The age of a piece of jawbone found at Kent’s Cavern in the 1920s has been reassessed, and is said to ‘represent the oldest known anatomically modern human fossil in northwestern Europe’.
A preview of the paper in Nature is here:
nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10484.html
but this newspaper article is a friendlier summary:
guardian.co.uk/science/2011/nov/02/humans-torquay-ice-age
It's mad to think that the period of warming was 'only' 1000yrs. A short period from our retrospective view, but at the time, it would have seemed to them that people had lived there forever. 50 generations would be long enough for it to seem like that's the way it had always been, and would always be.
A short period from our retrospective view! 1000 years ago the Normans hadn't arrived - that feels a pretty long span of time to me. :-)
This story was actually important enough to be in the Metro, with pictures. Which is pretty important, obviously.