British history via U-tube.

  I watched a couple of decent, lengthy U-Tube presentations by “The Histocrat”.  The first one talks about humans moving into Britain a million years ago.  Over the last million years Britain has suffered several ice ages severe enough to drive all the humans out of Britain, and as many interglacial periods were the forests and the game and the humans came back.  With both the ice ages and the interglacials lasting 10,000 years or more.  Used to be, they only wrote about humans settling in Britain after the last ice age went out 10,000 years ago.  Apparently they have discovered a couple of sites in Britain that are much older since the last book I read was written.  They failed to describe just how these older sites were dated.  Carbon 14 dating only works back 30-40 thousand years.  A million years is too old for carbon 14 dating. 

   They did discuss the seas breaking thru the straits of Dover, creating the English Channel and cutting Britain off from the Continent.  And sinking Doggerland.  They were a little vague on just when this happened, and after it happened how did humans get across the Channel and onto English soil?  No discussion of when early humans, especially Heidelberg man and Neanderthal man might have developed boats.  It doesn’t take much of a boat; the Channel is only twenty miles wide and can be crossed in a birch bark canoe in good weather. 

   The second one, which started up automatically after the first one finished, picks up the story around 8000 BC with the Beaker Folk.  It claimed that DNA evidence shows a turnover in British population with the appearance of Beaker Folk graves.  They fail to describe how this DNA testing works and how many samples of DNA going back before 8000 BC they have.  Some discussion of introduction of copper and bronze into a flint using late Neolithic Britain.  The author clearly knows little about metal work, he describes bronze as “hard”.  It isn’t very hard.  Flint is much harder than bronze.  Bronze is tougher than flint; you can make a bronze sword that works.  You cannot make a flint sword; flint is brittle as glass and would break the first time you struck anything with it.  The author makes a big deal over copper versus bronze.  I don’t see that, bronze is a straight forward alloy of copper with 10% tin which gives a metal much tougher than plain copper.  But other than adding the tin, bronze works the same way as copper does.  You can cast it and sharpen it the same way as copper.  A copper smith doesn’t have to learn much to become a bronze smith.  The author discusses smelting copper from the ore (oxides or sulfides of copper).  Actually copper working got started with native copper.  There used to be nuggets of pure copper just lying around to be picked up.  They are mostly gone by now, but they were important back in the day.  The native copper can be hammered into shape, or melted and cast into shape, much simpler that figuring out how to smelt copper from ores.