Ancient Britain

For the purposes of this article, Prehistoric Britain is Britain during the period between the first arrival of humans on the land mass now known as Great Britain and the start of recorded British history. The "recorded history" of Britain is conventionally reckoned to begin in AD 43 with the Roman invasion of Britain, though some historical information is available from before then.

Archaeological prehistory, which comprises the bulk of this article, is commonly divided into distinct chronological periods. These are based on the development of tools, from stone to bronze and iron, as well as changes in culture and climate that can be determined from the archaeological record. The boundaries of these periods are uncertain, as the changes between them are gradual. In addition, the dates of these changes demonstrated in Britain are generally different from those of Continental Europe.

Britain has been intermittently inhabited by members of the Homo genus for hundreds of thousands of years, and by Homo sapiens for tens of thousands of years. Modern humans reached Britain by around 42,000 years before present (BP), but the island was unoccupied during the last glacial maximum, between about 25,000 and 15,000 years ago.

People then briefly re-occupied Britain, but cold conditions returned during the Younger Dryas, about 12,900 to 11,600 years ago. It is not known whether Britain was wholly uninhabited during the Younger Dryas, but people certainly moved in when the climate improved around 9600 BC. Britain and Ireland were then joined to the Continent, but rising sea levels cut the land bridge between Britain and Ireland by around 11,000 years ago. A large plain between Britain to Continental Europe, known as Doggerland, persisted much longer, probably until around 5600 BC.

By around 4000 BC, the island was populated by people with a Neolithic culture. However, none of the pre-Roman inhabitants of Britain had any known, surviving, written language. Because no literature of pre-Roman Britain has survived, its history, culture and way of life are known mainly through archaeological finds. Though the main evidence for the period is archaeological, there is a growing amount of genetic evidence, which continues to change. There is also a small amount of linguistic evidence, from river and hill names, which is covered in the article about Pre-Celtic Britain and the Celtic invasion.

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