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Comment by aaaaaaaaaaab | Hacker News Reader

On foot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

Yup, "they walked" was my answer too. Thought that was pretty common knowledge that the North Sea as it is now was formed as the ice from the last ice age melted, cutting off the British Isles into what they are now.

Trawlers still occasionally pull up tree stumps etc in their nets from the Doggerland area

Most people are not aware that the sea level rose with more than 120 meters in the past 20k years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.pn...

Great point.

Most people are also not aware that sea level will rise even more in the coming 20k years if we go on like that.

Not to detract from your valid point that we should curb global warming, but if all the glaciers and ice caps melts the sea level will rise by approximately 70 meters according to the USGS[1], so that would make it impossible for it to rise even more than what it did in the past 20k years, but I also think that if that rise of 70 meters will happen, it will take less than 1k years.

[1]: https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-...

There's a good episode of In Our Time about Doggerland:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006707

I was going to post exactly the same.

More to the point, Britain wasn't an island a mere 10k years ago. Why would we ever assume that Britain was difficult to reach 1M years ago?

Apparently nobody here has actually read or even skimmed the article. The author obviously knows that Britain has been connected by land to the continent several times in the past million years.

Bit redundant reading the article that's asking a question that's got a clear answer, really. Just because it's posted here doesn't make it worth reading.

The headline asks a rhetorical question and the article argues that the answer is more complicated than "duh, they walked there". That's the whole point.

Does the article even have a salient point worth discussing in relation to its clickbait title? I think I can sum up the entire article with just the sentence "a tangle of footprints near Hazebruh (because this is England) has been dated 850,000–950,000 years ago". It certainly doesn't answer the question in a more succinct way than the OP did.

>Why would we ever assume that Britain was difficult to reach 1M years ago?

Because we have a lot of geologic data to suggest that Britain alternated between difficult to reach and a frozen wasteland. This is the topic discussed in the article.

  When the Isles were warm enough to live in, the English Channel would be full of water, and, whatever their other skills, Roger and his kind could not cross 34 km of open sea. But when Europe got cold enough for falling sea levels to turn the Channel into a land bridge, it was usually too cold for anyone to cross it and live in Proto-Britain.

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