There is evidence dating back to the warm spell before the last Ice Age. No human bones have been found, but large flint implements which belong to the earliest part of the Old Stone (Paleolithic) Age have been discovered at various sites.

One of the most important and interesting sites is in Slindon Park on the edge of what was once a raised beach some hundred feet above the present sea level. Here primitive men lived by hunting and fishing. They did not, however, belong to the species from which humans are descended but to a similar species later to be ousted by Home Sapiens.

 

During the period which is known as the Mesolithic Age the vast ice sheets which covered Scandinavia and the North were melting quite fast and this gradually raised the levels of the Seas and Oceans.

 

In contrast, during the last Ice Age the sea levels had dropped so that the British Isles and Iceland had been linked by land to the Continent. There was no division between Sussex and Northern France, only a flat plain with a river flowing down the centre of what is now the English Channel.

 

As this river widened, the nomadic groups would have had to take longer detours to cross at a narrower point until at last the British Isles were cut off from Europe and have reached their present state.

 

During the last Ice Age, the ice sheets crept as far as the Northern sides of the Thames Valley. Nothing belonging to the later periods of the Old Stone Age has so far been found in Sussex. Ten thousand years ago, however, conditions had so far improved with the retreat of the ice sheet, that hunters following game from the East crossed what is now the North Sea, but which was then dry land, to Britain.

 

They moved from one temporary encampment to another in various parts of England, including a number in Sussex. These people we can definitely think of as our own remote ancestors, but like the earlier Paleolithic hunters they were still nomadic, and did not practice agriculture.

 

There are many sites where they made their tools and weapons to hunt with. The more noted sites are Selmeston where one pit yielded over 6,400 worked flints, Chithurst and West Heath in the Western Rother valley. (We ourselves have found several flint tools in our garden)

 

When the British Isles were cut off from the rest of the Continent there was little contact for some two or three thousand years.

 

 

 

 

 

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