Carved by the hand of a Neanderthal 100,000 years ago. One of the remarkable hand axes discovered from the bed of the North Sea. © SCEZ

An amazing haul of 28 flint hand-axes, dated by archaeologists as around 100,000 years old, have been recovered off the coast of Norfolk.

The remarkable find was made by a Dutch amateur archaeologist, Jan Meulmeester, who sifted through gravel unearthed from a licensed marine aggregate dredging area 13km off Great Yarmouth and delivered to a wharf in southern Holland.

Reckoned to be the finest hand-axes that experts are certain come from English waters, the rare finds show that deep in the Ice Age, mammoth hunters roamed across land that is now submerged beneath the sea.

“These finds are massively important,” said Ice Age expert Phil Harding of Wessex Archaeology and Channel 4’s Time Team. “In the Ice Age the cold conditions meant that water was locked up in the ice caps. The sea level was lower then, so in some places what is now the seabed was dry land.”

The finds were made in the North Sea - an area of dry land during the Ice Age. © Wessex Archaeology

Bones and teeth, some of which may be from mammoths, and fragments of deer antler were also recovered along with the axes, which archaeologists believe would have been used by hunters in butchering the carcasses of the animals.

The hand-axes date to the Palaeolithic (or Old Stone Age) but exactly when in that 750,000-year time span is yet to be determined. Further study is needed but the shape of the handaxes can be compared with finds up to 100,000 years old, which means these tools were made by Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis, not by modern Homo sapiens.

It is very likely that these handaxes were made, used and left behind during a cold period, on land that is now under water. If they are found to have come from soils that have plant remains in them, it will confirm that they were deposited when the area was dry land. Archaeologists have suspected that sites like this exist in the southern North Sea, though until now it could not be proven.

“Although we don’t yet know their precise date,” added Mr Harding, “we can say that these hand-axes are the single most important find of Ice Age material from below the North Sea.”

Archaeologists believe the axes would have been used by hunters in butchering the carcasses of animals. © SCEZ

As part of a dredging industry protocol signed with English Heritage in 2005, the dredging company Hanson have now moved dredging to another part of the seabed and an exclusion zone has been set up around the area in order to protect any further remains that may be present.

English Heritage is now co-operating with Dutch counterparts, the National Service for Archaeology, Cultural Landscape and Built Heritage to evaluate the finds.

“These are exciting finds which help us gain a greater understanding of The North Sea at a time when it was land,” said Ian Oxley, Head of Maritime Archaeology at English Heritage. “We know people were living out there before Britain became an island, but sites actually proving this are rare.”