Researchers at the University of Warwick have extracted ancient DNA from sediment cores beneath the North Sea, detecting traces of temperate woodland trees alongside vertebrates including beaver, deer, and bear in a region known as Southern Doggerland. The findings, drawn from 252 samples across 41 marine cores, push the presence of habitable forests in this now-submerged territory back more than 16,000 years, thousands of years earlier than previously assumed. The discovery reframes Doggerland not as a barren glacial wasteland but as a potential refuge for wildlife during some of Europe’s coldest millennia.
Forests Beneath the Waves
Doggerland once connected Britain to mainland Europe across what is now the southern North Sea. As ice sheets retreated and sea levels climbed after the last glacial maximum, the land gradually disappeared underwater. Most reconstructions had placed the arrival of temperate forests in the region well after the peak of glaciation, but sedimentary ancient DNA, or sedaDNA, now tells a different story. The new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, detected genetic signatures of woodland trees and multiple vertebrate species in stratigraphic layers dating to before 16,000 years ago. Authentication relied on DNA damage patterns and contamination controls, standard safeguards that help distinguish genuine ancient sequences from modern intrusions.
The 41 marine cores were collected along the path of a prehistoric southern river system that once drained through Doggerland, according to a University of Warwick release. That river corridor would have supported riparian habitats where beavers, deer, and bears could thrive. The presence of temperate trees at such an early date suggests that pockets of Southern Doggerland remained warm enough to sustain mixed woodland even while ice sheets still covered much of northern Europe, a pattern consistent with the concept of northern glacial refugia. In this view, Doggerland functioned as a sheltered landscape where plants and animals could persist and later recolonize surrounding regions as climates improved.
How sedaDNA Rewrites the Fossil Record
Physical fossils from the North Sea floor have long hinted at Doggerland’s biological richness. Radiocarbon-dated bones of beaver and other terrestrial animals, compiled in a Radiocarbon dataset with accompanying stable isotope data for carbon-13 and nitrogen-15, already demonstrated that large mammals inhabited the region. But bones trawled from the seabed are often displaced from their original context, making it difficult to pin down exactly when and where animals lived. Waves, currents, and fishing gear can move skeletal remains far from their original resting places, blurring the picture of past ecosystems.
SedaDNA sidesteps that problem. Because genetic material leaches directly into surrounding sediment, it tends to stay locked in the stratigraphic layer where the organism actually existed. That means researchers can match species detections to specific depths and time horizons with far greater precision than loose fossil finds allow. The Warwick team’s earlier methodological work on Doggerland sedaDNA, documented in a previous announcement, laid the groundwork for the multi-proxy approach used in the new PNAS paper. By combining sedaDNA with seismic mapping and environmental indicators such as pollen and microfossils, the researchers built a layered picture of ecology, geology, and chronology in a single analytical framework.
This approach also illustrates how digital infrastructure is reshaping paleoenvironmental studies. The curation of sequence data, metadata, and core descriptions relies on robust repositories and publishing platforms. Tools such as the Cambridge Core help centre underpin access to key journals and datasets, allowing specialists in different disciplines to interrogate the same evidence base and cross-check interpretations in near real time.
Scale of the Search
The sedaDNA campaign sits within a larger European research effort called Europe’s Lost Frontiers, funded through the Horizon 2020 program and the European Research Council. According to the project’s official reporting, researchers mapped approximately 185,000 square kilometers of the North Sea basin using seismic surveys to guide two separate coring campaigns, which together yielded 78 cores. Seismic data identified buried river channels, lake beds, and other features likely to preserve organic material, allowing scientists to target the most promising sediment layers rather than sampling at random.
The integration of simulation methods with field data distinguishes this project from earlier Doggerland surveys, which relied heavily on bathymetric mapping or opportunistic fossil recovery. By modeling how ancient landscapes responded to changing sea levels and climate, the team could predict which areas were most likely to have supported forests and wildlife at different points in time, then test those predictions against the sedaDNA record. This feedback loop between models and measurements improves confidence in both, narrowing the range of plausible reconstructions for how Doggerland looked and functioned at different stages of the late glacial period.
Rising Seas and a Vanishing World
Doggerland’s disappearance was not a single event but a drawn-out process driven by accelerating sea-level rise. A sea-level curve built from 88 offshore North Sea peat data points, spanning approximately 13,700 to 6,200 years ago, shows that rise rates peaked around 10,300 years ago at roughly 8 to 9 millimeters per year. Over the broader window from 11,000 to 3,000 years ago, estimated global mean sea-level rise reached approximately 37.7 meters. Those numbers mean that within a few human generations, entire river valleys and forested lowlands would have slipped beneath the waves, transforming once-fertile terrain into a shallow marine shelf.
Inundation modeling published in Quaternary Science Reviews has mapped which parts of Doggerland were lost during specific time windows and where land persisted longest. That work also addresses how flooding affected the preservation of archaeological material, a practical concern for anyone hoping to recover more evidence of human or animal occupation. The combination of rising seas and, potentially, catastrophic events like the Storegga submarine landslide around 8,200 years ago would have made the final remnants of Doggerland uninhabitable in relatively short order, isolating surviving communities on shrinking islands before they, too, were overtopped.
Recent reconstructions of the North Sea basin indicate that some higher ground, including the Dogger Bank area, may have remained exposed until as late as about 7,000 years ago. A University of Warwick summary of this work notes that the “lost world” persisted in places even as surrounding lowlands drowned. Against this backdrop, the newly documented early forests in Southern Doggerland underscore how much ecological and cultural history now lies offshore.
What Early Forests Mean for Migration
The detection of temperate trees and large mammals more than 16,000 years ago carries implications beyond Doggerland itself. If mixed woodland and sizeable herbivore populations were already established in Southern Doggerland during the late glacial period, then the region could have acted as a stepping-stone corridor for postglacial recolonization of northern Europe. As ice margins retreated and climates warmed, animals moving out of southern refugia would have encountered not an empty tundra, but a mosaic of forested valleys and wetlands stretching across what is now the North Sea.
For humans, too, such landscapes would have been attractive. Forested floodplains offer timber, game, fresh water, and predictable seasonal resources such as nuts and berries. Although the new sedaDNA study does not directly address human presence, its reconstruction of habitat quality helps constrain where and when hunter-gatherer groups could have lived. If beaver, deer, and bear were exploiting temperate woodlands in Southern Doggerland more than 16,000 years ago, then the ecological foundations for human foraging and settlement were already in place long before the final inundation.
The emerging picture is of Doggerland as a dynamic refugium – a place that sheltered plants and animals through climatic extremes, funneled migrations as conditions improved, and then disappeared beneath rising seas. By extracting genetic traces from buried river sediments, researchers have extended the timeline of that story deeper into the last glacial period and shown that forests, not just bleak steppe, once covered the seafloor between Britain and the continent. As analytical techniques continue to improve and more cores are analyzed, the drowned landscapes of the North Sea are likely to yield further surprises about how life adapted to a world in rapid transition.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
