Doggerland

I recently ran across an incredible documentary on Doggerland. Doggerland, in case you did not know, was a large piece of land that basically connected Britain to Europe. There was no channel. It was during a time when a lot of the water was locked in ice. The people living there were your basic hunter/gatherer type hunting mammoths, rhinos, hippos while trying not to get eaten alive by lions!

What a time that would have been to live in! I thought I'd share ANOTHER documentary that I have since found. For some reason this whole Doggerland topic really resonates with me. It kind of makes you wonder what the landscape will look lke in your area once the planet goes through another one of it's inevitable cycles of climate change. Will Peoria, Illinois (my hometown) be completely inundated? What will archealogists find on the sea bed?

Doggerland Documentary
Wiki Article

I really wish I could find that great documentary I had seen the other day. It was extremely well put together and directed.

Hippos and lions and ice?? Somehow that doesn't ring true.

That was BEFORE the dramatic rise in water levels.

No hippos in Doggerland - they never made it back up here after the last ice age (they lived in Britain during the last interglacial 130,000 years ago though). Not sure if any remains of lions have been foun either, but could have been some, though perhpas more likely further east. Like tigers and wolves, lions used to lived everywhere from the tropics to the arctic - but we didn't like them so we killed all the European lions thousands of years ago.

Documentary said there were definitely hippos. The area of Doggerland (mainly in the souther portion - but prevalent, really, every where) was completely crowded with many, many rivers and tributaries that acted a lot like the waters that Hippos thrive in today.

As far as the lion. There have been considerable findings (from what I understand) of lion teeth in the area that we would call the British coast (eastern coast).

Great documentary...
Lions, tigers, bears, hippos, rivers full of fish....possibly all set off with naturally growing veggies. Looks like the ancients were eating better than modern man does.

What got me was the fact that, as the one gentleman put it, more is known about Mars than is known about the British-Euro land bridge. Wonder how many more land bridges that connected other continents existed before the last melt down. That is not counting the Bering land bridge between Russia and Alaska.

As for hippos existing in Britain, hippos have been found in the US as well. When the continents were much closer all of these large animals had free range benefits. They wandered wherever they wished. It was the predatory animals, man, and nature that controlled where and what animals existed in any given area.

Again, thanks...

~holly

It was prime territory for the Neanderthals too.

Yeah. The documentary I linked was great. I really wish I was able to find the one I had seen the other day. Come to find out that the "Time Team" in the docu I linked has TONS of documentaries just like this one. How excited was I to sit at work and watch a couple of them. Cheers to these guys.

Like I had said earlier...the entire Doggerland area really resonates with me. Imagine all these findings, not buried in dirt and clay but on the floors of rivers, lakes and seas across the world!

I can't help but imagine what these people thought as they watched the landscape they were familiar with vanish. Granted, it probably took some time but someones grandfather could have sat with their child on the dwindling shores and told him of the days when the water wasn't visible from their vantage point.

Given the chance I would have stayed on the British side and not gone into France.


EDIT: I found an excerpt from the documentary that I was talking about. Exciting.
I found an excerpt!