Time Team S20 special - britains stone age tsunami

8,000 years ago a tsunami passed through the sea like the recent tsunamis in the Indian Ocean and Japan it would prove to be a phenomenally destructive force when in rich land it wiped out miles of this coast and the lives of thousands of people who lived here but I'm not in Thailand or Indonesia or Japan I'm on the east coast of Britain this was a tsunami that tore through Stone Age brick it was one of the worst in the history of humanity in this film we uncover extraordinary evidence from this horrific moment in our past scientists reveal the single earth-shattering event that caused the tsunami and at one of Britain's richest Stone Age sites we discover the complex society that lay right in its path nine thousand year old fines offer rare glimpses into those people's sophisticated lifestyle and their spiritual beliefs these are holy objects in the Mesolithic and they're just so incredibly rare the tsunami was the most dramatic incident in a long and volatile epoch one that would drown a Stone Age world in the heart of Europe this was one of the most defining eras in our history making Britain and Ireland now we can tell the whole story of this disaster the time forgot to piece together the story of the Stone Age tsunami you have to go back not just eight thousand years but twelve thousand to the end of the last ice age this was seven millennia before the Egyptians built their first pyramid or our ancestors created Stonehenge glasses still covered much of the northern hemisphere but they were starting to melt the planet was warming this period of rapid climate change would transform Britain and in the midst of this volatile time in our prehistory came a catastrophic event a tsunami hitting the shores of Britain sounds like something out of a disaster movie doesn't it a work of fiction that couldn't possibly happen but it did happen and it was a long time ago and there's compelling evidence to prove it experts are now certain that Montrose Basin on Scotland's East Coast was once a tsunami disaster zone but the clues that tell us were in the right place a tiny and rather ordinary except to the highly trained eye right well what we can see here with a curious layer about halfway down which I think you could just about see I can see very clearly you mean this is an orangey brown band it signifies an unusual event that took place whilst this clay and silt was being laid down now that is the deposit of the tsunami so all this brown stuff this is all sand yeah that's right oh yeah yeah yeah it's very coarse isn't it it is now why do you think that that is from a tsunami rather than any other kind of event flooding awesome these clays and silts have been deposited over a period of probably two thousand years or more and yet there's only one single layer of sand within them so it's unique but even the trained eye need a microscope to see the clues in the sand evidence that reveals the full power of the killer wave and we found that the diatoms the little lacquer organisms which live in a real environment or can do so are often broken and eroded as if they'd be bashed about a lot by waves so that means that whatever this is it came from the sea and there was a great deal of force and tumble to get it here correct the pulverized microscopic sea creatures mixed in with the sand are a clear indication of the immense power of the surge that must have reached up to three miles inland it is quite extraordinary isn't that we can get so much information about a cataclysmic event the took place so long ago just from a little line of sand in the mud absolutely and we can say something about his age quite precisely the radiocarbon dates tell us that it's about eight thousand one hundred years old and the cherrystones which we can find here and there in the sand would have been laid down in the autumn this is a remarkable clue to have survived wild cherries only fruit and fall in autumn the stones mixed in with the tsunami deposit mean it can be pinned down to that time of year once scientists could spot the evidence the tsunami had left behind they could begin to appreciate its sheer scale the same sand crops up at 34 other locations from the Shetland Isles to Northumbria this was an awe-inspiring event one which devastated nearly 400 miles of our prehistoric coast but even with the knowledge of when and where the disaster hit it's still a huge challenge to find any traces of the people who might have been caught up in the ancient catastrophe this was 8,000 years ago a time just after the last ice age before people in Britain had started farming it's around 6000 BC in an era known as the Middle Stone Age or Mesolithic it's one of the least understood periods in our prehistory and it still puzzles archaeologists even today there is no one crucial Mesolithic site which is beginning to answer those questions it's in Yorkshire and it's called Starr car for the first time we're piecing together a picture of life in Britain around the time of the tsunami I've never been here before but I'm really excited about it a lot of archaeologists say that Starr car is - the Mesolithic what Stonehenge is to 3000 BC in other words you've got to come here if you want to see the big picture ever since the site's discovery fines from Starr car have been challenging our fundamental assumptions about how our Stone Age ancestors lived we've always thought of Stone Age people as hunter-gatherers living a nomadic life primitive and precarious but star car is revealing the existence of a much more advanced and complex society back in Mesolithic Britain the latest Stone Age Explorer here is Nikki Miller Oh Nikki hello thanks for letting me come on side pleasure what's the big deal about star car why is it the people get so excited about it we don't know much about the Mesolithic and it has such an amazing array of finds and because it's part of a great lake complex with lots of sites all around here so we're not just talking about one site we're talking about a whole landscape that's right you have to imagine it great body of water all around us here how'd you know that there's a lake here we know because we have all this peat in the section there that all that black earth and that actually infilled the lake and became what we call now Palio Lake flick stone 10,000 years ago a shallow lake formed in this valley traces of people living here have turned up at 24 different sites all on what was then the lakeshore over time the lake filled up with reeds and vegetation plants that break down to form peat it's this peat that holds clues to the Mesolithic past does the peat help or hinder the protection of the files it's a massive help because it stops oxygen getting into the archaeology and stops deterioration so we actually have preservation of antler wood bone in fact we've even got some bone it yes I fear it's a horse jewel fantastic is quite massive here as well as the bones from animals hunted by Mesolithic people hundreds of spearheads made from antler and would have turned up plus the remains of red deer boar and other wild animals see this is really weird for me because normally if I'm looking at the site of this kind of date all are never shown is Flint's that's right that's usually what there only is and that's why this is so important it's because the piece is here it preserves all these amazing artifacts and we learn so much more about how people were living from the bone and antler in the wood the sheer quantity of finds emerging from this one site paid a detailed picture of an astonishingly rich lifestyle one that seems to have continued largely unchanged for millennia it's that society which would be devastated by soon the back then Britain was a very different place if the inhabitants of star car had travelled 20 miles to these cliffs their view east wouldn't have been anything like the one we see today what Stone Age people would have seen from up here wasn't the sea it would have been a great low-lying landscape a plain part of a landmass so huge it was virtually another European country stretching all the way from me right across to Germany and we called this drowned world dog around doggerland was once inhabited it was probably a place much like star car and it seems a more complex fascinating place than we've previously imagined eight thousand years ago a massive tsunami hit Britain's east coast it would cause untold devastation most vulnerable to this tsunami was doggerland that lay at the heart of Mesolithic europe today dog a bank which gives doggerland its name is an underwater sand bank back in the Stone Age it lay above sea level and doggerland was no empty wilderness fishing trawlers frequently drag up prehistoric animal bones and human works tools from the seabed archaeology suggests that right in the tsunamis path play Stone Age settlements but to understand what this place was really like you need to be able to explore every detail of the seabed this is exactly what a team from Birmingham University succeeded in doing using 2,000 square miles of oil company surveys they've mapped what looks like an alien terrain Vince you know what this reminds me of one of those pictures of the surface of Mars yeah the Red Planet well it's not quite like that and it wasn't like that in the past there's a lot more water here it is in fact a foreign country what you're looking at is one of our first maps of rivers which flow underneath the North Sea this white line the snakes across the landscape as a meandering River and into it you've got a whole series of smaller streams things like absolutely yeah some of them are white some of them change color because of the underlying geology but you can see the tributaries you you you don't have to be a geographer to spot that sort of thing this is only a small bit of the North Sea isn't it have you managed to create a picture what they whole area would have known like flat but actually it was like this it was flat but indeed it was not featureless we've got thousands of kilometers of cross cutting channels small islands perhaps slightly larger islands on which people lived but the most dramatic features right in the center here this is a marine depression but 12,000 years ago this would have been a massive lake into which most these rivers would have flowed doggerland was a vast European Delta the size of Germany and from plant remains found in North Sea sediments Vince's team have got some idea what it would have been like to live there what starts showing us is that doggerland is a very lush place to live in the rivers we have reed beds we have deciduous woodland hazel we think is a very important component of this woodland oak and elm as well and this is a landscape that's full of resources it's a fantastic place to live this was a Mesolithic land of plenty home to thousands of people who could enjoy it estuaries lakes and lowlands many of the finds from the peaty soil of stark are show that these Mesolithic people weren't as we once thought primitive nomads scraping along as hunter-gatherers and it was a sensational discovery in 2010 that completed this new picture it was a really interesting area because it was very different from everywhere else it was it was dark in color and when we were digging it or Flint's were just popping out all over the place it was very very dense and when we dug into it we found that there was a sort of depression in the ground which was about three metres across and 20 centimetres deep and it was full of this very dark soil which was Zuma bleah something organic a bit like reeds and then around about it there are 18 post holes and we suddenly realized that we had something really important here so what was it it was a structure it's a house somewhere people actually live that's right that's extraordinary isn't it because up until then people had thought that in Mesolithic times people didn't have permanent homes they wandered around they were hunter-gatherers that's right people tend to believe that people were moving around the landscape in very small groups and not settling anywhere and we think from the archaeology we've got this shows that is something different that they're actually building very substantial houses so what do you imagine this house to look like well it would be it would be about four metres across and would be over a six-foot-tall and some kind of tent like shape probably with a an opening a doorway somewhere around it as well is it fair to say it was a glorified bivouac no it's something much more substantial than that it is a house a house that's ten and a half thousand years old this makes it the earliest house ever found in Britain and what's more radiocarbon dates revealed it had been lived in for between 200 and 500 years what's remarkable about this is that it implies that there were people who were born here brought up here maybe spent their whole lives here and would have identified with this land yes and quite possibly we have generations living in this house so this was a find of international importance that's right yes it changes the way we see hunter-gatherers it's the most surprising aspect of Mesolithic life that's emerged at Starke our people weren't just passing through lake Flixster they were settling here and it's likely they also settled on the doomed shorelines of doggerland in the path of a future tsunami to understand the kind of life Stone Age people might have led in this threatened world time teams Alex Langlands has met up with experimental archaeologist Jackie wood what we've got here is prime Mesolithic real estate do you by the lake so animals need to get their water so they're coming to the lake so you'd have to go and hunt them in the dense forest just wait here yeah well come to you yes and also the best vegetation for eating as well as the fish so that water is absolutely fundamental to the Mesolithic way of life totally and it's their mode of transport then get right through they didn't it's easier to go along the river than right through the forest it'll make sense absolutely people surrounded themselves with the resources they needed to live well and their tools marked out the Mesolithic as a time of finely crafted gadgets or advanced than anything that had gone before the originals are rare and fragile but we can discover exactly how they worked by testing some replicas Jackie you got a fantastic array of tools here talk me through some of them this is your Mesolithic toolkit basically or everyday things you'd need okay and one of the most vital tools in prehistory and particularly the meso thing is a bone needle and this would be actually to drill the hole that it allows you to make that hole just makes the hole okay that's an awl that's an all right this was like a kind of spoke shaver this is how you get the sort of nice rounded needle edge and this one here is actually your saw it's really fine edge on it and that's how you draw it out of the actual bone sort out first I don't put a bit of research on this and if it takes about four hours to make a bone needle from scratch but you've got all the tools for the job so there's a lot of things that we don't know but at the same time we can reconstruct the tools and then have a go at these things ourselves with them Mesolithic people made fishing nets clothes even log boats forgetting about these finds paint a picture of remarkably sophisticated settlements which would have been completely wiped out by a tsunami films visiting York University to see one more crucial discovery one which appears to show that people weren't just living side by side but working together Nikki I've been drooling and dribbling over these Timbers ever since I saw you unpacking them just phenomenal pieces of wood being a really boring archaeologist what's their context where do they come from they come from right on the edge of the lake so they would have been just under under water but the important thing is they are part of a structure that's right yes I mean that you have to imagine there on the lake but they're all laid out close to each other in the same direction so presumably to stabilize the muds and that stretches over an area of 30 metres and was probably some kind of platform going out into the water what they'd uncovered was the equivalent of the Stone Age slipway it made the muddy banks accessible and was probably a place to dock boats to undertake a construction of this short is a major piece of civil engineering it takes time and it takes a lot of people these aren't just natural pieces of timbers well they have actually been worked so they have been split and hewn so you can see with this one for instances it's rounded there but it's flat at the bottom correct me if I'm wrong but these are planks out of an enormous tree you've got to chop that tree down and then you're splitting it to make it into what virtual planks it's basically the earliest form of carpentry that we know of that is what makes this so important the sheer fact that it is the birth of carpentry the birth of woodworking and I mean the crucial thing too it's not just the undertaking the concept of building something like this it's that organization that goes into it the population the people that you need to actually organize things and keep the day-to-day routine of the village going on at the same time Nikki believes it took a thriving organized community sharing their woodworking know how to build a slipway on this scale and there's an unusual vantage point just near star card that will help her and Phil get a better idea of what that community may have looked like in its heyday but boy does it stink I should think when the wind is in the right direction you've got this sort of sweet smell of refuse wafting over your trench everything I promise you that you'll get a good view of the landscape when we get over this bit here and she's right at the top of the landfill site there's a breath of fresh air Nikki I'm beginning to get a really strong impression of just how complicated a lot of these settlements were paint me a picture what Blake flick Stan really was like that's what's so nice about this because we get the whole picture of the landscape here and if you look right down in the valley there all those green fields are basically the lake like flicks turn you also have to imagine about 25 sites all around the lake which were their settlements so this really is very typical of what we might have seen on doggerland yeah I think we can use this as an analogy with lakes and rivers and vegetation and houses and structures and platforms and so on yes and hundreds of people living here the more we learn about Lake Flixster the more settled skilled and at one with their environment Mesolithic people seem to be and back at the campfire alex is discovering a few of their creature comforts where we going straight down to the sacrifice this isn't just a log it's part of a ten thousand year old recipe perfect there yep just get meat that's great well that's a hot fire but what have we actually got in that clay then well we've got is a whole salmon it is stuffed with bird leaves give us some flavor and wrapped in grasses and then putting some silted play it's from the baked by the farm that sounds absolutely delicious normal Meza love it food Wow that's gonna be ready in how long about two hours but also in the fire I've noticed we've got some rocks basically in prehistory they use stones for heating water or cooking with the main thing that a child would learn as an as a little child was what stones to put in the fire and what stones not to because he puts anything that's not igneous like granite no panic yeah it blows up because it just shatters just yeah sedimentary rocks just explode so you have to know your rocks so that's mistake very important okay and we're going to actually heat some water with those in leather bag I'm drove it in wow if I can catch with boiling isn't it it's it one more yeah I think our hot these are hot and we go again what the far we're not far off a boil there what are you using this water for me and obviously not having a cup of tea are you know well it's gonna use this is actually for washing basically and we had a plant which we found in the pollen record that was here in the Mesolithic yep called so quit okay it's actually got sapiens in the water right it's actually make a soapy liquid and actually museum sort of top museums still use this soap worked for very ancient tapestries it's a really gentle sort of soap that's great and it is so cool yeah you can feel it can't you yeah see that lava that's amazing so I mean basically I've been sat me on the campfire I've just finished gnawing away on a deer bone and I've got grease all over my hands just come over here stoning lovely trees wonderfully very keen hands yes remember that salmon eat your heart out Jamie I can see the Mesolithic family arguing about which bottle the second all of what I've learnt here was made me sort of rethink what we call the Stone Age that actually you've got all the technology to hand to live a really rather kind of enjoyable lifestyle it's a lifestyle I'll also be able to share thanks to some unusual archaeological work from the team at Birmingham University they've assembled everything they know about Mesolithic doggerland into one extraordinary experience honey are you ready for some time traveling oh yes please bring it on let's have these things up for you using artificial intelligence they've tested how plants and animals known from the archeology would have colonized this virtual landscape it's fantastic if you actually put on your headset you can hear some ambient sound could you use this thumb to turn around and you know a little change it's a powerful simulation of a lost world okay you're getting close to a little animal can you see ah he's a pig that's pork for dinner then dog land certainly was a big place all these thousands of years later I still can't find my way out they reckon up to a hundred thousand Stone Age people lived here all focused on the coast and the waterways but there was a major problem it was right in the path of a tsunami the catastrophic tsunami that hit the east coast of Britain eight thousand years ago would have swamped the region we now call doggerland the Britain was in the throes of global warming low-lying doggerland had been defenseless against the encroaching seas by the time the tsunami hit in 6100 BC this landscape was no more than an area of shallow islands the end of the Ice Age put the planet in a state of major upheaval it wasn't just that the ice sheets were retreating but the Earth's crust itself was creaking and uplifting this massive climate change wasn't just the setting for Britain's Stone Age tsunami it was the very cause of it 700 miles to the north beneath the Norwegian Sea layers of sand and boulders had built up during the ice ages their vast weight put pressure on thin muds that lay in between this produced a dangerous cocktail of sediments lying right on the edge of the continental shelf unstable and massive it was about to give way and tsunami expert Dave Tappan knows what triggered it there was an earthquake and it shook the seabed and a huge volume of sediment collapse and as it did so as it flowed down the seabed it created a wave tens of meters on so this is a debris that's coming off the land this is something which all takes place underwater absolutely so what is that that we can see there what we have here is an image and what it shows is like a massive scar which we formed when this sediment collapsed a 200-mile section of the marine shelf the size of Iceland gave way and plunged to the seafloor the earthquake had set off an underwater landslide of gargantuan proportions now known as the stereo slide it tore across the ocean bed for hundreds of miles but how do we know that the land slip in Norway created the tsunami which caused all the markings on the British landscape couldn't they be entirely different phenomena it is possible and it took a lot of science to work it out what we know is that the straightest slide took place about 6,200 years bc and the sediments which we've been looking at here will lay down at the same time and the correlation is very good and to a scientist such as myself it's pretty convincing the underwater slide displaced millions of tons of seawater and created a massive wave a tsunami that radiated out across the sea it struck Norway then Iceland and Greenland traveling faster in the deeper water of the Atlantic it would have reached North America in just three hours Britain's East Coast also lay right in the tsunamis path Mesolithic people would have had no warning of the impending catastrophe but we can imagine the terror they were about to experience it was all too horrific li clear when tsunamis hit Japan in 2011 and Indonesia and Thailand on Boxing Day 2004 our Stone Age tsunami traveled crest first towards Britain's east coast the vast energy behind a tsunami wave makes it relentless unstoppable and deadly as it reach or it rose to a height of 10 meters people in its path what powers it couldn't be outrun would be another damage that it did depend a lot on the topography of the particular piece of land it was going up absolutely the topography the the flatness of the land or the height whether there are valleys would have made a massive difference for example the one we're walking up now then that would focus the wave and the wave would build and build and build it would be amazingly destructive just as the Japanese tsunami carried away whole towns so the stone-age tsunami must have picked up branches trees and boulders in its way stripping the land of vegetation and destroying settlements the effect of the tsunami on doggerland and the East Coast would have been catastrophic finding any direct evidence of the impact on Mesolithic people of such a brief incident 8000 years ago would seem near impossible but in Scotland archeologists now realize that's exactly what they did find back in 1979 during an excavation beneath Castle Street in Inverness Phil's joined curator Kate McCullough to find out more misson lovely men who tagged but of course the crucial thing is that we come to have a look at the sight of this Mesolithic campsite that's right and this is it and here we are right above it literally right here I mean the view up here looking down into the the river itself must have been absolutely superb in the Mesolithic beard it's a perfect location so we've got the river directly below us here fresh water navigation fantastic I choose it food water food and water ideal speaking of which that's gonna have a coffee when archaeologists dug here over 30 years ago they had no idea of the significance of what they'd found right on top of the mezzo lytx settlement was the same telltale layer of sand found across Scotland but back then they had no idea where it came from so these are the original photographs on the excavation that's right this is a profile shot of the section at the depth of the tsunami and the Mesolithic horizon so here we have this very dark dark loamy layer that's the Mesolithic occupation site and directly above that the tsunami layer and the sheer fact that you've got that relationship with where people were living and the Toonami lying directly on top of it and I suppose when they actually dug this site they simply didn't know the importance of the site that they were excavating that tsunami hadn't been recognized at that time so what are the chances of an area in this immediate locality being redeveloped in the in the short term today I want to dig it whether or not the camp was occupied at the precise moment the tsunami struck we'll never know but even if some people survived the impact of the disaster must have been shocking and lasting if you imagine that these people have a witness a wall of force a huge wall of water coming down and wiping out their villages they would have had a profound change of their views with nature and particularly the sea yeah I suppose up until then they would have thought of the sea or something beneficent something that provided them with everything they wanted well absolutely it provides food protection it's really important so how would people have reacted do you think emotion there was a snarly in Papua New Guinea in 1998 the villagers there who were most affected who lost the children and the old people the one thing they did is they moved away from the coastline and actually saw the sea has something deeply evil and dangerous in the face of such trauma Britain's Mesolithic people may also have turned their backs on the sea and perhaps look to their gods for comfort star car provides clues about who those might be at the University of Cambridge museum of anthropology and archeology Phil gets the chance to see the sights most strange and sacred objects Wow ah these are found in the muds Stark are they made out of red deer skulls and we think that they were probably used as headdresses these are holy objects in the Mesolithic and they're just so incredibly rare and they give us a completely different insight into the Mesolithic I think a reverential dot for the Hat and an application of the glasses is called for here you can see how much they've been modified how much they've been changed and chopped about they've removed the whole bulk of the answer but kind of they've Steve they've kept the spirit of it by just leaving these wallet like presumably like horns they found an extraordinary 21 sets of antler headdresses at starker and all share a similar design the antlers were broken off and the stumps thinned down the nose bone removed while the inner skull was hollowed out finally two mysterious holes were bored into the back of the skull one of the things that we're sort of thinking is that they may have used them in a shaman's as way of transforming themselves into these animals they maybe took some kind of Lucy Jones went into a trance and it's a way of communicating with the spirit world I'm sure these people had a perhaps a greater sort of spiritual sense than we perhaps give them credit for their awareness of their environment the awareness of the way the Sun moved the moon the planets all most of it you can't live in the natural world without having some recall to spirituality and then like you say you have to have some holy man who might actually be able to put you in connection with that spirit world these skulls point to a rich Mesolithic culture full of magic and mysticism Alex and experimental archaeologist Jackie Melville are determined to work out how the headdresses might have been used and what divine powers they conjured the only thing that is slightly perplexing really is these holes in the back right okay so these are being suggested as sort of fake eyes or something to do with wearing them perhaps as masks but if you're wearing them sort of on the back of your head you wouldn't be able to see those sort of I know this is sort of eyes in the back of the head yes Mike head is it that you're looking two ways you know right okay front and back or could it possibly be that you would wear them sort of the other way over your face and it would sort of write like that as a mask so I can sort of peer out of my little mask here so as I'm dancing around the fire and you know do I look particularly horrifying you do actually you look you quickly I think that there's something you put them on your head you think that it has to be he possibly I mean they may have had two uses you may have actually used them to stalk the deer but also you know to become the deer and maybe you know they were part of two different forms of several minutes you think these might actually have a practical use yeah in the stalking of deer it's all about becoming a deer to catch a deer to feed your family maybe the antlers will warm not simply as a disguise but in the belief that they'd allow the hunter to embody the animals very soul and to outwit their prey and from what we know of other cultures similar skulls were worn to conjure up spirits just as this Siberian shaman was doing nearly ten thousand years later in 1692 when he was sketched by a passing Explorer the Stone Age tsunami had been short and sharp but it was a harbinger of a more permanent devastation that lay ahead an even greater threat loomed from the melting IceCaps a flood on such a scale that it would destroy doggerland for good the Stone Age tsunami that hit the shores of northern Britain and doggerland in 6100 BC had been a terrible disaster but after a few hours the water would have receded for doggerland though the rising sea levels posed a more enduring threat when we look at the rate of sea-level rise during the end of the last ice age actually locked up in those ice sheets it's about 120 meters of sea level and so if you can imagine all of this melting over about four thousand year period you're having a complete change in the landscape as each generation went by Mesolithic people saw more of their land disappear they'd have to change their way of life and find ingenious new ways to survive to find out how they did this films joined archaeologist Martin Bell and his team on a slice of that drowned land the lies in the seven estuary in South Wales where exactly are we in the landscape so to speak this was the edge of a former Island which was gradually being buried and encroached by rising sea level and accumulated sediments and at the time that low Hill would have been surrounded by an oak forest the River Severn itself would have been right over there these ten kilometers away and then gradually that whole valley drowned and if we were here in the Mesolithic period we would have been mixing with Mesolithic hunters that would have been operated on this beach yes living on the edge of the island actually over 20 years of digging in this meza lytic hunting ground martins discovered how people might have coped with their shrinking world what's especially at this spot well it's the forest really this is part of the the oak forest you can see around us the stumps of various trees poking up from this flat peaty surface and the extraordinary thing about this tree and a number of others is that there's charcoal scatters around the tree now hang on I mean we got any other evidence of humans being here yesterday walking around here I discovered first of all this Flint blade here sticking out of the peat and then right next to it another Flint and then even more exciting from my point of view charred hazelnut and so can we say then that this was a campsite with a calf fire no I don't think so I think the evidence is suggesting that these people were deliberately burning vegetation in order to encourage particular plant resources that they were interested in the most obvious one of course the hazelnuts so this to you is a prime example of Mesolithic people actually burnin actually creating a landscape is that in response to the road in Sheela well a lot of land had been lost of course half the territory of some communities would have been completely lost to the seas that in a way it's logical that they would have intensified the use of the remaining areas of landscape it's an astonishing conclusion these supposedly primitive people appear to have understood that burning vegetation makes soil more fertile and encourages new growth of edible plants and it turns out they were doing this all over Britain's coasts and in doggerland but what do we know about doggerland last days it appears that the final sea level rise that made Britain and Island was no gradual inundation more a worldwide deluge what was it that finally can't Britain off from mainland Europe we think there was a huge flood about 8,000 years ago which finally split us from Europe we have to look to North America to actually see the reason why they're the ice sheet is still melting and it's building up huge amounts of melt water in this lake called liquor gassy Lake Agassiz was a lake that would literally change the world 163 trillion tons of fresh water were being held back by a great ice dam but as the ice melted that dam gave way and all that water that's been stored pours into the North Atlantic into the North Sea you would have seen two to four meters of sea level rise which is huge so literally over a couple of years you would actually see your distant cousins on the other side of dog land suddenly disappear at the rate of 5 to 10 million tons per second the lake emptied flooding coasts across the Northern Hemisphere and drowning doggerland once and for all the flood severed Britain's last links to Europe and we've remained an island ever since over time a new culture would develop distinct from our continental neighbors and the trajectory of our history would change irrevocably among the events that created the island of Britain after the Ice Age the tsunami was surely the most dramatic single catastrophe and in the future if the planets gripped in another big freeze we may well find that history repeats itself we've all been confronted over the last 10 years or so with images of the pain and suffering that tsunamis can cause but they were over the other side of the world it's hard to imagine that early in human history people living right here suffered a similar trauma when a tsunami arrived and even harder to imagine that one day even though it may be thousands of years in the future it's almost certain another tsunami will visit this coast just as one did 8,000 years ago first-hand accounts from survivors caught up in the tornado that swept through Oklahoma super tornado is on for next Thursday at 8:00 the next tonight humans are meant to be complex beings although by the looks of it with some data analysis we're pretty predictable human swarm coming up

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Length: 46min 46sec (2806 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2013