Britain became an island after Çatalhöyük was built.
The sea swallowed the last of Doggerland, the land linking England to the continent, around 6200 BC — by then people had lived at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia for some 1,200 years.
The events
- The sea swallows Doggerlandc. 6200 BC · North Sea. After the Ice Age a lived-in plain of rivers and marshes, Doggerland, lay where the North Sea is now. Melting ice raised the sea, and around 6200 BC a tsunami from the Storegga Slide off Norway apparently drowned what was left. Britain was cut off from the mainland for good.
- Çatalhöyükc. 7400 BC–6000 BC · Anatolia, Turkey. One of the largest Neolithic settlements: up to several thousand people in mud-brick houses packed wall to wall. There were no streets; people walked across the roofs and climbed down ladders inside. The walls bore paintings, and ancestors were buried under the floors.
More amazing facts
- 8000 BC The oldest known boat is about 10,000 years old. The three-metre Pesse canoe from the Netherlands was hollowed out of a single pine trunk with stone or antler tools between 8040 and 7510 BC.
- 8000 BC · 3000 BC In the middle of the Sahara, rock paintings show people swimming.
- 7500 BC · 1600 BC A cat was buried beside a human on Cyprus 9,500 years ago, nearly 6,000 years before the famous cats of Egyptian paintings.
- 7000 BC Some flutes about 9,000 years old can still be played.
- 7000 BC One of the world's oldest known alcoholic drinks was a cocktail of rice, honey and hawthorn.
- 7000 BC · 5500 BC People were having their teeth drilled up to 9,000 years ago. A Neolithic graveyard at Mehrgarh in Pakistan held eleven molars from nine adults with holes drilled while they were alive.