Man in the Wildwood

[tartanwiz]

Was there ever a time when Wildwood Britain was uninhabited by human beings, or did Stone Age people move into Britain while the forest was spreading northwards?

[New Forester]

There have been a few people here probably for the last few glaciations and interglacials -- the earliest relatively modern human remains (Homo heidelburgensis) in Britain are the Swanscombe skull, dated at about 400,000 years old (from the Hoxnian interglacial, at least four glaciations ago) and the even older Boxgrove bones of the same type from about 500,000 years ago.

 

Homo heidelburgensis evolved into Homo neanderthalensis by about 300,000 years ago, and they lived here for another hundred thousand years or so.  However, there is then no evidence for people for a very long period -- from about 200,000 years ago to about 100,000 years ago.  The Neanderthals returned by about 50,000 years ago, but then gave way to our own (independently evolved) species about 35,000 years ago -- that's well before this interglacial, and is broadly the time as Australia and perhaps America was colonised by Homo so called sapiens.

cont...

[New Forester]

...cont

By the way, don't confuse Neanderthals with small-brained "ape-men" such as Australopithecus or the recent Indonesian finds -- Neanderthals had brains as big as or bigger than ours, and it took tens of thousands of years for our technology to develop further.  They were just a different species of human.

So there have been some interglacials with very few or no humans, but not this one.  However even in much of this interglacial (from about 10,000 years ago) humans in Britain would have been hunter-gatherers with relatively little impact on the environment (other than wiping out the larger animals).  Pastoral farming (grazing animals) did not arrive until perhaps 4,500 years ago.

So Neanderthals occupied Britain for more than three times as long as we've been here.

Much of this stuff is presented on this excellent page:

http://www.fathom.com/feature/190260/

[tartanwiz]

Thanks, New Forester.