Catching up with the reading, I learn that all Britons are newcomers. All previous colonising attempts having ended in failure, it was only a group of people who arrived a mere 12,000 years ago (or later) from whom the population that entered history were drawn.

This marks the final report of the five-year Ancient Human Occupation of Britain, on which I’ve previously reported. The oldest evidence of a human species comes from 700,000 years ago,

“It looks like there were eight separate colonisation attempts we can record and seven of those were unsuccessful,” said Prof Stringer, speaking yesterday at the British Association Festival of Science in Norwich. “Britain was re-populated over and over again. This is a very young continuous occupation we’re seeing here.”
Each unsuccessful population died out or was forced to retreat due to an adverse change in climate. “Britain has suffered some of the most severe climate changes of any area of the world during the ice ages,” said Prof Stringer. “At this time Britain was on the edge of the inhabited world, at the edge of human occupation and human capabilities.”

Kind of makes you wonder about what it might be like in a couple of hundred years, with all the coming turbulence of the world climate…