The land that is now the bed of the southern North Sea was above water — a vast plain of rivers, lakes, marshes, and forests that connected what is now eastern England to what is now Denmark and the Netherlands.

This was inhabited land, a significant part of the Mesolithic world of northern Europe.

The communities that lived on Doggerland were connected to the communities in Britain.

People moved across the landscape, following game, maintaining social relationships, exchanging mates and ideas and material goods across what was not yet a stretch of water but simply more land.

Britain’s Mesolithic inhabitants were not isolated islanders; they were part of a continental-scale network of communities that occupied the full range of the postglacial northwest European landscape.

As sea levels rose — steadily, over centuries and millennia, as the great ice sheets melted — Doggerland shrank.