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• About Peterborough
• Historical Peterborough
• The landscape is formed
• Our first people
• Farmers and potters
• Monuments and mysteries
• Pre-history gives way to the Romans
• The Romans make their mark
• Settlers and saints
• A medieval new town
• From abbey to cathedral, from town to city
• Civil war and a return to peace
• Prosperity and puddles
• A tribute to a rural tradition
• The railway age
• A modern city emerges
• A century of changes

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Our first people

The earliest human remains found in England date back some half a million years.   It is not known exactly when human feet first roamed the Peterborough area, but the evidence of flint tools made and discarded do indicate that people were here a few hundred thousand years ago. Many stone hand axes have been found locally, along with the 'waste' flakes produced when chipping tools into shape. 

The creators of the earliest of these flint tools were people such as Neanderthals, who were stockier in build than 'modern' humans, and had heavy, prominent faces. 'Modern' humans, people much more like us, became dominant about 35,000 years ago. We know that these people, of the palaeolithic period ('Old Stone Age',c.500,000 to c.8500 BC), were few in number, and that they were very skilled hunter-gatherers, able to live off the land without any formal method of agriculture.

The Peterborough area was on the fringe of the glaciers during the last Ice Age, and when it ended, around 10,000 years ago, people moved once more into the thawing landscape. This was probably a very mobile population, following game migrations and seasonal foodstuffs across the country. The river valleys served as hunting grounds and as corridors to ease travel through the heavily wooded landscape.  Rising sea levels, and the sluggish progress of the rivers flowing to the North Sea, caused reed swamp to develop in the Fens. Trees toppled, and were submerged for thousands of years, re-appearing as 'bog oaks' when the Fens were eventually drained.