The southern coast of England lies approximately 5 degrees farther from the equator than does the south of Tasmania and the northern limit of Scotland is about 18 degrees farther. Australian prehistorians are impressed by the ability of Aborigines to occupy Tasmania perhaps as far back as 30,000 years ago. During the ice age a vast ice sheet extended from Scandinavia across the North Sea to cover most of Britain. Human occupation was severely limited, though some settlement in the extreme south may have been possible. There is still a good deal of debate on this issue. Perhaps by 12,000 BP, definitely by 10,000 BP, England was colonised more generally by Homo sapiens, as one of the last areas of Europe to be settled. Initially, early hunter gatherers trickled across the land bridge from Europe until the melting of the glaciers led to the final rising of the seas, re-forming the English Channel about 8000 BP. Thereafter the slow flow of human beings that persisted came by sea, as they had come from island South-east Asia to Australia several millennia earlier (Starr, 1974). Less than 8000 years after the English Channel re-formed, this primitive ‘British’ society had become the richest, most powerful and most technologically advanced nation on earth, incidentally rolling the ancient Aboriginal society into substantial oblivion. While the Aborigines at one end of the earth acquired an exceptional accommodation to nature in local terms, their distant relatives at the other extreme were able to develop an exploitative technology and mode of handling their environment to gain a form of mastery over much of the globe.