Excavating a 8000 year old boatyard?
Bouldnor Cliff is a 8000 year old site of human occupation that is now submerged 11 metres under the Solent on the Isle Of Wight. It is thought this site was on a lakeside originally – before the last Ice Age ended and sea levels rose. Bouldnor is teaching us a lot about wood working, for example how they built various huts, tools and canoes. String, wood, bone, foodstuff, ancient DNA of dog, auroch and wheat, the oldest boat building site in the world, as well as flint tools have all survived.
Bouldnor Cliff is an underwater Middle Stone Age site that dates to 6,000 BC. This was a time when the hunter gathering epoch was drawing to a close and when Great Britain was being separated from mainland Europe by sea level rise. The lowlands that lay between the two land masses covered around half a million square kilometres and would have been home to many family groups. They had developed wide-ranging trade links, moving along coastlines and rivers. The land they occupied was rich in vegetation, animals and wildfowl but ultimately it was all to be lost under the sea. These people had to adapt to the loss of land around them as the outline of modern Europe was taking shape. 