What If: English Channel

What: The English Channel (see Google Maps) seperates England from contiental Europe, namely France. The English Channel as we know it today was formed at the end of the last Ice Age, around 10,000 BC.  Before that point it was just a river, part of the Rhine. The people of this period, Mesolithic / Neolithic ( Middle and New Stone Age) were hunter gatherers who would have followed their prey around living a nomadic life. They would certainly have walked across the English Channel following their prey. Indeed, many fishing boats in both the English Channel and North Sea regularly pull up bones of pre-historic animals. Over time, the Rhine flooded due to melting ice, forming what we see today as the English Channel.

What If: The English Channel never formed?

The most obvious is that Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) would be part of Europe, possible part of France. So all of us here would be eating snails and frogs and speaking French. England, as well as the rest of Great Britain, would have been populated much earlier as getting here would have been so easy. England, as a nation would have lost it's Island image and national identity. Perhaps more than this, the Common Wealth and English Empire would have not been formed nor the English Navy, which would have altered history dramatically. For example, would the colonisation of the Americas still have happened, indeed would Austraillia have been populated so heavily, and by whom.

Extending beyond that, there are only two ways that the English Channel would not have formed. The first is simply that the land would have been higher so that it could not have flooded, the second would be the Ice Age never ended. With the first, shipping would simply be diverted around the North Sea, however, with the second option, shipping would have to go much further to get from parts of Europe and Asia to America.