Cloudy with chances of Ice Age

BRITAIN has had one of the most volatile climates on earth with up to 10 ice ages forcing early settlers into exile, leaving the land uninhabited for periods of up to 110,000 years, researchers have found.

A study — led by the Natural History Museum — of 700,000 years of human attempts to settle in Britain found that the Gulf Stream, which keeps the British Isles warm, kept collapsing, plunging them into Arctic cold. The lurches from temperate to freezing sometimes took as little as 10 years . . .

Thirty archeologists, paleontologists and geologists from institutes across the country worked together to construct a detailed calendar of early humans’ arrivals and departures.

They concluded that the present temperate climate is an anomaly and steamy heat or bitter cold are far more typical.

Stringer said: “We have evidence that between 500,000 and 12,000 years ago humans were only in Britain for about 20% of the time. Between 180,000 and 70,000 years ago Britain was abandoned, completely empty of people.”

Posted by David on August 28, 2006 10:00 PM