Archaeologists digging on a Norfolk beach found stone tools that show the first humans were living in Britain much earlier than previously thought. Scientists at the Natural History Museum are now able to utilize CT scanning for inspection of ancient fossils that are able to tell them when humans actually arrived in Britain.
A spectacular haul of ancient flint tools has been recovered from a beach in Norfolk, pushing back the date of the first known human occupation of Britain by up to 250,000 years.
While digging along the north-east coast of East Anglia near the village of Happisburgh, archaeologists discovered 78 pieces of razor-sharp flint shaped into primitive cutting and piercing tools.
The stone tools were unearthed from sediments that are thought to have been laid down either 840,000 or 950,000 years ago, making them the oldest human artefacts ever found in Britain.
The flints were probably left by hunter-gatherers of the human species Homo antecessor who eked out a living on the flood plains and marshes that bordered an ancient course of the river Thames that has long since dried up. The flints were then washed downriver and came to rest at the Happisburgh site.
The early Britons would have lived alongside sabre-toothed cats and hyenas, primitive horses, red deer and southern mammoths in a climate similar to that of southern Britain today, though winters were typically a few degrees colder.
“These tools from Happisburgh are absolutely mint-fresh. They are exceptionally sharp, which suggests they have not moved far from where they were dropped,” said Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London. The population of Britain at the time most likely numbered in the hundreds or a few thousand at most.
Posted by Metrology Solutions Provider 
Industrial CT scanning involves taking hundreds to thousands of 2-D X-ray images of an object. In CT scanning, a tube generates X-rays that penetrate the object being inspected. The X-rays are absorbed and interpreted by a detector on the other side of the object. The object is rotated on a stage 360° while images are acquired at set increments, typically from 0.25° to 0.1°, depending on the desired final resolution. Images are rendered as voxels (3-D pixels), with resolution from a few microns to hundreds of microns, depending on the X-ray detector pixel size.
