That's right. This is around 700,000 years.
Present day is back there.
Chris and his team
have collected evidence of human occupation from sites right across Britain.
This is a leg bone about 500,000 years ago.
400,000 years ago we've got one human fossil from that period from Swanscom be in Kent.
We know
the Neanderthals were back here in Britain about 60,000 years ago.
That brings us nicely up to the present day with a modern human,
so there we are.
But the periods without any people at all
coincide with something rather chilling -
ice Ages.
So when were those ice ages that you were talking about?
There's a whole series of them.
Here,
about 13,000 years ago,
you've got the peak of the last ice age.
Then we've got a major cold stage here,
another one here.
So I can count seven major ice ages over the 700,000 years?
Yep,
and at least seven extinction events of the people.
It's only us that are the last survivors.
All the rest of these species, of course, died out,
and they died out successively in Britain
and Britain had to be repopulated about every 100,000 years.