British Isles British Isles The British Isles are an archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean off the north-western coast of continental Europe that consists of the islands of Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man and over six thousand smaller isles. They have a total area of about 315,159 km and a combined population of just under 70 million, and include two sovereign states, the Republic of Ireland (which covers roughly five-sixths of the island of Ireland) and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The islands of Alderney, Jersey, Guernsey and Sark, and their neighbouring smaller islands, are sometimes
History of the British Isles known as the Old and Middle Stone Ages, were characterised by a hunter-gatherer economy and a reliance on stone tool technologies. The Lower Palaeolithic period in the British Isles saw the region's first known habitation by early hominids, specifically the extinct Homo heidelbergensis. One of the most prominent archaeological sites dating to this period is that of Boxgrove Quarry in West Sussex, southern England. By the Mesolithic, "Homo sapiens", or modern humans, were the only hominid species to still survive in the British Isles. British Isles were linked to continental Europe by a territory named Doggerland. In the British Isles,