The Conservative party's proposed dash for wind power is good news for the climate, but it could be bad news for archaeology, with rapid offshore windfarm development closing off access to some of the best preserved and most complete evidence of early human communities in the world.
There is a perception that the humans were short, brutish and nasty, and that they had to keep moving and scrabbling around to feed.
Most of the land that people would have inhabited is now underwater because the global sea level was 70 metres lower at that time.
The region was covered in forests and river valleys. It stretched from southern England to Norway, four times the size of the Netherlands, when the sea level was at its lowest. It is located under 15 metres of cold murky water, surrounded by cables and shipping lanes, and no one has yet undertaken the massive challenge of carrying out an archaeological excavation there. A lot of archaeological artifacts, dredged up by fishing boats or washed up on English and Dutch beaches, show that the area has been occupied by humans for hundreds of thousands of years.
A 50,000-year-old flint tool that showed Neanderthal people were capable of thinking in a complex way was one of the treasures that was displayed last year. Stone and bone tools dating from 15,000-8,000 years ago were on display.
Over the past decade, Gaffney has been leading a project to translate surveys from oil and gas exploration into detailed maps of the hills, rivers and valleys of this lost world. From the 85,000 sq km mapped so far, they have been able to identify the most desirable places for human habitation and the most likely places for artifacts to have been preserved. They joined a Belgian navy ship to conduct a survey of a large ancient river system in bad weather.
One of the questions Gaffney and his colleagues want to answer is how settled humans were. We suspect that life might have been much more if the communities of Howick village on the Northumberland coast and Star Carr in North Yorkshire had existed 10,000 years ago.
There are 850,000-year-old human footprints in Norfolk.
They want to know how much social interaction took place between different communities and whether they traded goods.
The rapid development of offshore wind power presents an incredible opportunity for Gaffney and colleagues.
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