This popular-science book tells the story of one of the most important, but least known major archaeological sites in Europe: Doggerland. Few people know that the beaches along the North Sea lie on the edge of a vast lost world. A prehistoric landscape that documents almost a million years of human habitation and lay dry for most of that time. Doggerland is where early hominids left the first footprints in northern Europe, more than 900,000 years ago. Later, for hundreds of thousands of years, it was the scene of ice ages. A world of woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses, horses and reindeer and the successful Neanderthals who hunted them, including Krijn: the first Neanderthal from Doggerland.At the end of the last Ice Age, the first modern humans also left their traces here, including the famous Leman-and-Ower-Banks spearhead - the first documented Doggerland find - and some of the oldest art in the region. With the onset of the Holocene, our current era, Doggerland's inhabitants were increasingly confronted with climate change and rising sea levels, just as we are today.The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived in a rich, but constantly changing world - to which they successfully adapted. Ongoing submergence and a huge tsunami around 6150 BC marked the beginning of the end. A few centuries later, the last islands disappeared under the waves and with them the story of Doggerland was lost in time. This book brings this vanished world back to the surface.

北海の底に眠る「ドッガーランド」という失われた大陸を、科学の知見と圧倒的な想像力で現代に蘇らせた本作は、単なる考古学の記録を超えた壮大な人類の叙事詩です。九十万年前の足跡からネアンデルタール人の息遣いまで、断片的な遺物からかつての豊かな生態系を鮮やかに描き出す筆致は、読者に悠久の時間を体感させ、現在は海の下にある広大な大地を幻視させる魔力に満ちています。 本作が突きつける本質的な問いは、絶え間ない気候変動に翻弄されながらも適応し続けた先人たちの強靭さと、その終焉の儚さです。海面の上昇によって消え去った文明の姿は、まさに現代を生きる我々の鏡であり、科学的な記述の背後には深い哀愁と文明への警句が潜んでいます。失われた記憶をサルベージする著者の情熱は、私たちの根源にある知的好奇心を激しく揺さぶり、大地への認識を一変させてくれるでしょう。