Relic by relic, beachcombers in the North Sea have helped archaeologists piece together a lost world once inhabited by modern humans, Neanderthals, and even earlier hominins. ScienceMagArchives
; EUROPE'S LOST FRONTIERS PROJECT/EUROPEAN RESEARCH COUNCIL; NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ANTIQUITIES LEIDEN ; MANON BRUININGA
Those findings suggest several phases of occupation. Tools and other relics 800,000 years old or more harken back to when this part of Europe was likely occupied by, an early human thought by many researchers to be an evolutionary dead end. One set of footprints, found in a layer of compressed sand on a beach in the United Kingdom and dated by its geological context, recorded children and adults apparently migrating across a mudflat.
The seafloor bones are filling in the picture of Europe's genetic past. Studies of ancient and modern DNA indicate that certain groups of hunter-gatherers entered northern Europe from the south and east perhaps about 14,000 years ago, after much of the ice had melted; modern European populations still carry their genetic legacy.
More than a decade of work paid off last year when Gaffney and Belgian researchers headed to the Brown Banks, about 50 kilometers off the U.K. coast. Mapping had suggested that between 7000 and 13,000 years ago, the spot was an elevated area 30 kilometers long, overlooking a river.took core samples, scooped up sediment, and made"grabs" with a metal claw.
He and Niekus then used chemical signatures from collagen preserved in dozens of the bones to analyze what people in Mesolithic Doggerland were eating before and during that transition. As the landscape changed, the diet of its residents did, too, shifting from land animals to freshwater fish."It shows their flexibility in the face of climate change," Amkreutz says."They didn't leave as sea levels rose; they changed their diet.