There is a drowned country under the North Sea, and the fishing boats keep pulling bits of it up in their nets.
It is called Doggerland. Ten thousand years ago you could have walked from Norfolk to the Netherlands across it without getting your feet wet. Think rivers and reed beds, wooded valleys, marsh and lagoon, and probably the richest hunting ground in the whole of Europe. Red deer. Wild boar. And aurochs, the great wild cattle, moving across the lowland the way game does where nobody has ever hunted it hard.
People lived there. Thousands of them, following the herds, building camps on the high ground where the animals came to drink. For a mobile hunting people it was close to paradise. Endless meat, endless fresh water, and not one reason on earth to plant a seed.
Then the ice that had been holding the sea back finished melting. The water came up slowly, year on year, taking the low ground first. A vast landslide off the Norwegian coast sent a tsunami tearing through what was left. The sea did the rest, and the best hunting country in Europe went under and stayed there.
We only know any of this because of the fishermen. In 1931 a trawler called the Colinda, working the sea off Norfolk, dredged up a lump of ancient peat, and inside it was a barbed harpoon point carved from antler, around nine thousand years old, dropped on dry land by a hunter who had no idea the sea was coming for him. Since then the nets have brought up mammoth tusks, the bones of woolly rhino, reindeer, wolf and bear, and a pick carved from the leg bone of an aurochs. Early trawler crews used to fling the bones back overboard so they would not foul the gear.
Sit with the picture for a moment. Britain spent the deepest, longest stretch of its human story not as a nation of farmers but as a hunting ground, and the people who lived here did it on meat, in a landscape so generous that agriculture would have looked like a downgrade. The grain came later, with the rising water and the shrinking land, when there was no longer room to simply follow the herd.
We did not give up being hunters because we found something better. We did it because the finest larder we ever had drowned, and we have been improvising ever since.
The harpoon sits in the castle museum in Norwich. The country it was lost in is forty metres down off the Dogger Bank, where the wind farms are going up now.