Prehistoric Britain

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 similar to modern times, alongside animals such as the straight-tusked elephant, lion (Panthera fossilis), cave hyenas, and Stephanorhinus rhinoceroses. Fossils of very early Neanderthals dating to around 400,000 years ago have been found at the Swanscombe site in Kent, and of classic Neanderthals about 225,000 years old at Pontnewydd in Wales. Britain was unoccupied by humans between 180,000 and 60,000 years ago, when Neanderthals returned. By 40,000 years ago they had become extinct and modern humans had reached Britain. But even their occupations were brief and intermittent due to a climate which swung between low temperatures with a tundra habitat and severe ice ages which made Britain uninhabitable for long periods. The last of these, the Younger Dryas, ended around 11,700 years ago, and since then Britain has been continuously occupied.