Pootler

  In the last post, I covered the centuries between the arrival of the Middle Stone Age hunter-gatherers and the point at which they were elbowed out of the picture. For you lovers of jargon, that is the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods.  I tend to believe everything from Hollywood, so m y take on it is a simple progression from Raquel Welch, in her fetching furs in the film 'One Million Years B.C', to the Stone Age sophistication of the Flintstones.  These 'Neolithic' incomers were our first farmers and the first humans to have any real effect on the landscape. They took their time getting here; farming is thought to have originated in the East some 6000 years earlier and edged in our direction at less than a mile a year. Farming can support more people than hunter-gathering, so the population grew rapidly. W hile their predecessors adjusted their lives to the land they found, the newcomers shaped it to suit their needs. T his was the start of the clearance of the o...

  I have avoided the human story in the blog so far because there were no humans  until around a million years ago. Only recently has  our species of  homo, who we laughingly call 'sapiens' or 'wise', had a visible impact. So there isn't much to see or say. N otwithstanding, for the sake of the narrative,  I want to tip my cap to our more direct predecessors, who,  one day around 5000 years ago, got to work doing a bit of landscape gardening and monument building,   Summary first, then a tad more detail for the interested.   Britain was still very much connected to Europe when early human hunter-gatherers arrived around 900,000 years ago. They didn't stay; the country was virtually uninhabitable for long periods during the ice ages. During the warmer breaks, when the ice melted and sea levels rose, the connections to Europe shrank, which must have discouraged migration Neanderthals appeared around 400,000 years ago. They came and went, d...

I covered the rock foundations of our hills and valleys in previous posts, so now I will torture the analogy and examine the floor coverings. T his 5th post in the series starts from only 2.5 million years ago, with the ice age. In  geological terms, that is a distance from the present day no greater than the gaps in a country  bus timetable.   The debates about the constant changes to the landscape and the climate over millions of years have always made it hard for a non-specialist like me to sift out simple cause-and-effect relationships. As we get closer to the present, the increasing amount of fine-grained detail available makes it  even harder. So i f any professional paleogeologists are reading this,  stop now,  for the sake of your mental health.    At the point when we left the last post, what is now Southeast England was still connected to Europe.  The map below will give you some idea.  Southern England, 2 million years ago....