It seems that the old sceptr’d isle is something of a seasonal delicacy, in the long cycle of meteorological time. BBC Science reports Recent Findings:

• The evidence suggests there were eight major incursions [onto the area now called the British Isles]
• All but the last – about 12,000 years ago – were unsuccessful
• A number of major palaeo-sites mark the periods of influx
• Extreme cold made Britain uninhabitable for thousands of years

Scientists now think there were seven gaps in the occupation story – times when there was probably no human settlement of any kind on these shores. Britain and the British people of today are essentially new arrivals – products only of the last influx 12,000 years.

“Australian aboriginals have been in Australia longer, continuously than the British people have been in Britain. There were probably people in the Americas before 12,000 years ago,” Professor Stringer explained.

Actually, I wonder about bullet point number two, there. Surely the current occupancy of these islands could only be said to have been successful if it were to persist through the next Ice Age, whenever that turns out to be? And what prospect would we, or anybody, have of that? In the face of actual glaciers and permafrost, we migrate or die.

The more interesting point in the article for me, though was that this part of the world has undergone some of the most extreme variations in climate of any in the world, over the scale of the last Geological Era (approximately the last 2 million years, less than half the time humans have been around). This is interesting because, despite the designation “temperate” which has characterised the local conditions through all of recorded history, the longer timescale shows that the local climate might swing towards tropical heat or sub-Arctic desolation.

Indeed, if the BBC’s info-graphic is to be any sort of guide, it has passed from one extreme to the other about fifteen times in 700,000 years. That is, major, major climate change, roughly again, every 50,000 years on average. Less major but biospherically significant changes occur with much greater freqency. I think that means that this is one of the places where the climate really jumps when the cycle cracks its whip. I think that makes us, in the wider scheme of things, something of a borderline case, a canary in the coalmine of geologic time.

I’m recalibrating my sense of cushioned abundance accordingly.

(via Sci-Tech Daily)