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Channel 4 at 9pm.

"In this Time Team Special, Tony Robinson and the Team call upon the leading experts in the field to piece together the new discoveries and research that have rewritten the books on the ancient human occupation of Britain in recent years. It is a fascinating tale of the drowned world that once was part of Britain."

Article in The Guardian on the same subject.. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,2064221,00.html

Jim.

OOPS!

I thought this was quite interesting - weren't the mesolithic spearheads they brought up from the North Sea beautiful objects? The part where they demonstrated how long ago 700 thousand years was by using the full length of a football pitch (1 step = from us to the neolithic) was a good touch too. It is strange to think that we believe this is How Things Are, yet only a few thousand years ago the coastline was utterly different and there was all this land connecting us to the continent. They also claimed that the inundation of that land (the most recent time) would have been very fast, the water moving several metres every day. Strange times.

One thing that saddened me about the show was that those Dutch beam trawlers absolutely knacker the sea bed and it takes the wildlife years to recover. The trawlers basically tow a large, weighted mouthed net which literally scoures the sea bed, nothing escapes, hence the archaeolocical finds. Fishing friends of mine tell me that if you fish over where those boats have been you'll catch nothing.
It's all well and good to be trawling up these wonderful artifacts but the act of doing so is destroying the real evidence, the settlements and landscapes. The same applies to gravel extraction.
What struck me as being a little sad was how there was a concentration of artifacts in one area implying a settlement yet no one had said to the trawler skippers, "keep out of that area, let's try and preserve whats left".