The middens of Oronsay and the Scottish west coast show reliance on shellfish and shallow-water fishing. The inhabitants of Star Carr in Yorkshire were hunters, preying especially off the red deer whose skulls and antlers they made into headdresses. Technology came along the same or similar routes. He suggests that the Celtic languages also developed there, perhaps 5,000 years ago, became the lingua franca of the western sea-lanes, and then spread from the Atlantic seaboard. Much of our gene-pool, he thinks, comes from northern Iberia, to which the west of Britain and Ireland was more acessible than the east. Cunliffe stresses 'mobility, connectivity and the sea' as major themes, though he might well have added 'continuity' to mobility. So, in schoolbook history, the Goidelic Celts, arriving from Gaul, got pushed into Ireland by the Brythonic Celts, who were then pushed into Wales by the Anglo-Saxons, themselves displaced across the Danelaw by the Vikings.

One has to wonder, could we cope with natural disasters such as this as well as our hunter-ancestors did?Īnd can we tell any more about our ancestors than that they were here? Our traditional narrative has long been that of invasions from the east and retreat to the west. Much more precisely datable, by tree-rings, to a mere 3,000 years ago, are the signs of a 20-year winter caused by volcanic ash. A thick layer of sand along the east coast of Scotland bears witness to an ominously huge tsunami, perhaps connected to the drowning. The melting ice separated Ireland from Britain, Britain from the Continent, and drowned ' Doggerland', where hunters had roamed what is now the North Sea.

They still had to cope with enormous upheavals, which dwarf modern fears of climate change. Humans made a new start only when the birch, pine and hazel woods began to recolonise the tundra, and it was these pioneers, Cunliffe points out, who were 'the direct ancestors of the majority of the people' living in Britain and Ireland today. Some 13,000 years ago a dramatic drop in mean annual temperature – 15C in the space of a single generation – drove even the hardy hunters of Paviland and points north out of Britain entirely. Yet most of the period of human inhabitation of Britain has little to do with who we are now. A mere 30,000 years ago, people much like us buried one of their number, 'the Red Lady of Paviland' (he was actually a man), in a cave in south Wales.īarry Cunliffe, then, has a great sweep to cover, which he does with usually unchallengeable authority. Neanderthal teeth from near Rhyl are maybe half that old. Flint debris, teeth and a shin bone from near Chichester have been dated back half a million years. H uman or proto-human history in Britain goes back a long way.

Britain Begins by Barry Cunliffe