Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans

But now we cannot be so certain. In June 1999 Paul Pettitt wrote another article for the popular journal British Archaeology, in which he gave the first details of a remarkable burial that had just been excavated at a rock shelter at Lagar Velho, in Portugal.19 The bones were from a boy who had been buried about twenty-four thousand years ago. In theory this was at least five to six thousand years after the last Neanderthal had settled in the Iberian peninsula. He had been buried with some ceremony: he wore a shell pendant or amulet around his neck, and the edges of the grave were marked out by stones and bones. Also in the grave were articulated bones of red deer and rabbit – presumably placed there as offerings. The grave contained a layer of red ochre, from dye which coloured either the boy’s clothes or his shroud. Red ochre burials are known from other sites of this period across Europe and into Russia, and I shall have more to say about one of them, from south Wales, shortly.

The real interest in the Lagar Velho boy lies in the anatomical form of his bones, which are clearly those of Homo sapiens, but also reveal a number of distinctively, and very strongly marked, Neanderthal features. Anatomically, there can be no doubt whatsoever: his ancestors had interbred with Neanderthals, and not just once, but regularly and over a long time. It would be impossible to account for so many Neanderthal features any other way. What are the wider implications of this discovery? Did the two groups of humans routinely interbreed everywhere? We don’t know, but probably not. Spain and Portugal may be a special case, as there does seem to have been a persistent ecological border zone (known as the Ebro Frontier) between the two groups along the northern edge of the Iberian peninsula.

It would seem that modern humans took their time to penetrate south of the Ebro Frontier, possibly because they were better adapted to the cooler conditions of the north. But whatever the root causes might have been, Neanderthals persisted for some time in Spain and Portugal, and it would appear that even though the end result for one group was extinction, for extended periods relations were more friendly than genocidal. The impression we get is what one might expect of human interactions at any time. In some areas the genocide was swift, efficient and ruthless; in others the two groups continued to live side by side for several millennia, and the ‘genocide’ may not have been deliberate, but more the sad consequence of an inevitable process. As groups of Neanderthals became more widely separated, mates would be harder to find, and the population would decline further. It was a process that in the end took some ten thousand years to complete.20

The evidence provided by a particular form of DNA, known as mitochondrial DNA (see Chapter 5), which is passed on via the female line, suggests strongly that Homo sapiens is not a direct descendant of Homo neanderthalensis.21 So how on earth does the Lagar Velho boy fit in with this? The leading authority, Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at Oxford University, has suggested that the Lagar Velho boy may be the human equivalent of a mule – a cross between two closely related, but different, species: horse and donkey. The mule is tough, strong and hardy, but sterile, because its parents do not share the same number of chromosomes (horses have sixty-four, donkeys sixty-two). We don’t know yet, because the Lagar Velho boy’s DNA has not been examined, but Bryan Sykes reckons that if he was indeed a cross between a modern human and a Neanderthal, then he might well have been sterile, like the mule. This, of course, would help explain why Neanderthal genes appear to be absent from our own genetic make-up.

As I have already noted, although bona fide Neanderthal bones are so far lacking in Britain, their culture, the Mousterian, was certainly present, and their hand-axes have been found at a number of cave, rock-shelter and open sites, mainly in southern England, but also in East Anglia, south Wales and the midlands.22

I want now to move forward to what one might term our own time – the world of the earliest truly modern man, known as Crô-Magnon man, after a rock shelter at Les Eyzies in southern France which produced particularly good collections of bones.23 Crô-Magnons were not identical to us, and if I may return for one final time to that slightly strained Oxford Street analogy, they would not inspire sideways glances from even the most ill-mannered of passers-by. But they were different from us nonetheless, with slightly larger brains (maybe this reflected their larger body size), larger teeth and somewhat flatter faces. Physical anthropologists, such as Chris Stringer in his African Exodus, feel that the tall and relatively thin frames of early Homo sapiens betray the fact that they evolved in the warm, tropical climates of Africa, rather than in Europe.24

One of the best-known examples of Crô-Magnon man in Britain is the so-called Red ‘Lady’ of Paviland Cave, on the Gower Peninsula of south-west Wales. I put the word ‘lady’ in quotes because ‘she’ was in fact a he. His story is altogether most unusual, and is well worth repeating. Like many archaeological tales it is caught up with contemporary intellectual and political controversies.

Dean William Buckland, the first excavator of the Red ‘Lady’ of Paviland, came across some of ‘her’ bones in 1823. He had been invited by the landowner to investigate the cave at a time when he was attempting to reconcile the field evidence of geology with the Biblical account of Creation and Noah’s Great Flood – surely a futile pursuit if ever there was one. But in many ways Buckland was a most able and remarkable man. He was the first Reader in Geology at Oxford, and was later appointed Dean of Westminster. Sadly, he took the clerical line, and backed the wrong horse when it came to the Great Flood. Nor was he by any means adept at creating snappy titles: his discovery of bones and other items at the Goat’s Hole Cave, Paviland, was published in 1823 as Reliquiae Diluvianae: or Observations on the Organic Remains contained in Caves, Fissures, and Diluvial Gravel and on other Geological Phenomena attesting the action of an Universal Deluge.25 He considered that the Red ‘Lady’ was Roman, and that the bones of extinct animals found around ‘her’ dated to a time before the Great Flood. One could say he got it as wrong as it was possible to get it.

It is of course only too easy to take the work of men like Buckland out of the context of their times. True, he failed to find a link of any sort between the lowland river gravels of Britain – patently water-derived deposits – and the Biblical Flood; and he allowed his powers of reason to be overruled by his emotional acceptance of a theological doctrine which was never meant to be taken literally, even when first written. But the fact remains that he did go into the field to find empirical evidence to support his views, at a time when most clerics would never have left their libraries. He also took the work of science seriously; and although he certainly didn’t intend it, by doing what he did and by promptly publishing his results, he ultimately helped release geology from the grip of the Church. And he did discover a most remarkable burial, complete with loosely associated Palaeolithic flint implements.

What is the modern view of the Red ‘Lady’ and the archaeological deposits from the Goat’s Hole Cave? Stephen Aldhouse-Green has just edited what he himself has entitled A Definitive Report, and I’m confident it will survive the test of time rather better than Dean Buckland’s Reliquiae Diluvianae.26 (There are also some shorter, and perhaps more accessible, accounts widely available.27)

Buckland’s report concluded that the body was that of a Roman scarlet woman, or ‘painted lady’, whose business was to look after the carnal needs of Roman soldiers from a camp nearby – which we now know is Iron Age anyway. All round, it was an excellent story for a man of the cloth to concoct. But the truth was more remarkable than fiction. In the words of Stephen Aldhouse-Green, ‘When the “Red Lady” skeleton was found, it was the first human fossil recovered anywhere in the world.’28 The burial of the body recalls that of the Lagar Velho boy. The Paviland body was that of a young Crô-Magnon man aged twenty-five to thirty, about five feet eight inches (1.74 metres) tall, and probably weighing about eleven stone (seventy-three kilos). His build and weight were somewhat smaller than the average for such early Homo sapiens, and radiocarbon dates have shown he was alive around twenty-six thousand years ago – again, pretty well contemporary with Lagar Velho.

The molecular biologist Brian Sykes, writing in the definitive report, describes how DNA extracted from the bones can be related to the commonest ancestry extant in Europe. This strongly suggests that the current population of Britain arrived in these islands in the Palaeolithic, and did not spread here seven thousand years ago with the arrival of Neolithic farmers from farther afield. As we will see later, it was most likely the concept of farming that reached us, rather than a wholesale migration of farmers.

I’ll describe the details of the Red ‘Lady’s’ burial in a moment, but first I must say a few words about radiocarbon dating, which will become a regular feature of our story from now onwards.

Radiocarbon dating was invented by Willard F. Libby, a chemist at Chicago University, in 1949.29 The idea behind the technique is straightforward enough. Libby was researching into cosmic radiation – the process whereby the earth’s outer atmosphere is constantly bombarded by sub-atomic particles. This process produces radioactive carbon, known as carbon-14. Carbon-14 is unstable and is constantly breaking down, but at a known and uniform rate: a gram of carbon-14 will be half broken down after 5730 years, three-quarters broken down in twice that time (11,460 years), and so on. Libby’s breakthrough was to link this process to living things, and thence to time itself.

Carbon-14 is present in the earth’s atmosphere – in the air we all breathe – in the form of the gas carbon dioxide. Plants take in the gas through their leaves, and plant-eating animals eat the leaves – and carnivores, in turn, eat them. So all plants and animals absorb carbon-14 while they are alive. As soon as they die, they immediately stop taking it in, and the carbon-14 that has accumulated in their bodies – in their bones, their wood or whatever – starts to break down through the normal processes of radioactive decay. So by measuring the amounts of carbon-14 in a bone, or piece of charcoal, fragment of cloth or peat, it is possible to estimate its age.

But there are problems. First of all, cosmic radiation has not been at a uniform rate, as Libby at first believed. Sunspots and solar flares are known to cause sudden upsurges of radiation. Nuclear testing has also filled the atmosphere with unwanted and unquantifiable radiation. If these problems weren’t enough, the quantities of radiation being measured in the radiocarbon laboratories around the world are truly minute, especially in older samples, such as those from Paviland Cave. Efforts have been made to quantify the way in which radiocarbon dates deviate from true dates, using ancient wood samples that can be precisely dated to a given year AD or BC. This process is known as calibration, and is now widely accepted in archaeology (I’ve tried consistently to use calibrated radiocarbon dates in this book). All this uncertainty means that radiocarbon dates are usually expressed in the form of a range of years – say 1700 to 2000 BC, rather than a single central spot-date of 1850 BC.

A by-product of radiocarbon dating are the figures known as the ‘stable isotope values’ of carbon and nitrogen. These provide very useful information on the general nature of an individual’s diet when the bone was being formed. It would appear that fish and seafood formed a major part of the Red ‘Lady’s’ diet. Today the sea is close by Goat’s Hole Cave, but in the Upper Palaeolithic it was about a hundred kilometres away. Of course, fish could have been caught in rivers closer by, but such a very ‘fishy’ diet surely suggests regular access to the sea – and with it a way of life that must have involved a great deal of travel. The contrast with Boxgrove, which was closer to the sea, but where there was no evidence for fish-eating, is remarkable; but then, so too is the huge time-span (roughly 480,000 years) that separates these two Palaeolithic sites – it’s easy to forget that the Palaeolithic takes up about 98 per cent of British prehistory.

There are remarkable aspects to the Paviland burial which illustrate some of the far-reaching changes that were in the process of transforming humanity. That may sound grandiloquent, but the Upper Palaeolithic was the first period in which many of the defining characteristics of modern civilisation become apparent. Put another way, without the social and intellectual developments of the period, what was subsequently to be known as civilisation would have been impossible. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the achievements made by the people of the Upper Palaeolithic period. We may not always be aware of it, but we owe them an enormous amount.

There is far more to Paviland than just the famous burial. The cave floor also produced numerous flint implements and the by-products of their manufacture, together with charcoal and ash, all of which were found in contexts that must predate the burial. Radiocarbon dates suggest that this earlier occupation preceded the Red ‘Lady’ by three thousand years (i.e. about twenty-nine thousand years ago), and there is evidence that the cave was intermittently occupied both before and after that date, as well as after the Red ‘Lady’ burial. This extended use would indicate that the Goat’s Hole Cave was well known to people at the time.

The Red ‘Lady’ burial was accompanied by a mammoth ivory bracelet and a perforated periwinkle pendant, numerous seashells and some fifty broken ivory rods. Marker stones were placed at the head and foot of the grave. The staining, which most people regard as being derived from heavily stained clothes or wrapping, still colours the two ornaments and the bones, but there is a colour difference between the bones of the arms and chest and the hips and legs – which perhaps suggests that the young man was buried in a two-piece garment of some sort. The feet were only lightly stained, which would indicate that he wore shoes. The ochre, a natural product, was obtained locally. The body was headless, and it’s quite possible that it was deliberately buried in this way – other headless burials are known from this period – but the removal of the head could also have taken place later: perhaps it was carried away by the sea, which is known to have broken into the cave. The archaeological term for disturbance of this sort, which takes place after a deposit, such as a burial, has been placed in the ground, is ‘post-depositional’. It can sometimes take a great deal of skill to distinguish between an action that took place when a body was placed in the ground and a subsequent, post-depositional, effect. It’s something I always have in the back of my mind when I’m excavating.

Paviland Cave also revealed three remarkable bone spatulae. They are small things, roughly six inches (fifteen centimetres) long, and are beautifully shaped, with unusual curves and bulges that don’t seem to make immediate practical sense. As well as the spatulae, there were a number of worked pieces of mammoth ivory, including a well-known perforated pendant that was thought to have formed part of the burial assemblage. Radiocarbon now shows that these objects were slightly later than the Red ‘Lady’ burial, and indicates that the cave was repeatedly used between about twenty-five and twenty-one thousand years ago.

To sum up, there was a main phase of settlement in the cave around twenty-nine thousand years ago, with intermittent occupation both before and after. Then came the burial, at twenty-six thousand, and later use of the cave between twenty-five and twenty-one thousand years ago. It’s no wonder that Paviland Cave is the richest Upper Palaeolithic site in Britain – but does this pattern of use and reuse tell us anything more about the site? I believe that the Goat’s Hole Cave was a special place of some sort. If archaeologists have a fault it is to describe everything they find as special, unusual or remarkable. That’s because it is to them personally, who have spent weeks, months or years slaving away at whatever it might be. But is it to the world in general? In the case of Paviland it most certainly is, for the following reasons.

Paviland Cave lies at the extreme northern edge of the Early Upper Palaeolithic world, and it was used remarkably late in the sequence, when the climate was getting very chilly. Those unique bone spatulae and the episode of mammoth-ivory working happened at a time when the climate was rapidly deteriorating and evidence for settlement elsewhere in Britain was virtually unknown. If we also bear in mind that nearly all well-preserved occupied cave sites have extensive living areas outside the cave itself, and that those at Paviland have been removed by the postglacial rise in sea levels, then the use of the cave so far into the developing glaciation, or mini-Ice Age, is truly remarkable – and demands explanation.

Let’s look at the artefacts before turning to the burial itself, and first at those strange, red-stained mammoth-ivory rods discovered by Dean Buckland.30 They don’t appear to have any practical purpose, other perhaps than as blanks for ivory beads, but as there’s no indication that any had been notched or cut up prior to being more closely worked, that idea can probably be rejected. That leaves us with the archaeologist’s catch-all explanation for anything he can’t understand: ‘ritual’, or religion, to use a non-jargon term. If we do decide to invoke religion as an explanation, we shouldn’t do so on negative grounds alone; it always helps if we can provide some positive evidence that supports the suggestion. And in the case of these peculiar ivory rods there is a positive suggestion, but it comes from an unexpected source.

In 1981 the anthropologist J.D. Lewis-Williams published a detailed study of the rock paintings of a southern African people known as the San.31 Like the communities of the Upper Palaeolithic, the San were hunters. Their realm was the Kalahari desert, and they lived in small, mobile groups of a few dozen people. Their houses were light and temporary, as befits a highly mobile lifestyle, and their religion was based around shamans and rock art. The San used ochre-painted rods, very similar to those from Paviland, in their religious ceremonies. This could just be coincidence, but the close similarity of the way that the two sets of people were organised and lived their lives does give it greater weight. The red colour of the ochre plainly recalls blood, and with it the symbolic expression of animal or human life-force. It goes without saying that the sight (and meaning) of blood was an everyday occurrence to a hunting people.

As for those three oddly-shaped, but beautifully made, bone spatulae, they’re unique in Britain, and probably in western Europe. The closest parallels for them are in Moravia, or the plains of Russia, where they occur in context dates of twenty-four to twenty thousand ago – precisely contemporary with the later use of Paviland Cave. So what are they? They may have been used to perform a useful purpose of some sort, but then the same can be said, for example, of the Christian paten and chalice – the platter and goblet used in the Eucharist. The workmanship employed on the spatulae is wholly exceptional, and if we compare them with similar items from contemporary sites on the Russian plain it’s possible to see links, for example, with highly stylised images of the female form.32 While not necessarily objects of veneration in their own right, these decorated spatulae could have been closely involved in religious ceremonies. It’s certainly very odd that three were found together. This would suggest deliberate disposal, or laying to rest after use, rather than casual loss in the normal course of daily life. As we will discover shortly, by this late time in the Paviland sequence we are drawing ever closer to the last great glacial maximum of eighteen thousand years ago, when conditions outside the cave were becoming extremely cold. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that some fairly strong incentive must have been required to tempt people so far north. As Professor Richard Bradley and others have shown,33 certain places, and the stories attached to them, had extraordinary pulling power for people in the past – and of course in the present too: Lourdes springs immediately to mind.

I find in my own work in the East Anglian fens that the shape and form of the modern landscape can often mask patterns and landforms that would have been obvious in prehistory. In the fens this has been caused by the wholesale drainage of the past three centuries, which has lowered the land surface and shrunk peats, so that areas that were once high are now low, and vice versa. Something similar applies at Paviland Cave, which today sits just above the high-tide mark. In the Upper Palaeolithic the sea level was massively lower than it is today, when the waters of the Bristol Channel have inundated a broad coastal plain. But at low tide it’s still possible to stand on the floor of the drowned coastal plain and look up towards Goat’s Hole Cave, just as people would have done twenty-six thousand years ago. It’s a very striking and affecting sight; but more important than that, it’s a setting that accords well with the situation of comparable important places in the religious and mythological lives of people with shamanistic religions – people like the San.34

There’s always a danger of delving into ethnographic and anthropological literature and doing a Little Jack Horner: inserting a thumb to select a plum, whilst ignoring less palatable fruit that doesn’t happen to fit with our ideas. This was the fatal flaw of many late-Victorian writers, who would assiduously comb through a vast range of anthropological writing, classical authors and travellers’ tales, selecting plums to bolster a particular theoretical view of the world. Sir James Frazer, one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology, was guilty of this academic sin,35 and today very similar things are done at the weirder extreme of so-called ‘alternative’ archaeology (the realm of ley lines, Atlantis, aliens, UFOs, etc.). If you pull a huge array of plums out of their original contexts it becomes easy to draw far-fetched conclusions, particularly with regard to things as imprecise as simple landscape features like lines of posts, or stones or pebbles. So the great ceremonial straight ‘roads’ on the high plains of southern Peru could be compared, for example, with Neolithic cursus monuments in lowland Europe (I shall have more to say about these later). It seems not to matter that each is taken out of context to ‘prove’ that ancient people were in regular contact over immense distances, or came from the same alien or extra-terrestrial source. To return to the earlier analogy, plums are being pulled out of two quite separate pies, whereas it’s the pies themselves that ought to be looked at.

To return to those ivory rods, it’s reasonable to seek illustrative parallels from a culture that is comparable in other respects to that at Paviland, but one should also be on the alert for other uses of rods in that culture – perhaps to support a temporary roof, or whatever.36 More to the point, one should beware of drawing parallels that are too specific – and the use of ochre-stained rods within a ritual might well be such a case. Only time will tell. On the whole, it’s safer and ultimately wiser to seek broader parallels that might help explain why and how people chose to do different things. A good, and very relevant, example are the criteria that lie behind the selection of special places by recent societies that practised shamanistic religion. That might help explain why Goat’s Hole Cave was selected for special treatment. This takes us back to the low-tide mark at Paviland.