Prehistoric England

If we allow three human generations to a hundred years, then just a little more than two hundred of them will take us back far before the nineteenth century, seventy centuries, to around 5000 bc, when the inhabitants of southern England were setting up great monumental structures which still exist today. England had had human occupants for a long time before that. Its oldest known human remains go back to the Middle Pleistocene era, 200,000 years ago: skull bones of that era found at Swanscombe in the Thames Valley have been identified as those of a sub-species oiHomo sapiens, a user of stone hand-axes and other implements. Caves in Somerset, Devon, Derbyshire and Kent have shown traces of occupancy from the mid-Palaeolithic period, some 35,000-40,000 years bc, perhaps left by Neanderthal man, the species which was supplanted by our own.

Our own sub-species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has been traced back for about 35,000 years in Europe, though no skeletal evidence from so far back is found in England. The most southerly part of England, south of the Thames and the Bristol Channel, was never covered even by the furthest advance of ice sheets in the ice ages, though the landscape would have been a sub-arctic tundra, inhospitable to settlement. At that time, the English Channel had not yet been formed and Great Britain formed an extension of the continental land-mass. Though there were great rivers to cross, settlers from east and south were able to come on dry land until around 6000 bc, when rising sea levels formed the North Sea and the English Channel as we know them. In geological terms, the Channel is a very recent stretch of sea. Inhabitants on both sides, across many generations, had ample time to adapt to the changes in their landscape, though ultimately, twenty-one miles of still-widening salt water confirmed the existence of Europe's largest island. As with all islands, its cut-off state would encourage the development of species not known on the continent; hand-in-hand with those developments would grow an insular state of mind among the human inhabitants. But prehistoric Europeans were too enterprising to allow a narrow sea to be a barrier, and there was uninterrupted trading and contact, and also immigration, or even invasion, by boat.

From the Upper Palaeolithic period through the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods (Old, Middle and Newr Stone Ages) there is a continuous record of human activity, particularly in the south and east. The people were hunters and fishers, living on lake verges in temporary or transportable dwellings. As the Palaeolithic period merged slowly into the Mesolithic, the range of human activity began to develop, with the domestication of animals, the start of farming techniques and eventually the use of pottery and more specialised tools. Monumental grave mounds were built in the form of long barrows. It was during the fourth millennium bc that farming began to be practised in England, and this coincides with permanent settlements and a change in burial practice to mega-lithic tombs. Henge monuments, like the earliest erections at Stonehenge, belong to this era.