Waves of immigration and retreat typify UK history

NORWICH, England, Sep 5 (Reuters) Britain has been occupied and vacated by people at least eight times, the earliest occasion being some 700,000 years ago and the most recent dating back just 12,000 years, scientists said today.

And each time Neanderthals ventured across the land bridge that then connected Britain to mainland Europe they were forced to retreat again by the advancing ice sheets.

''It looks like there were eight separate colonisation periods, but only the most recent has been successful -- so far,'' Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum said.

''These were windows in time when the climate was right for people to be here during the interglacial periods,'' he told reporters at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Stringer, presenting the findings of five years of work on the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project which ends this month, said at that time Britain was at the edge of the universe as far as humans were concerned because of the extreme cold.

He said modern man may have first come to Britain as long as 35,000 years ago before being forced to retreat south again by the last ice age, and it was only 12,000 years ago that the most recent period of continuous occupation began.

One of the major findings of the project was the discovery of stone implements dating back 700,000 years at Pakefield on the east coast some 193 km north of London, pushing back by 200,000 years the earliest evidence of occupation so far north.

Stringer said he believed there could be a link between these and artefacts found in Spain where there is some evidence of Neanderthals as much as 1.2 million years ago.

He did not rule out that there might be evidence still to be found pushing back even further the earliest date of human occupation on Britain.

Danielle Schreve from the Royal Holloway University and also a member of the project said they had discovered evidence that far from being scavengers of low intelligence, Neanderthals had adapted to climate change, planned forward and hunted in groups.

At a quarry at Lynford near Norwich scientists had found 25,000 animal bones and teeth -- including those of 11 woolly mammoths -- and 2,500 stone tools used to kill and butcher them.

Not only had the Neanderthals had to work together to drive the giant animals into what was then a swamp, but the bones showed that the animals were of prime age when they were killed.

''We think the Neanderthals are behaving cooperatively to hunt and kill the animals and to protect their kill from scavengers,'' she told reporters.

''There appears to be evidence at Lynford of planning and foresight,'' she added.

REUTERS MS PC1717