Terra Incognita Revisited: the settlement patterns of early humans in north-west Europe

North-west Europe has long been recognised to be on the margins of the Palaeolithic world, but with its long history of research has been used as a laboratory to explore ideas on human dispersal and range-limits against a backdrop of periodic climate change. This paper re-examines the distribution of Lower and early Middle Palaeolithic sites across the region, and the historical and geological factors that have influenced the record. For the Lower Palaeolithic, the imbalance in sites between Britain and mainland Europe is argued to be largely the result of thicker loess cover over northern France and Belgium, making historic access to fluvial sediments more challenging. This, together with the effects of glaciation in Britain, make it difficult to determine range-limits to human occupation, which are likely to have been considerably beyond known distributions. For the early Middle Palaeolithic there is an impoverished record in Britain, which has been emphasised by new discoveries in adjacent submerged areas of the North Sea Basin. It is suggested that a real boundary to human occupation lies in south-east England, being on the margins of the deeper loess-rich soils which supported the mammoth steppe.