© Deep Time Maps/Alison Mackey/DiscoverFrom Doggerland to Beringia, the sea took some of prehistory's most important archaeological sites. All over the world, scientists are beginning to find them again.
For decades, textbooks taught that humans left our ancestral African homeland and spread across the world via the landmasses we know today, reaching Australia less than 50,000 years ago and the Americas a mere 13,500 years ago. But there's a continent-sized gap in our knowledge about our collective past that scientists are only now starting to fill in.
From the North Sea to the island-dotted tropics between Asia and Australia, from the frigid waters of the Bering Strait to the sunny Arabian Peninsula, now-submerged coastal landscapes were exposed and accessible to our ancestors at multiple times in prehistory, including key periods of human expansion across the globe. The square mileage of these areas now under the seas is equal to that of modern North America.
"My own view is that there are certainly sites out there," says University of York archaeologist Geoff Bailey. "Some of the areas [that would have been] most attractive to humans are now underwater."
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