See also: 

Ancestral Thames

European LGM refuges, 20,000 years ago. The Thames was a minor river that joined the Rhine, in the
southern North Sea basin at this time.
  Solutrean and Proto Solutrean Cultures
  Epi Gravettian Culture

Researchers have identified the River Thames as a discrete drainage line flowing as early as
58 million years ago, in the Thanetian stage of the late Palaeocene epoch.[27] Until around
500,000 years ago, the Thames flowed on its existing course through what is now Oxfordshire,
before turning to the north-east through Hertfordshire and East Anglia and reaching the North
Sea near present-day Ipswich.[28]
At this time the river-system headwaters lay in the English West Midlands and may, at times,
have received drainage from the Berwyn Mountains in North Wales. Brooks and rivers like
the River Brent, Colne Brook and Bollo Brook either flowed into the then River Thames or went
out to sea on the course of the present-day River Thames.
About 450,000 years ago, in the most extreme Ice Age of the Pleistocene, the Anglian, the
furthest southern extent of the ice sheet reached Hornchurch in east London.[29] It dammed the
river in Hertfordshire, resulting in the formation of large ice lakes, which eventually burst their
banks and caused the river to divert onto its present course through the area of present-day
London. Repeated advances of the ice sheet progressively pushed the channel southwards to
form the St Albans depression.[30]
This created a new river-course through Berkshire and on into London, after which the river
rejoined its original course in southern Essex, near the present River Blackwater estuary. Here it
entered a substantial freshwater lake in the southern North Sea basin, south of what is
called Doggerland. The overspill of this lake caused the formation of the Channel River and later
the Dover Strait gap between present-day Britain and France. Subsequent development led to
the continuation of the course that the river follows at the present day.[30]
Most of the bedrock of the Vale of Aylesbury comprises clay and chalk that formed at the end of
the ice age and at one time was under the Proto-Thames. At this time