ABSTRACT
From a northern European point of view, an interrupted archaeological record indicative of successive dispersals and regional extinctions is the rule throughout the Upper Palaeolithic (Verpoorte 2008). As with the preceding Middle and Lower Palaeolithic, hominin groups dispersed into the region infrequently and the relatively precise chronology available for the British Upper Palaeolithic reveals that it was interstadials, some of which approached the Holocene in terms of mean temperatures, which ultimately facilitated the northwestwards dispersal of grassland faunal communities into Britain. Only towards the end of the Pleistocene can one identify a boreal woodland community – in the second half of the last interstadial before the Holocene – an indication of the Early Holocene and Mesolithic communities to come. As will be seen below, the British Upper Palaeolithic record is remarkably sparse and even the Late Magdalenian/Creswellian record of the first half of the Late Glacial Interstadial need represent, in our opinion, no more than the activities of one group resident for a handful of years.
