A PREHISTORIC "British Atlantis" in the North Sea may have been lost in a tsunami 8,000 years ago.
New research has suggested Doggerland - a low-lying island off the East Yorkshire coast - was hit by a tidal wave and abandoned by its inhabitants, according to a study by Imperial College London.
Historians say the marshy land was roughly the size of Wales and was a "paradise" for hunters and fishermen before it was submerged.
For the first time, scientists have linked the abandonement of the island to a tsunami created by a landslide off Norway.
A coastal shelf 180miles long fell into the sea - an event known as the Storegga Slide - producing a 130ft wave.
The waves were 16ft high when they reached Doggerland - enough to devastate the island.
Historian Vince Gaffney from the University of Birmingham has been studying landscapes under the North Sea.
He said: "Perhaps many people don't realise but until about 6,000 or 7,000 years ago, the current area of the southern North Sea was actually dry land.
"It was inhabited by hunter gatherers who roamed across pretty much the whole of the area between Yorkshire and Denmark.
"However, global warming, the end of the Ice Age and rising sea levels, meant that this landscape was actually swallowed up by the sea over time and it was pretty much lost to knowledge.
"About six or seven years ago, we started a project using oil data - data collected by the oil industry - to start mapping this lost landscape and the results have actually been wonderful.
"Currently we've mapped rivers, hills, lakes, marshes, over an area of about 23,000 square kilometres.
"That's an entirely new prehistoric country in fact.
"We're now starting to try and use that information to model where hunter gatherers may have lived, with the idea that we'll eventually go back to sea and use modern coring techniques to see if we can find traces of settlement.
"That's a first and we're very excited that we've been able to carry out that sort of innovative exploration at Birmingham.
"But we are recognised as innovators within digital archaeology and remote sensing and this probably has been one of the most important and largest projects of its kind in this country or indeed the world."
During the last Ice Age, sea levels were much lower and Doggerland connected Britain to mainland Europe.
It allowed humans to walk from north Germany to East Anglia.
But 20,000 years ago, when the sea began to rise, the landscape was gradually flooded.
The latest study, linking the tsunami to the loss of Doggerland, comes from Dr Jon Hill.
He said: "The research we've done is using advanced computing modelling to look at the Storegga Slide.
"No other study has predicted what the wave would have looked like."
