Stone Age Humans Likely Inhabited ‘Lost World’ Land Bridge

The sunken Stone Age landscape of Doggerland, which stretched between Britain and the European continent tens of thousands of years ago, was filled with fertile forests and offered an ideal setting for prehistoric humans. In fact, prehistoric humans may have occupied the now-undersea land bridge much earlier than previously thought—perhaps as early as 16,000 years ago, during Europe’s Mesolithic (or Middle Stone) Age, according to a 2026 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This was a mild environment by about 16,000 years ago,” says lead author Robin Allaby, who studies ancient DNA at the University of Warwick in the U.K. The research shows Doggerland by this early time featured forests of oaks, elms, birch and stands of hazel, as well as mammals including boar, deer and bears.

Allaby’s team examined ancient DNA from sediment cores taken from the seafloor in the underwater region. They found evidence of forests and animals but no direct sign of prehistoric humans. “There wasn’t enough human DNA,” Allaby explains, though he says it’s likely that prehistoric humans were also living there by then, perhaps in small numbers.

Until about 20,000 years ago, Britain and northern Europe were covered with vast ice sheets from the last stage of the Ice Age. The ice sheets receded as the climate warmed, leaving what are now England and the Netherlands relatively high and dry. Doggerland itself, which once joined the east of England with what are now the coasts of the Netherlands and Germany, was exposed by the receding ice sheets about 18,000 years ago. Then it slowly sank beneath the waves in the following millennia as the sea level rose, and it mostly vanished forever after it was flooded by a tsunami about 8,000 years ago.

Many ancient artifacts and other traces of human habitation, including several fragments of human skulls, have been dredged up from these sunken lands by fishing boats, and scientists now know that Doggerland was populated by early hunter-gatherers. But it was thought early humans could have only occupied Doggerland for a few thousand years before it disappeared beneath the waves. The 2026 study, however, indicates it might have been inhabited much earlier.

Luc Amkreutz researches connections between sunken Doggerland and the changing climate of the time. “Doggerland and in particular its riverine and coastal settings may have formed important refugia that provided something of a green oasis of sorts,” says the prehistorian and archaeologist from the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. “Doggerland may…have been a key staging point for the peopling of northern Europe.”

Scientists had speculated since the late 19th century that the vast but now-submerged land bridge once stretched between England and the European continent, but the first physical proof emerged in 1931 in the nets of an English fishing trawler called the Colinda. The object, taken from sediments on the seafloor, proved to be a finely worked barbed spear point, a little more than 8 inches long and made of red deer antler. Archaeologists estimate the point was fashioned about 12,000 years ago by a prehistoric human hunter in the long-lost lands under the sea.

Scientists once thought that Doggerland was mostly barren tundra for the first few thousand years after the ice sheets receded, and that it only became well-forested—and therefore suitable for humans—by about 11,000 years ago. But the 2026 study pushes that timeline back by about 5,000 years.

Allaby adds that the presence of fertile forests in Doggerland at the time, rather than tundra, is “a bit of a mystery.” He suggests that trees might have repopulated the newly ice-free Doggerland from fertile ground that had weathered the Ice Age. It’s probable, he says, that hunters from the south then followed herds of prey animals that migrated into the region.