Lost world revealed by human, Neanderthal relics washed up on North Sea beaches

She has since plucked more than 500 ancient artifacts from the broad, windswept beach known as the Zandmotor, or “sand engine.” She has found Neanderthal tools made of river cobbles, bone fishhooks, and human remains thousands of years old. “It’s not a blank area, it’s not a land bridge, it’s probably one of the best areas for hunter-gatherers in Europe,” says Vincent Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Bradford.The dark, cold waters that now hide the region add to its allure because they preserve organic material for DNA analysis and radiocarbon dating better than on land. Chemical analysis helped show how Neanderthals used complex methods to process birch bark into tar, as a team including Niekus, Amkreutz, and van Wingerden reported in PNAS.Archaeologists can’t know exactly where on the sea floor an artifact found on the beach originated, so the context they prize is missing. (More conclusive tools have turned up in the United Kingdom and Belgium, on each side of Doggerland.) About 20,000 years ago, a severe cold spell made the entire region too cold to be habitable.But the end of the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago, brought a brief idyll: Pollen samples, DNA evidence, and fossilized wood fragments recovered from the sea floor suggest a fertile landscape of forests and rivers, with plentiful birds, fish, and mammals. Studies of ancient and modern DNA indicate that certain groups of hunter-gatherers entered northern Europe from the south and east perhaps about 14,000 years ago, after much of the ice had melted; modern European populations still carry their genetic legacy.The trove of human bones that amateurs turned over to Altena for sampling promises to add to the picture. Core samples collected along river valleys by the Lost Frontiers team traced the flooding, amounting to a “transect through time,” Gaffney says.To explore the impact on people, Amkreutz analyzed dozens of human bones dragged up by fishing boats as well as finds plucked off the Zandmotor and other Dutch beaches. Soon the landscape vanished as global sea levels continued to rise.This 13,000-year-old skull fragment of a modern human was fished up off Rotterdam, the Netherlands.At his lab at the University of Warwick, Robin Allaby is tracing the changes by searching 60 of the core samples collected by Gaffney and his team for what’s called environmental DNA, shed into water and soil by ancient species. “We can see the rise of an estuarine environment and a slow switch to marine taxa,” Allaby says, as bears and boars give way to sea grasses and fish.Researchers say the techniques being pioneered or perfected in the North Sea could be applied to far-flung hot spots of human migration, including Beringia and the waters that surround the archipelagos of Oceania.