Who were the first people to reach the British Isles?

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When we think of difficult places for humans to live, our minds tend to go to the most extreme places: Sahara, the high Arctic, the peaks of the Himalayas. The British Isles are not as invaluable as these places, but they still represent a significant challenge for old people.

This was brought home to me when I came across a September study of some of the earliest evidence of hominins living in the UK. The occupation it documents is really old, over 700,000 years old. But this is relatively recent when you consider how early hominins found their way out of Africa. These early explorers were quick to go to, for example, Indonesia and slowly to Britain.

Let’s put some specific numbers on this. Hominins lived in Africa already in 6 or 7 million years ago. Still, the oldest widely accepted proof of hominins outside Africa from 1.8 million years ago is at Dmanisi in Georgia, where bones of Homo erectus have been found. These early members of our lineage, it appears, were the first to wander more far -reaching, eventually reached Java in Indonesia.

Still, all evidence of hominins in the UK is from the last millions of years. It is a delay of millions of years.

In fact, the delay may be even longer because there are scientists who believe that hominines lived outside Africa significantly earlier than this. At Xihoudu in China, stone tools were found in the river excavations dated 2.43 million years ago. Artifacts in Shangchen on a Chinese plateau were dated 2.12 million years ago. For the past five years, I have written about Stone Tools from Jordan that may be over 2 million years old, and artifacts from India, apparently 2.6 million years old. All of these are disputed, where the main question is whether the objects are truly man -made tools or just cuts similar to them after they are based by animals or led a fast -flowing river. But the examples are moving up and I would not be surprised if something more definitely shows up in the near future.

Either way, it seems that it took our old relative for a while to settle on the UK.

Goodbye blue skis

Or maybe they really came here early, looked a look and turned back without leaving a trail. Britain’s climate may be mild in the sense that it rarely sees real extremes of hot or cold, but the gloomy and frequent rain is their own special kind of challenging.

I remember vividly discussing the British climate with Nina Jablonski at Pennsylvania State University, who told me that Britain has “a punishing low and very seasonal UV regime”. In other words, it is incredibly cloudy. Unless you enter the distant polar regions where the sun does not rise for months at a time, it is difficult to find everywhere that gets less sunlight.

And it’s in today’s climate. There were times when it was colder. Ever since the beginning of the Pleistocene Epoch 2.58 million years ago, the climate has looked up and down, alternating between cold ice periods and warmer interglacials. We have been in an interglacial for 11,700 years, but under the glaciers the polar ice sheets expanded south and covered large parts of the UK.

Our evidence of old people in the UK has been primarily from the warmer interglacial periods – but the recent study changes it.

It focuses on excavations in Old Park next to the city of Canterbury in southeastern England. In the 1920s there was a quarry in Old Park called Fordwich Pit, where hundreds of stone tools were found. Since 2020, Alastair Key at the University of Cambridge has led excavations in the area.

By 2022, Key and his team published their original findings and described 112 artifacts coming from levels known to be at least 513,000-570,000 years old. My colleague Jason Arunn Murugesu wrote about this at the time and noted that the artifacts were “the oldest of their kind known from Britain and among the earliest knew in Europe”.

Three years later, Key’s team has expanded the excavation and discovered even older sediments containing stone riots. Hominins appear to have been there between 773,000 and 607,000 years ago.

For context there was a hot interglacial between approx. 715,000 and 675,000 years ago. Before and after, the climate became cold.

The team also found two newer layers containing artifacts, which they dated to 542,000 and 437,000 years ago. Both fall smack in cold ice.

The implication is that hominins occupied and resumed Old Park several times, including during the glacier periods when the British climate was on its toughest.

into the north

Let’s put this into a wider context. Old Park is not entirely the oldest proof of hominins in the British Isles, even if it is close. And the oldest known evidence is actually no longer there.

In 2013, scientists walking along a beach at Happisburgh in East England came on 49 footprints. They had been preserved in layers of silt, which had been revealed by severe erosion. Footprint flushed away within weeks, but archaeologists were able to document them and show that they were between 850,000 and 950,000 years old.

Happisburgh has also provided stone tools from over 780,000 years ago, and the nearby place for Pokefield had stone tools that are about 700,000 years old. However, the oldest known hominin bones-in contrast to objects-from boxgroves are in southeastern England and are only 500,000 years old.

Of course, these places are only a sample because the archaeological record is incomplete. By 2023, Key and his colleague Nick Ashton, based on the fragmentary nature of the record, assessed hominines may have been in Northern Europe already 1.16 million years ago. Given the new evidence from Old Park, perhaps this date could be pushed back a little.

And this is where the mystery comes in: Who were these old people who managed to survive in Britain’s often gloomy climate?

In consideration of that Homo erectus Seems to have been the first hominines to leave Africa, we might assume it was them. But there is hardly any evidence for them in Europe. There are stone tools from Korolevo in Ukraine from 1.4 million years ago, but no hominine bones. Likewise, in March, I reported the discovery of some fragmentary facial bones from a cave in northern Spain, dated 1.1-1.4 million years ago. Their discoverers called them tried on ”Homo aff. erectus” – which means they may be H. erectusAt But it is not possible to be confident.

Northern Spain was also home to another species called Homo anteness. They are known from a cave and appear to have been about 772,000 and 949,000 years ago.

Meanwhile, boxgrove -hominins may have heard to another species called Homo Heidelbergensis. Their status is a little difficult: They seem to have lived in Europe a few hundred thousand years ago, but not many remains are unequivocally assigned to the species.

How these species are related to each other, and to us and other later groups such as the Neanderthals, are honestly any guess. As a result, the earliest Britons are still hidden from us behind a thick fog. Which seems appropriate.