Who Lived in Britain Before the Romans?

Britain before the Romans is not a simple picture of ancient Britons unchanged since time began. Population history tells a more complicated and fascinating story—one of multiple replacement events, migrations, and cultural transformations that stretched across tens of thousands of years.

The oldest human presence in what we now call Britain dates to around 800,000 years ago, when a now-extinct hominin we call Homo antecessor left footprints on a Norfolk beach and stone tools at Happisburgh. But these earliest inhabitants were not the ancestors of modern Britons. Britain was depopulated and repopulated multiple times as glaciations made it uninhabitable.

After the last ice age, hunter-gatherers moved in from what is now continental Europe—people genetically related to populations in Spain and Scandinavia. One of these individuals, Cheddar Man, who lived around 7,000 BCE, was recently found to likely have had dark skin and blue eyes. His descendants occupied Britain for thousands of years.

Then, around 4,000 BCE, something dramatic happened: ancient DNA shows a near-complete replacement of the hunter-gatherer population by farming communities who had migrated from Anatolia through Europe. These people built the long barrows and henges we associate with Neolithic Britain.

A thousand years later, another major migration transformed the population again. People associated with the Bell Beaker culture and carrying steppe ancestry—ultimately derived from populations near the Black and Caspian Seas—arrived and within a few centuries accounted for the majority of British ancestry. These people spoke early Indo-European languages and brought bronze metallurgy.

The Iron Age saw continued migration and cultural exchange with continental Europe. By the time the Romans arrived in 43 CE, they found a society shaped by Celtic languages and cultures—but built on layers of earlier populations that had been substantially but not completely replaced with each wave of newcomers.