7th millennium BC

In most of the world, however, including north and western Europe, people still lived in scattered Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer communities.

[4] Farming gradually spread westward and northward over the next four millennia, finally reaching Great Britain and Scandinavia c. 3000 BC to complete the transition of Europe from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic.

[8] “Sheep and goats were domesticated in South West Asia, probably in the region of eastern Anatolia and northern Syria between 8000 and 7500 BC, and were part of the agricultural package that was transmitted to Greece and the Balkans during the pioneering movements in the seventh millennium.

[10] The starting point for the Northgrippian is the so-called 8.2 kiloyear event, which was an abrupt climate change lasting some four centuries in which there was a marked decrease in global temperatures, possibly caused by an influx of glacial meltwater into the North Atlantic Ocean.

After the Last Ice Age ended c. 9700 BC, increasing sea levels gradually inundated Doggerland, a land bridge which linked Great Britain to Denmark and the Netherlands.

Sometime in the second half of the 7th millennium, the Storegga Slides occurred off Norway to generate a huge tsunami which completely overwhelmed Doggerland and its Mesolithic community of an estimated 5,000 hunter-gatherers.