This exhibit at the Leiden national museum of antiquities about Doggerland seems worth a visit. The Guardian has a nice article about how many archeological finds from what is now the North Sea but was inhabited land eight thousand years ago, have been collected on the beaches (because Dutch beaches are replenished with sand brought in from further out at sea) by people walking on the beach.

Stephen Baxter wrote several books about a speculative history in which the inhabitants of Doggerland successfully defended against the rising sea and mesolithic tsunami that in our timeline created the southern North Sea. In his books Doggerland became an early and powerful centre of civilisation, taking on the role that ancient Rome had in our actual history. I enjoyed reading those books, and I think it might be fun to ‘backfill’ my memory of reading them with how the actual archeological finds connected to Baxter’s starting point look.

Stephen Baxter wrote Stone Spring, Bronze Summer and Iron Winter, aka the Northland trilogy, on this alternative history.


A 1929 German plan to turn the North Sea into a giant polder, basically recreating Doggerland, with dams from Norfolk to Jutland and across the Channel (shunting the Rhine and Thames southwards to the Atlantic). Image source Dutch National Archive, no known copyright restrictions.

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