500,000-8000 BC Palaeolithic

For most of the Palaeolithic period the British Isles was a peninsula (a narrow strip of land projecting from a larger land mass). It was only for short periods, when the climate warmed and ice-sheets melted, that sea-levels rose and Britain sometimes became an island.

Ireland is separated from Britain by much deeper channels of water than those separating Britain from mainland Europe. This meant that it was only possible to get there overland at times of extreme cold, when ice-sheets covered much of the British Isles and the sea-level was sufficiently low. However, there is no evidence for human occupation in Ireland during the Palaeolithic.

At times this extreme cold would have made the British Isles an inhospitable place to live, particularly in the north of England and Scotland. Although there may have been human occupation of these areas in warmer phases, the evidence is extremely sparse or in the case of Scotland, has yet to be found. One of the reasons for this might be the destruction of sites by the advance of the ice-sheets that frequently covered these areas.

In contrast, southern and eastern England and parts of Wales have a wealth of evidence. Some of the sites date back to at least 500,000 years ago. The evidence mainly consists of stone tools, but at some sites animal and occasionally human bones, beetles, molluscs and plant remains have been found. These provide important evidence of the various types of environments occupied by humans in England and Wales during the Palaeolithic.