At the time of the last Ice Age, the glacial melt led to enormous increases in sea levels. This meant that relatively flat coastal areas were prone to be lost to the sea. This was the case in the East Anglian area of the UK, where it faced the North Sea.
     A combined team of archaeologists from the Universities of Bradford (UK) and Ghent (Belgium) have, for the very first time, planned and carried out a systematic survey of the seabed in the area of a sunken river estuary off the coast of Norfolk. Using existing knowledge of other researched and recorded Stone Age activity and settlement patterns they concentrated on a specific area of the seabed.
     Their research had been extremely well founded and they were pleasantly surprised to find what they thought had been a Stone Age settlement, 35 metres under the water, drown over 8,000 years ago but which later proved to be even older, dating from 8,200 to 7,700 BCE.
     Furthermore they also remarkably recovered two artefacts of immense significance. The first was a fragment broken off a hammer stone (estimated to have been about the size of a grapefruit). The second major find was a small flake of flint, with evidence of having been finely worked.
     These finds have encouraged the team to continue with the next phase of research and Dr. Simon Finch, of the University of Bradford, is quoted as saying "Our ongoing research will hopefully enable us to reconstruct what life was like on a more than 100,000 square miles of former land under what is now the North Sea and the Irish Sea, before it was inundated by sea level rise 10,000 to 7,000 years ago".

Edited from The Independent (11 June 2019)