Prehistoric Britain

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Several species of humans have intermittently occupied Great Britain for almost a million years. The earliest evidence of human occupation around 900,000 years ago is at Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast, with stone tools and now destroyed footprints possibly made by Homo antecessor or Homo erectus. The oldest human fossils, around 480,000 years old, are of "Boxgrove Man" (possibly Homo heidelbergensis) from the Boxgrove site in Sussex. Until that time, Britain had been permanently connected to the Continent by a chalk ridge between South East England and northern France called the Weald–Artois Anticline, but during the Anglian Glaciation around 425,000 years ago a megaflood broke through the ridge, and Britain became increasingly isolated from continental Europe, until fully becoming an island around 130,000 years ago. During the Lower Palaeolithic and Middle Palaeolithic, Britain was primarily inhabited by humans during warm interglacial periods, when Britain exhibited a temperate climate...

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