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(around 13.7 billion,
Big Bang – but it seems it was neither big, nor a bang. Time, space and everything else in the universe were contained within a ‘singularity’ – something infinitesimal, immeasurably tiny – that appeared for reasons unknown and in a place unknown.
After eight billion or so uncounted, unlamented years came planet Earth and, three and a half billion more years after that, a soup of life began to simmer in her oceans.
Britain,
present location,
around 60 million years ago.
Homo erectus – upright man – who began spreading north, east and west, into Asia and Europe, just less than two million years ago.
Homo heidelbergensis.
Homo habilis,
Homo ergaster,
Modern humans
around 40,000 years ago
Boxgrove.
‘handaxe’
Palaeolithic handaxe,
Homo heidelbergensis
Homo neanderthalensis
BoxgroveMan lived during the period known as the Lower Palaeolithic,
Boxgrove Britain was wiped away, like chalk dust from a blackboard, by the Ice Age known to geologists as the Anglian.
Homo neanderthalensis.
Neanderthals
Swanscombe,
In Britain the warm interglacial known by Swanscombe Woman is referred to as the Hoxnian,
After thousands of years of warmth, the cold returned again to the land – extreme cold. The Neanderthals, like the Homo heidelbergensis people of Boxgrove before them, were driven off, out of Britain.
Britain apparently remained devoid of human life for the next 300,000 years and more.
From 14,000 or so years ago people were living all across southern Britain – in and around caves in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, in the Creswell Crags area near Sheffield in south Yorkshire, at Kent’s Cavern in Devon as well as at just less than 30 other known locations, all of them in England.
‘Creswellian Culture’
‘Magdalenian’
Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain
Lascaux and Altamira,
Creswell art was made during a relatively brief time – known to geologists as the Late Glacial Interstadial – when the ice had retreated, to some extent at least.
Gough’s Cave in Somerset’s famous Cheddar Gorge.
Gough’s Cave 15,000 years ago.
‘Big Freeze’.
Younger Dryas,
geological period
Holocene
Palaeolithic – Lower, Middle and Upper – was over.
This Britain wore new clothes, forests of aspen, birch, later followed by elm, hazel, lime, oak and pine – the trees of the Wild Wood – and through its dappled shadows moved creatures styled for concealment. When the hunters returned it was the red deer they sought, and wild cattle, boar and elk.
The first bands of hunters to arrive in Britain 11,000 years ago
After the Old Stone Age of the Palaeolithic comes the Middle
Stone Age of the Mesolithic.
near Scarborough
Star Carr.
ground of the North York Moors, the Yorkshire Wolds and the Howardian Hills.
Vale of Pickering
‘microliths’
1797
Burrington Combe
Aveline’s Hole
