Ictis British tin was shipped from Massalia on the Mediterranean coast of Gaul. Julius Caesar, in his "De Bello Gallico", says of the Veneti: "This last-named people were by far the most powerful on the coast of Armorica: they had a large fleet plying between their own ports and Britain; they knew more about the handling of ships and the science of navigation than anyone else thereabouts." William Camden, the Elizabethan historian, took the view that the name "Ictis" was so similar to "Vectis", the Latin name for the Isle of Wight, that the two were probably the same island. The
Prehistoric Britain occupied Europe, or Britain's large mineral reserves. See Roman Britain for the history of this subsequent period. Prehistoric Britain Several species of humans have intermittently occupied Britain for almost a million years. The Roman conquest of Britain in 43 AD is conventionally regarded as the end of Prehistoric Britain and the start of recorded history in the island, although some historical information is available from before then. The earliest evidence of human occupation around 900,000 years ago is at Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast, with stone tools and footprints probably made by "Homo antecessor". The oldest human fossils, around 500,000