When did people first arrive in Britain? How did they live then? And how do we know this now? What did Britain look like? And how has the landscape and climate changed since? In Homo Britannicus, Chris Stringer, Britain’s foremost expert on this subject, draws on all the latest evidence and techniques of scientific investigation to reveal the truth about our ancestors. 

          Along the way, he discovers a Britain so tropical that man competed with lion, hyaena and sabre tooth tiger to survive. He describes times when Britain was cold enough for us to live here alongside reindeer and mammoth. And others, colder still, when we were forced to flee altogether as a wall of ice spread south across the country. In this dramatically changing landscape, Chris recounts the tumultous journey of Homo Britannicus across the millennnia and looks to the future to see how it might continue.

          Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this history is how recently we have come to know it. Our life in Britain began far longer ago and has been far more varied and dramatic than was ever previously imagined. Over the past few years, the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project, led by Chris, has made discoveries that have stunned the world, pushing back the earliest known date of man’s arrival in Britain by a staggering 200,000 years, to a date earlier than any other known in northern Europe. This book represents the culmination of all their collective efforts around the British Isles.