Bones from a Cheddar Gorge cave show that cannibalism helped Britain's earliest settlers survive the ice age

New carbon dating techniques reveal that 14,700 years ago humans living in Gough's Cave in the Mendips acquired a taste for the flesh of their relatives, and not just for ritual reasons

Scientists have identified the first humans to recolonise Britain after the last ice age. The country was taken over in a couple of years by individuals who practised cannibalism, they say - a discovery that revolutionises our understanding of the peopling of Britain and the manner in which men and women reached these shores.

Research has shown that tribes of hunter-gatherers moved into Britain from Spain and France with extraordinary rapidity when global warming brought an end to the ice age 14,700 years ago and settled in a cavern – known as Gough's Cave – in the Cheddar Gorge in what is now Somerset.

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