Archaeologists unearth 600,000-year-old evidence of Britain's early inhabitants

[Judi Lynn]

New finds have indicated that some of Britain’s earliest people lived in the Canterbury suburbs.

According to the research, led by the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, archaeological discoveries made on the outskirts of Canterbury, Kent (England) confirm the presence of early humans in southern Britain between 560,000 and 620,000 years ago, making it one of the earliest known Palaeolithic sites in northern Europe.

Researchers have now used contemporary dating techniques using radiometric dating, infrared-radiofluorescence (IR-RF) dating, and controlled excavations of the site. The site was initially discovered in the 1920s when laborers discovered handaxes in an old riverbed.

In a study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the researchers have confirmed the presence of Homo heidelbergensis, an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human which existed during the Middle Pleistocene and an ancestor of Neanderthals. Homo heidelbergensis is thought to have descended from the African Homo erectus during the first early expansions of hominins out of Africa beginning roughly 2 million years ago.

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