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Ancient flint meat-cutting tools found in sediment along a highway in Dartford, Kent, prove Neanderthals were present in Britain before the beginning of the last ice age (and possibly before the previous two or three cold periods or interglacials), when the British Isles were joined to mainland Europe due to low sea levels. The find pushes back the earliest known evidence for Neanderthals in England by 40,000 years, according to a June 1  report in the Daily Mail headlined "Neanderthal Man Was Alive in Britain at Start of Ice Age.

Previous notions postulated "pre-Neanderthals" (perhaps H. heidelbergensis) sparsely occupying Britain in the Pleistocene Period but vacating it when the climate became prohibitively cold about 200,000 years ago. It was thought that true Neanderthals did not reach Britain until about 60,000 years ago, not far in advance of their cousins, H. sapiens sapiens.

Neanderthals were known to be in northern France and Belgium about the same time. Their range must now be extended to Britain, and that country's prehistory recast. As in the rest of Europe, it appears Neanderthals were living in Britain hundreds of thousands of years ago since a date like the Dartford find is only a terminus ante quem. If Neanderthals were living 100,000 years ago off the present-day junction of the M25 and A2, they probably had not just arrived. Similarly, they probably did not die off or move out of Britain in the next generation. It was not an excursion or isolated incident. The chances are unlikely that the first, and so far only, evidence of Neanderthals in Britain would be from the exact beginning or precise end of their population's stay.

Current thinking about interglacials is changing, well, like the weather, but there have undoubtedly been many eons-long stretches of time during which Britain was temperate and hospital to humans. Since the Middle Pleistocene about 600,000 years ago,significant advances of continental ice sheets in Europe have occurred at intervals of approximately 40,000 to 100,000 years. These long glacial periods were separated by more temperate and shorter interglacials. The age of Neanderthal humans is conventionally set at 400,000 years before present but may be revised backward as we learn more and encounter more fossil evidence.