Tabula Peutingeriana and Doggerland

I like mysteries and trying to puzzle them out. Today, an old map of the Roman world went briefly on show in Vienna called the Tabula Peutingeriana.

The map shows a substantial island between England and the Continent. No such island exists today, but one did exist in the past. It's referred to as Doggerland (note Doggerland is also used to refer to the land bridge between Britain and the Continent).

What happened to Doggerland?

Rising sea levels in the current interglacial (the last 12,000 years or so) inundated Doggerland. The conventional view is this happened between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago.

The Dogger Bank is there on the nautical charts. The highest points are less than 20 meters under the sea.

The mystery is that an island that supposedly dissapeared several thousand years earlier is on a Roman era map.

This led me to search around for alternate explanations for the island. There are a number of small islands off the coast of Europe called the Friesian Islands, but reliable histories say these weren't islands before the 13th century. Again because of rising sea levels over the last 2,000 years.

Further searching led me to Pytheas, a Greek explorer who seems to have travelled around Britain and even as far as Iceland. Ancient writers are notorious for just inventing stuff. But Pytheas seems to have got a lot of things right and historians think he did indeed make the journeys he describes. Pytheas says he went to an island in the North Sea, the source of amber (a valuable commodity in those days). Historians say the island was Heligoland is a small island off the coast of Germany (and as a historical aside swapped by Britain for Zanzibar in the 19th century). Heligoland is a sandstone outcrop and would not have suported substantial forests or bogs required for amber production. As well Heligoland could well have been joined to the mainland 2,000 years ago and therefore wasn't an island in Roman times.

Anyway, Heligoland is nowhere near the size and location of the island on the Tabula Peutingeriana map. So what is the island and why does it matter?

The conclusion I reached is that Doggerland still existed in Roman times as a sizeable island. Which means that current estimates of a steady sea level rise over the last few millenia are probably wrong and some time in the last 2,000 years we saw a rapid rise in sea levels, enough to send Doggerland under the waves for good (well until the next ice age).