British Isles naming dispute "British-Irish Isles" and the Islands of the North Atlantic. In documents drawn up jointly between the British and Irish governments, the archipelago is referred to simply as "these islands". To some, the dispute is partly semantic, and the term is a value-free geographic one, while, to others, it is a value-laden political one. The Crown dependencies of the Channel Islands may also for geo-political reasons be included in the British Isles, despite not being geographically part of the archipelago. United Kingdom law uses the term British Islands to refer to the UK, Channel Islands, and Isle of Man as a
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,