EARLY humans started living in Britain up to 200,000 years earlier than
previously thought.
Most prehistorians have assumed that the predecessors of modern humans first
lived in Britain sometime between 450,000 and 500,000 years ago. But discoveries
from four sites in south-west and eastern England now “strongly suggest that
they arrived substantially earlier,” says Simon Parfitt of London’s Institute of
Archaeology, who is on secondment to the Natural History Museum.
Researchers working in conjunction with the museum have discovered a
prehistoric flint hand axe and a flint flake thought to have been used as tools
at two sites on the East Anglian coast. These were found in sediments that date
from 550,000 to 600,000 years ago according to some geologists—or from
between 600,000 and 700,000 years ago according to others.
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Neither of these finds has yet been published, and the museum won’t reveal
the exact locations of either site while they are being further investigated.
The dates are calculated using a range of techniques, including analysing the
sediments for ratios of certain oxygen isotopes.
Clear evidence of very early human activity also comes from butchery marks on
a deer bone unearthed at Westbury Cave in Somerset. A relatively primitive
species of vole found within the same stratum suggests that it is at least tens
of thousands of years older than more evolved vole species discovered alongside
evidence of human habitation at Boxgrove, Sussex—the location which until
now has been accepted as Britain’s oldest human occupation site.
Researchers from the Natural History Museum are now taking another look at a
series of controversial tool-like flints found at Westbury Cave. These
unprepossessing lumps of flint have previously been dismissed as having been
shaped by purely natural forces, but some scientists at the museum and elsewhere
now believe that they were knapped by prehistoric humans.
Scientists are also re-assessing material excavated in the 19th century in
Kents Cavern in Torquay. There, archaeologists found very primitive stone tools,
but they have never been accurately dated. But scientists now believe that the
geological strata they come from could be much older than Boxgrove.
Depending on the date they arrived, the individuals who shaped the tools
hundreds of thousands of years ago were either members of the Homo
heidelbergensis species or its ancestor Homo erectus. Our species,
Homo sapiens, evolved from Homo heidelbergensis in Africa.