Free Republic

Deep beneath the North Sea, scientists have discovered a fossilized forest that could hold traces of prehistoric early humans who lived there around 10,000 years ago, before the land slipped beneath the waves a few thousand years later. The discovery gives the researchers new hope in their search for "lost" Middle Stone Age — or Mesolithic — settlements of hunter-gatherers, because the find shows that they have found a particular type of exposed ancient landscape.

An enormous underwater landslide 60,000 years ago produced the longest flow of sand and mud yet found on Earth. The landslide off the coast of north-west Africa dumped 225 billion metric tonnes of sediment into the ocean in a matter of hours or days. The flow travelled 1,500km (932 miles) - the distance from London to Rome - before depositing its sediment. The work, by a British team of researchers has been published in the academic journal Nature. The massive surge put down the same amount of sediment that comes out of all the world's rivers combined over a period...