At https://phys.org/news/2026-03-north-sea-lost-world-habitable.html … it seems forests were growing in what is now Doggerland. Or at least along the line of the river running up through Doggerland into the upper basin and the Atlantic. Robert also sent in the same link I had on my desk awaiting attention. The paper is published in PNAS – see https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2508402123 … for the full research findings. Oak, elm, and hazel were present more than 16,000 years ago, overturning previous assumptions that thought trees grew at around the same point in time as they did on the British mainland. Why would they grow on Doggerland but not on the mainland? This may actually be an artifact of the research, based on dna found in sediment cores from the floor of what is now the southern basin of the North Sea. Where all those gas wells squat. This is a relatively new area of research and it may not be as exact as the researchers think. However, if there was a rift along the centre of the North Sea that in turn created a sort of sunken area of land, keeping it warmer than the land around about it, there is a possibility these postulated dates might have substance.
Parts of Doggerland, we are told, went on to survive flooding events such as the collapse of the Storegga Shelf off Norway, that created a massive tidal wave. That was around 8000 years ago and parts of Doggerland were still dry land a thousand years later. Doggerland is described as a ‘micro refugia’ for certain plants and trees – even during the Late Glacial Maximum. The inference here is that glaciation only affected the mountainous northern and western parts of the British mainland. This idea might upset some geologists. It may also have been a heartland of human settlement during the Mesolithic period. The refugia idea may also explain how trees so quickly reestablished themselves in NW Europe after the Late Glacial Maximum.
Robert also sent in another link – https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/rivers-oceans/we-got-evidence-of-boars-deer-bears-aurochs-ancient-dna-reveals-sunken-realm-doggerland-had-habitable-forests-during-the-last-ice-age … which, said that way, is a bit puzzling all round. It seems the North Sea sediment possesses not only evidence of plants and trees growing on the bottom of what is now a sea but the dna of a variety of animals from wild pigs and bears to deer and aurochs, all animals that lived in Britain into the historical period. Are the sediments really as reliable as reported? Robert is supicious for different reasons. Why did it take ten thousand years to flood the North Sea basin? It was supposed to have happened much quicker, as a result of the collapse of the Storegga Shelf. Uniformitarianism on top of the narrative it would seem.
Robert also sent in another link – https://www.sci.news/paleontology/straight-tusked-elephant-paleoecology-14625.html … which goes much further back, to around 125,000 years ago – and towards the end of the last interglacial. The site, in Germany, has the remains of straight tusked elephants. It doesn’t tell us how many elephant remains were at the site – only that the teeth of 4 of them provided information on where they had roamed prior to being buried. However, the press release later says ‘the concentration of remains …’ shows that Neanderthals did not kill elephants and mammoth on the off chance but they killed them in numbers. No mention of Neanderthal remains near the elephants and it looks like a mass grave once again. Perhaps an entire herd of elephants wiped out in one go.