mammoths and from red deer to cave lions. I have also found around 500 artefacts. My interest in artefacts in particular has grown a lot in recent years! This is mainly because I have learned a great deal about how to recognise them. It also appeals to your imagination that you are holding something from a time when everything was different. A bone spearhead from about 10,000 years ago is my best artefact, and my best animal find is a rhino jaw with three molars. What is still on my wish list is a beautiful predator’s tooth. Hyena, lion or bear, with a slight preference for the lion. and in the field of artefacts I would prefer a bone fragment from a Neanderthal, but a nice flint spearhead would also be very cool!

Ivan’s boot and a freshly found fragment of mammoth tusk (Ivan van Marrewijk).

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Dancing with the ocean and the past Emma Louise Wyn Jones Born on: 30 April 1993 Living in: Cambridgeshire, Great Britain Profession: Heritage Media Interpreter Collecting since: 2020

It’s a warm summer’s day on the Norfolkshire coast and I make my way down to the shoreline. From here, the beach stretches 3 miles east towards the small town of Happisburgh, well known for the discovery of a beautiful Palaeolithic handaxe and some fossilised early human footprints. With sand underneath my feet, I stash my sandals in my backpack alongside my water bottle and picnic before I begin my dance with the ocean. I’ve timed my arrival with the tides to give me an optimum amount of time to scour the beach for hidden gems. I fall into a pattern as the waves rush and retreat, walking methodically back and forth. My eyes scan the ground below acting as a human version of a metal detector, leaving no stone, pebble or shard overlooked. It doesn’t matter if my feet get wet but I play the game with the water’s edge, darting up the beach as a wave grows closer before chasing its tail to see if it’s left any goodies behind! Hunting for worked flint on this beach is nothing like fieldwalking. With so much flint littering the shoreline, every wave lends the opportunity for it to be rolled and tumbled leaving behind hundreds of seabattered pieces and flakes, ready to trick even a well-trained eye. The hours pass and I pick up countless false leads. At most I have a small handful of worked flakes in my pocket with their familiar bulbs of percussion. The sun is now high in the sky as I wander up and down. My eyes scan automatically, they’re learning to spot the pretenders and I now opt to nudge potentials with

my

foot

before

reaching

down to inspect. I feel my mind wandering and I decide it’s time for lunch. Another wave pushes me up the beach and as I go to take another step, directly below me is unmistakably a small handaxe. It’s the first handaxe I’ve ever found and I look down in disbelief before quickly scooping it up away from the incoming wave. The water that rushes over my feet is welcomingly

Emma with her handaxe on the beach (James Dilley).

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refreshing as I hold the patinated flint up to inspect it. As the wave retreats, I place my find back on the sand where it was found to take an in situ photograph which I link to a GPS position I take of where I’m standing. A little further down the beach at Happisburgh, an offshore research team is diving an underwater site that their data so far indicates could be one of the possible sources of these artefacts. By recording my find in situ and passing on this information to the research team, this allows them to continue to build a clearer picture of where artefacts are being deposited by the sea and can give an indication of where they may have originated. It’s a good habit to get into even if you are fairly certain the artefact has been moved outside of its primary context. Artefacts are sometimes found near to their original context and in rare cases in their original context (for example where there have been cliff falls) which can give researchers vital clues to piece together an often complex picture. Later that same day I picked up the proximal end of a laminar flint blade that would have been detached by an anatomically modern human. So far in this area only a small amount of material has been found that can be definitively attributed to the Upper Palaeolithic. Because of the rarity of these finds, it demonstrates the importance of recording and reporting to build a more complete picture of the past. It’s amazing to think that a walk along the beach on a warm summer’s day might just change our understanding of our ancient human past with little more than a smartphone.

Goosebumps from a stone Hester Loeff Born on: 14 April 1975 Living in: Zierikzee, the Netherlands Profession: curiosity cabinet maker and nature researcher Collecting since: 2014

I have been a fanatic fossil collector since early 2015. I prefer to search on the beach of Maasvlakte 2 because there you can find amazing things, like bones and molars of the woolly mammoth and rhinoceros, steppe wisent, primeval horse but also of large predators from the last ice age. On 19 March 2015, I also went to the Maasvlakte, a long journey from Zierikzee, but I was happy to make the trip. As always, I parked at P5, the Hoekse slag. As I crossed the beach passage I saw fresh footprints. Too bad, someone had beaten me to it. There are quite a few searchers, on some days you can easily find five others, and that does not increase your chances of success. In the wake of my predecessor I walked along the low tide line. It wasn’t going to happen. I had collected some shells and small stuff like mouse-teeth, but that was it. On the way back, not far from the beach, I suddenly saw a piece of stone that was different from all the other stones. I picked it up, but had no

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Hester with her Middle Palaeolithic scraper (Frans de Winter).

idea what it was. I took a few photos and put them on the Facebook page of the Dutch Association for the Study of Pleistocene Mammals (Werkgroep Pleistocene Zoogdieren; WPZ) and on the ancient find checker (www.oervondstchecker.nl) and soon the first comments came in. First some cautious reactions, “that it was probably a flake, but people missed the percussion waves”. Later came the connoisseurs and they answered that it was most probably a Levallois flake. I had no idea what it meant and the word ‘Palaeolithic’ was also a new term to me. But Neanderthal production, that I understood! A cabinet of curiosities full of North Sea finds made by Hester (Hester Loeff).

If that was the case, it meant that I had in my hands a tool made by a Neanderthal! I was the first person, after that Neanderthal, ever to have that flake in my

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hands! A realisation like that gives you goosebumps from head to toe, and I still get chills when I tell about it or think about it. The Levallois flake has been examined by an expert and has been entered into a database. For years the Levallois flake had a place of honour in my collection, because it is and remains my best find ever! As it is cultural heritage I recently donated it to the National Museum of Antiquities. In the meantime, I will keep on searching on the Maasvlakte, because let’s be honest: it is a beautiful place.

The Klûvedûker (bone diver) Kommer Tanis Born on: 13 April 1964 Living in: Havenhoofd, the Netherlands Profession: sea fisher Collecting since: 1980

My father used to say it when I was very young, “such a strange boy” (after a book by W.G. van de Hulst). He never understood what possessed me to collect. I myself know nothing else than that I have collected naturalia all my life. Fortunately, my mother was more understanding and encouraged me in her own modest way. But as always, there were limits: birds’ eggs were ok, but their nests were not allowed into my bedroom, nor was the skeleton of my grandfather’s dog. That hurt. But satisfaction and pain, any passionate collector will recognise. I have collected: shells, eggs, stones, recent bones and fossils. How does one come to build such an extensive collection? Two main things are indispensable: a tic and avarice. As I mentioned above, I have a tic for naturalia and beauty in general, it grabs me and moves me. Unfortunately, as a Christian I also have to admit to possessing unbridled greed. The Bible puts it very aptly: “The world has two daughters (and their names are) Give (and) Give!”. One of the first things I could say as a child was: “Kommer waa, Kommer want!” By collecting recent skeleton parts, and partly due to the profession of my father and grandfather – sea fishing – I ended up with fossils from the Pleistocene. There are millions in the North Sea. My grandfather fished with the so-called otter trawl and later with the beam trawl for flatfish in the southern North Sea first from home port Goedereede-Havenhoofd and from the Delta Works from Stellendam. So when I came on board as a child, I saw mammoth fossils and more for the first time. At one point, I must have been about 16 years old, there was a part of a woolly mammoth’s pelvis on the spare net on deck, that’s where it all started. From the age of 19 onwards, I started fishing myself and went on to collect fossil skeletal parts of Pleistocene mammals. One of the hurdles many young collectors have to take is starting a relationship and getting married. My girl and current wife has never been fond

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Kommer with his son and a number of mammoth bones from his collection, including a large femur (upper leg) (Hans Wiltschut).

of my collecting passion but has not inhibited it either, at least no more than expected. It is nice that she gradually developed a liking for archaeological finds from the North Sea, so that finding a certain balance is a lot easier. I have been collecting for 40 years now and understandably, the collection has grown considerably. After a hundred or so pieces, I started to get into the swing of things, partly because of other collectors. After I met Dick Mol, the

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pressure rose to the red zone. Collectors can be a burden and a joy to each other, but up to now our passion has only strengthened us. Two different people and minds, but one in passion. Because I have been fishing in the North Sea since I was a teenager, I have been able to collect many pieces from the catch myself, almost like finding them in situ. Together with a fellow fisher who, like me, had his own cutter, we undertook several expeditions in the Eurogeul area with varying success. The best catch was half a lower jaw of a young mammoth with a dp2 and dp3 (molars) in it that my son just managed to pick up before they were washed overboard. Furthermore, thousands of pieces in my collection were obtained from other fishers for a fee. Since a few years, I have also been buying pieces from all over the circumpolar region of the northern hemisphere via the Internet. One of the most beautiful pieces in the collection is a thigh bone of a forest elephant (Elephas antiquus) caught by a cutter from Goeree in the Stenengeul, a stretch in the southern North Sea off Katwijk. But there are thousands of other pieces, often of equal scientific value. Fortunately, in the Netherlands we have a fruitful cooperation between amateurs and professionals in the field of North Sea palaeontology, and I sincerely hope that this cooperation will continue.

Combing the Norfolk beaches... Darren Nicholas & Joanne Leonard Born on: 16 August 1967

Born on: 1 April 1971

Living in: Norwich, Norfolk, Great Britain

Living in: Norwich, Norfolk, Great Britain

Occupation: social care worker

Occupation: assistant accountant

We developed an interest in history from watching the television series Time Team. We have always enjoyed walking on the local beaches in Norfolk and from our new found interest in Palaeolithic history in 2013 we began to find fossils and what we thought could possibly be lithic artefacts on the surface of the beaches. We later had these fossils and lithics identified at a local fossil roadshow organised by The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) team. Having these identified and learning more about the artefacts from the experts encouraged us to continue with our collecting. Following this we also learned about the existence of Doggerland. Our collection covers any faunal and floral remains and flint artefacts from the Palaeolithic period at local Norfolk beaches. The faunal collection includes hippo, elephant, rhino, cave bear and giant beaver among others. The floral remains are mainly made up of pine cones from Palaeolithic sediments within Happisburgh beach. The flint artefacts are varied and include handaxes, cores, flakes and retouched flakes.

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Darren holding a handaxe (Joanne Leonard).

We like the fact that you never quite know what you will find and that you could possibly find something that has never been found before. The artefacts we find often lead to further research and better understanding of the Palaeolithic history of the area. If we come away from the beach emptyhanded, at the end of the day we at least we have had a nice walk on the beach! It is difficult to point out our favourite find, but if pushed it would have to be our first handaxe found back in 2013 and identified at the fossil roadshow which led to our interest in collecting and collaboration with the AHOB team, now PAB (Pathways to Ancient Britain).

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Joanne at the site of sediments with tree and pine cone remains (Darren Nicholas).

Imagination running wild by Doggerland Meinbert Gozewijn van Soest Born in: 1964 Living in: Amsterdam Profession: visual artist Collecting since: 1974

At the edge of the Netherlands, on our unsurpassed beaches, begins a drowned world: Doggerland. A world that, with a few finds, conjures up an improbably large landscape that stretches endlessly in my imagination. For a year now, I have been searching the beaches of Bergen aan Zee, Egmond and Camperduin, sometimes Petten and Texel. I grew up in Bergen and as a child walked around dry peat banks on the beach at Camperduin. The story went around that they were the remains of Doggerland. It fired my imagination, and I wanted to become an archaeologist or palaeontologist. But I became an artist, and one of the projects I have been working on for quite some time is the Relics Museum (www.relikwieenmuseum.nl). A collection of things that to me say something about the relationship between eternity and impermanence. About knowing you are mortal, and at the same time knowing that you are a link in an endless chain of life. My most beautiful find comes from the beach of Bergen aan Zee, a Levallois core with a shiny black patina. It is exciting and refreshing at the same time to hold the stone in your hand, knowing that someone held it at least 30,000 years ago. What kind of weather would it have been at that time? What were they eating that night? Was there a father carving a toy bear cub for his child from a piece of wood or bone? This is what I would like to find: an object that clearly shows that such sentiments were alive and well back then.

Meinbert in his studio with his most beautiful find (Meinbert Gozewijn van Soest).

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Meinbert’s Levallois core (Frans de Winter).

Best find? Impossible to choose! Patrick Ouwehand Born on: 30 August 1987 Living in: Katwijk, the Netherlands Occupation: public attendant (and collection assistant) at Naturalis and personal trainer Collecting since: 2014

As a young boy, I used to wander about town and countryside (dunes and beach...) looking for bones, coins, stones, shells, etc. My gaze was (almost) always directed to the ground. Searching and collecting are in my blood. In 2014, I ‘discovered’ the Maasvlakte 2 and the Zandmotor. Two beaches that, because they were raised with sand from the North Sea, are now rich in fossil remains and artefacts from the ice age, among others. A true Valhalla for hikers, fossil hunters, beachcombers, seekers, or whatever you want to call it.

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I myself can be found most on the Zandmotor. The first years, I went there once a week, but due to lack of time, that has become a bit less. Through the years, I’ve been able to find a lot of beautiful things, like teeth and bones of mammoths, rhinoceroses, bears, several teeth of white sharks (the so-called GW’s – Great Whites), a tusk of a walrus, a jaw of a (big) wolf, an ulna of a young beluga, several artefacts made of flint and bone, a 9000-year-old piece of human skull (dated in Groningen) etc. Every single one of them beautiful finds, some because of their appearance, completeness or rarity and others because of the story they tell. For this reason I find it difficult to label one of my finds as ‘best find’. I have been able to pick up many beautiful things but there is still one that is very high on my list and that is a point: the tip of an arrow, spear or harpoon to be precise, made of bone or antler. A piece of Patrick and his collection (Patrick Ouwehand).

Mesolithic crafting that I hope to find one day. So there is always something to wish for.

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Beach trips became different… Renate Wolthuis Born on: 7 September 1976 Living in: Melissant Profession: retail sales assistant Collecting since: 2018

My interest in fossils started in the spring of 2018 when my eldest son came home from school with a fossilised cattle vertebra.  He had received it from Kommer Tanis, who had told him about fossils and where to find them in his class. We thought it was great! We don’t live that far from the Maasvlakte area, so we had been going there for a while, but from then on our visits to the beach changed.  Now I can be found on the beach of Maasvlakte  2 every week, full of enthusiasm, enjoying the nature around me and looking for all the beautiful things from the past. This is what I like about this hobby: you are out and about and every search is exciting.  You never know what will cross your path! Sometimes I spend up to 30 hours a month searching the beach, depending on the season. The past few years, I have found a lot of interesting things: bones, molars and teeth of all kinds of prehistoric animals, but also artefacts, tools and points from the Mesolithic and Palaeolithic era! There were some very special finds

Renate and her mammoth baby molar (Frans de Winter).

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too, but the most special to me was a baby mammoth’s baby tooth (dp2). It’s the first molar a mammoth gets in its life, and ‘mine’ hasn’t been chewed yet. So it must have been from a very young baby mammoth, or probably even from an unborn mammoth foetus. I hope to do many more great searches on the beach... because although I’ve had a lot of luck, there is still so much I’d like to find – I have a veritable wish list!

I have my finds on loan Kees van Hooijdonk Born on: 6 August 1952 Living in: Rucphen Profession: customs officer (retired) Collecting since: 1976

My great passion is collecting mammal fossils. I have a very inquisitive nature and when I think about it, that is where my hobby originated. On the beach, I used to scour the waterline for anything that had washed up. One day I found a piece of stone with leaf prints on it: “...but that doesn’t belong on the beach at all, does it?” By delving into the literature, I discovered that the stone had come from mine-waste material used in the Delta Works. A new hobby was born! As a starting fossil collector, you want to collect all the fossils you can find, but considering the overwhelming amount, you can’t keep up with

A drawer from Kees’ collection (Kees van Hooijdonk).

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Kees with one of the handaxes he found near Yerseke (Frans de Winter).

that. Therefore I focused on fossils of Pleistocene mammals like the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and cave lion. During a meeting of the Dutch Association for the Study of Pleistocene Mammals (Werkgroep Pleistocene Zoogdieren; WPZ), I was directed to a shell processing plant in Zeeland, where many fossils and artefacts were found which originated from the North Sea. In consultation with the management I was able to collect there for many years and built up a collection of over 3000 fossils and artefacts. The interesting thing about my collection is its diversity: fossils from the beginning of the ice age – when there was a warm period with mastodons, saber-toothed cats and monkeys – and fossils from the end of the ice age, when there was a cold period, with woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses and cave bears. I have fossils of all these animals in my collection. Perhaps not the most beautiful, but certainly the most special are the fossils of the sabre-toothed cat Homotherium, including a complete heel bone that was discovered in my collection by Klaas Post at a time when hardly anyone had heard of the animal. Special are some very old handaxes: not fossils in the literal sense, but a direct indication of the presence of Neanderthals. Collecting is no longer allowed on the shell heap: too dangerous and no insurance company wants to cover the risks. But this does give your collection a new dimension: from collecting to studying. I have published and lectured on various finds and thus transferred some of my knowledge. I have now donated part of my collection to the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities.

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Finding the most beautiful things close to home Mirjam Kruizinga Born on: 28 September 1989 Living in: Vlaardingen, the Netherlands Collecting since: 2016

In April 2016, I attended a determination day at the Museon together with my boyfriend. Until then we knew little about fossils. Collecting fossils always seemed fun to me and I was planning to maybe do that on a holiday at some point. That day at the Museon opened our eyes. Collectors showed their finds to amateur palaeontologists. We were amazed that such beautiful things could be found so close to home! After this meeting, we started searching on the beach of Maasvlakte  2. In the beginning, we came back with nothing relevant, but after a while we started to recognise the bone material. Facebook and the ancient find checker (www.oervondstchecker.nl) helped us enormously. We saw other people’s finds passing by and learned to recognise the material. Over the years, our collection has grown bit by bit. Searching is relaxing and it is always a surprise whether you will find something or not. On average, we search once a week. Maasvlakte  2 and the Zandmotor are our favourite search locations. We mainly collect animal

Two top finds from Mirjam’s collection (Frans de Winter).

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Mirjam with her mini-handaxe on the beach of Maasvlakte 2 (Frans de Winter).

material and artefacts. Our collection consists of molars and bones of animals that used to live in this area, like cattle, horses, deer, mammoths, sharks, beavers, rhinoceroses, foxes and bears. Our collection also consists of some Palaeolithic and Mesolithic artefacts. The most beautiful finds of our collection are the two points made of bone and antler, a flint handaxe and a molar of a baby mammoth. Almost every searcher has a list of what they would like to find. On our list are fossil human material and a predator’s tooth from a bear, lion or hyena. No idea if we will ever find these, but we are very pleased with what we have found so far!

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Dreaming of a complete skeleton Cèdric Heins Born on: 16 January 2006 Living in: Almere Education: high school Collecting since: 2018

I have been collecting things from nature since I was 7 years old. When we heard in the spring of 2018 that you could find fossils at Maasvlakte  2, we went straight there to look. On that very first day, we found two ball joints of a mammoth. Since then, we drive from Almere to the Maasvlakte every weekend. We leave early in the morning and come home in the afternoon. Once in a while, we go to the Zandmotor, but we mainly find fish vertebrae there, so the Maasvlakte is more fun. We find beautiful things every week. My whole room is fitted with show­ cases and cupboards to desalinate, dry, exhibit and preserve my fossil collection. We have fossils of many different animals like mammoth, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, beaver, desman, turtle, horse, cattle, deer, wolf/dog, hyena, giant eel, fish, lion, bear and forest elephant. But also various artefacts made by humans, such as bone points, flint flakes and cores, blades and a scraper. All finds are placed on their own shelf in the showcases and I have a separate showcase for finds made by humans. The first time we found a worked flint was very special. The idea that thousands of years later you are the first person to hold it. Two of our finds, a piece of human skull and a bone point with pitch remains, were loaned out for scientific research. I am very curious about the results. I hope to find a dp2 (baby tooth) from a mammoth, a snake vertebra, a desman molar, a frog bone, a flint axe and an awl soon. My dream is to find enough bones of each species so that I can put a complete skeleton together. I have made a good start!

Cèdric with his collection (Cèdric Heins).

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Luc Amkreutz, Rachel Bynoe, Bjørn Smit & Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof

SEARCHING THE COAST AND MAKING FINDS: WHAT THEN? Mammalian fossils and stone tools are regularly found on the beaches of Great Britain and the Netherlands, either eroding out of deposits, washing up on beaches or as the result of beach replenishment schemes depositing Pleistocene sands from offshore. These important prehistoric finds from the North Sea are the subject of this book and their recovery is largely down to the vigilance of collectors and interested parties along both the Dutch and British coastlines. These are often called amateur archaeologists and palaeontologists, although there is little ‘amateur’ about them. They are mostly driven people, young and old, with very diverse backgrounds, who in their spare time dive deep into the past. In the open air, they passionately search among the heaps of shells and gravel on the wharfs, but especially on the beaches, covering many kilometres and spending many hours staring at the ground and the surf. Once back home, among the bones and artefacts, at least as much time is spent on arranging and cataloguing the collected finds, sometimes with an almost museumlike professionalism. It is thanks to the cooperation of recreational and professional enthusiasts that we know so much about the human and animal inhabitants of Doggerland. The reporting of finds is central to this, and for certain types of finds legally required. Below, we briefly present the most important information.

Freshly found finds and fossils (Patrick Konstapel, Rick van Bragt, Sibo van Maren, Ivan van Marrewijk, Willy van Wingerden & Renate Wolthuis).

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Found animal remains? A large part of the find material from the North Sea concerns animal remains. There is no official reporting obligation for the (fossil) remains of animals that died long ago in the Netherlands or Great Britain, but it is of great importance that many finds are identified; for yourself, but also for the scientists who may be looking for that very species. There are various ways to share your finds and make them known to the world. A good move is to post them on either the Facebook group Fossil Collectors UK or the Facebook page of the Dutch Association for the Study of Pleistocene Mammals (Werkgroep Pleistocene Zoogdieren; WPZ), or, even better, to become a member of this workgroup. You can also post your finds on www.paleontica.org. On this website and through these associations you can also find handy tips on how to best handle (Pleistocene) bone material. Such material can sometimes disintegrate without proper treatment. Specifically for the Dutch Maasvlakte 2, there is the ancient find checker (www.oervondstchecker.nl) that has been taken over from the Port of Rotterdam Authority by Naturalis. Pleistocene animal finds from the coast can also be reported at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam. A freshly collected fossil found by Willy van Wingerden (Willy van Wingerden).

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Found an archaeological object ? Between all the animal bones, especially on the beaches, archaeological finds are regularly found, such as (pre)historic artefacts: flint tools and working waste but also tools made of bone and antler. Even pieces of bone or antler with cutting or chopping marks can count as archaeo­logical finds. Whilst artefacts from British beaches are, in principal, owned by the Crown Estate, there is no obligation under law to report these. However, these finds are increasingly recog­nised as an important resource for understanding archaeologically significant deposits both on and offshore and, as such, it is recommended that finds are logged with a relevant agency: •

•

Fresh finds found by Emma Louise Wyn Jones, Ivan van Marrewijk, Willy van Wingerden and Renate Wolthuis.

In the first instance, you should get in touch with your local Finds Liaison Officer (FLO) (telephone 0207 323 8611), who will be able to identify your find and record it as part of the Portable Antiquities Scheme. The Marine Antiquities Scheme is another avenue for you to report your find, which you can do online as well as through their app.

Archaeological remains found in the Netherlands are subject to the Dutch Heritage Act. On the basis of this Act, the Minister responsible for heritage has to be notified (www.cultureelerfgoed.nl/onderwerpen/erfgoedwet). In practice, a finder can contact the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands so that the find can be registered. You can report your find to the municipality using a ‘discovery report form’. This ensures that your finds are registered in Archis – the national registration system for archaeological finds. Archaeological finds can also be reported to the (archaeological department  of ) the municipality or province, the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities, archaeological businesses or the Archeo­hotspots. These organisations all have access to the Archis database. Finds from Maasvlakte 2 can also be reported in the archeological find checker (see above) and thus come to the attention of archaeologists. Furthermore, there is the Doggerland Research Group (Werkgroep Steentijd Noordzee), a group of professional archaeologists who focus on the prehistoric archaeology of the North Sea. They are happy to receive reports of prehistoric archaeological beach and shipyard finds via email.

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Found human remains? Between the animals and the artefacts, pieces of human skeleton sometimes turn up, often fragments of the skull, pieces of the mandible, teeth or long bones. •

•

If you suspect that it is a recent find, report it to the local police. They can determine whether the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) or British Criminal Investigation Department (CID) should be called in. Recent finds can play an important role in legal investigations or in tracing the relatives of drowned persons up to many decades ago. If it concerns an old (fossil) piece of bone found in the Netherlands, it is a good idea to report it to the Doggerland Research Group, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands and/or the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities (see above). If you make such a find in Great Britain, make sure to contact your local Finds Liaison Officer (FLO).

This will be particularly the case with reclamations such as the Maasvlakte and the Zandmotor. When in doubt, it is important to inform both the police and one of the other agencies. It is important not to touch human material with your bare hands as this may impede later ancient DNA and isotope analysis. So pick it up with a paper towel or with clean gloves, do not clean it, wrap it in a clean plastic bag, keep it in the refrigerator and report it as soon as possible to the organisations mentioned.

A human skull fragment of a Doggerland inhabitant from the Mesolithic, found on the beach of the Zandmotor (Huug Lansbergen).

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Treasure Act If you are based in Great Britain and recover finds of gold, silver or groups of coins over 300 years old, or anything else that falls under the definition of ‘treasure’ then these fall under the Treasure Act of 1996 and must be reported to the local coroner within 14 days. Similarly, anything that came from a wreck (both watercraft and aircraft), should be reported to the Receiver of Wreck within 28 days.

Finally With all finds, it is important to document the find data. Always make a note of the following: • • • • •

The location of the find (ideally with the coordinates using a GPS system or the GPS function of a mobile phone). The circumstances in which the find was made (just after sand suppletion, in a shell bank etc.). The date the find was made. Who made the find and where it is kept. Take a picture of the find ‘in the field’ and later at home (in case of human remains do not take a second picture at home – handle it as little as possible).

It is very important to report your finds and discoveries. This certainly does not mean that you will lose them: at the most you may be asked, as stated in the Dutch Heritage Act, to temporarily hand over your find for research. If you do, make clear arrangements with the researcher in question and ask for a loan agreement form. Find identification days are often organised in museums where you can show your finds and have them identified. In the Netherlands such days take place at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities, the Natural History Museum Rotterdam, Historyland and Futureland, and in Great Britain they are organised at the Natural History Museum in London and at local natural history museums throughout the country. In case you do not collect yourself, or you are looking for a good destination for your finds or collection, the National Museum of Antiquities has a central collection of prehistoric finds and human bone material from the North Sea. For Pleistocene animal finds, you can send a request to Naturalis or the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam.

Useful websites & contact info

Finds Liaison Officer: https://finds.org.uk/contacts Marine Antiquities Scheme: https://marinefinds.org.uk/ Treasure: https://finds.org.uk/treasure/advice/summary Receiver of Wreck: https://marinefinds.org.uk/team/members/RoW Animal remains identification: www.paleontica.org Maasvlakte 2 finds: www.oervondstchecker.nl NL discovery report: https://formulier.cultureelerfgoed.nl/archis/vondstmeldingsformulier Doggerland Research Group: [email protected].

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Luc Amkreutz & Stichting de Noordzee

THE NORTH SEA: THE BUSIEST SEA IN THE WORLD

North Sea wind farm (benoit­ gras­ser/stock. adobe.com).

The North Sea is one of the most intensively used and navigated seas in the world. The area is of great economic value for fishing, oil and gas production, wind energy by means of wind farms (60 GigaWatt in 2050; enough for approximately 6 million households), for the extraction of raw materials whereby sand, gravel and shell material are sucked up from the bottom for processing or coastal defence and also for the food supply, such as seaweed cultivation. In addition, this sea in the heart of Europe is a true infrastructural hub where numerous cables, pipelines and navigation channels run and are maintained under water and where busy shipping lanes provide access to the world ports of Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg. The area is a major lifeline of modern European prosperity and of global importance. The number of interventions planned for the Dutch coast alone in the coming years is overwhelming. All these interventions form opportunities for prehistoric archaeology, but even more often they pose threats to the soil archives. Therefore, in 2009, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands and fellow organisations such as English Heritage jointly published the North Sea Prehistory Research and Management Framework, which was updated in 2019. The aim of these policy documents is to increasingly work with marine stakeholders to research or protect heritage at an early stage. Many of the same offshore developments also pose a threat and ongoing burden to today’s North Sea and its unique ecosystem. Examples are stranded or injured porpoises, or the 345 containers of the cargo ship MSC Zoe and the millions of plastic pellets that ended up in the (UNESCO) Wadden area in 2019. We are also familiar with such pollution at sea, think of the plastic soup, hundreds of thousands of cotton swabs and the virtually untraceable microplastics.

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The question is what will be found in drill cores in a thousand years’ time. The many interventions and pollution show us that our human coexistence on the edges of the North Sea is now in a precarious balance with our natural environment. Like our heritage, our living environment is finite and it is good to reflect on this.

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Disposable cutlery on the beach at Noordwijk (Stichting de Noordzee).

Hans Peeters & Bjørn Smit

FUTURE FOR DOGGERLAND? COLLECT, RESEARCH AND PROTECT Tens of thousands of finds, brought to light in fishing nets or dredged up with sand, gravel and shells, bear witness to the wondrous history of the North Sea. From the end of the last ice age, the land was once inhabited by hunters, fishers and gatherers, and before that by Neanderthals and other early hominids. Some  disappeared under the waves, almost invisible, although along the English coast at low tide fossilised remains of trees protrude above the waterline and on the Wadden Islands tree trunks occasionally wash ashore to be used as garden decoration. But it is mainly the modern, large-scale economic activity at sea that makes traces of the past landscape and its inhabitants visible. For decades, Dutch fishers in particular have been catching bones of prehistoric animals, such as mammoths, rhinoceroses, hyenas and lions, as well as human bones and all kinds of flint, antler and bone tools. Also in the extraction of gravel, shells and sand, a lot of prehistoric remains are brought to the surface to end up on the heaps of Dutch shipyards, or on beaches along the coast. The previous chapters highlighted many facets of this particular drowned landscape and show that the North Sea holds a unique archive which allows us to form an idea of that landscape and the people, animals and plants which lived in it. Doggerland in the past was in all probability an attractive habitat, the playground of groups of people who had all kinds of social and cultural relationships with each other, but also with the natural environment in which they lived. But we must realise that this seabed archive is vulnerable. Today, the North Sea is an attractive economic area. It is now a playing field for the extraction of all kinds of raw materials and the generation of energy, a traffic hub for international shipping, an important area for fishing, but at the same time also an important ecosystem that is under high pressure. The latter also applies to archaeology.

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Joining forces The realisation that this invisible prehistoric landscape is slowly but surely disappearing calls for action. What can we do to prevent that more and more of this archaeological and palaeontological landscape will be ‘cleaned up’? How can we ensure that scientifically valuable objects and data are properly collected, examined and stored if long-term preservation in the soil is not possible? The plans for the expansion of the port of Rotterdam and the construction of Maasvlakte 2 at the beginning of the 21st century were a major trigger. The realisation of the first Maasvlakte in the 1960s1970s had already led to unexpected discoveries of Mesolithic ‘harpoon points’ on the then newly raised beaches. It was thought that the construction of Maasvlakte 2 would once again excavate strata from that period. Consultation between the Port of Rotterdam Authority, the municipality of Rotterdam and the then State Service for Archaeological Investigation (now the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands) led to agreements about research that would focus on archaeological remains and the remains of prehistoric animals. Soon, the next initiative arose. Not only the Dutch researchers and policy makers were confronted with the problems of an eroding soil archive, solutions were also sought for the English part of the North Sea. This led to a joint framework for research and the handling of this vulnerable soil archive. This North Sea Prehistory Research and Management Framework (NSPRMF) was published in 2009 and subsequently received

A new policy line, the North Sea Prehistory Research and Management Framework (NSPRMF).

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support from Belgium. The most important gain is that the prehistoric remains of human habitation and landscapes, especially in the southern North Sea area, have been put on the map of policy makers and developers. The growing attention also led to attempts to get a better grip on this unruly subject. After all, it is not about shipwrecks, cannons and coin treasures that speak to the imagination. In close cooperation with geologists, the main focus was on the structure of the underground seabed. Based on knowledge of the landscape conditions under which soil layers were formed and their age, the ‘archaeological potential’ was investigated: is it realistic that a certain layer contains prehistoric remains and how old are they? This information has been summarised and is currently still being supplemented in maps of the North Sea showing zones where remains of prehistoric landscapes may still be present. Such maps and overviews are an important instrument for Rijkswaterstaat, which is responsible for, among other things, the protection of the Dutch coast. Sand from the North Sea is used for coastal protection, but archaeological remains may be hidden in that sand. In short, where should the sand come from if we want to spare prehistoric remains as much as possible? Or for which sand extraction areas should we take archaeological remains into account?

Dutch glory It will not surprise anyone that it is not so easy to indicate exactly where archaeo­ logical sites will or will not be disturbed, if only because the entire area of the North Sea is enormous and we have far less soil data available compared to on land. The thousands of finds on beaches clearly demonstrate that sand is still being extracted from areas with remnants of former landscapes. The very fact that all these objects are picked up and taken home, and are also shown to specialists, shows that not all is lost. The beach walker who occasionally picks something up, the systematic collector, both make their contribution – sometimes literally. By systematically recording and describing all those finds, researchers are able to gather valuable data about the prehistoric habitation of Doggerland. If, in addition, it can be determined from which soil layers these objects originate – and this is becoming increasingly possible – a whole story can eventually be told about everything from daily activities and technological developments to diet and genetic relationships. An important step in the further cooperation between these collectors, scientists and policymakers is therefore to facilitate various activities to bring finds and knowledge together. Find determination days are organised, for example, where people can show their finds to experts so that they know what they have in their hands. These contacts also make it easier to reach agreements between the various authorities about what is important and how to find solutions in often complicated situations – the expansion of a port, dredging a channel or reclaiming of a beach is no mean feat. The way this is developing is absolutely extraordinary and is also being followed internationally with great interest.

Mutual understanding and making choices The basis for this positive development lies in the mutual understanding that has developed over the years. This has proved crucial in the search for solutions for Maasvlakte 2.

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Archaeological potential Step 4 Possible potential on geomorphological grounds No Prehistoric remains intact Mesolithic + Upper Palaeolithic + residual Middle Palaeolithic Mesolithic + Upper Palaeolithic Mesolithic + Middle Palaeolithic Mesolithic + residual Middle Palaeolithic Mesolithic Residual Mesolithic + Upper Palaeolithic Upper Palaeolithic Middle Palaeolithic Residual Middle Palaeolithic

This map provides insight into the possible preservation (different colours) of land surfaces with archaeological remains from different periods in the Netherlands. The model is based on the geological structure for the first 30 metres below the seabed. The grey zone indicates that, based on the geological structure, there are probably no preserved land surfaces. Shading indicates that there may still be some form of preservation based on geomorphological characteristics (after Vonhögen-Peeters et al. 2016, fig. 4.5).

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Where archaeology initially presented an obstacle, it was eventually seen as an opportunity to add an extra dimension to an already impressive project. Archaeological finds, for example, have become an element in the Futureland visitor centre, from which searches for finds on the beaches are organised. It was important that the archaeologists involved were prepared to make choices; not everything can or needs to be ‘saved’, because all the results that would be achieved would actually lead to ‘scientific profit’ in the first place. The enthusiasm grew to such an extent that engineers responsible for the construction of Maasvlakte 2 also thought about how the research could be realised technically and logistically. That was no easy task: the archaeological remains that were discovered in corings in the Yangtze Harbour lay at a depth of some 20 metres below sea level! In the end, the research was a great success and is now internationally recognised as an example of how opposing interests can be resolved together.

Is there a future for Doggerland? From this point of view, it looks good for Doggerland. At the same time, we should not forget how this chapter started. The North Sea is a vast ‘construction site’ with an enormous economic and ecological value where many developments will take place in the years to come. In that context, the archaeology of prehistoric Doggerland is only a minor aspect that needs to be highlighted again and again, because new initiatives and projects are done by continiously varying people, organizations and companies. To keep Doggerland on the map, we need to be in it for the long haul.

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Luc Amkreutz & Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof

THINKING OF DOGGERLAND: A VANISHED LANDSCAPE REMEMBERED

“Thinking of Doggerland, I see broad rivers steadily flowing through endless lowlands.”

A Neanderthal concentrates on moulding birch pitch around a flint knife (Tom Björklund, for the exhibition Neanderthal – In the land of the mammoth hunters, 2020-2021 in Moesgaard Museum, Denemark).

This paraphrasing of the famous first line of the poem Herinnering aan Holland (Remembrance of Holland) by Hendrik Marsman (1899-1940 AD) is apt. The wide rivers Meuse and Rhine were already there many tens of thousands of  years ago and they flowed much further than today through the lowlands of the North Sea basin to the distant sea. During the ice ages this area was a largely open plain, an endless steppe with important migration routes for reindeer and grazing grounds for megafauna along the rivers. After the climate warming of the Holocene it was a primeval and vast forested landscape, with rich rivers and lakes, extensive resourcerich wetlands and a dynamic coastline. Here and there were higher ridges, the wellknown banks in the present sea. They were home to Holocene hunter-gatherers for a long time after the Atlantic flooded the lowlands via the English Channel and the northern North Sea and Britain became an island. How long would the ancient landscape of the shallow North Sea have existed in people’s minds and stories? How long before the sea had ‘always been there’? In geological terms it is like yesterday, yet the memory seems to be fading fast. Or has it?

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Continental shelf with in red the maximum dry area 20,000 years ago (Simon Fitch/Europe’s Lost Frontiers, University of Bradford).

A forgotten landscape? During the peak of the last ice age, sea levels were about 120-130 metres lower. On the continental shelf there was an estimated 20 million square  kilometres more land worldwide. At 2 million square  kilometres Australia was a third larger and Europe was more than 40% larger at 3.2 million square kilometres. Not all of this was habitable during the ice ages, but the present North Sea, with more than 200,000 square kilometres, was a largely inhabited area. The memory of Doggerland is far from self-evident for the current European inhabitants around the North Sea. Few know of its existence at all. This enormous landscape has been forgotten for many thousands of years and then ‘rediscovered’ again. Somehow that is remarkable for an area that existed for such a long time. Elsewhere, however, there is evidence of surviving memory of such drowned places. In 2020, for example, extensive publications were made about drowned Aboriginal sites on the north-western edge of Australia along the Murujuga coastline. The sites were located at depths of 3 to 14  metres. One was even associated with a freshwater spring. Geomorphological survey and dating showed that these deposits were drowned about 8500 years ago, when the North Sea people were also confronted with a rapidly rising sea level. Ethnographic research adds another dimension. Research by Nicholas Reid and colleagues shows that many stories of Aboriginal coastal communities refer to lost lands. There are legends of land split in two by water and places once accessible by foot or by swimming. For example, the Narranga of Spencer’s Gulf (South Australia, west of Adelaide) tell of the area once being a large low river plain with freshwater

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lagoons. The area stretched northwards for more than 160  kilometres, but was flooded with seawater. This drowning can be dated geologically to between 12,450 and 9550 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. There are also stories of islands that used to be accessible. The Yarra at Port Phillip Bay in Victoria remember that the bay area was a hunting ground for kangaroos and possums and that the Yarra River flowed into the sea much further away. This drowning took place between about 9350 and 7220 years ago, in our Mesolithic era. It is clear that there are memories, preserved in stories and legends, of drowned landscapes all over the world and that some of these memories can be traced back to actual events. Ethnographic research shows that these deep time stories were often ritually embedded in these groups, as if they were a doctrine that could not be deviated from. This has ensured that these living memories of a world thousands of years ago still exist and sometimes even provide a basis for archaeological and historical research.

From forgotten to remembered Among Australian Aborigines, the strong oral tradition has a clear function. Famous are the songlines, mythical stories that give meaning to the landscape and its creation in the Dreamtime within their animistic belief system. They often contain all kinds of practical information that is crucial for navigation, to know who lives where, or where important sources of food and water are located. They are creation myths, but at the same time knowledge reservoirs. It is clear that such memories no longer exist in Europe. The regularly interrupted settlement history, the many migrations and specific developments quickly made such knowledge superfluous, probably already in the Neolithic. On the other hand, the fascination with drowned worlds and catastrophic floods is very present and a common theme in contemporary popular culture. There are many standard myths, such as Atlantis, the Biblical Flood and the flooding in the Gilgamesh Epic, but also, for example, stories of a lost kingdom off the Welsh coast, inspired by the drowned forests. Gaffney and colleagues agree that this fascination is symptomatic of a deeper concern with humanity’s present and future position on earth. It is the task of archaeologists to not only debunk the myths, but above all to share knowledge about the actual drowned worlds. There are plenty of them. A famous example, besides Doggerland, is the area around the Black Sea where an enormous land surface disappeared around 6075 BC, often associated with the story of Noah’s Flood. Of greater magnitude is Beringia, the ‘landbridge’ between Siberia and Alaska which may have been inhabited between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago and can be related to early habitation south of the ice sheets, the Clovis complex (c. 13,000 years ago). This is younger than the earliest habitation of the Americas that took place along the Pacific coast and for which the evidence can now also be found underwater. Truly gigantic is the tropical Sundaland, the drowned lowland on the continental shelf between Southeast Asia and Australia. During the last ice age this was a vast forest area of more than 2 million square kilometres, crossed by large rivers like the Molengraaff River, named after the Dutch explorer and geologist Adolf Frederik Molengraaff (1860-1942 AD). It is precisely these literally drowned worlds that bring us a message about humanity.

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Lessons from Doggerland Doggerland teaches us that the world as we know it, is temporary; that borders, land and sea off our coast are relative and that change can take a very long time, but can also happen very quickly. The way in which the various Channel breakthroughs and the beginnings of Britain as an island were used in the political debate about Brexit speaks volumes in this sense. The area also teaches us something about former inhabitants. About the fact that we were not here first and that there have been several waves of migrants who settled in the area for shorter or longer periods of time. It reminds us of the relativity of our own presence and, in fact, of our status as migrants on this earth. It also points to the success of our species, Homo sapiens, in adapting to an environment and its limits. All these stories come together in a great contemporary theme: climate change and what goes with it. While working on this book, the NRC newspaper headlined on 21 August 2020: Greenland’s ice hasn’t melted as fast as this in half a century. In 2019, this ice cap alone lost 532 billion tonnes of mass, causing the global sea level to rise by 1.5 millimetres. It is just one of the many news stories that increasingly alert us to the fact that our world and living environment are changing. While Doggerland shows that the many changes in the Pleistocene and Holocene are part of the Earth’s natural cycles, it is now scientifically indisputable that the current changes are not and that the scale and speed at which they are occurring is unprecedented. It is clear that a warming climate, melting ice sheets and changing gulf currents will have large-scale impacts, including a very significant rise in sea levels of almost a metre by the end of the 21st century, even if we manage to reverse the warming. This will undeniably have a major impact, as large population centres with high densities are mainly located in low-lying, coastal areas and river valleys. It is an infrastructure that is immobile and anchored. Elsewhere, climate change will lead to pressure on rain-fed agriculture and conflicts over access to water. It is not inconceivable that the changes under way will drastically affect the basis of our modern society. Is there another way? Doggerland does not provide an answer, but perhaps does offer a perspective. The small-scale, mobile societies of the first half of the Holocene also had to deal with large-scale landscape changes and disappearing habitats, but, with the exception of catastrophes such as the Storrega landslide and tsunami, this dynamic was intrinsically part of their reality and world view. The environment was not static, but alive and the human community merely a part of a larger (animistic) system. There is truth in this. We will have to be flexible again in the future in order to cope with the coming changes. Such a change actually begins with a new awareness of old knowledge, namely, that humans too are only a part of an extensive ecosystem with a precarious balance. A re-evaluation of our own position is therefore needed to face the future in a positive way. Less manufacturability and more balance. That is what Doggerland has to tell us.

Doggerland in the now Regardless of how a renewed memory of the lost world under the North Sea might contribute to our world, a true rediscovery has been underway for a few years now. Doggerland is trending. Whether it is to give Brexit a basis in the past, which is hardly credible, or, more credibly, to underline the unity of Europe. In addition,

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Doggerland, and especially the idea of a drowned world, is a current theme and a brand in pop culture, in novels, children’s books and as product marketing.

Novels, thrillers and children’s books One of the earliest authors to mention Doggerland was the famous British science fiction writer H.G. Wells, who partly situates his A story of the Stone Age (1897) in Doggerland:

“This story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea.” In recent years, a flood of new books featuring Doggerland has appeared. In her book Timesong. Searching for Doggerland (2019), Julia Blackburn takes the reader on a journey through time and along the North Sea. Along the way she visits sites, talks to researchers, but also to casual walkers and fossil collectors on the beach. It is a poetic quest about time and about man, in which stories are alternated with poems or timesongs that form a kind of connection in time. In Maria Adolffson’s popular but bleak Swedish thriller series Doggerland (20192021), Inspector Karen Hornby must pull out all the stops to unravel the secrets of the fictional island state of Doggerland. The book Doggerland (2019) by British author

The name and brand Doggerland are popular, and adorn thrillers, children’s books, novels, music and cider, among other things.

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Ben Smith is aptly situated on a decaying wind farm in the North Sea and is about loneliness, survival and the machinations in which our lives are caught today. Also published in 2019 is Élisabeth Filhol’s novel Doggerland, about a Scottish geologist who dedicates her life to the study of Doggerland rather than pursue a career with the big oil companies in the 1980s. The story fittingly focuses on the relationship between humans and nature and our urge to domesticate the latter. The fascination with Doggerland is a theme par excellence that is also reflected in stories for children. Already in 1989, the book Verstoten. Toen de Noordzee nog land was (Outcast. When the North Sea was still land) by children’s book author Tonny Vos Dahmen von Buchholz was published. The story describes the adventures of a group of reindeer hunters in the North Sea tundra. At the end of 2020, the children’s book Doggerland. Die versunkene Welt (Doggerland. The sunken world) by Daniel Bleckman appeared, in which the twins Lex and Leya travel by time machine to the island of Doggerland 8000 years ago. More firmly rooted in science, and at least as exciting is the children’s book Onder de golven. Het verhaal van Doggerland (Beneath the waves. The story of Doggerland) (2021) by archaeologist and children’s book author Linda Dielemans with illustrations by Djenné Fila (Fontaine Uitgevers). It is a journey in time for children and, just like this publication, part of the Doggerland. Lost World under the North Sea project of the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities.

Music and drinks For those who prefer to listen rather than read, there is also Doggerland music. There is a North Sea folk trio called Doggerland that combines traditional music styles from both sides of the North Sea. In 2017, they released the album No sadness of farewell, with a fitting cover. And Ian Anderson, former singer, flautist and guitarist of Jethro Tull wrote the song Doggerland on his solo album Homo erraticus. The lyrics speak for themselves (see opposite page). Music needs a good drink. An 8% Doggerland Baltic Porter is made by the Oakshire Brewing Company in Oregon (USA). Closer to home, the Groningen Doggerland Craft Cider brewery builds a bridge between the continent and Great Britain by combining the English cider tradition with the Groningen apple surplus.

Doggerland now It is clear that Doggerland has taken on a life of its own since Bryony Coles coined the term in 1998. Archaeologically, it stands for the immense drowned Holocene and Pleistocene landscape about which so little is known and which offers so much research potential. It is becoming less of a ‘landbridge’ to be ignored and more of a heartland of European prehistory. Politically, it has become a loaded term and the growing number of books, music and products show that it is a subject that captures the imagination. It is a mythical place, a lost world in the past or present, that can be visited above or below the waves. A haven for the imagination. The very fact that Doggerland is no longer there, but once was, offers a perspective for a romantic approach and perhaps also very clearly holds up a mirror to us. About our identity as human beings, as Europeans and as inhabitants of a fragile and changing planet. In any case Doggerland seems to mean something to many and is a connector, above and below water.

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Doggerland Our footsteps o’er the Doggerland, Chased retreating ice and snow, Left us breathing high and dry, Land’s End to Scapa Flow. The seeds of Albion, wind-blown Free, scattered to the moors, Dormant beneath the soggy heath Where stouter oaks will grow. All across the Doggerland All across before the tides Across with boar and elk and wolves Take the high lands near and wide Strike with rock and flint and Bone, follow trail and hoof. Onwards to another place, a place to raise a roof. And these four walls to shelter Us upon this blessed plot: This earth, this realm, this England - Island, alone, aloof. All across the Doggerland All across before the tides Across with boar and elk and wolves Take the high lands near and wide Back across the Doggerland, Costa villa overkill. Warm farmhouses in Tuscany Challenge Winter’s will. We pensionable, geriatric, Sun-creased wrinklies long For this earth, this realm, this England, a burial ground to fill. All across the Doggerland All across before the tides Across with luggage, kids and sunscreen Melted mortgage, dreams that died All across the Doggerland All across before the tides Across with boar and elk and wolves Take the high lands near and wide Doggerland lyrics – Ian Anderson © The Ian Anderson Group Of Companies Ltd

Thinking of Doggerland

199

Flint handaxe made by Neanderthals. Found by Kees van Hooijdonk in 2001 near Yerseke, originally from the Zeeland Banks, North Sea (11 cm; c. 90,000-50,000 years old).

200

Hans Peeters

AFTERWORD Is there still anything left to discover about Doggerland? On the basis of what is presented in this book, you would almost think not. But nothing could be further from the truth: what we know now is only the tip of the iceberg. What we have come to call Doggerland is a small part of the Northwest European prehistoric landscape, where various representatives of the human species have lived since almost a million years ago. Thousands of generations of people, social relationships, cultural developments, life and death in a landscape that was constantly changing under the influence of climate fluctuations. Warm phases when the sea level was high alternated with colder phases, ice ages when the sea level could drop by more than 100 metres. Habitable land disappeared or became accessible. What we know of Doggerland today is probably little more than the stars that we can see in the cosmos with the naked eye, without a telescope. The remarkable thing is that behind those stars lies a complex story. This is also true of the finds from Doggerland. As Nick Ashton has shown in this book, the finds on the English coast have provided a surprising new perspective on the earliest (at least, as far as we know) habitation of northern Europe, but their significance goes beyond that. It is about the adaptability of early human forms, which seem to have inhabited large parts of Europe long before Neanderthals and modern humans. The many finds from the Middle Palaeolithic bear witness to the structural presence of Neanderthals in Doggerland and the surrounding parts of the continent and Britain. The Serengeti of the North, with its abundance of wildlife, but also with geological processes that dramatically altered the landscape, such as the creation of the link between the North Sea and the English Channel. The deflection of the great Rhine system towards the Strait of Dover will have influenced the dispersal of groups of Neanderthals and perhaps the earliest modern humans in Northwest Europe. We know very little about the earliest colonisation of Doggerland and its surroundings by modern humans; it is still a black box. Certainly, it was a phase in which it became very cold, so cold that large areas consisted of polar desert. But whether there really was no human presence is perhaps questionable in view of

201

archaeological findings on the mainland in Britain and Belgium. It is perhaps only a matter of time before we see the first traces emerge from the North Sea. What is clear is that Doggerland was inhabited at the end of the last ice age and into the Holocene. The many finds of worked bone and antler, flint tools and also remains of humans themselves clearly show that Doggerland was part of a cultural landscape populated by hunter-gatherers. That cultural landscape, of course, stretched over the presentday mainland, where thousands of sites have been discovered from the Late Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods. However, the picture is fragmentary, mostly due to unfavourable preservation conditions. Organic remains are fragile and will disappear rapidly if not covered with sediment and below the water table. The latter is often the case in northern Germany and the southern Baltic. But the question is what these sites tell us about the people of Doggerland. In other words, how representative are all these sites ‘on dry land’ and in the Baltic area for what happened in Doggerland? What can the finds from the North Sea tell us? Several chapters in this book have addressed that question. A series of small-scale studies have shown that the preservation of many finds is so good that ancient DNA can offer us insight into genetic aspects. Stable isotopes provide information about the diet of humans, and collagen (protein) informs us about the origin of bones from which tools were made. The first results are surprising and show that there is still a lot that we do not know. North Sea pioneer Leendert Louwe Kooijmans was, as he writes at the beginning of this book, at the forefront of a new discovery at the end of the 1960s. Now, 50 years after the publication of his classic article about the finds of the Brown Bank, we are starting an exciting research project in which we will get to know the Doggerlanders better. The Dutch Research Council NWO has awarded an extensive subsidy within the framework of the National Science Agenda to further investigate thousands of finds from the North Sea. This project, called Resurfacing Doggerland. Environment, humans and material culture in a drowning postglacial landscape, will for a period of five years (2021-2026) extract as much data as possible from the many materials collected by a large number of enthusiasts. Thanks to the grant and a contribution from the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, we will be able to do so much more, using modern and traditional research methods, so that we can really go ‘in depth’. We are going to try to create a well-founded picture of social and cultural developments in the drowning landscape between 20,000 and 6000 years ago. Most of the researchers who worked on this book are participating in this project, and the many collectors will also be able to contribute. Resurfacing Doggerland is an important step towards more steadfast cooperation between researchers and collectors, but also with organisations involved in the many spatial developments in the Dutch part of the North Sea. Archaeology cannot be seen separately from this. However, the ‘story’ of Doggerland is not only of scientific importance. As this book shows, it is a story with many lines and dimensions, which is about relationships between humans and environment. It is therefore also a topical story. Doggerland now also appeals to writers, musicians and even beer brewers. It can only be that this book is the starting signal for an exciting new phase in the discovery of this lost landscape.

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

Perforated antler axe recovered by GO 14 around 2013 near ‘de Stekels’, southern North Sea. Part of the wooden haft is still present in the perforation (18.2 cm; c. 9000‑6000 BC).

203

Collector Meinbert Gozewijn van Soest on the Zandmotor (Frans de Winter).

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DOGGERLAND. LOST WORLD UNDER THE NORTH SEA

FURTHER READING General Amkreutz, L., M. Niekus, D. Schiltmans & B. Smit, 2017. Meer dan bijvangst! De prehistorische archeologie van de Noordzee. Cranium 34(1), 34‑47. Amkreutz, L., A. Verpoorte, A. Waters-Rist, M. Niekus, V. van Heekeren, A. van der Merwe, H. van der Plicht, J. Glimmerveen, D. Stapert & L. Johansen, 2018. What lies beneath… Late Glacial human occupation of the submerged North Sea landscape. Antiquity 92(361), 22‑37. Bailey, G., N. Galanidou, H. Jöns, H. Peeters & M. Mennenga (eds), 2020. The archaeology of Europe’s drowned landscapes. Springer. Evans, A., J.C. Flatman & N.C. Flemming (eds), 2014. Prehistoric Archaeology of the Continental Shelf. A global review. Springer. Flemming, N., M.N. Cagatay, F.L. Chiocci, N. Galanidou, H. Jons, G. Lerico­lais, T. Missiaen, F. Moore, A. Rosentau, D. Sakellariou, B. Skar, A. Steven­son & H. Weerts, 2014. Land beneath the waves: Submerged landscapes and sea level change. A joint geoscience-humanities strategy for European Continental Shelf Prehistoric Research. In: N.C. Chu & N. Donough (eds), Position Paper 21 of the European Marine Board. Gaffney, V.L., S. Fitch & D.N. Smith, 2009. Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland. Council for British Archaeology. Louwe Kooijmans, L.P., 2017. Onze vroegste voorouders. De geschiedenis van Nederland tot 5000 v. Chr. Bert Bakker. Mol, D., J. de Vos, B. van Geel, J. Glimmerveen, H. van der Plicht & K. Post, 2008. Mammoeten, neushoorns and andere dieren van de Noordzeebodem. Kleine encyclopedie van het leven in het Pleistoceen. Veen Magazines. Peeters, J.H.M. & G. Momber, 2014. The southern North Sea and the human occupation of northwestern Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum. Netherlands Journal of Geosciences 93(1‑2), 55‑70. Van de Noort, R. 2011. North Sea Archaeologies. A Maritime Biography, 10,000 BC – 1500 AD. Oxford University Press.

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Research Amkreutz, L. & M. Spithoven, 2019. Hunting beneath the waves. Bone and antler points from North Sea Doggerland in front of the Dutch Coast. In: D. Groß, H. Lübke, J. Meadows & D. Jantzen (eds), Working at the sharp end: from bone and antler to Early Mesolithic life in Northern Europe. Wachholtz Verlag, 383-404. Gaffney, V., S. Fitch, M. Bates, R.L. Ware, T. Kinnaird, B. Gearey, T. Hill, R. Telford, C. Batt, B. Stern, J. Whittaker, S. Davies, M.B. Sharada, R. Everett, R. Crib­ don, L. Kistler, S. Harris, L. Kearney, J. Walker, M. Muru, D. Hamilton, M. Law, A. Finlay, R. Bates & R.G. Allaby, 2020. Multi-Proxy Characterisation of the Storegga Tsunami and its Impact on the Early Holocene Landscapes of the Southern North Sea. Geosciences 2020(10), 270. Krause, J. & T. Trappe, 2020. De reis van onze genen, onze geschiedenis en die van onze voorouders. Nieuw Amsterdam. Mays, S., 2010. The archaeology of human bones. Routledge. Missiaen, T., S. Fitch, M. Muru, R. Harding, A. Fraser, M. De Clercq, D. Garcia Moreno, W. Versteeg & V. Gaffney, 2020. Targeting the Mesolithic: Interdisciplinary approaches to archaeological prospection in the Brown Bank area, southern North Sea. Quaternary International 2020. Reid, N., P.D. Nunn & M. Sharpe, 2014. Indigenous Australian Stories and Sea-Level Change. In: Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages. Foundation for Endangered Languages, 82‑87. Richards, M.P., 2019. Isotope analysis for Diet studies. In: M.P. Richards & K. Britton, Archaeological science: an introduction. Cambridge University Press, 125‑143. Ungar, P.S., 2017. Evolution’s bite. A story of teeth, diet and human origins. Princeton University Press. Van der Plicht, J., L.W.S.W. Amkreutz, M.J.L.Th. Niekus, J.H.M. Peeters & B.I. Smit, 2016. Surf ‘n Turf in Doggerland: Dating, stable isotopes and diet of Mesolithic human remains from the southern North Sea. Journal of Archaeological Science Reports 10, 110‑118. Vonhögen-Peeters, L.M., S. van Heeteren & J.H.M. Peeters, 2016. Indicatief model van het archeologisch potentieel van de Noordzeebodem. Deltares. Geology & source material for reconstruction maps Bailey, G.N., J. Harff & D. Sakellariou (eds), 2017. Under the sea: Archaeology and Palaeolandscapes of the Continental Shelf. Springer. Belt, T., 1874. Glacial Period. Nature 10(239), 62-63. Cohen, K.M., K. MacDonald, J.C. Joordens, W. Roebroeks & P.L. Gibbard, 2012. The earliest occupation of north-west Europe: a coastal perspective. Quaternary International 271, 70-83. Cohen, K.M., P.L. Gibbard & H.J.T. Weerts, 2014. North Sea palaeogeographical reconstructions for the last 1 Ma. Netherlands Journal of Geosciences 93(1-2), 7-29. Cohen, K.M., K. Westley, G. Erkens, M.P. Hijma & H.J. Weerts, 2017. The North Sea. In: N.C. Flemming, J. Harff, D. Moura, A. Burgess, G.N. Bailey (eds), Submerged landscapes of the European continental shelf: quaternary paleoenvironments. John

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Wiley & Sons, 147-186. Flemming, N.C., J. Harff, D. Moura, A. Burgess & G.N. Bailey (eds), 2017. Submerged landscapes of the European continental shelf: Quaternary palaeoenvironments. Wiley-Blackwell. Gaffney, V.L., K. Thomson & S. Fitch, 2007. Mapping Doggerland: The Mesolithic landscapes of the southern North Sea. Archaeopress. Gibbard, P.L., 1995. The formation of the Strait of Dover. Geological Society, London, Special Publications 96(1), 15-26. Gibbard, P.L. & K.M Cohen, 2015. Quaternary evolution of the North Sea and the English Channel. Proceedings of the Open University Geological Society 1, 63‑74. Gupta, S., J.S. Collier, A. Palmer-Felgate & G. Potter, 2007. Catastrophic flooding origin of shelf valley systems in the English Channel. Nature 448(7151), 342-345. Gupta, S., J.S. Collier, D. Garcia-Moreno, F. Oggioni, A. Trentesaux, K. Vanneste & J.C. Arthur, 2017. Two-stage opening of the Dover Strait and the origin of island Britain. Nature Communications 8(1), 1-12. Hijma, M.P. & K.M. Cohen, 2010. Timing and magnitude of the sea-level jump preluding the 8200 yr event. Geology 38(3), 275-278. Hijma, M.P. & K.M. Cohen, 2019. Holocene sea-level database for the Rhine-Meuse Delta, The Netherlands: implications for the pre-8.2 ka sea-level jump. Quaternary Science Reviews 214, 68-86. Hijma, M.P., K.M. Cohen, W. Roebroeks, W.E. Westerhoff & F.S. Busschers, 2012. Pleistocene Rhine–Thames landscapes: geological background for hominin occupation of the southern North Sea region. Journal of Quaternary Science 27(1), 17-39. Jelgersma, S., 1979. Sea-level changes in the North Sea basin. In: E. Oele, The Quaternary history of the North Sea. Almqvist & Wiksell international, 238-248. Lambeck, K., 1995. Late Devensian and Holocene shorelines of the British Isles and North Sea from models of glacio-hydro-isostatic rebound. Journal of the Geological Society 152(3), 437-448. Peeters J.H.M. & K.M. Cohen (eds), 2014. North Sea submerged land­scapes and prehistory. Geology, prehistoric archaeology and research potential of the southern North Sea. Netherlands Journal of Geosciences 93(1/2), 3‑6. Shennan, I., K. Lambeck, R. Flather, B. Horton, J. McArthur, J. Innes & R. Wingfield, 2000. Modelling western North Sea palaeogeographies and tidal changes during the Holocene. Geological Society, London, Special Publications 166(1), 299-319. Stouthamer, E., K.M. Cohen & W.Z. Hoek, 2020. De vorming van het land – geologie en geomorfologie. Perspectief Uitgevers. Sturt, F., D. Garrow & S. Bradley, 2013. New models of North West European Holocene palaeogeography and inundation. Journal of Archaeological Science 40(11), 3963-3976. Tizzard, L., A.R. Bicket & D. De Loecker, 2015. Seabed Prehistory: Investigating the palaeogeography and Early Middle Palaeolithic archaeology in the southern North Sea. Wessex Archaeology. Vink, A., H. Steffen, L. Reinhardt & G. Kaufmann, 2007. Holocene relative sea-level change, isostatic subsidence and the radial viscosity structure of the mantle of northwest Europe (Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, southern North Sea). Quaternary Science Reviews 26(25-28), 3249-3275. Walker, J., V. Gaffney, S. Fitch, M. Muru, A. Fraser, M. Bates & R. Bates, 2020. A great wave: The Storegga tsunami and the end of Doggerland? Antiquity 94(378), 1409‑1425. Further reading

207

Bronze Age 2000-800 BC

Subboreal

11,650-8200 BP

Early Holocene

7100-6450 BC

Preboreal

Birch and pine forests, strongly warming climate

Young Dryas

Subarctic park landscape, strongly cooling climate

Bølling-Allerød

Birch and pine forests, warming climate

10,250-8700 BP

13,000 BC

Stein

Corded Ware

Funnel Beaker

Ertebølle Ahrensburg Oldest art NL

14,650-12,850 BP

Late Upper Palaeolithic 14,000-11,650 BP

Tjonger/Federmesser

12,850-11,650 BP

Creswell

Late Glacial

14,650-11,650 BP

10,000 BC

12,000 BC

Michelsberg

9650-7100 BC

11,650-10,250 BP

11,000 BC

Hazendonk

Early Mesolithic

Hamburg

9000 BC

Mixed forest, warming clime

Magdalenian

8000 BC

Boreal

🌫 Emptying

Middle Mesolithic

Lake Agassiz

6450-5300 BC

🌊

☠ 🌋 Skull fragment oldest modern human being NL

Late Mesolithic

Kongemose

Drowning Doggerland

Maglemose

Formation of coastal plain

Rössen

forest, temperate climate

Tardenoisian

Atlantic

8700-5700 BP

6000 BC

7000 BC

Swifterbant

Predominantly deciduous

Linearbandkeramik

Neolithic

5300-2000 BC

Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt

8200-4200 BP

Holocene

11650 BP-now

5000 BC

Peat formation, local deforestation

«« »»

4000 BC

Middle Holocene

3000 BC

Vlaardingen

5700-2600 BP

Romans in NL

Deforestation, somewhat wetter climate

Bell Beaker

2000 BC

🗡

Iron Age

800-12 BC

Storegga tsunami caused by undersea landslide

4200 BP-Now

1000 BC

Reclamation, sea inundation

Eruption Laacher See volcano

Late Holocene

Subatlantic

2600 BP-Now

Tundra and arctic desert

14,000 BC

15,000 BC Upper Palaeolithic

16,000 BC

40,000-11,650 BP

Late Pleniglacial

17,000 BC

Early Pleniglacial 75,000-50,000 BP

Arctic desert

Middle Palaeolithic

70,000 BP

110,000-75,000 BP

100,000 BP

Early Glacial

90,000 BP

300,000-40,000 BP

Odderade

85,000-75,000 BP

Rederstall

92,000-85,000 BP

Brørup

104,000-92,000 BP

Bush and steppe tundra Forests with pine and birch Bush and steppe tundra Forests fir, spruce, birch

☠ Krijn

60,000 BP

Tundra

Châtelperronian/ Leaf-shaped point

Moershoofd

50,000-43,000 BP

50,000 BP

Tundra

Pitch piece

Shrub-steppe tundra Arctic desert

Gravettian

Shrub tundra/dwarf birch

(stadial) Hengelo (stadial)

Mousterian/ Keilmesser

40,000 BP

Denekamp

Aurignacian

Ice cover to Dogger Bank and Denmark

30,000 BP

80,000 BP

Solutrean

75,000-14,650 BP

110,000-11,650 BP

Shrub and step tundra

Pleniglacial

Weichselian ice age/glacial

20,000 BC

125,000-11,650 BP

19,000 BC

Late Pleistocene

18,000 BC

29,000-14,650 BP

Eemian

125,000-110,000 BP

Mixed woods fir, spruce, birch Deciduous forests with yew and hornbeam

Mousterian/ Keilmesser

Bush and step tundra

110,000-104,000 BP

Middle Palaeolithic 300,000-35,000 BP

Birch and pine forests; strongly warming climate

Saalian

Arctic desert/tundra; ice cover to middle NL Mixed deciduous forest; arctic desert/tundra Deciduous forests

Elsterian

Arctic desert/ tundra; land ice to the north of NL

470,000-420,000 BP

Cromerian

850,000-470,000 BP

Glacial & interglacial periods

110,000 BP

Culture/group date (c.) Funnel Beaker

120,000 BP

3400-2900 BC Hunebedden (megalithic tombs)

200,000 BP

3400-2600 BC

Stein

Bell Beaker

🦴 Homo Heidelbergensis @ Boxgrove GB

Holsteinian

Early Acheulean

774,000-125,000 BP

Middle Pleistocene

370,000-125,000 BP

Handaxes @ Great Yarmouth GB

Forests fir, spruce, birch

Late Acheulean/ Levallois

Brørup Herning

300,000 BP

400,000 BP

2500-2000 BC

Corded Ware

2900-2500 BC Corded Ware migrants from the south Russian steppes

Vlaardingen 500,000 BP

3400-2600 BC

Hazendonk

3700-3400 BC

600,000 BP

700,000 BP

Michelsberg

4400-3500 BC Flint mine Rijckholt-St-Geertruid, polished flint axes North Sea

Rössen

4900-4400 BC

800,000 BP

Swifterbant

5000-3400 BC

900,000 BP

👣

Glacial & interglacial periods

Early Palaeolithic

3,000,000-300,000 BP

Menapian

Glacial period

Early Pleistocene

2,580,000-774,000 BP

1,200,000-1,070,000 BP

Homo antecessor @ Happisburgh GB

Bavelian

1,070,000-850,000 BP

1,000,000 BP

1,100,000 BP

Linearbandkeramik

5300-4900 BC First farmers in the Netherlands

Ertebølle (north)

5200-3950 BC Hunter-fisher-gatherers with pottery in southern Scandinavia

Kongemose (north) 6000-5200 BC

1,200,000 BP

Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt (south) 7500-5500 BC

Maglemose (north) Waalian

1,450,000-1,200,000 BP

1,300,000 BP Glacial & interglacial periods

9000-6000 BC

Tardenoisian (south) 9000-6000 BC

1,400,000 BP

Ahrensburg

12,850-11,000 BP

1,500,000 BP

Tjonger/Federmesser 13,900-12,850 BP

Creswell

Eburonian

1,800,000-1,450,000 BP

1,600,000 BP

14,000-13,500 BP

Hamburg

Glacial period

15,500-13,000 BP

1,700,000 BP

1,800,000 BP

Magdalenian

17,000-12,000 BP Cave paintings Lascaux, earliest modern humans in the Netherlands

Solutrean

22,000-17,000 BP

Gravettian

CHRONOLOGY

28,000-22,000 BP Venus of Willendorf

Aurignacian

43,000-28,000 BP Modern humans in Europe, Chauvet cave paintings

Key Geological period Interstadial/interglacial (complex) Stadial/glacial (complex) Landscape & vegetation Archaeological period Archaeological culture

This overview goes from young (left) to old (right) and shows geological periods, climate phases and archaeological cultures. In the left timeline there is a switch from before Christ (BC) to years ago (BP).

Event/find

Calibrated dates were used. For archaeo-

1000 years

logical periods/cultures in the Holocene BC

10,000 years

is common, for those in the Pleistocene BP.

100,000 years

All dates are approximate.

Period continues

Châtelperronian/Leafshaped point 50,000-40,000 BP Neanderthal/Levallois and serrated tools

Mousterian/Keilmesser

160,000-50,000 BP Neanderthal, handaxes, spearheads, scrapers, Levallois

Late-Acheulean

300,000-160,000 Neanderthals, handaxes, Levallois

Early-Acheulean

1,740,000-300,000 BP Homo erectus/Homo antecessor/ Homo heidelbergenis/early Neanderthals, choppers, handaxes

Lost World under the North Sea

This popular-science book tells the story of one of the most important, but least known major archaeological sites in Europe: Doggerland. Few people know that the beaches along the North Sea lie on the edge of a vast lost world. A prehistoric landscape that documents almost a million years of human habitation and lay dry for most of that time. Doggerland is where early hominids left the first footprints in northern Europe, more than 900,000 years ago. Later, for hundreds of thousands of years, it was the scene of ice ages. A world of woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses, horses and reindeer and the successful Neanderthals who hunted them, including Krijn: the first Neanderthal from Doggerland. At the end of the last Ice Age, the first modern humans also left their traces here, including the famous Leman-and-OwerBanks spearhead – the first documented Doggerland find – and some of the oldest art in the region. With the onset of the Holocene, our current era, Doggerland’s inhabitants were increasingly confronted with climate change and rising sea levels, just as we are today. The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived in a rich, but constantly changing world – to which they successfully adapted. Ongoing submergence and a huge tsunami around 6150 BC marked the beginning of the end. A few centuries later, the last islands disappeared under the waves and with them the story of Doggerland was lost in time. This book brings this vanished world back to the surface.

ISBN 978-94-6426-113-4 ISBN: 978-94-6426-113-4

9 789464 261134

Doggerland Lost World under the North Sea

Doggerland

Doggerland Lost World under the North Sea

edited by: Luc Amkreutz & Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof