By the rest of the world’s standards, the wildlife of the British Isles is rather tame. However, this hasn’t always been the case. Wind back the clock just a few thousand years and these islands were home to beasts that would have made even the bravest of our ancestors quake in their reindeer pelts…
For nearly one million years, humans have occupied the British Isles. The first of these humans weren’t Homo sapien like us, rather Homo antecessor - one of nearly a dozen prehistoric human species that lived during the Pleistocene Period (2.5 million to 11,700 years ago). Since those pioneers first set foot on the British Isles more human species have followed, including Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis (better known as neanderthals), and, eventually, anatomically modern humans.
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Humans weren’t the first creatures to discover the British Isles; there were many larger, fiercer animals here before them, and more that would arrive soon after. Humans lived alongside these beasts for thousands of years and regularly clashed with them for not just food, but territory too.
A lot of these beasts faced extinction, many at the hands of our ancestors, while others survived and still roam some remote parts of the world today.
Here are 10 prehistoric beasts that may have terrified early Britons.
Woolly mammoths
Over the course of the last 2.5 million years, northern Europe has been periodically covered by huge ice sheets - sometimes stretching as far south as southern England. The lands below these ice sheets were an icy tundra, known as the Mammoth Steppe. This was a difficult place to live, yet it supported some of the largest mammals the world has ever seen, including the iconic woolly mammoth.
Standing 3.5m tall, weighing in at 6,000kg, and sporting two 4m-long curved tusks, a woolly mammoth would have been a terrifying sight. Still, that didn't stop our ancestors from hunting them.
We’ve evidence of not only Homo sapiens hunting these furry behemoths, but neanderthals too. At a cave known as La Cotte de St Brelade in Jersey, large mounds of woolly mammoth and woolly rhino bones have been uncovered. These remains show signs of having been hunted and, later, butchered. It’s thought the neanderthals that lived on Jersey at this time, roughly 180,000 years ago, may have corallaled their prey off cliff tops with fire brands.
Woolly mammoths disappeared from the British Isles 14,000 years ago. They lasted several thousand years longer in North America, and a tiny population survived on Russia’s Wrangel Island right up until 2,000 BC - some 1,000 years after Stonehenge was constructed on Salisbury Plain, where they once roamed.
Cave lions
Believe it or not, the British Isles were once home to lions larger than those that currently prowl the savannas of sub-Saharan Africa. These lions, known as cave lions (or Panthera spelaea), looked a lot like their extant cousins, but they were nearly 50% larger.
Cave lions preyed on many of the same large herbivores as our ancestors, from mammoths to reindeer. They’d also seek out caves on their hunt for bear cubs and, in doing so, often come face to face with humans also using these caves for shelter. There’s evidence from across Europe of interactions between cave lions and humans. In Spain, at a cave known as La Garma, researchers have found signs of humans skinning cave lions for their pelts, while in France, at Chauvet Cave, some extraordinary charcoal paintings of cave lions stand as stark evidence of our ancestors’ ability to create art.
What exactly early Britons, and early Europeans, thought of cave lions we’ll never know, but from what we know of how they were treated and depicted, we can guess they were both feared and venerated. In some early European cultures, particularly in Germany where a 40,000-year-old ivory statue of a half-man, half-lion figure was found in 1939, cave lions may even have been considered gods.
Irish elks
Today, elk stand roughly 1.2m tall, but Megaloceros - a Pleistocene ancestor of theirs - stood at almost double that, towering over the humans it lived alongside. This extinct deer was certainly hefty, but it was its formidable, 3.7m-wide antlers that would have no doubt induced the most terror amongst those unlucky enough to bump into one in the dense forests it lived in.
Megaloceros’ common name, irish elk, is somewhat of a misnomer. It wasn’t an elk, rather a member of a slightly different group known as old world deer. And it wasn’t only native to Ireland; it actually roamed vast swathes of Europe, from Spain to southwestern Russia.
That said, most remains of Megaloceros are found in Ireland where conditions at the end of the last ice age were fantastic for preserving fossils, which is how it got its name.
While Megaloceros was a herbivore, it would have still posed a significant threat to humans. You need only look at today’s moose and the fact that they’re responsible for wounding more people annually in Alaska than bears, to understand that Megaloceros were dangerous beasts.
Woolly rhinos
Aside from their size and horns, today’s rhinos are known for their dry, practically hairless skin. Some of their extinct relatives weren’t so well-groomed, however, particularly the woolly rhino. This appropriately-named, extinct rhino shared some similarities with its extant descendants: large nasal and frontal horns, three-toed feet, and a stocky build. It also had some differences, chiefly the thick coat of hair that kept it warm during particularly cold periods.
While woolly rhinos were similar in size to today’s largest rhinos, white rhinos (~1.6m tall, ~2,500kg), their closest living relatives, sumatran rhinos, are actually the smallest rhino species alive today, weighing in at just 800kg. These small rhinos are covered in a coat of short, reddish-brown hair and live on the tropical islands of Sumatra and Borneo.
Like today’s rhinos, woolly rhinos were imposing beasts and could have easily injured, or even killed, humans. We’ve some evidence that early Britons hunted woolly rhinos, or at least scavenged their remains. In 1926, a 12,000-year-old woolly rhino rib bone, engraved with a small dancing man, was found at Pin Hole Cave in Derbyshire. Woolly rhinos also appear in cave art across Europe, suggesting they were a somewhat regular sight for ancient peoples.
Scimitar-toothed cats
Everyone has heard of sabre-tooth cats, or Smilodon, but their close cousins scimitar-tooth cats, or Homotherium, were just as deadly, if not more so. Unlike Smilodon, Homotherium are thought to have hunted in small groups, using their longer hind limbs to run down prey rather than ambush it. Their canines were also shorter than Smilodon’s (~10cm rather than ~30cm) but interestingly serrated. These adaptations made Homotherium formidable predators capable of hunting mammoths, bison, horse, and reindeer - the same large mammals our ancestors also hunted.
Homotherium were only occasional visitors to the British Isles, evidenced by the fact that only sporadic remains have been found. The remains we have found, however, tell an interesting story. In 2000, a Homotherium jaw was dredged up from the Brown Bank in the North Sea, an area that was covered by dry land during parts of the Pleistocene.
This land is known as Doggerland and it once stretched all the way from the east coast of England to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark.
It’s in Doggerland where researchers think early Britons may have clashed with groups of Homotherium as they tracked herds of mammoths and bison from Eurasia. These clashes wouldn’t have happened often and most early Britons likely never encountered Homotherium. The same can’t be said for humans who lived in North America. They lived closely alongside Homotherium for thousands of years up until their eventual extinction 12,000 years ago.
Polar bears and brown bears
At the time of the last glacial maximum (LGM) some 20,000 years ago, the majority of the British Isles were covered by ice sheets. According to some estimates, the Scottish Highlands were covered by ice sheets more than a kilometre thick during this period. Considering this, living in Scotland 20,000 years ago would have been a lot like living in the Arctic today, and based on some fossil finds the wildlife would have been similar too.
In 1927, a bear skull was unearthed from a cave in Inchnadamph, deep in the Scottish Highlands. Only in the early 2000s was this skull finally identified as a polar bear’s and dated to roughly 18,000 years ago. This skull remains the only evidence of polar bears in the British Isles, suggesting they were incredibly rare.
Their close cousins, brown bears, were a lot more common. In Ireland, a subspecies of brown bear thrived and is thought to have survived alongside humans right up until 500 BC. A butchered knee bone from a brown bear, found in a cave in western Ireland and dated to 12,800 years ago, tells us that our ancestors not only came face to face with bears, but ate them too. Interestingly, these Irish brown bears are the maternal ancestors of all living polar bears, according to a DNA study conducted in 2011.
Cave hyenas
We can actually thank these prehistoric predators for the fantastically preserved, Pleistocene-aged bone hoards we find across the British Isles and the rest of Europe. As their name suggests, cave hyenas lived in caves and would regularly drag carcasses back to their dens. These caves sheltered animal remains from the elements and, in doing so, increased their chances of being fossilised. In the British Isles, cave hyena dens have preserved bones from all manner of large mammals, including Irish elk, straight-tusked elephants, and even hippopotamuses.
The main difference between cave hyenas and today’s spotted hyenas was their size - at ~100kg, cave hyenas were twice as heavy as their extant relatives. Their diets differed too. While spotted hyenas largely prey on small antelopes, cave hyenas went after larger mammals like horses and bison. They’d also scavenge whatever carrion they could find.
There’s lots of evidence of humans interacting with cave hyenas, particularly neanderthals. Some animal remains processed by neanderthals also show signs of having been gnawed by hyenas, suggesting the two would occasionally steal each other’s kills. There’s also evidence of them competing for caves.
Cave hyenas disappeared from the British Isles around 32,000 years ago, a long time before the peak of the last ice age.
Steppe bison
Standing 2m tall, weighing in at nearly 1000kg, and sporting a pair of half-metre-long horns, steppe bison (Bison priscus) were some of the biggest bovids ever, dwarfed only by their American cousins, the giant bison, or Bison latifrons. A single steppe bison might not have prompted our ancestors to run away in terror, but a herd of hundreds certainly would have done.
This extinct bison is amongst the most well-known megafauna from the Pleistocene, thanks largely to several mummified specimens that have been found in the remote parts of Canada and Siberia. These ‘bison mummies’ preserve everything from the bison’s bones, horns, and hair, to its stomach contents, painting a vivid picture of not only what they looked like, but how they lived.
Humans hunted steppe bison across North America and Eurasia, including in the British Isles where they’re thought to have been numerous, gathering in large herds during breeding seasons. They’ve been absent from the British Isles for roughly 28,000 years, but two years ago - in 2022 - four European bison were released into a woodland near Canterbury, Kent, as part of a ground-breaking rewilding project.
It’s here in East Anglia where these bison’s ancestors would have roamed during the Pleistocene, back when this part of the British Isles was covered by icy tundra.
Grey wolves
As recently as 1680, grey wolves lived in the British Isles. The earliest known grey wolf remains, found at Pontnewydd Cave in Wales, date all the way back to 225,000 years ago and to a time when neanderthals were the only humans known in this remote part of Europe. Unlike humans, who came and went from the British Isles, wolves remained a permanent fixture of British wildlife throughout the latter stages of the Pleistocene.
These prehistoric wolves, standing 85cm tall and weighing in at 45kg, were just like today’s wolves and would have also hunted in large packs. They competed with humans, but unlike other predators on this list they survived alongside them for thousands of years, past the last ice age and well into the modern period.
From written Roman and later Saxon accounts of the British Isles, we know that wolves were here in huge numbers from the 1st to the 11th century. Their numbers were then slashed in the latter middle ages when they were mercilessly hunted in an effort to stop them from killing domesticated livestock.
It was in Killiecrankie, Scotland, where the last wolf is thought to have been killed in 1680, though there were rumours and sightings of wolves right through the 18th century. The reintroduction of wolves to Scotland has long been discussed and plans have even been proposed, but there’s no sign of them returning any time soon.
Other humans
As mentioned above, Homo sapiens weren’t the first humans to discover the British Isles. Our ancestors arrived comparatively late compared to other human species, around 40,000 years ago and some 860,000 years after those who left footprints and stone tools at Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast. It’s thought these original Britons were Homo antecessor, a likely candidate for the last common ancestor between neanderthals and us.
When we arrived in the British Isles, we’d have run into many of our relatives, including neanderthals. While it’s thought we probably warred with them, there’s more evidence of us assimilating with them. This evidence is literally in our DNA, around 2% of which we share with neanderthals.
As well as bumping into neanderthals, our ancestors will have also met rival groups of their own kind. How these early Britons may have interacted with one another is a bit of a mystery, but we have found some evidence of possible cannibalism amongst Homo sapiens, dated to 15,000 years ago in Gough’s Cave, Somerset. From this site, human toe and rib bones have been found that bear marks made by human teeth. Other clues include human jaw bones that have been severed from their skulls and deliberately broken in a similar way to the jaws of other animals.
There’s also evidence in Gough’s Cave of its inhabitants manufacturing ‘skull cups’ from human heads. Terrifying, right?
