Early Humans
| Happisburgh | Homo antecessor | 900 | Acheulian |
| Pakefield | ↓? | 700 | |
| Boxgrove | Homo heidelbergensis | 500 | |
| Swanscombe | pre-Neanderthal | 400 | |
| Baker’s Hole | early Neanderthal | 337 | Levallois |
| Creswell Crags | Homo neanderthalensis | 60 | Mousterian |
| Kent’s Cavern | Homo sapiens | 41 | Aurignacian |
| Gough’s Cave | Homo sapiens | 11.7 | Magdalenian |
The earliest evidence of humans in Britain was found near Happisburgh in Norfolk where coastal erosion exposed a site that produced flint tools and animal bones dated 900 kya. No human remains were found but the only species in Europe at that time were Homo antecessor (1200-800 kya). Hominan footprints on the beach were the oldest known outside Africa.
Flint tools found in association with teeth from the water vole Mimomys savini (unknown anywhere in the world after 650 kya) on the cliffs at Pakefield in Suffolk suggest that hominans (humans) were present in England about 700 kya.
The evidence of the first human to be identified in Britain comes from a site at Boxgrove in Sussex which produced a partial tibia and two front teeth dated to 500 kya, of Homo heidelbergensis (700-300 kya), or ‘Heidelberg Man’, named after the site of its first discovery (the Mauer-1 mandible) in Germany. Also present were three hundred flint handaxes and the bones of bears, bison, deer, horses and rhinoceros.
Three fragments of a human skull dated to 400 kya retrieved from Barnfield Pit, a quarry at Swanscombe in Kent, are described as early Neanderthal. Bontnewydd, Denbighshire, North Wales, is the only site in Britain to have fossils of a classical Neanderthal (230 kya). No human remains or tools have been found from Britain between 180 to 60 kya although Neanderthals thrived elsewhere in Europe during this time.
The Clactonian industry is named after finds dated to around 400 kya found at Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. The artefacts included flint chopping tools, flint flakes and the tip of a wooden shaft but no handaxes. It seems to have coexisted with the early part of the Acheulian industry.
The site at Baker’s Hole at Ebbsfleet in Kent is dated to 337-300 kya and produced large Levallois cores and flakes representing the discarded remains of stone handaxe tools by a population probably consisting of Neanderthals.
Creswell Crags, an enclosed limestone gorge on the border between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, contains several caves occupied by Neanderthals about 60-50 kya.
Around 42 kya Homo sapiens (modern humans) were living in Europe possibly side by side with the Neanderthals, who probably were extinct by 40 kya. An upper jawbone found in Kent’s Cavern, a limestone cave in Torquay, Devon, has been identified as Homo sapiens and dated to 44-41 kya.
Gough’s Cave, Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, has yielded Upper Palaeolithic (Creswellian) flint, bone and antler artefacts, animal bones (horse and red deer) and human bones (with cut-marks which could indicate prehistoric cannibalism).
Doggerland
Doggerland was an area of land, now submerged beneath the southern North Sea, extending from the east coast of Britain to the west coasts of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.
During the Middle Pleistocene (781-126 mya), Doggerland drained the Thames, Rhine and Scheldt rivers. In the north it was blocked off from the North Sea by glaciers and to the south it was blocked off from the Atlantic by the Weald-Artois chalk anticline between England and France.
Around 450 kya (MIS 12) the rising water forced the southern barrier, creating the Dover Strait and the prehistoric Channel River carrying the Thames, Rhine, Scheldt, Somme, Meuse and Seine waters southwestwards into the Atlantic.
During subsequent cold periods and short interglacials the ice connected Britain to mainland Europe, but during the other interglacials it became an island. The Devensian, the fourth and final glaciation of the Ice Age, was followed by the Flandrian interglacial (11.7 kya-present), which corresponds geologically with the Holocene Epoch, the warm phase in which we now live.
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