London - Archaeologists are searching for the lost tribes of prehistoric Britain - at the bottom of the North Sea.
In a unique and ground-breaking operation, scientists plan to search for evidence of Stone Age human activity on Britain's very - own “Atlantis” - a vast prehistoric land, once located between England and southern Scandinavia, which was engulfed by rising sea levels about 7 500 years ago.
The archaeologists hope to find evidence of flint tool manufacture, plant pollen and the DNA of plant and animal species used by the long-lost land's inhabitants.
Due to be launched later this month, the multimillion-pound project is the largest of its kind ever attempted anywhere in the world and will lead to the development by British scientists of a range of new scientific techniques.
Past survey work in the southern part of the North Sea has identified some of the vanished territory's original river valleys - and it is two of those now long-drowned valleys that the scientists will target in their search.
They plan to recover ancient pollen, insects and DNA from plants and animals, and to use high definition survey techniques to accurately rediscover what the lost Stone Age landscape looked like, what vegetation flourished there and how humans used the environment. The project will reveal the culture and lifestyle of the generations of prehistoric Britons who flourished there for 6 000 years until it finally disappeared beneath the waves in the middle of the sixth millennium BC.
This “British Atlantis” originally covered about 100 000 square miles of what is now the North Sea. However, following the end of the Ice Age, thousands of cubic miles of sub-Arctic ice started to melt and sea levels began to rise worldwide between 8000BC and 6000BC.
Gradually, most of the 100 000 square miles became permanently inundated - and by 6500BC, the remnants of the dwindling North Sea territory had become a 140-mile-long, approximately 100-mile-wide island, nicknamed Doggerland, roughly where Dogger Bank is today. Over the centuries, this too gradually shrank and was finally overwhelmed by the waves in around 5500 BC.
The expedition hopes to discover whether the inhabitants were culturally more advanced than previously believed. Plant DNA obtained from another “drowned” landscape (the Solent, between the Isle of Wight and mainland England) suggests that Stone Age people in that area were eating - and therefore importing or possibly growing - wheat about 2 000 years earlier than previously thought.
Now the scientists plan to systematically search for similar wheat or other domesticated species DNA evidence in what was once dry land under the North Sea.
Within the next few weeks the scientists will start sinking bore holes into the drowned Stone Age land surfaces in order to extract samples of ancient earth.
Hundreds of such samples will be taken to the laboratories at the universities of Bradford, Warwick, Lampeter, St Andrews and Birmingham where scientists will separate out seeds, pollen, potential DNA material and tiny fragments of broken flint - telltale evidence of the manufacturing of flint tools).
Using sonar and high-definition seismic equipment, the archaeologists will also produce more refined 3D maps of the original landscape and its topography. It is conceivable that they may even locate man-made Stone Age structures. The research is likely to transform the academic world's understanding of pre-agricultural British society. That is because the vast majority of pre-agricultural Britons almost certainly lived in now long-drowned coastal environments - and very few such areas have ever been systematically investigated.
The project may also revolutionise the world's understanding of the spread of agriculture. Until very recently, all the available evidence suggested that once agricultural knowledge had reached an area, it quickly triggered rapid economic and social change. But the recent very early wheat DNA evidence from the Solent, if confirmed in the upcoming “North Sea Atlantis” investigation, would totally contradict that understanding. Instead, it may be that agricultural knowledge spread widely at least 2 000 years earlier than previously thought but had no significant economic or social impact for scores of generations.
The archaeologist leading the entire North Sea investigation, Professor Vince Gaffney of the University of Bradford, believes that the project will transform the academic world's understanding of how northern Europe was re-colonised by humanity when climatic conditions became warmer about 12 000 years ago - only for the communities to be wiped out when sea levels rose.
“Because these areas of continental shelf became sea, they have been inaccessible to archaeologists until now. This project will access new data at a scale never previously attempted,” said Professor Gaffney. “Novel mapping, DNA extraction and computer modelling representing people, animals and even individual plants will generate a four-dimensional model of how Doggerland was colonised and eventually lost to the sea.
“A dramatic, and previously lost, period of human prehistory will begin to emerge from the seismic traces, fragments of DNA and snippets of computer code that will form the primary data of this innovative archaeological project,” he added.
The project is being funded over the next five years to the tune of €2.5m by the EU's European Research Council.
The Independent