How did people get to Britain 950k years ago?

There's no firm line between scholarly and pop history other than the reputation and credibility of the work, which often isn't obvious to lay readers.

------------------------------------------ The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a massive tome written by an American reporter who lived through the eponymous era. It has a great deal of detail which I had never heard of before, and shaped my understanding of WW2. It is also quite moralising, maintaining that Nazi Germany was inevitable because of a servile German character, that the depravity of the SS was in part due to their homosexual deviancy, and a little too focused on the personalities of individuals. Admittedly, the last part is quite interesting. Why do I still recommend it? Because I think there is enough depth there, and enough of a distinction in the text between the author's theories and the facts, that you can learn a great deal from it.

For instance, the sheer stupid chance that led to him waging such terrible war. How so many men could have prevented his rise to power. He might have died a soldier in the first world war, or the French or English could have crushed his open violations of the peace treaties, or how his takeover of multiple nations was facilitated by the petty racism of British diplomats. There's also detail concering the poltical, economic and social factors that allowed this chance to exist in the first place. Like the disconnect between the German military and the Weimar Republic who they were sworn to protect, or the war-weariness of Western Europe which was partially responsible for their leaders to continually cede ground to a madman who publically outlined his plans to genocide entire peoples. ------------------------------------------ The 10,000 Year Explosion is not widely accepted by academics, but is not widely panned either. And whilst it does seem to over-play its thesis, the core idea is quite sound: evolution still applies to modern humans, and the rapid growth of the species over the past 10k years has allowed for a great deal more variation and selection to occur, and as such we should see far more changes in human biology now than throughout the average 10k period of history. The exact mutations described and the hypothesis for why they occured are, of course, more conentious. I don't have much of a general opinion, as the authors go through a wide variety of population differences like lactose intolerance, diease immunity, hearing adaptations due to language use and, yes, IQ. The depth and quality of research on these varies, so the reliability of conclusions in the book does too. ------------------------------------------ "The Dawn of Everything" covers some interesting anthropological data, but the reviews I've read paint a poor picture of the author's interpretation of what the data means. Whilst it points to an important idea, that the human transition to agriculture was not nearly as sharp or uniform as is popularly believed, I think you'd be better served by reading this page on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity and reading some of the cited papers and authors' works.