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Lower Palaeolithic
| Lower Palaeolithic (up to 250,000 years ago) There is evidence from bones and flint tools found in coastal deposits near Happisburgh in Norfolk and Pakefield in Suffolk that a species of Homo was present in what is now Britain around 700,000 years ago. At this time, southern and eastern Britain were linked to continental Europe by a wide land bridge allowing humans to move freely. The current position of the English Channel was a large river flowing westwards and fed by tributaries that would later become the Thames and Seine. Reconstructing this ancient environment has provided clues to the route first visitors took to arrive at what was then a peninsula of the Eurasian continent. Archaeologists have found a string of early sites located close to the route of a now lost watercourse named the Bytham River which indicate that it was exploited as the earliest route west into Britain. Sites such as Boxgrove in Sussex illustrate the later arrival in the archaeological record of an archaic Homo species called Homo heidelbergensis around 500,000 years ago. These early peoples made Acheulean flint tools (hand axes) and hunted the large native mammals of the period. They drove elephants, rhinoceri and hippopotami over the tops of cliffs or into bogs to more easily kill them. The extreme cold of the following Anglian Stage is likely to have driven humans out of Britain altogether and the region does not appear to have been occupied again until the ice receded during the Hoxnian Stage. This warmer time period lasted from around 300,000 until 200,000 years ago and saw the Clactonian flint tool industry develop at sites such as Barnfield Pit in Kent. The period had produced a rich and widespread distribution of sites by Palaeolithic standards, although uncertainty over the relationship between the Clactonian and Acheulean industries is still unresolved. This period saw also Levallois flint tools introduced, possibly by humans arriving from Africa. Finds from Swanscombe and Botany Pit in Purfleet support Levallois technology being a European rather than African introduction however. The more advanced flint technology permitted more efficient hunting and therefore made Britain a more worthwhile place to remain until the following period of cooling Wolstonian Stage, 352,000–130,000 years ago). However, there is little evidence of human occupation during the subsequent Ipswichian Stage between around 130,000 and 110,000 years ago. Meltwaters from the previous glaciation cut Britain off from the continent for the first time during this period which may explain the lack of activity. Overall, there appears to have been a gradual decline in population between the Hoxnian Stage and this time suggesting that the absence of humans in the archaeological record here was the result of gradual depopulation. Middle Palaeolithic (from around 180,000 to 40,000 years ago) From 180 to 60 kya there is no evidence of human occupation in Britain. From 60 to 40 kya Britain was grass land with giant deer and horse, with woolly mammoths, rhino and carnivores. Neanderthal man had arrived in Britain by around 40,000 years ago. | |
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