Member Article

Durham University explores ancient Britain

Researchers at Durham University are celebrating after securing funding for a project exploring the ancient human occupation of Britain. The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project (AHOB) has just been awarded a grant of £999,000, which will enable the project to continue until 2010.

Archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists from institutions all over the country have been brought together by the AHOB. Rebecca Scott, a Postdoctoral Researcher in Palaeolithic Archaeology, and Dr Mark White, a Senior Lecturer in Palaeolithic Archaeology, both from Durham University, are among two of the specialists working on the project hoping to find archaeological evidence of Britain’s earliest colonisers.

Dr White said: “It’s a very exciting project to be involved in and we’re aiming to build up a picture of the presence of early humans in Britain during the Pleistocene, an era which occurred approximately 1.8 million to 12,000 years ago. We’ve already discovered evidence suggesting the human occupation of Britain dates back as far as 700,000 years, 200,000 years earlier than had originally been thought.”

The first year of the new phase of the project will include extracting DNA from a fossilised jaw, found at Kent’s Tavern in Devon, to determine whether it is that of a modern human or a late Neanderthal man. Initial radio-carbon dating on the remains seem to suggest they could be 35,000 years old, meaning the fossil could date to the time when modern humans may have first encountered the Neanderthals in Western Europe. If this is found to be the case, it will be the first fossil of its kind to be found on the British mainland and could yield crucial information about how early man spread across Europe.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .