In reply to summo:
> We've only really lived in the UK 10,000years and it's thought that there were many previous attempts, perhaps as many as 9 or 10. But climate, food, glaciation pushed people back further south in Europe.Whilst man didn't farm 10,000 years ago perhaps the slow progression towards it had started. You can see during times like the mini ice ages etc.. that at times it was border line survival. Plus as you know the human density was much lower. There wouldn't have been a whole town of folk all foraging the same forest.Perhaps we've changed a little and our energy demands, brain etc.. Are greater now than they were arounaround 10 or 50,000 years ago.
Well, yes and no.
We returned to the British and Irish peninsula around 15,000 years ago, but the attempts made before that would probably have lasted for a few thousand years at a time. Cold periods would have pushed humans back to the south, but in the later, shorter periods there is evidence to suggest that settlements survived this period, but hunted smaller game and probably just toughed it out. There is also a big difference between winter and a full-on ice age, particularly in densely forested areas.
The earliest evidence of a Homo genus settlement in the U.K. is from around 700,000 B.C., and Homo heidelbergensis was dropping bones for us to find 450,000 years ago. If we're looking at the idea of large, hominid species foraging to survive all year round then obviously it was possible for them to survive quite happily - we just don't know because the things they made, used and ate are almost impossible to detect in an excavation site beyond a certain point.
Farming was developing around 20,000 years ago, but way over in the middle east, and probably didn't reach the U.K. area until 7-5,000 years ago by even the earliest estimates. Before that it was likely that we forest gardeners, modifying the landscape to suit our needs and promote the growth of useful plants, but it's very difficult to say how far back that went.
Paleoanthrobotany is fascinating, but mostly guesswork, experimentation and assumption. We know from core samples that this plant was around 15,000 years ago, we know from speaking to hunter-gatherer cultures around the world that they know how to process it to remove a toxin or make it palatable, and we can analyse it to find a calorific or nutritional value. But we cannot say for certain that our ancestors, 15,000 years ago, ate that plant - we can only say that it's likely.
So much of our common cultural assumptions about our ancestors is based on a Victorian analysis of early remains - 'these guys didn't have wheat and cattle so they must have been savages, eking out an existence and barely able to survive'. But when we visit tribes and cultures elsewhere in the world that live wholly or partially on wild food they seem happy, have a cultural structure, have elaborate religious ceremonies and so on. Why would our ancestors have been any different?