For most of human prehistory you could walk from England to the Netherlands across a lush plain of rivers, marshes, and wooded hills now called Doggerland. Rising meltwater drowned it slowly — then a colossal underwater landslide off Norway may have finished it in a single afternoon. Trawlers still haul up 9,000-year-old harpoons and human jawbones from a world nobody knew was there.
How a single antler harpoon dredged up in 1931, twenty-five miles off Norfolk, first hinted that the floor of the North Sea was once dry land walked by people.
PBS Eons lays out the big picture: a fertile lowland the size of a country, the rising seas that shrank it, and the mega-tsunami that may have wiped the last of it off the map.
The full geography: the Dogger Bank it's named for, the Mesolithic people who lived and hunted there, and the slow timeline of its disappearance beneath the waves.
A feature-length journey across half a million years of this lost landscape — who lived there, what it looked like, and the long process by which the sea took it all back.
Archaeologist Vince Gaffney used oil-industry seismic data to map 23,000 square kilometers of seabed, reconstructing Doggerland's rivers, hills, and lakes in three dimensions.
Around 6200 BC a slab of seabed the size of Scotland slid off Norway's continental shelf, sending a tsunami racing across whatever remained of Doggerland.
A full documentary on the drowning of Doggerland — the centuries of creeping water and the single catastrophe that may have delivered the final, sudden blow.
The scattered inventory that keeps surfacing: barbed bone points, a dugout paddle, mammoth tusks, and even a human jawbone — fragments of a civilization now under the sea.