close
more_vert

Yes I agree. I've been looking at some of the North Sea stuff recently. It is fascinating, but hardly likely to "re-write history". 1000's of mammoth tusks and bones have been dredged up so there will certainly be areas that have been scraped clean. The trawer "Colinda" brought up a fine antler "harpoon" spearhead way back in the 1930's. It was found in a block of peat so was not dropped from a boat. The geology is not going to give much if anything in the way of megaliths and the people of the time when it was dry land would have been nomadic. My understanding is that the land was sometime wooded and sometime marshy or boggy
Fierce currents and movement of sand will have buried much and moved much.

Have yet to listen to the radio programe

Thanks for telling us about this programme, Littlestone. Interesting stuff, but I grew just a tad irritated by the repeated statement that the old textbooks were wrong in writing about a narrow bridge when the reality is a massive landscape. That is true, but hasn't that been known for quite some time? There has been no detail of rivers and lakes up till now, but it has been known before this"discovery" that the sunken land was bigger than England and extended from south of the Isle of Wight right up to Orkney and Shetland and right over to the low countries.

Never mind - saying that "the textbooks will have to be re-written" is a standard line for preparing the ground for your own book!

Loads of stuff including digital pictures of the landscape beneath the North Sea in these massive downloads See http://www.offshore-sea.org.uk/site/scripts/downloads.php?categoryID=37

>The geology is not going to give much if anything in the way of megaliths
Probably true, but you never know. We can live in hope. Though the Cornish and Irish coasts most likely offer a better chance of stoney stuff than the North Sea does.

>the people of the time when it was dry land would have been nomadic

Depends on how far from the present coastline you go I guess. I'm under the impression that there were still some fairly mobile folk kicking about in the neolithic. Admittedly, my Northumbriocentric perspective probably skews my view towards thinking that the meso/neo transition was longer than it may have been in other areas, but I do think that this underwater stuff could provide genuinely new information. Especially in expanding on the really old stuff. Maybe they'll dredge up some evidence about that alleged seaborne activity along the ice sheet.

What Fitz says about offshore dumping is so very true though, as is the point about erosion by currents. I've watched the ship that takes the aluminium smelting effluvia go about it's business of concreting the surface of a patch of the seabed off the Northumberland coast. Maybe in a strange way, this could protect sites from the erosion of currents. In ref to the shifting of the sands, the beaches up here are very different from the way they were even just 30 yrs ago. Yet still, in situ evidence of neolithic settlement has been found off the mouth of the Tyne, despite millenia of shifting currents and centuries of industrial shenanigans. Best think positive eh?

Cheers for't links PH, they look most interesting too.