All,
Here a nice summary of Britain' prehistory that came out in the May Issue of British Archaeology and that also focuses on the activities of AHOB, the major ongoing project that I mentioned earlier in the Links Board. The latter's Website appears to be growing and already contains a good range of information, including a fairly detailed chart (
CLICK HERE or
HERE) that can be used in concert with Nick Ashton's article. Note also that Nick Ashton is the co-author of "Lower Palaeolithic Core Technology and the Origins of the Levallois Method in North-Western Europe" that was recently discussed on the Prehistory Board.
Jacques Cinq-Mars
Hunting for the first humans in Britain
When did humans first come to Britain? And how did they survive? Nick Ashton reports on our first half million years
Few of us, perhaps, can remain unmoved by the physical traces of the most ancient human occupation in Britain. Finds from this period frequently excite enormous media attention - from the discoveries in the mid-1990s of Britain's earliest human remains at Boxgrove in Sussex, some 500,000 years old, to the reports last year of possible Neanderthal butchery of mammoths at Lynford in Norfolk.
The backdrop to this earliest phase of human history was the periodic change in climate, when temperatures swung from extreme cold - bringing ice-sheets to the threshold of London - to levels somewhat warmer than today. Britain had been linked to continental Europe from long before the human period, but from about 750,000 years ago the land link to the continent widened, easing the passage of the earliest colonists into Europe's furthest north-western peninsula.
Lions to reindeer
Climate change transformed the native fauna and flora of Britain. At times, straight-tusked elephant, hippopotamus and lion inhabited the open river valleys, surrounded by dense, deciduous woodland. At other times, open steppe was grazed by horse, bison and mammoth. Harsh tundra and ice dominated during the coldest episodes with only animals such as reindeer and musk-ox surviving.
The history of humans in Britain is dominated by these changes in environment, which - at their harshest - drove people out of Britain altogether. But when exactly were humans present or absent in Britain? How did their lifestyles change with changing conditions?
These and other questions may be answered over the next few years. A major new research project is now underway, the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project (AHOB) …
CLICK HERE for the full article.
