Extract from “Landmarks from the Past”, written by Gillian Clegg. England: Wayland LTD, 1994.

Amazon eBay: The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Editor's Introduction | Humans arrived in Britain over 500,000 years ago but occupation has not been constant since that time. Populations have come and gone in response to environmental factors, the most important of which is climate. The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project aims to investigate and document the history of the human community in the British Isles and to reveal how those people lived. Chris Stringer of the Department of Palaeontology at The Natural History Museum and head of the project explains what is already known about this fascinating aspect of prehistory and what he and his colleagues aim to discover. The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) research project is a five-year programme funded by the Leverhulme Trust which began in October 2001. Its aim is to investigate the timing and nature of the human occupation of the British Isles during the Quaternary (the geological period which started about 1.8 million years ago--the Pleistocene is the name given to the part before the warm period in which we live now). The project brings together a range of specialists including archaeologists, palaeontologists, stratigraphers, sedimentologists, and isotope analysts from a core of British universities and national museums. A group of Homo heidelbergensis on the banks of the river at Swanscombe, England, about 400,000 years ago. The central purpose of the programme is to provide a detailed settlement history of Britain over at least a 500,000 year period. This will be achieved by reconstructing ancient Britain with its former inhabitants, revealing aspects of their technology and behaviour and exploring how and why these changed over time, reconstructing the environments in which they lived and the resources that these provided, and documenting the animals that shared their landscape. By taking this broad sweep in time within a single sub-region of Europe, it is hoped to identify patterns of human social organisation, behaviour, technology, economies, habitat preferences and landscape use. The project takes a multidisciplinary approach towards integrating known archaeological and environmental data with the Quaternary timeframe. During the Quaternary, the landmass that would become the British Isles witnessed frequent and often dramatic transformations in climate, environment and landscape. The long- and often short-term effects of these factors on human populations must have been dramatic if not catastrophic. Ice-sheets repeatedly advanced and retreated, fluctuating global sea levels led to sporadic isolation from mainland Europe and major changes in the pattern of North Atlantic currents dramatically influenced the nature and rapidity of climate change. Repeated glaciation successively remodelled the British landscape and its river systems. Diverse mammal faunas have been recorded from this time period, containing species as different as hippopotamus and reindeer, while floras varied from temperate woodland to steppe tundra. Against this background a fluctuating signal of human presence can be recognised over at least half a million years. Abundant archaeology has been preserved at many British sites and faunal remains provide further direct evidence of human activity in the form of butchered or modified bone. These are often found associated on well-preserved occupation surfaces, a rare occurrence in a European context. Although actual human fossils are rare in Britain, those that do occur are well provenanced. Hence there are few better places to examine the many factors influencing and limiting the distribution of early human populations. During the peak of the last Ice Age, 20,000 years ago, the northern polar front extended down to the level of Iberia and there were icebergs floating off the coast of Portugal. Britain was locked in an icy regime and during the winter was surrounded by frozen seas. It is thought that people were unable to sustain occupation in Britain during this period. At the times of the lowest sea levels and maximum ice, the continental shelf on which Britain is situated was joined by quite an extensive land bridge to Europe. So potentially, people, animals and plants were able, periodically, to spread from Europe. But when sea levels were high, Britain was either an island or connected to the continent by only a very narrow land bridge. The interaction of these forces can be modelled and so the ability of fauna, flora and people to come to and fro can be charted. Thus as the climate pendulum swung backwards and forwards, profound climatic and geographic changes occurred.