Where do I start when discussing the history of Britain? The obvious answer is ‘at the beginning’, and for me that means when humans first set foot on the land we now refer to as Great Britain – but when was that? Nobody knows for certain of course, but archaeologists believe that footprints discovered at Happisburgh on the Norfolk Coast in 2013 date from around 850,000 to 950,000 years ago making these footprints the earliest evidence of human activity on the island, which in this context, refers to the countries of England, Wales and Scotland including their associated islands (but not Ireland).

Who these people were and where they came from is best left to anthropologists, but the age of these footprints suggests that they may have been left by Homo antecessor, an early human species known to be present in Europe at the time.

Continue reading →

Originally posted 2025-11-28 10:55:37.