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. And,Īs Cunliffe shows, today's archaeologists are driven by the same desire to understand the past - the only real difference is that we have vastly more evidence to work with.H uman or proto-human history in Britain goes back a long way. Britain Begins also explores the development of these early myths, which show our ancestors attempting to understand their origins.

But before the development of the discipline of archaeology, people used what scraps there were, gleaned from Biblical and classical texts, to create a largely mythological origin for the British. The story told by the archaeological evidence, in later periods augmented by historical texts, satisfies our need to know who we are and where we come from. Underlying this narrative throughout is the story of the sea, which allowed the islanders and their continental neighbours to be in constant contact. Using the most up to date archaeological evidence together with new work on DNA and other scientific techniques which help us to trace the origins and movements of these early settlers, Barry Cunliffe offers a rich narrative account of the first islanders - who they were, where they came from, and how they interacted one withĪnother. From that time onwards Britain and Ireland have been continuously inhabited and the resident population has increased from a few hundreds to more than 60īritain Begins is nothing less than the story of the origins of the British and the Irish peoples, from around 10,000BC to the eve of the Norman Conquest. The last Ice Age, which came to an end about 12,000 years ago, swept the bands of hunter gatherers from the face of the land that was to become Britain and Ireland, but as the ice sheets retreated and the climate improved so human groups spread slowly northwards, re-colonizing the land that had been laid waste.

Britain Begins by Barry Cunliffe