As a bonus question: Was it Neanderthals or Homo Sapiens first?
The Homo genus has been on the British Isles for 100s of thousands of years. And there are Neanderthal remains yes. And modern humans arrived there before the last Ice Age, though presumably left during it.
I assume you mean the last cold period within the current ice age. Still unlikely, since that started about 120K years ago, and modern humans started migrating from Africa maybe 50K years ago.
Wikipedia puts the earliest Homo sapiens to be at least 25,000 years ago.
Until about 8000 years ago Britain wasn’t an island, but connected to Europe with a now submerged landmass known as Doggerland, a notion that sends a chill up the spine of every Englishman. The low-lying landbridge was submerged by a tsunami.
The Beeb reports that Homo neanderthalensis feet in ancient times did walk upon England’s mountains green, and would have beat us to it, see for example “Red Lady” who was a bloke and probably not a communist hung around Wales 33,000 years ago. These Neanderthal tools found on Jersey date at between 100,000 and 47,000 years old.
If you want to go really far back, footprints 800,000 years old have been found in Norfolk, possibly belonging to Homo antecessor. We also have evidence of Homo heidelbergensis knocking about England around 500,000 years ago.
Presumably the people 500,000 years ago referred to those of 800,000 years ago as ‘The Old Ones’.
Homo Sapiens wasn’t “first” in Europe or Asia. We were “first” in Australia and the Americas. I guess you could say Antarctica, too. Early members of Homo were all over most of Europe and Asia long before we were even a species.
The “Red Lady” was Sapiens, not a Neanderthal.
What I meant precisely was before the last maximum glaciation which was about 20-25K years ago.
It’s interesting to realize that whoever or whatever existed in Britain during the last interglacial period was utterly obliterated by the ice sheets that later covered the entire island, and Britain was completely recolonized starting about 9000 BCE.
Not quite - I can’t find good information right now but I think the south coast of England was never covered by an ice sheet. And the ice sheet which reached as far south as London was hundreds, not tens, of thousands of years ago. In other words at the time of the last glacial maximum large parts of England were not covered by ice all year round.
However, the south of England was still uninhabitable because of the cold, so you’re right that humans left the peninsula/island of Britain and then recolonised it.
When did the first African/pakistani/Indian migrate there? That’s when the first humans got there.
Poms don’t count as human.
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nercEUROPE.html
This suggests that the area of the southern “coast” of Britain to the middle of France was “Polar Desert” or Tundra except for some brief respites from the weather, for about 110,000BCE to 12,000BCE, desert for 22,000 to 12,000 years BCE.
I’m not sure how adaptable to polar conditions the earlier humans would be. Obviously, well enough to travel the trans-Siberian land bridge. So possibly there would have been Europeans in lower Britain 22,000-plus years ago.
Moderator Note
stui magpie, an ethnic slur that’s the reverse of the typical ones is still an ethnic slur. Keep this kind of “joke” out of GQ. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Yeah I know, among the oldest human remains ever found and still thousands of years after Neanderthal remains.
Humans had returned to Somerset by 14,700 BP, when this skull/drinking cup was deposited in Gough’s Cave.
Neanderthals were living in Lynford at about 60,000 BP; before that is a gap of about 140,000 years when no humans seem to have lived here (in the UK). This coincides with the worst of the last ice age, although there were some warmer periods too.
Lynford Quarry - Wikipedia.
In particular there were no hominins in the UK in the Eemian, when it was warmer than now.