Doggerland sank—and Britain became an island forever
Humans reached the British Isles by about 900,000 years ago at Happisburgh. Continuous occupation dates from the early Holocene around 11,700 years ago. Rising seas drowned Doggerland, the land bridge to Europe, sometime after 6500 BCE.
Palaeolithic foragers came and went with glacial cycles at least nine times. Boxgrove Man, possibly Homo heidelbergensis, dates to about 480,000 years ago; Neanderthals occupied intermittently until roughly 50–40,000 years ago, and modern humans from about 40,000. Mesolithic settlement by 9000 BCE persisted through a cold snap around 6200 BCE. Neolithic farmers arriving about 4100 BCE cleared forests and raised chambered tombs, then stone circles; Bronze Age builders reshaped Avebury, Stonehenge, and Silbury Hill. Celtic languages spread in the first millennium BCE.
Caesar raided in 55 and 54 BCE; Claudius’s invasion in 43 CE annexed southern Britain. Agricola’s campaigns (77–83 CE) pushed into Caledonia; conquest-era Celtic deaths are estimated at 100,000–250,000. After Rome, Angles and Saxons forged England’s heptarchy while Picts, Dál Riata, and Strathclyde shared Scotland. Vikings overran much of England; Alfred’s Wessex endured. William of Normandy won at Hastings in 1066 and ordered the Domesday survey. Scotland’s struggle with England produced Stirling Bridge (1297), the Declaration of Arbroath (1320), and recognition of independence under Robert the Bruce in the 1328 Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton.
England and Scotland were separate kingdoms until the 1603 Union of the Crowns and one kingdom after 1707. The British monarch headed all the Isles’ states from 1603 until Ireland’s Republic of Ireland Act in 1949. Ireland’s parliament was subordinated to London before the 1801 union, enacted after the 1798 rebellion amid war with revolutionary France, with promised Catholic Emancipation blocked by George III.
Source: History of the British Isles
