Humans have tried to colonise Britain on at least eight separate occasions in the past 700,000 years, palaeontologists said yesterday. On each occasion but the last populations were wiped out when an ice age arrived. "British people today are new arrivals, we're products of only the last 12,000 years," said Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum. The findings, which mean that modern native Britons are descended from a continuous line younger than their counterparts in the Americas and Australia, are part of the five-year Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (Ahob) project, which concluded this month. Evidence from burial sites shows that modern humans, homo sapiens, arrived in Britain around 30,000 years ago. But Professor Stringer's project showed that other species of humans made the journey from Africa via Europe some time earlier. A recent fossil discovery in Pakefield, Suffolk, was identified as a species called homo antecessor, nicknamed pioneer man, and was dated at 700,000 years old. It pushed back the first evidence of humans by some 200,000 years. Pioneer man was known to have lived in southern Europe 800,000 years ago and probably made the journey to Britain via a connecting land bridge. "It looks like there were eight separate colonisation attempts we can record and seven of those were unsuccessful," said Prof Stringer, speaking yesterday at the British Association Festival of Science in Norwich. "Britain was re-populated over and over again. This is a very young continuous occupation we're seeing here." Each unsuccessful population died out or was forced to retreat due to an adverse change in climate. "Britain has suffered some of the most severe climate changes of any area of the world during the ice ages," said Prof Stringer. "At this time Britain was on the edge of the inhabited world, at the edge of human occupation and human capabilities." When the first humans arrived Britain was warm, resembling modern north Africa. The human inhabitants would have shared the country with hippos, elephants, rhinos and hyenas. But ice covered the country at several stages, making the environment similar to that of Scandinavia. As an ice age approached temperatures dropped too low for the unadapted people to survive. The Ahob project also shed fresh light on Neanderthal man. Danielle Schreve, of Royal Holloway, University of London, found evidence these humans may not have been scavengers with low intelligence, as often described. By examining animal bones and teeth - including those of 11 woolly mammoths -and 2,500 stone tools used to kill and butcher them at a site in Lynford, Norfolk, Dr Schreve concluded that Neanderthals adapted to climate change, made plans and worked in groups to hunt animals.
View: Full Article | Source: Guardian Unlimited