A tsunami wave that struck Europe over 8,000 years ago may have wiped out the Paleolithic inhabitants of northern Britain. Known as Storegga, this natural disaster coincided with a dramatic decline in the local population.
In the Middle Stone Age, the population of northern Britain was only of the order of a thousand people. Most of them presumably lived in small coastal settlements, right in the path of huge tidal waves.
Archaeological evidence shows that around 8200 years ago the number of settlements across Northwest Europe declined sharply. This was due to a prolonged drop in temperature across the continent, although some researchers have doubted that coastal communities were significantly affected by these climatic changes.
The Storegga tsunami was caused by a huge underwater collapse off the coast of Norway and produced giant waves over 20 meters high that struck islands in the Shetland archipelago.
In the north of England, the waves were 3-6 meters high. To find out whether the tsunami could have destroyed the local population, the researchers conducted computer modeling of the wave at the archaeological site of Howick in Northumberland.
