Fish and game

The earliest known occupation of Britain by humans occurs in the Palaeolithic—the Old Stone Age.

A huge length of time, it sees many changes in the environment, encompassing several glacial and interglacial periods that greatly affect human settlement in the region.

Providing dating for this distant period is difficult and contentious.

The inhabitants of the region at this time are bands of hunter-gatherers who roam northern Europe following herds of animals, or who support themselves by fishing.

Recent (2006) scientific evidence regarding mitochondrial DNA sequences from ancient and modern Europe has shown a distinct pattern for the different time periods sampled in the course of the study.

Despite some limitations regarding sample sizes, the results were found to be non-random.

As such, the results indicate that, in addition to populations in Europe expanding from southern refugia after the last glacial maximum (especially the Franco-Cantabrian region), evidence also exists for various northern refugia.

Southern and eastern Britain at this time are linked to continental Europe by a wide land bridge allowing humans to move freely.

The current position of the English Channel is a large river flowing westwards and fed by tributaries that will later become the Thames and Seine.

Reconstructing this ancient environment has provided clues to the route first visitors took to arrive at what was then a peninsula of the Eurasian continent.

Archaeologists have found a string of early sites located close to the route of a now lost watercourse named the Bytham River, which indicate that it was exploited as the earliest route west into Britain.

There is evidence from bones and flint tools found in coastal deposits near Happisburgh in Norfolk and Pakefield in Suffolk that a species of Homo was present in what is now Britain around seven hundred thousand years ago.

Cranial capacity had again doubled within the Homo genus by six hundred thousand years ago, from H. habilis to an archaic Homo species called Homo heidelbergensis, the second human wave to be pumped from Africa into the Middle East and Western Europe.

Sites such as Boxgrove in Sussex illustrate the later arrival in the archaeological record of heidelbergensis around five hundred thousand years ago.

The cranial capacity of H. heidelbergensis overlaps with the range found in modern humans; these early peoples make Acheulean flint tools (hand axes) and hunt the large native mammals of the period.

They are thought to have driven elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses over the tops of cliffs or into bogs to kill them more easily.

Up until the 1970s, these kill sites, often at waterholes where animals would gather to drink, were interpreted as being where Acheulean tool users killed game, butchered their carcasses, and then discarded the tools they had used.

Since the advent of zooarchaeology, which has placed greater emphasis on studying animal bones from archaeological sites, this view has changed.

Many of the animals at these kill sites have been found to have been killed by other predator animals, so it is likely that humans of the period supplemented hunting with scavenging from already dead animals.

The extreme cold of the Anglian Stage, from four hundred and seventy-eight thousand to four hundred and twenty-four thousand years ago, is likely to have driven humans out of Britain altogether and the region will apparently be unoccupied until the ice recedes during the Hoxnian Stage.

Homo erectus becomes extinct, with the known exception of Solo Man in Indonesia, by around 200,000 BCE, while Earth’s only remaining hominid, Homo sapiens Neanderthalensis, or Neanderthal Man, has spread into Europe and the Middle East.

The Neandertals, unlike Homo erectus, have brains similar in size to—or possible larger than—those of modern humans, although Neandertal brains are lighter in front and heavier in back.

They match modern humans in body weight, but are generally shorter, stockier and more muscular.

Although similar in appearance to modern humans, Neandertals have the large teeth, pronounced eyebrow ridges, protuberant jaws, receding chin, and sloping forehead associated with Homo erectus.

The similarity of their tongue bones to those of modern humans suggests that the Neandertals are fully capable of speech.

The Neandertals are the first hominids (as far as is known) to bury their dead and to actively care for aged and crippled members of their communities.

The fact that Neandertal graves contain food indicates a belief in some form of afterlife, although no grave goods have turned up.

Like previous members of the genus Homo, they have tamed fire and use it to roast meat and other foods.

The large animals hunted by the Neandertals include the giant cave bears, the mammoth, and the woolly rhinoceros.

Neandertaler stone implements represent distinct improvement over the tools of Homo erectus: more delicate, more precise, and more varied.

No artwork has been discovered in association with Neandertal sites.

Homo sapiens begins to evolve from two hundred thousand to one hundred and fifty thousand years ago as more modern-looking Africans use increasingly refined and more specialized toolkits to kill game of all kinds.

They also have more enhanced speaking abilities than their predecessors, displaying a blend of archaic and modern features.

The Neanderthals move into Europe around 150,000 BCE.

The game-hunting occupants of the Grotte du Lazaret (English: Cave of Le Lazaret), now in the eastern suburbs of the French town of Nice and now overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, dating to about this time, make tents, probably of animal hides stretched over a wooden framework, with the tent entrances facing away from the cave opening.

A wolf skull is situated inside the doorway of each tent.

The beginning of the last Ice Age is conventionally dated at about 120,000 BCE.

The Eemian, an interglacial period which begins about one hundred and thirty thousand years ago and ends about one hundred and fourteen thousand years ago, is the second-to-latest interglacial period of the current Ice Age, the most recent being the Holocene which extends to the present day.

The prevailing Eemian climate is believed to have been about as stable as that of the Holocene.

Changes in the earth's orbital parameters from today (greater obliquity and eccentricity, and perihelion), known as the Milankovitch cycle, probably lead to greater seasonal temperature variations in the Northern Hemisphere, although global annual mean temperatures are probably similar to those of the Holocene.

The warmest peak of the Eemian is around one hundred and twenty-five thousand years ago, when forests reach as far north as North Cape (which is now tundra) in northern Norway well above the Arctic Circle.

Hardwood trees like hazel and oak grow as far north as Oulu, Finland.

At the peak of the Eemian, the northern hemisphere winters are generally warmer and wetter than now, though some areas are actually slightly cooler than today.

The hippopotamus is distributed as far north as the rivers Rhine and Thames.

Trees grow as far north as southern Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago instead of only as far north as Kuujjuaq in northern Quebec, and the prairie-forest boundary in the Great Plains of the United States lies further west—near Lubbock, Texas, instead of near Dallas, Texas, where the boundary now exists.

Sea level at peak is probably four to six meters (thirteen to twenty feet) higher than today (references in Overpeck et al., 2006), with much of this extra water coming from Greenland but some likely to have come from Antarctica.

Global mean sea surface temperatures are thought to have been higher than in the Holocene, but not by enough to explain the rise in sea level through thermal expansion alone, and so melting of polar ice caps must also have occurred.

Because of the sea level drop since the Eemian, exposed fossil coral reefs are common in the tropics, especially in the Caribbean and along the Red Sea coastlines.

These reefs often contain internal erosion surfaces showing significant sea level instability during the Eemian.

A 2007 study found evidence that the Greenland ice core site Dye 3 was glaciated during the Eemian, which implies that Greenland could have contributed at most two meters (6.6 feet) to sea level rise.

Scandinavia was an island due to the inundation of vast areas of northern Europe and the West Siberian Plain.

Given that the shorelines of the islands of the present are at this time several feet higher, humans of this epoch must have used boats: the large island of Crete in the Aegean basin is settled as early as 128,000 BCE, during the Middle Paleolithic age.

The period closes as temperatures steadily fall to conditions cooler and drier than the present, with four hundred and sixty-eight-year long aridity pulse in central Europe, and by one hundred and fourteen thousand years before the present, a glacial era has returned.

The history of indigenous Australians is thought to have spanned forty thousand to forty-five thousand years, although some estimates have put the figure at up to seventy thousand years before European settlement.

A genetic study of one hundred and eleven Aboriginal Australians, published in the journal Nature on March 8, 2017 (Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia), implies that "the settlement of Australia comprised a single, rapid migration along the east and west coasts that reached southern Australia by 49–45 ka. After continent-wide colonization, strong regional patterns developed and these have survived despite substantial climatic and cultural change during the late Pleistocene and Holocene epochs. Remarkably, we find evidence for the continuous presence of populations in discrete geographic areas dating back to around 50 ka, in agreement with the notable Aboriginal Australian cultural attachment to their country.”

For most of this time, the Indigenous Australians lived as nomads and as hunter-gatherers with a strong dependence on the land and their agriculture for survival.

Only Africa has older physical evidence of habitation by modern humans.

There is also evidence of a change in fire regimes in Australia, drawn from reef deposits in Queensland, between seventy thousand years and one hundred thousand years years ago, and the integration of human genomic evidence from various parts of the world supports a date of before sixty thousand years for the arrival of Australian Aboriginal people in the continent.

Modern humans reach Australia by at least 58,000 BCE.

In 1990, a date of sixty thousand years was suggested for a rock shelter in the Northern Territory, but the finding, based on the use of a recently developed technique called thermoluminescence, is still being evaluated.

The first settlement would have occurred during an era of lowered sea levels, when there was an almost continuous land bridge between Asia and Australia, but watercraft must have been used at some points.

The fearsome cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) likely became extinct around 27,800 years ago, according to recent fossil reassessments.

Rather than a single cause, a combination of factors is believed to have led to its extinction. While overhunting by humans has largely been dismissed—since human populations at the time were too small to pose a significant threat—evidence suggests that cave bears and humans may have competed for shelter, particularly in caves.

Mitochondrial DNA research indicates that the cave bear's genetic decline began long before its extinction, ruling out climate change-induced habitat loss as the direct cause. However, a recent DNA study suggests that cave bear populations started declining around 50,000 years ago, coinciding with an increase in human populations.

Unlike its close relative, the brown bear, the cave bear was highly dependent on a vegetarian diet, making it less adaptable to environmental changes. Additionally, evidence suggests that cave bears exclusively used caves for hibernation, unlike brown bears, which could hibernate in thickets or other natural shelters. This specialized hibernation behavior likely contributed to high winter mortality when suitable caves were unavailable.

As human populations gradually expanded, both Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans increasingly occupied caves as living quarters, reducing the availability of essential hibernation sites for cave bears. Over time, this competition for shelter may have contributed to their gradual extinction.

Interestingly, cave bears are rarely depicted in prehistoric cave paintings, leading some researchers to speculate that human hunters may have avoided them, or that their habitat preferences simply did not overlap with early human settlements.

The bow and arrow, which allows hunters to attack animals from a secure distance, is, according to some indirect evidence, invented during this period.

Bone arrow points dating to sixty-one thousand years ago have been found at Sibudu Cave in South Africa.

The descendants of the immigrants to West Asia who had remained in the south (or taken the southern route) had spread generation by generation around the coast of Arabia and the Iranian plateau until they reached India.

One of the groups that had gone north (east Asians were the second group) had ventured inland and radiated to Europe, eventually displacing the Neanderthals.

They had also radiated to India from Central Asia.