Stone spring

89

For an age yet the chthonic convulsions would continue. Matters of geological chance would determine the future shape of land and sea: the release of stresses in the unburdened continental plates, the precise way the ice caps melted after their rough sculpting by the stray comet fragments. Small, random events, trivial on a planetary scale, yet with huge consequences for the humans who struggled to survive.

In Northland, as the seas rose, perhaps the flooding from north and south would continue, until the ocean broke through from north to south, separating Britain from Europe with a tongue of ocean.

Or perhaps humans could make a difference.

Time would tell. Afterword In 1931 a fishing trawler called the Colinda, working forty kilometres off the eastern coast of England, dragged up a lump of peat. Inside, the skipper found an elegantly barbed spear point made from a deer antler. Entirely unexpected, it was a relic of a country now lost beneath the ocean.

In 8000 BC sea levels were much lower than today, as vast quantities of water were still locked up in the ice caps, and around the world ocean floors were exposed. Britain was not an island. The bed of the North Sea was a vast plain now known as ‘Doggerland’, a country larger than modern Britain whose northern coast ran directly from England to Denmark. The present Dogger Bank was a shallow upland (called the First Mother’s Ribs here), and to its south was a salt-water estuary the size of the Bristol Channel, now known as the Outer Silver Pit (and here called the Moon Sea). With twenty-four major lakes and wetlands and sixteen hundred kilometres of river courses, Doggerland was a rich, well-watered landscape that would have been very attractive to human hunters, more so than the surrounding higher land – and probably the centre of north Europe’s culture at the time.

But as the last ice melted the sea levels rose, and the land itself, released from the ice’s weight, rose and fell in a complex geometry of rebound. Doggerland began to drown. The sea rise may have been punctuated by sudden events such as storm surges – or even by tsunamis, as depicted here. In c.6200 BC a massive undersea landslip occurred off the coast of Norway at Storegga (see Bondevik et al, Eos, vol. 64, pp. 289-300, 2003). My earlier tsunami originates in the same undersea area.

By c.6000 BC Britain was severed from continental Europe, by c.4000 BC the last islands were submerged, and that was the end of ‘Doggerland, a country that had been central to the cultural development of north-west Europe for perhaps twelve thousand years’ (chapter five of Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland, V. Gaffney et al, Council for British Archaeology, 2009). The question asked in this series is: what if this northern heartland, on the brink of the Neolithic, had not been lost to the ocean?

Doggerland’s existence was suspected long before the Colinda’s chance find. Observations of submerged offshore forests – ‘Noah’s woods’ – had been recorded since the twelfth century. Geologist Clement Reid, in his Submerged Forests (Cambridge, 1913), was the first to speculate that a drowned landscape might once have joined Britain to the continent. A key survey was published in 1998 by Professor Bryony Coles (Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, vol. 64, pp. 45-81), who coined the name ‘Doggerland’. This built on data about the North Sea gathered by geologists, environmentalists, marine engineers and others. (The Northland map in this volume is based on Coles’s projections.) A recent work led by the University of Birmingham utilised two decades’ worth of geological data, gathered by the oil and gas companies, to produce a detailed study of a large area south of the Dogger Bank (see Mapping Doggerland by V. Gaffney et al, Archaeopress, 2007).

The importance of Doggerland is now recognised. Doggerland is one of the three largest preserved drowned landscapes in the world, the others being Beringia, under the Bering Strait, and Sundaland, between Indochina and Java. Archaeologists are seeking World Heritage status for the site, and there are proposals for further work with undersea archaeology and sea-bottom coring. My portrayal of Doggerland here, inspired by the excitement of the ‘discovery’ of this lost country, respectfully draws on the work done by these generations of researchers.

In the Netherlands people have been struggling to keep their land from the sea since before Roman times. Their earliest efforts, as in the novel, were to build artificial hills called terpen or werden in flood-affected areas, from about 500 BC. If anybody really did try to save Doggerland by building polders and dykes and drainage channels, the evidence is lost beneath the North Sea.

This book is set in Britain’s Mesolithic period, c.10,000 BC- 4,000 BC. For an overview see Late Stone Age Hunters of the British Isles, C. Bark, Routledge, 1992. The Mesolithic roughly corresponds culturally to the ‘Archaic’ period in the Americas; see Prehistory of the Americas, S. Fiedel, Cambridge, 1992. My Doggerland Mesolithic culture is an invention, but draws on evidence of comparable cultures around the world (see Mesolithic Studies at the Beginning of the 21st Century by N. Milner et al, Oxbow, 2005).

My depiction of permanent dwellings is derived in part from the archaeology of a ‘house’ in Howick, Northumberland, dating back to c.8000 BC (see Ancient Northumberland by C. Wadding-ton et al, English Heritage, 2004). There is no evidence I know of regarding clothing worn in the Mesolithic. However, there is evidence of sophisticated clothing woven from vegetable fibres from much earlier epochs, even the depths of the Ice Ages (see for example, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/02/000203074853.htm). Hunting people observed in the modern age have shown themselves capable of remarkable feats of medicine, including Caesarean sections, which may be anaesthetised with opium derivatives (see for example, chapters eight and nine of Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age by R. Rudgley, Century, 1998).

Some speculate that of languages spoken in modern Europe only Basque remains of a very ancient language super-family known as Dene-Sino-Caucasian, which was later mostly supplanted by Neolithic language groups including Uralic-Yukaghir, which includes Finnish, and the Indo-European which includes the Celtic, Germanic and Italic languages (see L. Trask, The History of Basque, Routledge, 1977). This is controversial, however. And even the language group from which Basque derived must surely have been only one of many hundreds scattered across a sparsely populated Mesolithic Europe. I have respectfully borrowed or adapted some Basque words for names and place names. My name for Ana’s home, ‘Etxelur’, is inspired by the Basque words lur, land, etxe, home. My names for Britain, ‘Albia’, and the British, ‘Pretani’, derive from records made in antiquity that appear to be based on the journey of Pytheas in the fourth century BC (see The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, B. Cunliffe, Allen Lane, 2001).

My mythology of Northland is an invention, though it is assembled in part from fragments of Norse, Celtic and other lore.

‘Rock art’ based on ‘cup-and-ring’ circular forms is common in northern Britain and Ireland (see British Prehistoric Rock Art by S. Beckensall, Tempus, 1999). It is unusual in that, unlike art found in other parts of the world, it is almost all abstract. The dominant motif is a set of concentric circles with a radial ‘tail’, but many variants are found. The rock art is difficult to date (there is no organic component to allow carbon-dating). It is generally assumed to be Neolithic or perhaps Bronze Age, but it has been speculated that the art has Mesolithic origins.

The legend of Atlantis derives from Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias, written c.360 BC. Atlantis scholars have suggested dozens of possible locations for the lost island, including the bed of the North Sea, for example by a Professor F. Gidon in 1935. The plan of the principal city on Atlantis as described by Plato in Critias does indeed bear some resemblance to some examples of British rock art. However, my linking of my lost land of Etxelur with Plato’s Atlantis is pure, and mischievous, invention on my part, solely intended for the fictive purpose of this novel.

Ice Dreamer comes from a remnant of the Palaeo-American culture called the ‘Clovis people’, with their characteristic large, fluted spear points, which was displaced by Archaic cultures – ‘the Cowards’ in Dreamer’s language. Evidence that a cold snap at c.10,000 BC called the ‘Younger Dryas’ was triggered by a comet impact in North America was presented by researchers from the University of California to a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in May 2007 (New Scientist, 26 May, 2007), and additional evidence in the form of a global scatter of ‘nanodiamonds’, produced by the high temperatures and pressures of the impact, was presented more recently (Science, 2 January, 2009). The theory remains controversial (see New Scientist, 7 February, 2009). I have invented the detail of a secondary comet impact in northern Europe, which perturbs the complex sequence of landscape sinking and rebound.

The ‘Leafy Boys’, inhabitants of the forest canopy that once blanketed much of Britain, are my invention. There was surely an ecological niche to be occupied here, however, and the conditions of the forest would have made it unlikely that any fossil evidence would have been preserved.

The suggestion that Jericho’s wall was not for defensive purposes but a defence against floods and mud slides was made by O. Bar-Yosef (Current Archaeology, vol. 27, pp.157-62, 1996). Novu and Chona, walking from Jericho, follow the natural cross-European trade routes that appear to have been used in prehistoric times (see B. Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, Yale, 2008). The place Chona calls the ‘Narrow’ is based on the site known as Lepenski Vir. This is a novel, intended as an impression of an intriguing age, and not meant to be taken as a reliable history of the Mesolithic. Many of the dates are uncertain, many key landscapes are locked under the waters of the North Sea, and even on modern dry land the peoples of the time left scant traces of their presence. However, any errors or inaccuracies are, of course, my sole responsibility. Stephen Baxter Northumberland Winter Solstice, 2009