The earliest archaeological period is the Palaeolithic, the Old Stone Age.
The earliest humans belong to the 'Lower Palaeolithic' and most of our knowledge of them comes from Africa. Until fairly recently there was no evidence of humans in Britain before about 250,000 years ago. In the last few years, this has changed considerably and it is possible that early humans were in the area of Hentland and the middle Wye Valley over half a million years ago.
The earliest evidence of human activity in what is now Britain is from about 700,000 years ago. Around Happisburgh and Pakefield on the Suffolk coast flint tools have been found, and cutmarks on a bone from a bison-like animal. At the time Britain was a peninsula of mainland Europe and these early inhabitants could have roamed across a vast plain, now covered by the North Sea. The warm climate of the time ended with the onset of the Beestonian cold period.
The Cromerian interglacial followed the Beestonian period. During the Cromerian humans were active at Boxgrove in West Sussex where archaeologists have excavated 500,000-year-old remains. The Boxgrove people were Homo heidelbergensis and were active in both Africa and Europe. These 'hominins' were probably ancestral to both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens (us) and lived 300,000 before Neanderthals appeared.
The dominant material culture of hominins for a very long time is named 'Acheulean' and these tools were used by Homo ergaster (an early Homo erectus), and Homo heidelbergensis. Individual Acheulean hand-axes have been found at several sites in Herefordshire. Hereford Museum has one, which was found at Colwell in the eastern part of the county, and another found in a garden in Tupsley in the suburbs of Hereford. These tools were used by hominins long before Homo sapiens sapiens (modern humans) arrived.
a woolly mammoth
During the Lower Palaeolithic Britain's flora and fauna changed from tundra to temperate plains and woods then to tundra again. The coldest part of the cold spells would see glaciation over parts of Britain. Woolly Mammoths roamed the Hentland area and there bones have been found a few kilometres downstream at Arthur's Cave at Symond's Yat
Sometimes the sparse human population of the Hentland area would have shared the landscape with horses, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, macaques, hyenas and lions. Our present interglacial, despite global warming, is almost certainly nearer its end than its beginning.
It was during the Devensian cold spell that Homo sapiens sapiens arrived, heralding the period known to archaeologists as the Early Upper Palaeolithic. One of the earliest habitation sites for modern humans ison th Wye just downstream of Hentland, where flint tools found in King Arthur's Cave suggest that the cave was periodically inhabited over 30,000 years ago. The Early Upper Palaeolithic was brought to an end by the onset of the coldest part of Devensian ice advance, which brought to a temporary end human occupation of Britain.
Hentland would have been on the western (right) bank of an earlier version of the River Wye. This proto-Wye consisted of the Teme and the Lugg and the Wye below the present confluence with the Lugg
Archaeologists believe that there were no humans in Britain during the coldest part of the Devensian - about 29,000 to 20,000 BC. Average summer temperatures then were minus 10 degrees Celsius. The ice margin is estimated to have covered western Herefordshire to a depth of over a kilometre in height and seems to have terminated just west of where the city of Hereford now stands. Hentland, although beyond the glaciations, would have been under permanent snow and ice. However, in the areas away from the ice margin there would have been migratory herds of animals such as woolly mammoth, bison and reindeer.
The areas in which humans lived during the Devensian, and from which they would colonise the ice-freed lands, are known as 'refuges'. One of these refuges was in southern France/northern Spain (for convenience referred to as the 'Franco-Cantabrian' or 'Basque' refuge); there were others in the Balkans and the Ukraine.
As the temperature rose, during the Late Upper Palaeolithic, it was from these refuges that humans moved into north-west Europe. By about 13,000 years ago, the climate was on average slightly warmer than it is today. However, within a few centuries the cold returned and persisted until about 11,500 years ago. This period is known as the 'Younger Dryas' or the 'Loch Lomond' stadial.
The retreat of the ice at the end of the Younger Dryas left behind a treeless tundra landscape into which grazing animals and their predators, including humans, migrated. Although a small number of hardy ancestors of the modern British had arrived before the Younger Dryas, it was during this post-glacial period that three-quarters of the ancestors of the people of Britain and Ireland and their smaller islands arrived from these refuges. Current evidence suggests that despite a persistent popular belief in some fictitious Iron Age 'Celtic' mass migration from central Europe, Britain received the overwhelming bulk of its population from the Basque refuge many centuries earlier.
The route of this post-glacial movement of people was to become the 'Western Seaways', but in the earlier part of this period it was dry land; it would have been possible to walk from Brittany to south-west Wales. The landscape into which new people came at the end of the last ice age was treeless grassland, rich with game. Although the temperatures were low, there was abundant food and there are indications that the population grew rapidly.
That, generally speaking, the present populations have their origins at the end of the last ice age seems to be true of most of Europe. The simple explanation may be that the original hunters who followed their prey into the lands freed of ice, simply stayed there. In south-west Herefordshire they became, in turn, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age (perhaps Silures or Dubunni), Britons, Welsh and eventually English in culture as time passed.