Long before the ruthless Roman Empire walked the shores of what is now known as Great Britain, an ancient form of wisdom existed amongst the people who populated those ancient forests and mountains and its echo is still felt today.

180,000 years before the present, the planet was at the end of the last interglacial period and traces of our ancient seafaring ancestors can be found today in caves along the coast of South Africa using red ochre and selecting specialist stone to make spears and other hand tools from small quarries along the coastlines.

The use of these caves disappeared after 70,000 BP showing no further signs of occupation until around 12500 BP.

The reason for this was the forming of ice on the cooling poles as the new Ice Age drew the water from the oceans, globally lowering sea levels and leaving the caves stranded and out of reach.

It is now known that Homo sapiens spread along the coastlines of the world and populated nearly every continent.

What is not considered by modern science is how they crossed the great rivers and jumped from island to island or even the oceans that separated the great landmasses.

There were other forms of men in those times, some of a much more robust kind such as Neanderthal.

Homo sapiens were less robust and more susceptible to injury from the mighty creatures that roamed the land beside the shores. But our ancestors had a secret weapon that allowed them to survive the terrible cataclysms that struck the planet ending the last ice age and that was their ability to sail lightweight sea going craft made from animal skins.

They were shamanic and animistic in the same way as our more modern indigenous cousins the Amerindians who held this way of thinking until only a few hundred years ago when it was almost wiped out under the onslaught of the colonisers from the west.

Before Christianity these ancient tribes held a deep reverence for the planet and its inhabitants.

What had brought them to this world view was their ancient background as nomadic mariners as they followed coastlines and crossed estuaries in search of the seasonal bounties of nature's providence.

Their affinity with caves such as Lascaux as long ago as 36,000 BP is well documented revealing their annual meeting places up rivers in France and include the wide distribution of the famous Venus Figurines and carefully crafted beads made from mammoth tusk throughout the whole of Europe.

They lived well hunting the migrating herds as they travelled toward the summer grazing and breeding areas in the north and laid in wait for them as they crossed shallow places in rivers and swum the short distances from bank to bank.

The evidence of the use of caves in Britain in the summer months as part of their annual hunt can be found at such places as Creswell Crags in the middle of Britain where a drawing of an Ibex which is indigenous to the French Pyrenees has been found thus proving the annual hunter gatherer migration and the lack of the English Channel to block the herds.

The sailing craft of this ancient sea going people only drew around 18 inches and so could easily hide in ambush amongst the tall reeds at the shallow inlets and river mouths.

Some of the descendants of these vessels were reported by Julius Caesar in 64 BC and were estimated to be as long as 60 feet and were so swift under sail that they appeared to fly like birds over the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

The system of construction using a light wooden frame and stretched animal hides can still be found on the west coast of Ireland in the form of the Currach or Curragh which is still built and used to catch salmon and is extremely seaworthy and stable on ocean swells as was proved by Tim Severin in his Atlantic crossing to prove the possibility of Voyage of St Brendan the Navigator to the Americas.

It was the buoyancy of these craft that probably saved Homo sapiens when all the mammoths, Giant Elk, Sabre toothed tigers and Neanderthal man met their end in the sudden melting of the ice sheets 12500 years ago.

It is only now, with the advent of modern documentaries that the public begins to glimpse the awesome forces unleashed by tsunamis and flooding.

Great ice cliffs, as much as 1 mile high, broke sending tidal waves southward across the oceans at speeds in excess of 400 miles per hour and as they reached the coasts they attained heights of 60 feet or more utterly destroying all life as the roared across the plains and estuaries of the Ice Age world raising sea levels by 300 feet world wide and destroying any evidence of the works of Ice Age Man.

As we witnessed in the Asian Tsunami of 2004, small boats and yachts a few hundred feet offshore were unharmed as they rose and fell to the inundation, yet on the shore everything was crushed and drowned in an appalling m