A History of Britain - The Humans Arrive (1 Million BC - 8000 BC)

cut off from the rest of Europe by the end of the ice ages and Iowan people found themselves trapped in a battle of the elements for their very survival little did they know that their descendants would eventually unite their Island home and go on to found an empire that would one day claim ownership of a quarter of the globe [Music] you for centuries now people both homegrown and abroad have been fascinated by the history of Britain even from their earliest schooling British children are taught the great stories of the past here we learn of Henry the eighth and his six wives of the tumultuous events of the Norman Conquest we're taught of the reign of the great Tudor Queen Elizabeth the first and her unfortunate cousin Mary the Queen of Scots we're taught of her son James the first King to rule over all of Britain and a troubled reign of his son Charles who's struggled power mint would end in Civil War as adults we can all remember the names of a king or queen or two and the stories behind many of those men and women are as captivating now as they were in their day but what do we know of those times before there even were kings or queens Britain has been around for a long time and its people have weathered the Ice Ages not to mention competition from wild creatures and even a foreign invasion or two but going by what many of us are taught in school these times before kings or queens well they might never have happened let's take Stonehenge for example we've all heard about the Stone Age Monument in some form and a few of us might even have been to see it in person but what do we really know about the people who built it or any of the other great Stone Age landmarks and what do we know of the people who came even before them well that's where things get a little complicated you see looking at history as a succession of kings and queens whilst a tad predictable at times does have one big advantage and that's that there are plenty of records for us to go by even chronicling earlier times like the centuries when much of Britain was under the thumb of Rome has one important advantage and that can be summarized in just one word writing you see these times contain ample written records both of their history and of the day-to-day life of their people there's also some evidence of writing to be found on the coins of the celts who dominated britain prior to the arrival of Rome in the first century AD the accounts of their eventual conquerors allow us to reconstruct at least some picture of the lives of the people who lived in Britain at that time but these surviving written records have something in common they all date from just over the last two thousand years now on face value 2,000 years might sound like a while but even this great length of time is only a brief snapshot compared to the time that people have been living in Britain if we had to go on the visible record alone then this time before writing seems to us a dark age with the only evidence of human activity being in the form of those great Stone Age monuments that still remain standing that's because to the builders of Stonehenge and the people who came before them writing wasn't just a rarity it simply didn't exist few of us today can imagine a world without some form of written language yet people have lived on this island for far longer without writing than they have with it before anyone had even thought of kings or countries British farmers were lifting standing stones to mark the passage of the seasons and before we learnt to farm or to tame the walls with which we shared the land hunters were following the trails of the great beasts of ancient Britain and if we go even further back before we ever had the tools to tackle such large prey people were still alive and thriving in Ireland Britain and in fact they have been since before it was even an island to help us understand the beginnings of humanity in Britain we have to go back much further than 2,000 years thankfully there is an easy starting point you see for a long time there seemed to be an agreement amongst archaeologists that human residency in Britain had a fixed limit this was all down to one single catastrophic event a massive change in the climate of Europe that was fought have made life for the humans in Britain all but impossible it was called the Anglian 450,000 years ago a massive ice advance rolled across the surface of Britain it was so powerful that it reached as far as the Scilly Isles and today its effects can still be seen in a layout of modern Britain take the River Thames for example might be surprised to know that this famous River once ran much further to the north before the anglian intervened to shift its course an extreme change for certain but it could have been much worse other rivers such as the Thames sister the mighty by foam were destroyed completely by the advancing ice the surrounding countryside would have felt the effects of this advance - leaving much of Britain as an Arctic desert taken together these effects of the Anglian would have been catastrophic for human life in Britain the fossil record bears this out and from what we can tell there will be no evidence of human activity for the better part of the next 50 thousand years but in the last decade or so this idea of a hard limit to human life in Britain has taken something of a knock since 2010 new finds along the coast of Britain have been emerging to challenge the theory and from sites on the East Coast a very different vision of Britain's first arrivals has started to materialize here in hattiesburg archaeologists from University College London unearth bones of large mammals dating back over 800,000 years among the fossils of bison giant deer rhinos elephants and even hippos bones were found that bore the tell-tale marks of sharp stone tools and when it comes to the source of these marks there is only one obvious culprit stone tools found at nearby Pakefield only adds to the evidence for all we know future discoveries might push this date back even further but for the moment we can say with confidence that people were living in Britain almost 1 million years ago but when we say people what do we actually mean do we mean ourselves the familiar people of modern Britain or do we perhaps mean an older species of which we know far less the former is unlikely it wasn't just that Homo sapiens had yet to reach the coast of Britain but the best of our current knowledge our own species wouldn't fully evolved for almost half a million years to come instead the people living in Britain at this time was something quite different for a start they were shorter and more muscular than the average human of today they also had heavier brows than us along with smaller brain sizes and much stronger teeth and from finds at places like Boxgrove in West Sussex we know that they were capable a sophisticated tool making including the crafting of elegant hand axes on a mass scale and as far as we can tell their name was Homo heidelbergensis yet for all their tool-making proficiency many anthropologists now think that Homo heidelbergensis may not have been quite the hunters that we might expect that's because in the world these early humans inhabited there were far more capable hunters to compete with in addition to the giant deer rhinos and elephants that we mentioned before Britain was home to predators you'd more expect to see in places like the grasslands of Africa lions bears hyena and even saber-toothed cats all these could be found in early Britain and for the moment these early humans still lack the tools to give them an advantage over these more physically able predators but it is a scavengers that Homo heidelbergensis would have been in its element you for a start they were well equipped for this scavenging lifestyle like modern humans Homo heidelbergensis might not have been the fastest of animals around but they were great long-distance runners this ability to cross great distances without expending too much energy may well have allowed them to arrive on the scene before other scavengers appeared if they were lucky they may have been able to make off of the carcass entirely if not then that's when their tools would have come into play rather than focus on the flesh of the carcass which other creatures may have already claimed these people could have used their hand axes to remove the long marrow filled leg bones from the kill their goal achieved these early humans could have then retired to crack the bones with hammers and cleavers in a place of relative safety longer tools could then have been used to scrape out the nutritious marrow these early pioneers might not have looked quite the same as modern humans but the problems they faced would have been all too familiar direct evidence is difficult for us to come by but against the advancing cold of the Anglian they may well have taken to wearing scavenged hides to keep themselves warm what we do know for certain from charcoal unearthed at Boxgrove is that they and perhaps even earlier humans had already discovered an important ally fire but even these innovations would have been as nothing against the might the Anglian as the temperatures fell the people of Britain would have been forced to take the only option left to them they emigrated now that option was available due to britain's geography at the time 450,000 years ago France and Britain were still connected by a wide chocolate bridge it is through this bridge that early humans likely made their first forays into Britain and when the eyes of the Anglian drove them from their homes those who had survived would have migrated back across it into southern Europe of course they wouldn't be gone forever it took nearly 50,000 years but eventually the ice receded giving way first to forests then wide open grasslands it seems likely that other animals returned first and soon Lions ox rhinos elephants and even macaque monkeys could be found roaming the plains of England and only a short time after that people were back and living in Britain except this time they were a little different a startling find at swans come in the 1930s found the pieces of a skull dating back nearly 400 thousand years compared with Homo heidelbergensis these bones paint a picture of a shorter stockier creature barrel-chested and better adapted to the coal of northern Europe the Neanderthals had arrived in Britain we may never know for certain where the exact separation between Homo heidelbergensis and these newcomers occurred but it is likely that the process had at least been going on for the last couple of hundred thousand years the skull of the Swans comb woman he's still archaic when compared to late in the end a foul find and it might be that the line between the two populations was not something they would have realized themselves but what we can talk about with more certainty is what they brought with them given the tools we saw before they angry in' we might expect these newcomers to have come bearing hand axes perhaps more refined than britain's earlier visitors but to the surprise of many there is a distinct lack of these tools to be found in the fossil record at this time instead we see crude flakes and choppers most of them irregular and a far cry from sophisticated stone working of earlier humans archaeologists have debated to this day exactly what this means was it that these people simply didn't know how to make hand axes orderly just willingly give them up in favor of simpler tools if we go by another discovery found at modern-day clacton-on-sea it might be that they didn't need them at all there is still some debate about the exact nature of the wooden object on earth and Clacton was it his sphere as other finds around the time at shawn england in germany suggests was it something more mundane like a digging stick or something more versatile such as the javelin if it was a weapon was it held through the air to bring down prey or instead jabbed a cornered beasts at close range alas we don't know but we do know one thing woodworking had arrived in Britain unfortunately the climate would once again intervene after 30,000 years the hawks nyan interglacial came to an end the ice advanced and humans were forced out of britain once again so what do I mean when I say interglacial but might not be a surprise to learn that whilst the Anglian was an event of staggering intensity it wasn't exactly unique you see over the last two and a half million years the world has fluctuated up and then down in temperature the colder periods we label the ice ages and the warmer ones the interglacials now the reasons for these fluctuations are complicated it's likely that factors such as changes in the Earth's orbit along with changes in its plate tectonics and the composition of its atmosphere all play a role whichever the culprit this new ice age didn't last for long within thirty thousand years humans were back in Britain along with the hand axes that they were missing before but this time they had another trick up their sleeves with them they carried prepared rock cores a template from which they could quickly produce a wide variety of tools this type of stone working is known as little of valois technique not only did it make tools easier to craft but they could be made as and when they were needed this meant that it was no longer required for a person to carry a wide variety of tools on them at all times thanks this new method the first british multi-tools had arrived and we could only imagine just how much easier it would have made life for these early humans over the next 100,000 years the temperature of Britain would swing violently from one extreme to another time and time again the advancing cold would drive the knee and the fowls out only for them to return quickly and with new tools at their disposal but despite this the archaeological record seems to show a decrease in overall stone tool manufacturing around this time that doesn't automatically mean that there were less people in Britain but even if people were still flourishing out of sight changes in British geography were about to make it a moot point roughly 240 thousand years ago the land bridge between France and Britain finally failed it likely already been breached sometime before this but the final collapse was remarkably sudden during a severe glacial period water from rivers such as the Thames or the German Rhine found itself trapped by the build-up of ice around the North Sea basin eventually this formed a large glacial lake and over time pressure built within it soon it had only one way left to go the result was the destruction of the chalk ridge and the birth at least a widening of the Straits of Dover by the time the ice had receded the mainland route to Britain was gone those that remained existed only fleetingly and from what we can tell some animals made it back across in time many like the horse of the hyena never made it back to Britain during this time but despite this others did appear for the first time take for example the wolf who emerged in the hyenas absence to take its bone-crunching place now the science seemed to suggest that early humans were one of these lucky few who made it back but as the millennia go by there is less and less sign of their presence finally around 180 thousand years ago facing severe glacial conditions they seemed to have deserted Britain entirely and they wouldn't return for over 100 thousand years now that in itself may seem counterintuitive you see as severe as these glacial conditions were they had largely subsided by a hundred and twenty thousand years ago Britain warmed again producing pleasant forests which were home to an eclectic selection of wildlife they read like a jumbled list as if someone took animals from modern Europe and Africa and simply threw them together at random creatures like the reindeer bison lions hippos deer and bears all could be found living in Britain at this time this combination of ample prey and good weather would have been an easy fit for human life and yet there is no evidence of human habitation around this time that's because whilst the ice might have retreated it left behind a legacy that would deny humanity its return to Britain for the moment simply put ice melting produces water and ice melting on such a scale added to raise the sea levels around Britain whilst other species may have simply swum across the Straits humans had no such luck it took over 100,000 years for sea levels to fall far enough for the Neanderthals to return now almost 70 thousand years ago they had changed once again this time they were indisputably hunters crafted into predators over hundreds of millennia spends on the mammoth steps of Europe in the place of hand axes they now carried stone tipped Spears and it is likely that they acted as close range or even ambush predators for a sting off throwing their spears at their prey in the final moments of a hunt and yet by the time we rejoin these people their doom was already on the horizon during Britain's long abandonment and new and more efficient predator had been evolving in the deserts of Africa in the more near ahead these new creatures were destined to spread across Europe and to see all of the species of human lost to extinction they were called Homo sapiens they were despite this Neanderthals were back in Britain for the immediate future and exactly how they returned is more interesting still that's because the drop in sea levels that preceded their return didn't just let them back into ancient Britain it also gave them an entirely new land in which to live the remains of that land can still be seen today in the form of the Great North Sea sound Bank of dogger Bank hidden beneath the North Sea we know that this place doggerland once supported a thriving ecology all of its own within its hills and valleys there would have roamed great herds of mammoth boy rhino horse and reindeer all prime prey for the Neanderthals at the same time it was a fragile environment and one that could vanish quickly as the sea levels around it changed but Britain was far from stable itself while summer temperatures were still comparable to today the winter months could see temperatures plummet to lower than minus 10 degrees Celsius worse still this cold meant that there was little to nothing in the way of trees to be found on the steppes of Britain thick clothing could only have done so much to keep the cold at bay and with wood in scarce supply the inhabitants of these steps would have had to resort other sources of fuel such as mammoth dung in order to stay warm stone tools made a resurgence too with Flint hand axes coming back to the fore but further to the north a very different set of tools were emerging we still don't know for certain if it was Neanderthals or simply modern humans that were the source of these tools but either way around 45,000 years ago the people of Europe discovered that the strength and versatility of their tools would be greatly enhanced if only they combined their materials the results of this were called the leaf point blades long wooden Spears tipped with Finn Flint blades these new tools must have made their bearers the terror of the step allowing them to tackle prey such as elk rhino and even the mighty mammoths alas these new weapons came too late to save the Neanderthals by 40,000 years ago modern man Homo sapiens had finally arrived in Britain and Withers we likely brought cultural practices unknown to the Neanderthals evidence of this in Britain is slim around this time but we do know that practices such as cave painting figurine Carvey and even instrument making were alive and well elsewhere in Europe so why don't we see evidence of these practices here in Britain well that's because for more than the next 30,000 years our island home would rarely be habitable a lot of this is due to changes in our major source of warmth the Gulf Stream this warm current pulls water from North and Central America across the Atlantic where it surrounds and warms the continent of Europe it is this current that is responsible for the warm summers and relatively mild winters of modern Britain but it hasn't always been this way in fact there have been multiple occasions over the last 100,000 years when the Gulf Stream has simply stopped working and during those times the prospects for life in Britain would have been dire indeed between forty and thirty thousand years ago the Gulf Stream would turn on and off repeatedly forcing our ancestors from their newfound home on a regular basis when humans were able to return they did so only briefly on those rare occasions it's only Homo sapiens that reappears not the Neanderthals and that's because by this point they were extinct we don't know exactly how they died out but there are a few theories the first is that they fell victim to the changing climates of Europe and the limitations of their own bodies you see whilst modern humans are quite capable of ranging over a large distance in order to gather foods the squat frame of the Neanderthal would have limited the amount of territory that they could have covered as temperatures in Europe fell large prey would have become scarce ax and short ranging hunters would naturally have had less success in addition some scholars have suggested that modern humans played a more direct part in the Neanderthals extinction either by wiping them out or by interbreeding with them until their populations were all but absorbed the latter of these two theories has been lent more credibility in recent decades with the discovery that portions of Neanderthal DNA are alive and well in the modern human genome either way the Neanderthals were gone and Homo sapiens was in Britain to stay well eventually over the next few thousand years the climate would oscillate from one extreme to another any humans living in Britain were likely to have been seasonal visitors at best arriving from doggerland in the summer months then retreating as the cold returned but elsewhere in Europe humans were continuing to develop new tools and hunting strategies were slowly beginning to emerge the use of new materials such as antler bones and ivory gave birth to lightweight Spears whose bob tips could have been used against prey both at long and short range around the same time the adoption of the Ethel RT a long hollow shaft with a cup-shaped end would have vastly increased the range that a spear could have been thrown fishing also became a viable food source as the occasional return of the Gulf Stream would have brought new fish breeding grounds to Britain with these innovations semi-permanent camps such as those found in Central and Eastern Europe also would have begun to appear and amongst their remains we find signs of new cultural artifacts widespread carving of beads necklaces and even enigmatic venus figures are all in evidence from around this time and although burial of the Dead was nothing new by this point we had started to craft more elaborate burial rites which would one day climax in the great mega lives of Stone Age Britain finally the climate stabilized around 12,000 years ago the Gulf Stream returned for the last time and since then Britain's climate has reverted to the warmer temperatures we are familiar with today people slowly returned to its shores and this time it was permanent the Holocene a new human epoch had begun in typical human fashion we brought even more refined weaponry with us to Britain faced with new forests hunting grounds project our weapons such as javelins harpoons and even the bow and arrow originate from around this time and on top of this humanity had a new ally on their hunt we don't know quite when humanity first started to domesticate wolves but we do know that the process had been underway for thousands of years by the time the last big freeze ended these early dogs would have formed useful partners for directing prey when hunting and would also been capable of transporting extra weaponry and equipment for their human masters over long distances early on they may even have been considered an emergency source of food but by 12,000 years ago the relationship between humans and dogs have become so important that we'd even begun to richly bury our fallen friends so the human race was now in Britain to stay and headed them lay thousands of years of history in time these people would turn away from their hunter lifestyle settling down to farm the land newly reliant on the regular passage of the seasons they would build great monument to mark their passing and through them claim portions of the land as their own at times many of these native peoples of Britain would be all but replaced but their advances and their traditions would persevere eventually tribes and then nations would emerge amongst them along with the threat of invasion and foreign rule but before we can get to any of that ancient Britain still had one cataclysmic event left to undergo skipping forward to 8,000 years ago doggerland which had connected it to the rest of Europe for thousands of years finally came to a watery end there are good reasons for dog allen's demise the low-lying area had always been susceptible to changing sea levels and it wouldn't be surprising to learn that it been slowly eaten away by the rising waves but most archaeologists think that dog Alan's End would have come suddenly either in the form of a mega tsunami or the breaching of a massive glacial lake the former of these two theories is the more popular as we know that a landslide from around the same time of the coast of northern Norway would have sent giant waves surging across the surface of the North Sea doggerland and whatever was left of its inhabitant would simply have vanished beneath it with that Britain became an island and it remains so to this day next time on the histor crack from Stone Age builders to Bronze Age warriors we meet the people of Neolithic Britain here we learn the motivations of the craftsmen behind the extraordinary stone monoliths of the time on top of that we experience Britain's first housing boom and for the first time witness a darker side of humanity emerge as ancient warfare arrives in Britain

Channel: The Histocrat

Views: 725,976

Rating: 4.6321578 out of 5

Keywords: Humans, Britain, Ancient, England, History of England, Scotland, neanderthals, stone age, cro magnon, History series, Homo hidelbergensis, evolution, tool making, stonehenge, doggerland, dogger bank, fishing, Kings of England, The Histocrat, Anglian, Ice Ages, Mammoths, Woolly Rhino, Hyena, Wolf, Dogs, documentary, History

Id: kk5-ynRPfss

Length: 35min 42sec (2142 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

Loved this first episode. Looking forward to the next. The "upspeak" everyone is complaining about not only didn't bother me. In fact, I didn't even notice it, and I'm an American from Utah. On the other hand the extended black frames were a bit annoying. I'm betting that in this 36-minute clip almost 5 minutes of it is spent looking at a blank screen. All that said, well done!

[u/easilypersuadedsquid]

here is part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDB2IHCRLgo

[u/sponserbilleries]

Looks like he's taking a selfie