FOOTPRINTS

The north Norfolk coastline has received a jolly good Press recently, national surveys suggesting it is one of the healthiest places in Britain to live, and one of the most crime-free. Which is nice for me, as I live there. But another location further east around the same coastline inadvertently illustrates the swings and roundabouts of life by hosting not only severe coastal and cliff erosion, including the loss of land and homes, but also a beach of European archaeological importance. That place is Happisburgh (pronounced Hays-bruh), and the good/bad juxtaposition comes about because the latter has largely been brought about by the former.
To be fair, you can't really talk about these beach discoveries without mentioning the storm damage, and it is true to say that the North Sea has been unkind to Happisburgh. Successive lines of defences have, over the years, been battered into submission and cliffs nibbled away at an alarming rate. Again, destructive tides have scoured away more and more levels of beach sand, too, leaving deposits of the ancient and darkly mysterious Cromer Forest Bed exposed. And it was here that experts, working at low tide, found footprints, transient marks left as visual proof of the presence on these shores of ancient visitors in times distant, before the last Ice Age.  
The current thinking is that they date to more than 850,000 BC, and possible as much as 950,000 years ago; but in any event, they are the oldest relics of human activity found in Britain.
There were five people in this particular group, possibly including children, and they had evidently ambled southwards across a floodplain or estuary (in what is now called Doggerland) formed by two rivers, one of which, thousands of years later, would become the Thames. It would seem that some of them occasionally wandered sideways, perhaps searching reedbeds or creeks for eggs or shellfish, but in any event most probably looking for food. A very human thing to do.
But who were they? Certainly not Homo Sapiens, and probably not Neanderthals. Heidelbergensis is a possibility, but the hot money at the moment is going on 'Pioneer Man,' otherwise Homo Antecessor, a species which may have been extinct in Europe by 600,000, being replaced by Heidelbergensis, and later, Neanderthalensis.
It is possible that only the discovery of a fossil skeletal bone or bones will clear up the matter, and one would like to think that it is only a matter of time before one is found. Six Palaeolithic sites have already been located in the Happisburgh coastal area, and these vast Cromer beds actually run from Weybourne to beyond Pakefield in Suffolk, so there is a very good chance something will turn up one day.
But whoever they were, these people were able to come here because of environmental conditions were right at the time and because Doggerland was teeming with game and fish. But in generational terms they were not able to stay long because very slowly temperatures were beginning to drop again. Visits such as this thus became just one more doomed and episodic attempt to populate this land. Indeed, there have been at least ten of these episodes and at least ten waves of human occupation, potentially by four different species. We are in the tenth occupation phase right now.
However, the devastating retribution of the sea is one thing, and the question of whether, in centuries to come, even Happisburgh itself will actually survive, another. What seems more certain, because it has already happened, is that because of those five distant, unknown people, and because of some of the things they and others left behind, Happisburgh is already written into the history books.