London

Archaeologists are hoping that a £1.2-million grant from the Leverhulme Trust will help to revive the study of ancient settlement patterns in the British Isles.

Bone ideal: Chris Stringer says Britain is a good place to study early human settlements. Credit: NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

The grant will support five years of study by researchers at the Natural History Museum, London, and partner institutions. The team will investigate when people first arrived in Britain, and how the populations responded to environmental change. A particularly interesting question is why the country seems to have been uninhabited between 170,000 and 70,000 years ago.

Britain has some of the world's best archaeological sites from the Palaeolithic period, from about 500,000 to 12,000 years ago. In 1993, for example, a 500,000 year-old human shin bone was found at Boxgrove, near Chichester in West Sussex (see Nature 369, 311–313; 1994). But funding has been scarce for archaeology in recent years, researchers complain, and gravel extraction and coastal erosion are now threatening some of the most promising locations for exploration.

Archaeology “really has been neglected in the United Kingdom and many sites are being destroyed”, says Simon Parfitt of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. He hopes the grant will help to revive interest in the subject.

Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum and the project's director, says that Britain's variable geography and climate make it ideal for studying how early humans adapted to environmental change. Stringer says the project will conduct some new excavations, but will focus mainly on re-examining the extensive collections of stone tools, fossil remains and animal bones that already exist at various universities and museums.