Case file · Anomaly hotspot
Doggerland, the land under the North Sea
Doggerland was the low plain that joined Britain to the continent across the southern North Sea, inhabited by hunter-gatherers until rising seas drowned it in the early Holocene.
6,200 BCE · 54.70, 2.50 · status: official
The account
In 1931 the trawler Colinda dragged up a barbed antler point from the Leman and Ower bank, the first clear sign that people had lived there. The Storegga submarine landslide off Norway, around 6200 BCE, sent a tsunami across the remaining low islands. Seismic mapping led by Vince Gaffney has since traced its rivers, lakes and coasts. Writers have linked Doggerland to flood myths and lost-land legends around the North Sea.
The sceptical view
A real, mapped landscape; any link to specific legends is speculative.
Connections in the atlas
- Rungholt, the drowned town
- Atlit Yam, a drowned Neolithic village
- The Black Sea deluge hypothesis
- Lyonesse, the lost land of Cornwall
- Dunwich and the bells beneath the sea
- Cantre'r Gwaelod, the drowned hundred