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their ranges away from the worsening conditions, and the scattered groups of humans who
depended on them for food had no choice but to follow them. By the time of the coldest phase of the
Ice Age, 18,000 years ago, there were no humans left in Britain, or anywhere else in Europe north
of the Alps.
The descendants of the Red Lady and their contemporaries had retreated to refuges in southern
France, Italy and Spain, abandoning northern Europe to the frost and ice. Great glaciers flowed
downhill from the ice domes over the mountains of northern Britain, gouging out steep-sided
valleys and pulverizing the bedrock as they ground their way across the landscape, obliterating
everything in their path. All evidence of human occupation in northern Britain was completely
erased by the ice. Only south of a line from the English Midlands to central Ireland, which marked
the edge of the ice, could any trace remain.
And then, quite suddenly, the climate began to improve as the planet moved its alignment in the
heavens. The warmth of the sun returned to the northern latitudes and the ice began to melt. Our
ancestors followed the herds north from their huddled refuges as the frozen land began to thaw.
Carbon-dating of charcoal left by campfires has traced the advancing front and by 13,000 years ago
they had reached northern France. A millennium later, the older of the Cheddar Men, or his
immediate ancestors, were among the first to arrive in the Isles, by foot across the land that now
lies beneath the North Sea. His are among the oldest remains to be found anywhere in post-Ice Age
Britain. He arrived in a landscape scrubbed clean of human occupation by the effects of the Ice
Age, even though the ice itself never reached as far south as his home in Cheddar. His camp in the
gorge was perfect as an ambush site to trap the migrating herds of reindeer as they moved from
their summer feeding grounds on the high Mendips to spend the winter on the Somerset Levels.
Remains at the site showed he was skilled at making the variety of flint tools on which the life of
the hunter depended.
When he arrived, 12,000 years or so ago, the Isles were connected to each other and to the rest
of continental Europe. The sea was 100 feet lower than it is now and large tracts of land that are
now under water were well above sea level. Ireland was connected to mainland Britain through a
broad plain that joined it to the west coast of Scotland and took in what is now the whisky isle of
Islay. The Irish Sea, which now entirely separates Ireland from the rest of the Isles, was then a
narrow sea inlet between flat plains, blocked at its northern end by the isthmus that joined Scotland
to the north of Ireland. The Western Isles off the north-west coast of Scotland were similarly joined
to the mainland with a narrow strip of dry land. The Hebridean islands of Skye, Mull, Rum, Coll
and Tiree were not islands then; neither were the Orkney Islands, now separated from the far north
of the Scottish mainland by the turbulent seas of the Pentland Firth. Only the Shetland Isles, 60
miles north of Orkney, were truly islands in those far-off days.
Most important of all, there was dry land connecting Britain to continental Europe. This was no
narrow causeway, but a wide rolling plain joining eastern Britain to the rest of Europe from the
Tyne in the north to Beachy Head near Eastbourne in the south. The entire southern section of what
is now the North Sea was dry land intersected by wide rivers. The Thames was then a tributary of
the Rhine, their joined waters emptying into the sea 100 miles east of Newcastle upon Tyne. What
is now Britain and Ireland, separated by shallow seas, was then a great peninsula protruding into
the Atlantic Ocean. The Irish Sea was open only at its southern end and the North Sea was dry
land. The sea level was rising as the global temperature climbed back up after the last Ice Age. The