Divers find prehistoric forest dating back 10,000 years submerged in North Sea off Norfolk coast

The trees were part of land that once stretched all the way to Germany.

 Lizzie Dearden 

The remains of a prehistoric forest dating back 10,000 years has been found by amateur divers off the coast of Norfolk.

The trees, which once stretched from England to Germany, have been submerged for millennia beneath the North Sea and were covered by layers of sand before being revealed by stormy seas.
Divers Dawn Watson and Rob Spray, from volunteer group Seasearch, were studying marine life just 300m from the shore at Cley when they made the discovery.

“I set off north and I’d been swimming for about 15 minutes before I came to anything,” Ms Watson, 45, told the BBC. 

“It was a great wave of black stuff in front of me and it took me a while to work out what it was but it was just wood, shaped like a wave.

“To start with I thought it was a piece of wreck because it looked like a piece of hull…it’s the remains of a forest, probably oak trees that have been knocked flat, presumably by outwash from a glacier.”

Some of the wood was compressed but whole tree trunks with branches could be seen, with starfish and crabs making knots in the wood their home.

The preserved forest was part of the former landmass known as Doggerland, which connected the UK to mainland Europe until after the last Ice Age, when it was flooded by rising sea levels.
Boats have salvaged mammoth and lion fossils from the sea, as well as prehistoric tools and weapons, but scientists had no idea the forest could still be seen so close to the Norfolk shore.

Doggerland was once so vast that hunter-gatherers who could have walked to Germany across its land mass, the BBC reported.

“At one time it would have been a full-blown Tolkien-style forest, stretching for hundreds of miles,” Mr Spray told the Eastern Daily Press.

“It would have grown and grown and in those days there would have been no one to fell it, so the forest would have been massive.”

An ancient forest was revealed by storms on stretches of the beach between Borth and Ynyslas.
 
Last winter’s storm also revealed prehistoric forests off the west coast of Wales and in Cornwall.

Gnarled tree stumps and roots, believed to be dating from the Bronze Age, have become visible for the first time after peat was washed away on the shore near the village of Borth, Ceredigion.

The heavy winds and rain also shifted swathes shingle and sand on Cornish beaches, to reveal trunks of oak, beech and pine near Penzance in Mount's Bay.

800,000-year-old footprints found in Norfolk, Britain; oldest ancient human footprints found outside Africa

Footprints left by ancient humans 800,000 years ago have been found in Britain, the earliest evidence of such markings outside Africa.

Researchers discovered the footprints, which were left by both adults and children, in ancient estuary mud at Happisburgh in Norfolk in eastern England.

The only older footprints found so far are at Laetoli in Tanzania, at about 3.5 million years old, and at Ileret and Koobi Fora in Kenya at about 1.5 million years, researchers said.

"This is an extraordinarily rare discovery," Nick Ashton of the British Museum, who led the research team, said.

The find came at an archaeological site that has yielded several previous discoveries of stone tools and fossil bones, including mammoth remains.

The researchers found the prints at low tide when waves washed away much of the beach sand to expose the silt below.

"At first we weren't sure what we were seeing but as we removed any remaining beach sand and sponged off the seawater, it was clear that the hollows resembled prints, perhaps human footprints, and that we needed to record the surface as quickly as possible before the sea eroded it away," Dr Ashton said.

The group of early humans that left the footprints appeared to have consisted of at least one male and several smaller people believed to be females and youngsters, the researchers said.

"They are clearly a family group rather than a hunting party," Dr Ashton said.

Footprint owners estimated to be about as tall as modern humans

Analysis of the prints found that they were from a "range of adult and juvenile foot sizes" equating to modern shoe sizes of up to British 7 or 8.

The researchers estimated that the height of the ancient humans who left the prints varied from about 0.9 metres to over 1.7 metres, not far off the height of modern humans.

They were dated at 800,000 years old partly on the basis of the site's geological position beneath glacial deposits, but also because the fossils there come from now-extinct types of mammoth and horse and early forms of vole that were alive at that time.

But the question of exactly what type of ancient humans left their footprints in the sands of time remains a mystery.

They may have been related to people of a similar period in history found in Atapuerca in Spain, assigned to the species Homo antecessor, or Pioneer Man, said Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum.

"These people were of a similar height to ourselves and were fully bipedal," he said.
Homo antecessor apparently became extinct in Europe 600,000 years ago and was perhaps replaced by the species Homo heidelbergensis, followed by the Neanderthals from about 400,000 years ago, and eventually modern humans some 40,000 years ago.

AFP

PREHISTORIC WEAPONS

The enemy attacks! Full-blown battles were fought at the time of the Tollund Man. More illustrations. © Niels Bach

Among the earliest and most widespread of man's weapons is the spear. Originally it was merely a wooden pole with one end sharpened with a stone or piece of bone, but once palaeolithic man had discovered fire, some 500,000 years ago, charring was also used to harden and sharpen the tip. The next stage was to insert pieces of stone or bone in order to reinforce the point, and then to fit a stone head. From a very early period there were two types of spear, thrusting and throwing. The throwing spear, or javelin, tended to be lighter and in order to increase its range a device called the spear thrower was introduced. This acted as a lever and was a piece of shaped wood, bone or horn with a hook or recess into which the end of the spear fitted. 

Two of man's other original weapons are the club and the axe. The club was originally made of hardwood, the head being larger than the handle. Like the tip of the spear, the head was then reinforced with stone. The original axe was made entirely of stone, simply an almond-shaped head sharpened by flaking. In about 3500 BC the wooden haft or handle was introduced, being attached to the stone head by means of bent wood, horn sockets, lashing and gum. Then, during the neolithic or New Stone Age era, 7000-2000 BC, the art of grinding, polishing and drilling of stone was developed, which radically increased the effectiveness of the axe, both as a tool and as a weapon of war. The head was now often fitted to the handle by means of a circular hole drilled through it, known as the `eye'. 

Perhaps surprisingly, the bow was already in existence around 15000 BC. It was first developed by the Mediterranean civilizations, and was taken up in northern Europe during the ninth millennium. From the start, yew, because of its good tensile characteristics, was the preferred wood, although in colder climates, where yew did not grow, elm and occasionally pine were used. Most bows were man-sized, and by the third millennium the composite bow, strengthened with horn and sinews, was in use in some regions. The string was normally made with plaited leather strips. Stone arrowheads were used, and the arrow itself was straightened by passing it through a hole drilled in bone or horn. In order to obtain arrows of standard size-important in terms of accuracy-they were shaved by means of a hollow tube cut as grooves in a split stone. The other basic weapon was the slingshot, a spherically shaped stone which was projected from a leather sling, which the firer whirled above his head in a circular motion in order to impart increased velocity to the stone.

Late Ice Age hunting technology

Knecht's (1994) study of the evolution of Upper Palaeolithic projectile points has shown in detail how people adapted to the ice age environment and to the animals available for hunting. It has also demonstrated advanced conceptual abilities among these people and an acute awareness of the physical properties of the raw materials that were available. Knecht was able to illustrate technological progress towards more efficient, flexible spears. Another major consideration in the gradual changes in material and design was the ease of repair whilst away from camp. She also carried out experiments using a goat carcass to test the velocity and efficiency of the spearpoints as hunting weapons. Her findings corroborate those from Stellmoor. Flint points propelled by bow, spear-thrower or unaided human muscles were formidable weapons, capable of penetrating animal tissue and bone. The hunting of large, dangerous prey could be carried out effectively and more safely from a distance.

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Hunter, gatherer… architect? Civilisation's true dawn

• 03 October 2013 by David Robson
• Magazine issue 2937. Subscribe and save
• For similar stories, visit the The Human Brain and Human Evolution Topic Guides

WHEN Steven Mithen's team began to dig through the desert soil, his expectations were low. "We thought it was just a big rubbish dump," he says.

Still, even the prospect of rifling through trash was cause for some satisfaction. Mithen, an archaeologist at the University of Reading, UK, initially raised a few eyebrows when he told colleagues of his plans to dig for Stone Age ruins in south Jordan. "They said we'd never find anything there – it was a backwater," says Mithen. He proved them wrong by finding the remains of a primitive village. By sifting through its rubbish, he hoped to gain a glimpse of day-to-day life more than 11,000 years ago.

But as they dug through the detritus, one of his students came upon a polished, solid floor – hardly the kind of craftsmanship to waste on a communal tip. Then came a series of platforms engraved ...

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Neolithic settlements of Greece

Early Neolithic house from Nea Nikomedeia (left) and Middle Neolithic house from Sesklo acropolis (right). D. R. Theochares, Neolithikos politismos. Suntomi episkopisi tis neolithikis ston helladiko choro. Athens 1993, Figures 19 and 48.

Reconstruction of the Upper Town at Sesklo. D. R. Theochares, Neolithikos politismos. Suntomi episkopisi tis neolithikis ston helladiko choro. Athens 1993, Figure 43.

The known Neolithic settlements of Greece are dominated by the nucleated tell-village, with dispersed farms and hamlets of non-tell type clearly in a minority. Yet new research suggests that the balance requires significant adjustment. Tells are highly visible and hence became an early focus for archaeologists, whilst "flat sites" require more intensive surface survey, a methodology of recent application and one so far used in just a few Greek landscapes. Site survey is also revealing a greater density of Neolithic settlements outside of the well-known concentrations in Thessaly, Macedonia, and Thrace. Such methods, combined with rescue and research excavations by Greek archaeologists, have now identified flat sites amidst the tell landscapes themselves, including Thessaly. In South-Central Greece, around ancient Tanagra city (Bintliff et al. 2006), a complex, probably pre-plough non-tell Neolithic settlement pattern can be reconstructed, composed of nucleated hamlets or villages based on the most fertile expanses of high water table soils, around which a series of small rural sites line the river valley soils up to several kilometers away. The fact that such nucleated settlements in Southern Greece are rarely tells, probably reflects a much lower use of mudbrick and a more mobile settlement network than in the Northern plain tell societies, rather than indicating a less long-lived occupation of such landscapes.

General characteristics of tells

These artificial mounds represent villages with prolonged occupation and the dominance of mudbrick architecture, where over centuries or even millennia new houses are built upon the remains of older and accumulated domestic debris, constantly elevating the village mound. The plains of East Central and Northeast Greece have revealed through extensive survey remarkable numbers of such early farming settlements. The density of such small villages is unusual in Europe and high productivity was needed to sustain them, whilst social conflicts were clearly avoided. How these special landscapes were managed for high, sustainable productivity can be modeled, but more problematic is how such community packing avoided destructive inter-settlement warfare. The fixity of the tell domestic base, creating a radial zone of exploitation of the surrounding countryside in the direction of neighboring villages, and a vertical build-up of successive settlements on top of the original foundation, is contrasted to another form of settlement, commoner outside of the tell landscapes, where flat settlements may have been occupied over shorter periods as a result of regular relocation of the houses and fields of a community. One might expect that the confined tell territory led to a scarcity of building space in the village, whilst the larger occupation area and more extensive land use of flat sites might display open village plans with more scope for gardens, working areas, and stock enclosures.

Tells and their settlement plan

Interestingly, tells in Neolithic Greece and related cultures of the North Balkans share many features as regards village layout. Since in the Near East tells were a regular aspect of early farming societies, this form of village life and its associated worldview were also already present in ancestral communities. The striking feature is the ordered nature of living space, a design reinforced by generational replacement of houses on top of, or close to, earlier houses (Chapman 1994). Houses, and structures for storage, workshops or ritual, were separated by narrow lanes, often sharing the same orientation. Seemingly due to the high value of land around the village for subsistence, tells did not expand outwards to allow open space for that variety of inter-house activities which we are familiar with from Early Modern European village-plans: large open areas for communal gatherings of a social, political or ritual nature, household gardens, and stock enclosures.

Chapman argues convincingly that the tell is a powerful ancestral space, a social landmark with a cumulative place-value achieved through long-term community participation, a "habitus" (or traditional way of life, following Bourdieu) of stability. Replacing houses or even whole village-plans on the literal lines of older structures enforced conservatism, and perhaps an atmosphere of unchanging or cyclical time for tell societies. The increasing elevation of tells, usually set against flat plains, over time, emphasized the continuity between people and place. Elites seem normally absent within these small settlements (for exceptions see below), suggesting that the social structure was organized around families and larger kin-groups (lineages). The visual focus in tells is the individual domestic house, generally on a scale suitable for a large nuclear family. Appropriately, excavated tell houses, generally rectangular, rarely show differences from house to house or complex internal spaces. Contrasts the simple, organic construction huts of Early Neolithic Nea Nikomedeia with a more elaborate Middle Neolithic house from the Sesklo acropolis; the latter highlights the rare exceptions to this rule.

Halstead (1999b) stresses that the tell is focused on the individual household, usually discretely placed from its neighbors, with a general (but not complete) absence of community spaces (perhaps most village level social and ritual events took place outside the tell). In stark contrast to Chapman's communal model of the tell, Halstead prefers a small-scale society composed of competing households.

Halstead's viewpoint (modified more recently, see below) has the distinct advantage in offering a potential origin for the postulated, if very localised, development in mature to later Neolithic times of higher status individuals or families. And yet Chapman's emphasis on these communities as consciously nucleated societies cannot be neglected. If competitive households were central, a more efficient settlement pattern would have dispersed family farms across the tell's territory, which was small enough for most farms to have been intervisible and to enable social gatherings to occur with little effort at some central point, while offering ideal least-effort access to the family estate.

This is the appropriate moment to introduce a set of linked models, offering fundamental insights into Neolithic Greek societies, but also into later prehistoric and historic societies in Greece. Their suitability is so striking that at the time of my own application of these ideas in the late 1990s for both early farming societies and also for later periods (Bintliff 1999a), some of the same concepts were being explored for Neolithic Greece by Paul Halstead and Catherine Perles.

Greek Neolithic villages appear to fit our predictions for face-to-face societies with a broadly egalitarian ethos, with very few (but important) exceptions. Thus for our best-researched landscape, the tell villages in Thessaly, Halstead (1994, 1999b) suggests that small tells probably housed 40-80 people, large ones 120-240. On the other hand, Nea Nikomedeia in Macedonia, a tell where extensive excavation has taken place, is claimed by Pyke and Yiouni (1996) to have had even in EN times a population of 500-700 inhabitants. However just 12 percent of the site was dug, and Halstead (1981) downscales this estimation for the 2.4 ha tell site by arguing that many of the houses were not contemporary, and also that only a 56 early farming communities: Neolithic Greece minority of the site was built over, leading to a recalculation of 120-240 inhabitants. Perles (1999, 2001) has her own formula for relating settlement size to population, but still concludes for Thessalian tells that 100-300 occupants suits all but a few sites.

This analysis favors a position on tell social organization intermediate between Chapman and Halstead: the typical village was normally an effective, small-scale community based on interfamilial cooperation, but households remained independent and distinct units.

Europe's oldest prehistoric town found in Bulgaria

Archaeologists in eastern Bulgaria have unearthed the oldest prehistoric town ever found in Europe and an ancient salt production site that may explain massive riches discovered in the region.

Excavations at the site near the modern-day town of Provadia have so far uncovered the remains of a settlement of two-storey houses, a series of pits used for rituals, as well as parts of a gate, bastion structures and three later fortification walls - all carbon dated between the middle and late Chalcolithic age from 4,700 to 4,200 BC.

"We are not talking about a town like the Greek city-states, ancient Rome or medieval settlements, but about what archaeologists agree constituted a town in the fifth millennium BC," said Vasil Nikolov, a researcher with Bulgaria's National Institute of Archaeology, after announcing the findings earlier this month.

Dr Nikolov and his team have worked since 2005 to excavate the Provadia-Solnitsata settlement, located near the Black Sea resort of Varna.

A small necropolis, or burial ground, was also found this year, but has yet to be studied more extensively and could keep archaeologists busy for generations.

Archaeologist Krum Bachvarov from the National Institute of Archaeology described the latest find as "extremely interesting" due to the peculiar burial positions and objects found in the graves, which differed from other neolithic graves found in Bulgaria.

"The huge walls around the settlement, which were built very tall and with stone blocks... are also something unseen in excavations of prehistoric sites in south-east Europe so far," Dr Bachvarov added.

Well fortified, a religious centre and most importantly, a major production centre for a specialised commodity that was traded far and wide, the settlement of about 350 people met all the conditions to be considered the oldest known "prehistoric town" in Europe.

"At a time when people did not know the wheel and cart, these people hauled huge rocks and built massive walls. Why? What did they hide behind them? [It was for one reason] - salt," Dr Nikolov said.

'As precious as gold'

Dr Nikolov says the area is home to huge rock-salt deposits, some of the largest in south-east Europe and the only ones to be exploited as early as the sixth millennium BC.

These deposits were key to Provadia-Solnitsata's success and survival.

Nowadays, salt is still mined there but 7,500 years ago it had a completely different significance.

"Salt was an extremely valued commodity in ancient times, as it was both necessary for people's lives and was used as a method of trade and currency starting from the sixth millennium BC up to 600 BC," the researcher explained.

Salt extraction at the site first began in about 5,500 BC when people started boiling brine from the nearby salty springs in dome kilns found inside the settlement, Dr Nikolov said, citing carbon dating results from a British laboratory in Glasgow.

"This is the first time in south-east Europe and western Anatolia that archaeologists have come upon traces of salt production at such an early age, the end of the sixth millennium BC, and managed to prove it with both archaeological and scientific data," Dr Bachvarov confirmed.

Salt production was moved outside the settlement towards the end of the sixth millennium and productivity gradually increased. After being boiled, the salt was baked to make small bricks.

Dr Nikolov said production increased steadily from 5,500 BC, when one load from the kilns in Provadia-Solnitsata yielded about 25 kilogrammes of dry salt. By 4,700-4,500 BC, that amount had increased to 4,000 to 5,000 kilos of salt.

"At a time when salt was as precious as gold you can imagine what this meant," he said.

The salt trade gave the local population huge economic power, which could explain the gold riches found in graves at the Varna Necropolis and dating back to around 4,300 BC.

The 3,000 jewellery pieces and ritual objects have been internationally recognised as the oldest gold treasure in the world, raising questions as to how a culture of farmers and stock-breeders from a region otherwise poor in natural resources could acquire such wealth.

The excavations have however suffered from a chronic lack of state funding, which Dr Nikolov has replaced with private donations.

A British anthropologist, a Japanese ceramics expert and a team of radiocarbon specialists from Germany have worked on the site for free this season.

AFP