Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans

John Wymer’s survey of the river gravels unravelled the sequence of terraces of all the major river valleys of southern Britain, and for that alone it is notable. The results of the survey ‘provide incontrovertible evidence for the presence of human groups during intermittent occupations in all the major valleys, over a time span of some half-million years’.1 The survey also revealed extensive evidence for occupation in areas outside the major river valleys, such as around lakes, on the coastal fringe and in the chalk downland. It’s difficult at this stage even to hazard a guess at the British population during a warmer period of an interglacial, but I imagine that a low-level flight across the country would have detected the smoke from at most one or two fires. In 1972, the eminent archaeologist Don Brothwell estimated that the population for Britain as a whole at any one time during the Lower Palaeolithic would have been less than five thousand.2

So far we have been dealing with the longest period in British prehistory, the Lower Palaeolithic. Now we must move forward, and rapidly, if we are to keep to our schedule. The next significant stage starts shortly after 250,000 years ago and is known as the Middle Palaeolithic. Initially it would appear that occupation – or the evidence for occupation – during this period is slight, and this was doubtless due to adverse climate conditions. But unlike the previous period, the evidence from elsewhere in Europe is very much better. This is a shame, because it was a time of very considerable interest.

I started the previous chapter with some thoughts about the very earliest recognisable hominids, and perhaps the best way to span the half-million or so years that now confront us is via them (the hominids) and us (modern man, or Homo sapiens). In other words, we shall rapidly trace the story of human evolution and development, insofar as it affects what was shortly to become Britain. The other approach would be via the flint implements and other archaeological remains that were left behind.3 The problem here, however, is that there is a wealth of material which can be discussed and classified in various ways, depending on one’s archaeological interests and background.4 Sometimes one can become too introspective: it’s easy to be more concerned with flint implements, and what they may have been used for, than with the people who actually made and used them. I shall stick to flesh and blood – to people.

In the previous chapter we saw how early hominids moved out of Africa, and took a very long time indeed finally to colonise northern Europe. We then took a closer look at the site at Boxgrove, where possible ancestors of modern man and the Neanderthals butchered their meat and made flint tools for the purpose. It’s those two descendants – or possible descendants – of the people at Boxgrove who will concern us here. We will start with perhaps the most famous name in archaeology: Neanderthal man (Homo neanderthalensis).

The Neanderthals have not always had a good press, and I often wonder how they would have reacted to some of the things that have been said (or worse, painted) about them. A recent (and hugely expensive) television series and its spin-off book were at pains to be objective about them, and they succeeded admirably.5 But things haven’t always been so well done: there’s something about the Neanderthals, and our treatment of them, that ultimately mocks ourselves. When it comes to our closest, deceased relatives, historically we can’t seem to get it right. Perhaps they’re just too close to us.

The story of the finding of bones in the Neander valley (or thal) near Düsseldorf in 1856 is well known.6 It was a discovery that was profoundly to affect the development of archaeological thought, and not always for the better.7 Quite soon after the initial discoveries at the Feldhover Cave, other, earlier finds were recognised as people of the same type, or species. Neanderthals have been found over most of Europe and western Asia – but not, interestingly, in Africa; presumably because they had become so well adapted to cooler climates that they didn’t fancy crossing the Sahara desert. Actual hard-and-fast evidence for Neanderthals in Britain was only found very recently. They lived in this vast stretch of the globe for a very long time indeed, and during some of the coldest episodes of the Ice Ages, between about 130,000 and thirty thousand years ago. As we will see, the Neanderthals were on the earth for considerably longer than modern man (Homo sapiens) has yet managed.

Happily, there’s no shortage of Neanderthal bone to work with, and as a result we have a pretty good idea of what they would have looked like. For a start, they were absolutely human, and would not have given rise to those ill-bred stares in Oxford Street, although when first confronted with one, I suspect I might have registered that they came from somewhere a long way away. In the days when such questions were not considered sexist in academic circles, I once asked a colleague who specialised in the Palaeolithic whether he thought he’d fancy a young Neanderthal woman. He replied: ‘You bet I would, but I’d make myself scarce when her brother arrived.’ They were thick-set and quite heavily built, with stout bones that showed signs of having supported a very active body. The face was characterised by strong brow ridges above the eyes and a forehead that sloped backwards far more than ours. The lower face and jaw was more prominent, which tended to disguise the fact that the chin profile was weak.

Reading this through, I’m struck by the fact that I’m judging the unfortunate Neanderthaler as if he were an aberrant modern man. He might say of us: they have domed, baby-like foreheads which, when combined with a receding jawline and spindly limbs, gives them an awkward, insubstantial and unbalanced appearance.

Neanderthals had a larger brain than modern man, not just in relation to their somewhat larger body mass, but absolutely. I suppose we’re bound to say this, but there is no evidence that this larger brain gave them more intelligence. Indeed, the bare fact that they failed to survive the evolutionary rat-race – given no help whatsoever from Homo sapiens – tends to support this view. It has been suggested that the principal difference in the way the two species thought was that modern man was able to lump his thoughts together.8 He was more of a generalist, whereas Neanderthals were ‘domain specific’, to use a term coined by the cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen.9 Put another way, Homo sapiens was better at integrating concepts: he could identify similarities in supposedly unrelated spheres (the way that Newton could see how a falling apple and gravity were part of the same phenomenon). I remember reading that remarkable book by Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (1964), in which he maintained that all great intellectual insights came as a result of making links between different spheres (he termed them ‘matrices’) of thought. It would now seem that this ability to cross-reference and reintegrate is something unique to our species, and it led directly to the development of sophisticated language. Neanderthals, on the other hand, are believed to have maintained more rigid or impermeable pigeonholes in their brains: different realms of thought stayed apart from each other. In some respects this was good: it gave focus and discipline, as their magnificently executed flintwork attests. But so far as is known it doesn’t seem to have given rise to art (as opposed to decoration plain and simple), or to more complex symbolic expression.

There were other things that distinguished Neanderthals from modern humans. Plainly these ideas are tentative, but it’s worth noting that drawing conclusions about ancient behaviour from dry bones, flints and, crucially, the contexts of their discovery is a major achievement of Palaeolithic archaeology. The concept of ‘context’ is fundamentally important to archaeology.10 Essentially it refers to the way that different artefacts, bones and other finds relate to each other. Thus, the dagger found protruding from a dead man’s ribcage tells a very different story to the dagger tucked into a dancing Scotsman’s sock. The dagger may be constant, but the context – which provides the meaning – isn’t. The word can also be used in a more specific archaeological sense, which loosely correlates with ‘layer’ or ‘deposit’. So, in an ancient settlement, for instance, the soil (and the finds therein) that filled an abandoned ditch would form a different archaeological context to the ashes and charcoal in a nearby hearth.

Using such contextual information, it would appear that the children of Neanderthal parents grew up faster, and achieved their independence more rapidly, than their Homo sapiens equivalents.11 Maybe this was a result of their large brains and focused way of thinking, but it could have had a downside, too. Without prolonged exposure to their parents’ acquired experience and wisdom, the younger generation would have been forever reinventing and rediscovering things that their parents knew perfectly well. This would undoubtedly have affected the pace and dynamics of social development within the group as a whole. As we will see later, change in Homo sapiens society is by its nature slow, but in the case of the Neanderthals it must have been even slower. This would have put them at a considerable disadvantage compared with the more adaptable communities of Homo sapiens – especially in periods when the natural environment around them was changing rapidly.

One should resist the temptation always to put theories and observations on past behaviour into modern terms, but I can’t help thinking that the Neanderthal thought-process may have been similar to the overfocused approach of obsessive trainspotters or stamp collectors. Their hobbies lack interest or appeal for me, because they are devoid of most social context. Don’t get me wrong – I love steam trains, but I’m far more interested in their drivers and firemen and where they would have taken their summer holidays. I have lately observed a certain philatelic tendency creeping into archaeology, both professional and non-professional: an obsession with sites, dates, artefacts and other minutiae – at the expense of the original people and the stories that lay behind them. It’s all very Neanderthal.

It is clear that the Neanderthals ate a great deal of meat, which they undoubtedly hunted effectively, using a variety of techniques and tactics. As we have seen, their bones were robust and thick-walled, which indicates that their lives were extremely active. Dr Paul Pettitt, a notable authority on the subject, put it well: ‘Neanderthals lived fast and died young.’12 I don’t want to give the impression that Neanderthals were thugs, because the facts do not support that. Far from it, there is much evidence (mainly from Europe and the Middle East) to suggest that they cared deeply about death and the dead: burials were deliberately placed in dug graves, and bodies were sometimes accompanied by grave goods and red ochre – a natural powder-based mineral paint. Neanderthals took considerable care over the burial of children and older, physically disabled people, who would not have been able to survive outside what must have been a small, robust but nonetheless caring community. Sadly, as we will see shortly, our Neanderthal cousins were to learn that small, caring communities don’t last long when the competition for survival begins to hot up.

The Middle Palaeolithic is the name given to the period dominated by Neanderthal man. As we have noted, Britain was sparsely occupied especially during the earlier years of the period; I know of only one find of Neanderthal-style bones here (teeth and lower jaw fragments from two individuals), from Pontnewydd Cave, in north Wales. I say Neanderthal-style bones because although they have Neanderthal characteristics, their date is very early indeed (around 240,000 years ago), so they are perhaps best seen as coming from people who were ancestral to the true Neanderthals. But Pontnewydd Cave also had another, far subtler, archaeological secret to reveal.

The cave was superbly excavated by Dr Stephen Aldhouse-Green of the National Museum of Wales, in Cardiff. I first met Stephen when he was excavating open-air (i.e. non-cave) sites that were threatened by the construction of the New Town at Milton Keynes, in Buckinghamshire. At that time I was also working on open sites threatened by a New Town, at Peterborough, and we kept in close touch. Stephen’s approach was meticulous: everything was carefully planned and plotted, and his excavations were a model of neatness. When I returned to my own sites, which seemed to spread across acres of eastern England in an organic, amoeba-like sprawl, I envied his neatness and precision. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that archaeology can have different styles and approaches. In that respect it’s like art or design: there’s more than one way to approach a site or a given research objective, and very often the one chosen will reflect the personality and academic outlook of the people, or person, concerned. Stephen has always been meticulous and precise, which is absolutely essential in his line of Palaeolithic research, and was ideally suited to the excavation of the Palaeolithic caves and rock shelters he became interested in when he moved to Wales.13

He has examined a number of Welsh caves, and has found evidence for the presence of Palaeolithic people in or near them; but so far there is no convincing evidence for large-scale occupation in the manner of, say, Boxgrove. Sadly, Stephen has found no classic Flintstone-style cave dwellings, complete with hearths, floors and surfaces where families actually lived their day-to-day domestic lives. One reason for this might have been that other, rather fiercer animals, such as bears and hyenas, chose the caves for themselves. They were mainly used in the short term, as lookout spots during hunting, or as overnight stopping-off points. Gnawing on prey bones and other telltale signs suggest that at least one site, Priory Farm Cave, above the Pembroke river, was a hyenas’ den; even so, it produced evidence (in the form of flint tools) for human beings, albeit from our next period, the Upper Palaeolithic. Stephen’s research at Pontnewydd and other Welsh caves has shown that the river gravels do not tell the entire story: that large areas of upland Britain could have been occupied during warmer phases of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic, but all the archaeological evidence has been removed – in effect planed off – by subsequent glaciers.

Neanderthal people would not have arrived here until about sixty thousand years ago, during the second half of the last glaciation; this probably reflects the fact that Britain lay close to the northern limit of their distribution. The trouble is that, with the rather strange exception of Pontnewydd Cave, there was until very recently indeed no clear evidence for Neanderthal bones in Britain. So Pontnewydd Cave is potentially very important. Its location is unusual too, as it is currently the most north-westerly Earlier Palaeolithic site in Europe. The European landscape would have been very different then to that of today. It was largely open and treeless, steppe-like, with enormous expanses of grassy plain that extended into Asia. In Britain, as elsewhere, people mainly hunted large mammals, such as mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bear, spotted hyena, wolf and wild horse. It’s no wonder that their own bones often carry signs of injury similar to what a modern rodeo rider might expect. It was a challenging diet.

I mentioned that there was no clear evidence for the presence of Neanderthal people in Britain until ‘very recently indeed’. The latest discovery was announced in June 2002, about two months after I had completed the first draft of this book. The site in question is in Thetford, Norfolk, and is one of those commercial excavations that have become such an important part of the modern archaeological scene.14 Initial reports suggest that the bones and tools from the Thetford quarry are about fifty thousand years old, and were found close to a group of ponds which were used as watering places by Neanderthal people and their animal prey, which consisted of mammoth (bones of three or four animals), woolly rhino (a tooth) and reindeer (antler). Along with the bones, and most probably associated with them (using the word in its strictly archaeological sense), were eight hand-axes and 129 pieces of worked flint. Subsequent excavations have revealed many more bones, flint implements and hand-axes, some of them in mint condition. There are also clear signs that much of the mammoth bone had been cut up with flint tools. Was this a Boxgrove-style butchery site, or perhaps, better still, a settlement of some sort? We don’t know at this stage, but David Miles, Geoff Wainwright’s successor as Chief Archaeologist at English Heritage, is wildly excited. It’s a dream of a site, even if it hasn’t (yet) produced human bones.

The Neanderthals were the great survivors of the Ice Age world, and they made a far wider variety of flint tools than are found in the Lower Palaeolithic. Some are most beautiful, and show an extraordinary degree of skill and control. To my eye they also show that Neanderthals could create and appreciate, if not art, then craft of the highest order. The principal archaeological ‘culture’ of Neanderthal man is known as the Mousterian, after a series of overhanging rock shelters at a place called Le Moustier, in south-western France. Before we go on, perhaps I should say a few words about what I mean by the term archaeological ‘culture’, and how it differs from what we are used to in our own, living culture.

An archaeological culture is essentially an attempt by archaeologists to define a culturally distinct group of people, using any evidence left to us by the passage of time.15 Inevitably this means that, for example, Palaeolithic cultures tend to be very much larger and more broadly defined than those of later prehistory, for the simple reason that Old Stone Age artefacts are few and widely dispersed. Clearly there are problems in this: could we, for example, distinguish archaeologically between the different cultures of, say, nineteenth-century Wales and western England? I doubt it, but we could probably discern broad differences between the rural populations of eastern and western Britain. The landscape was different, in particular field systems were different, and people used regionally distinctive styles of tools, ranging from ploughs to bill-hooks.

This is the fleeting image – the chimera – that we are trying to pin down when we define an archaeological culture from groups of similar finds, animal bones, house types and so on. Ideally there should be a hard core of items that consistently occur together, and there should not be too much blurring at the edges, because by and large true human cultures tend to stop and start, rather than merge. This reflects the fact that societies have internal workings – that marriage, for example, tends to be restricted within a given culture – and that people need to speak languages or dialects that they all understand. Religion also provides barriers that most people find very difficult to cross. As I write these words, the barriers being erected by the world’s religions seem to be growing daily. It’s depressing, but it brings me to another aspect of archaeological cultures and their behaviour.

Professor Ian Hodder is extraordinarily dynamic, and produces books at the rate of one or two a year. Most tend to be very theoretical – indeed, Ian was one of the pioneers of ‘theoretical archaeology’, which gained a firm foothold during the latter 1960s and the seventies, and is now a permanent fixture.16 Ian and his followers steered archaeology away from what had previously been a practical, functional, quasi-scientific way of thinking. That was, they argued, a flawed approach, because it assumed that cultural behaviour could be predicted, and that it followed a series of rules or laws, none of which have yet been successfully defined. One example will suffice. Suppose we excavate a male burial in which we also find a gold-encrusted sword and jewelled spurs. The functional archaeologist would conclude that the person was a warrior prince, and that the society he came from was probably very hierarchical, with powerful warriors and humble, serf-like footsoldiers. Ian and others pointed out that that reading was altogether too simple. It ignored the fact that we often act in a symbolic way, which expresses what we want to believe rather than the reality which frames and colours the real world. Thus the aristocracy of England are traditionally buried without grave goods, symbolising the belief that all are equal in the eyes of God. A naive functionalist archaeologist might interpret English graves as indicating that British society was, and is, egalitarian – which is patently absurd, because it ignores the symbolism that objects and their contexts can express.

By drawing analogies with modern tribal societies, Ian Hodder was able to show that in times of social and economic tension the boundaries between different cultural groups became better defined and more closely guarded.17 A modern parallel would be the national boundaries of Europe in, say, 1935 compared with today. Before the war, to cross a border meant producing passports, submitting to a customs search, and so on; today, if you are driving, your shoe barely rises off the accelerator. And of course the world of modern European politics is very much more stable than it was in 1935. In archaeological terms, Hodder reasoned that cultures with clearly defined edges – for example, where one style of pottery stops sharply, and another starts with equal abruptness – were possibly co-existing in a state of tension. In times of peace, people would be less worried about maintaining their own identities at the expense of much else, and there would be more cross-border trade; as a result, boundaries would soon lose their clear definition.

This brings us, in a roundabout way, to the relationship between the cultures of Neanderthal and modern man – each of which was defined with stark clarity. It used to be thought that the two groups of humans co-existed in relative harmony, and that the demise of the Neanderthals was a result of external or internal forces – perhaps a failure to adapt to changing environmental conditions, combined with feuding between different groups in the face of declining resources. However, it looks increasingly probable that although the Neanderthals were excellent hunters of the biggest big game imaginable, they were no match for their two-legged foes in the form of Homo sapiens. As Paul Pettitt has written:

For too long we have regarded the extinction of the Neanderthals as a chance historical accident. Rather, where Neanderthals and modern humans could not co-exist, their disappearance may have been the result of the modern human race’s first and most successful deliberate campaign of genocide.18

When feeling depressed, I sometimes wonder whether the ability and instinct to carry out genocide isn’t one of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens. The ruthless use of force against the last real competitor we’ve ever had to face up to gave us the edge to survive in the Later Ice Age world. Without it, who knows – we may well have perished. Seen in the crudest Darwinian terms, it may have been legitimate thirty thousand years ago; but we still can’t shake the habit off.

This brings me to a question I am frequently asked. Did modern man and Neanderthals interbreed, or were they too busy fighting to have time for what one might consider to be more human pursuits? Had I been asked that question before 1999, my answer would have been a firm ‘no’, based on some substantial evidence. But it now appears that the picture is more complex.

The original bones from the Neander valley were scientifically dated to around forty thousand years ago. This made them relatively late, but within the known Neanderthal age-range. Then samples of DNA were extracted, and these showed that the original Neanderthal was by no means a close cousin of modern man. In fact the DNA from the bones, when compared with our own, showed a difference which the scientists considered represented a divergence of some half a million years. In other words, the two groups had a common ancestor who lived at the time of, say, Boxgrove. According to the DNA, there had been no genetic contact since then. This seemed to confirm the theory that the two groups had lived very separate lives, and did not interbreed.