This is a really good map which represents Doggerland rather more accurately than some others. Courtesy National Geographic. It suggests that the maximum extent of this "expanded British Isles" occurred around 18,000 years ago, and that by 10,000 years ago Doggerland was already much diminished in size.
There are lots of factors to take into account in working out how big this dry and ice-free area was -- isostatic depression, eustatic sea-level rise as water was returned to the oceans, the actual extent of glacier ice and snowfields, and even the extent of marshes and lakes, which must have been very extensive at times. Perhaps we should also give a name to the vast area to the South-West as well -- incorporating the Celtic Sea and the English Channel, and even extending well south into the Bay of Biscay. Suggestions on a post-card please.......
3 comments:
Lyonesse Doh.
M
Bit out of my depth here Mryris, so a bit less cryptic would help.
I think Lyonesse is a Cornish myth about lost lands to the West. The Welsh myths Brian has covered a few times and I can remember learning on my mother's knee. Maybe there are myths in Brittany too although I am not educated enough to know them. Nor do I know the Irish tales well.
What the "facts" are showing is that folk memories might have survived much longer that we thought. Really, there once was a time when there were extensive lands now under the sea which were inhabited by people similar to ourselves in many respects and rather close by.
Anyone know are there any comparable myths about the submerged land extending out from the Isle of Wight across the Solent and also across the English Channel?
The recent BBC Horizon programme on the Mesolithic Period brought attention to the discovery of Mesolithic settlement remains off Bouldnor, near Yarmouth (fairly close to the current route of the Yarmouth to Lymington ferry).
The Mesolithic remains lie off the NW edge of the Isle of Wight, and has led to the startling discovery of cereal remains with intact DNA, whose origin was hundreds of miles away. These must have been traded across the land link, somewhere north of France, long before conventional wisdom would have us accept that cereals, or at any rate, cereal farming, arrived with us, several thousands of years later, as part of the Neolithic Revolution.
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