Ancient human occupation of Britain

The earliest humans
In 2001, ex-policeman and amateur archaeologist Mike Chambers made a discovery that would help push back the earliest known date for human activity in Britain by several hundred thousand years. For sticking out of the seabed off the Norfolk coast at Happisburgh he found a hand axe – one of the earliest artefacts made by humans ever discovered in northern Europe.

Located in the remains of an ancient forest, revealed only at low tide, the axe – like the forest – was dated to between 500,000 and 700,000 years ago. It was one of several key discoveries made very recently that have stunned archaeologists and other scientists studying the ancient human occupation of Britain, and transformed our understanding of the earliest human activity here in the space of less than a decade.

Mike Chambers' find coincided with the establishment of a large-scale research project, the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB), bringing together archaeologists and scientists from a range of different disciplines and organisations to investigate this neglected period of prehistory. As one of the scientists involved in the project remarked, in relation to mapping the lost land bridge between Britain and Europe, so crucial to our understanding of early human activity here, 'We know more about the surface of Mars than we do this.'

Spectacular findings
AHOB's work resulted in spectacular findings. As well as the Happisburgh site, where they found a second hand axe in 2004, a team of experts assembled by AHOB also investigated another site in East Anglia at Pakefield. This, too, had first been highlighted by amateurs, who had discovered what appeared to be a tiny fragment of worked flint in situ in the same beds as a large collection of animal bones.

Over the course of the next few years, AHOB's excavations turned up more than 30 such flint flakes and one flint core from four different contexts at Pakefield. This suggested that humans were regular visitors to a landscape that experts had previously believed to have been devoid of human activity.

The Pakefield flints were found in sediments that contained large quantities of microscopic mammal bones. It was these that enabled scientists to date the flints. In particular, AHOB used what is often referred to by scientists as the 'vole clock', which featured in a previous Time Team programme at Elveden in the 2000 series. Simon Parfitt identified a species of Mimomys vole among the Pakefield sediments. This is known to have died out in European Russia before MIS16, an extremely severe cold period, and together with other mammal deposits enabled AHOB to date the flint finds to around 700,000 years ago.

Headline news
Since the oldest previous known evidence for a human presence in Britain dated from less than 500,000 years ago, this was a dramatic discovery – and it made headline news when it was first reported, in an article in Nature, at the end of 2005. Many of those reports referred to the people who made these tiny tools as the 'earliest Britons', although actually there is no direct line of descent between them and the people who inhabit these islands today.

In fact, as Chris Stringer explains in Britain's drowned world, there have been eight separate waves of colonisation of what is now Britain, seven of which have failed. These have coincided with the warmer periods between Ice Ages, with humans moving into Britain as the ice sheets retreated and being forced out again as they expanded. The latest (and, so far, uninterrupted) wave of occupation dates only from when temperatures began to rise again with the ending of the most recent Ice Age, starting about 13,000 years ago.

Text only