![]() ![]() Temporarily an island for the first time leaving it again devoid of human habitation. 100 000 years ago melting waters caused a rise in the sea level which flooded the English Channel and made Britain A further eleven glacial cycles followed, including an interglacial period whenīritain was host to animals such as hippopotamus now found in Africa. There is, however, no sign of occupation in our area. Over time of thousands of handaxes and other stone tools. The warm Hoxnian interglacial peiord 400 000 years ago led to recolonisation by humans and is evidenced in the south of England by the discoveries Mountains were ground down, new valleys carved and new rivers such as the Severn and the Avon came intoīeing. The weight and movement of the glaciers changed the landscape dramatically. Human bones have been found near Birmingham.īritain's most severe glaciation was the Anglian 478 000 years ago, when ice sheets miles thick covered the Midlands and reached as far south as London. Fossil evidence of Neanderthal man has been discovered in Kent and Sussex, but no Similar in workmanship that they were surely made by the same hand. No flakes of this rock have been found on the site which implies that the axes had been brought here from elsewhere, evidence of long-distance trade. Three of the axes, which had never been used, are made of a hard volcanic rock originating in North Wales and Of a temporary camp made by a group of hunters attracted here by the herds of game. Four handaxes and other tools, the oldest found in Britain, are evidence A single quartzite flake in mint condition is evidence of stone tool manufacture. At this time the climate was generally cooler than the present.Īnd there is evidence of human presence. On higher ground beyond the plain was woodland of pine and spruce. Water meadows and yet further stretched a dry grassland plain. Along the river were reed swamps, further away were The River Bytham was some 150m wide and meandered across a broad flood plain. Finds of insect species allowĪ picture to be built up of the site half a million years ago. River, the nearest to Birmingham being at a gravel quarry, now a land-fill site, at Waverley Wood Farm south-west of Coventry.Īrchaeological digs here have revealed an enormous amount of information and include finds of extinct species of bison, elephant, horse, mole, shrew and water vole. ![]() A number of Old Stone Age sites are known along the course of this ancient Stratford-upon-Avon and Leicester through East Anglia and northwards across land that has now become the North Sea. This great river, identified now only by gravel deposits, drained the southern Pennines and the south-west Midlands, flowed eastwards via The first colonisers may have followed theĬourse of a lost river, now named the River Bytham. Very different to the present coastlines, hills, valleys and rivers did not take their present shape until after the last Ice Age 10 000 years ago. With no sea separating Britainįrom the European mainland half a million years ago, the first humans were able to walk across the plain that is now the North Sea from northern France and the Low Countries. The human race evolved in Africa over a million years ago, but it was to be hundreds of thousands of years before human beings spread to every part of the world. The Lower Palaeolithic - the Early Old Stone Age ![]() The Stone Age is divided by archaeologists into three parts: the Old Stone Age or Palaeolithic, the Middle Stone Age or Mesolithic, and the New Stone Age or Neolithic. The Stone Age covered a vast period of time from c500 000 to c4000 years ago and saw the extinction of earlier species of humans and the emergence of our own species. ![]()
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