British and Belgian scientists are exploring the sea bed off Norfolk hoping to find evidence that Stone Age people lived there when it was still dry land.
In recent years, some trawler crews and researchers have found prehistoric animal bones and basic stone tools in North Sea sediment.
The team on the Belgian ship RV Belgica aims to map the Brown Bank area, a sand ridge about 30km (19 miles) long.
Mesolithic people are thought to have lived there in about 10,000-5,000BC.
"We suspect that the bank is on the edge of a large prehistoric lake, where you would expect settlements," said Prof Vince Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Bradford.
Despite the prehistoric finds from the North Sea bed, so far no Mesolithic settlement has been found in that vast area, which flooded after 6,000BC as the Ice Age glaciers retreated.
Eventually the British Isles were cut off from the continent.
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