A lost world beneath the North Sea was once full of forests

Long before rising seas swallowed Doggerland beneath the North Sea, this lost landscape may have been a surprisingly lush and life-friendly haven. New DNA evidence reveals that forests of oak, elm, and hazel were already thriving there more than 16,000 years ago-thousands of years earlier than scientists thought possible. Even more astonishing, researchers detected traces of a tree species believed to have vanished from the region hundreds of thousands of years ago.