The area of boulder cliff lies just offshore from the isle of wight in the english channel. Now it has immense archaeological interest given the amount of stone age artifacts found submerged in the seabed over the years. However, in 2019, researchers made one of their most exciting discoveries to date. Experts discovered an amazing stone age shipyard, and now they're unraveling its sunken secrets. So the stretch around boulder cliff was once dry land. However, as sea levels rose in the wake of the ice age, the site was submerged underwater, and luckily, the mud and silt that came with the rising tide served to preserve much of the stone age settlement.
With that in mind, researchers have explored around boulder for decades, but it wasn't until 2019 that they uncovered the remains of what they believe to be an ancient shipyard. Unlike anything they have seen, the site revealed in detail what life may have been like for our stone age ancestors. Now the journey to the discovery of the historic shipyard began back in 1999, for it was then that divers stumbled upon a lobster digging a burrow in the seabed of the solent. This is the pool of water between the english mainland and the isle of wight itself. And as the crust asean made way for its new home, it disturbed some curious artifacts. Indeed, experts from the maritime archaeology trust mat discovered that among the items the lobster had moved were stone age relics. To some extent, the historic finds were no surprise for local fishermen had been finding stone tools in the area for decades. Furthermore, in 1987, an ancient forest was found submerged around the same area of boulder, as technology improved radiocarbon dating on the pollen found showed that the woodland was around 8000 years old.
