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(#litres_trial_promo) It is true that apes can learn to use and even fashion tools; it is also true, as I have noted, that we arose from a common genetic stock. But the widespread adoption of something as complex as a stone-using technology could only have been accomplished by creatures who were both physically adaptive and who possessed mental capabilities that bear comparison with our own. Make no mistake, the earliest tool-using hominids were almost fully human: cross-bred ape-men they were not.
Pebble choppers were the main component of the earliest tool-using groups, but around 1.6 million years ago a new style of tool began to appear in Africa. Very soon it would be the tool of choice across the world. Possibly the best-known of all ancient archaeological artefacts, it’s known as the ‘hand-axe’. Like many archaeological objects it acquired its name early on, and we’ve been regretting it ever since. These tools may have been used in the hand, but they were never used for chopping down trees. So they weren’t axes as we know them. Perhaps the closest modern equivalent would be the light steel cleaver that’s used with such skill by chefs in Chinese kitchens.
Hand-axes come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but most are roughly heart-shaped. Their most distinctive characteristic is that flakes have been removed across the entire surface of both sides. This gives them a far thinner profile than a pebble chopper, and instead of one jagged cutting edge there are two, and they’re finer – and very much sharper. There’s also a very useful angle or point at the end opposite to the more rounded butt, which was the part that was gripped. These versatile tools, which were commonplace in the Palaeolithic, take great skill to produce: I could make a fairly convincing Bronze Age arrowhead out of flint, but I could never achieve a hand-axe. In addition to hand-axes, people at this time also made tools for scraping flesh off bone or hide. These scrapers had strong, angled working surfaces, and were also highly effective.
These earliest traditions of stone tools gave rise to a series of descendants of ever-increasing sophistication. Stone tool technologies in production gave rise to tens of thousands of waste flakes that litter the floor of Palaeolithic habitation sites to this day. Viewed in one way, it was a very wasteful technology. Then, about forty thousand years ago, some anonymous genius (I use the word advisedly) had the idea of fashioning a new range of tools from the flakes that had often previously been discarded as rubbish.
(#litres_trial_promo) The new technology soon evolved ways whereby long, thin, sharp blades could be removed from a specially prepared piece of stone or flint, known as a core. These blades were razor sharp, but they lacked the strength and durability of hand-axes. They were, however, the appropriate tool for the job at hand, and could be produced with just one, very carefully directed blow. Mankind was taking the first tentative steps towards specialisation, and also – perhaps more worrying – he was acquiring a taste for lightweight, disposable implements. Our throwaway culture has roots that extend back a very long way indeed.
The final stages of the long prehistoric tradition of flint-working happened in Britain a mere six thousand years ago, with the introduction of polishing in the earlier Neolithic. This technology was very labour intensive. First, a rough-out for the axe or knife was flaked in the conventional way, then the cutting edge and any other surfaces that seemed appropriate were polished using a sand-and-water grinding paste or a finely grained polishing stone, known as a polissoir. Flint is very hard, and the process of grinding took a long time. The end result was, however, very decorative, and there can be little doubt that many polished flint axes were produced to be admired rather than used. Some indeed are made from beautiful ‘marbled’ or veined flint, which polishes up superbly but is so full of internal planes of weakness that it shatters on impact. An axe that broke when it first encountered a tree would not be selected by even the most inexperienced prehistoric lumberjack.
In Britain, the half-million-year-old tradition of making stone tools came to an end around 500 BC, in the first centuries of the Early Iron Age. By then the long, thin blades of the Neolithic to Palaeolithic periods had long gone out of use. Indeed, I suspect that the ability to produce them started to die out rapidly after about 1200 BC. The last flint tools reflect the widespread adoption of metal, which supplied people’s need for cutting implements. So flint was used to provide scrapers and strange faceted piercing implements, which were produced by bashing gravel flint of poor quality that partially shattered, leaving a series of hard, sharp points. These points were probably used to score bone and scour leather. At first glance these odd-looking tools of bad flint seem strangely ‘degenerate’ when compared with the hand-axes and blades of much earlier times. But in fact they were good tools for certain purposes – and they were cheap (in terms of effort) and easy to produce.
I’m often asked how effective flint tools were, possibly because many people, especially those used to working with sharpened steel edge-tools such as axes, billhooks and knives, cannot believe that a flint blade could be of much practical use. I recall an incident in the early 1970s, when I was directing a large excavation at Fengate, on the eastern side of Peterborough. It was in the days before the planning regulations changed, and there was no friendly developer waiting to fund us, so we were working on a very tight budget indeed. One of our main costs then, as now, was staff, and in order to keep expenses down I came to an agreement with the authorities at North Sea Camp Prison, at that time a training establishment for young offenders, close by The Wash. They supplied me with labour, and I supplied them with work and training.
One day we discovered a multiple burial in a pit dating to the Neolithic period, and I took a party of North Sea Camp trainees to erect a scaffold shelter over it.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the distance to the north-west the clouds were growing darker, and I knew that rain would be with us soon; I also knew that the fragile bones in the pit – which included the remains of children – would be seriously damaged by the heavy thunderstorm that was heading our way. So we had to move fast. Six lads headed off to collect scaffold poles and the shackles that held them together, while I and the others went to choose a small used tarpaulin from the stock I kept on site for such emergencies. We soon had an A-frame erected, using the poles and shackles, then it came to fitting the tarpaulin cover.
By now a thin scatter of those warm, large drops that so often precede a thunderstorm was just starting to hit the ground. Already the wind was beginning to get up, and there were occasional squalls of much heavier rain. We dragged the tarpaulin over the frame, but it was far too large, and there was no way we could secure all of its billowing folds in place. The rest of the team had taken shelter in the site huts two hundred metres away, so we couldn’t summon help. I felt in my pocket for my knife, but it wasn’t there. I asked the lads if any of them had a knife, which of course they hadn’t.
After a very short pause, one of them sarcastically suggested I make one from flint. Stung by this, I reached down and happened to find a largish pebble at the edge of the grave. I rapped it firmly on one of the steel shackles, and it broke cleanly in half. I then gave it a series of lighter taps with the long handle of the wrench we’d used to tighten the shackles. These taps removed half a dozen sharp blades, and in no time at all we’d cut the tarpaulin to size and trimmed the long rope we’d used to tie it to the A-frame. After that there were no more sarcastic remarks.
Any discussion of northern Europe in the Old Stone Age has to approach the question of Ice Ages. The term was coined by the geologist Edward Forbes in 1846, when writing about the Pleistocene period of geological time. Victorian books on geology sometimes refer to the Pleistocene as the Glacial Epoch. As this name implies, the Pleistocene was marked by a series of extremely cold phases, which are known as glacials; these are separated by periods when the climate became very much warmer, known as interglacials. During the warmest of the interglacials it was actually somewhat hotter than it is today. Perhaps I should add here that our own epoch, known as the postglacial or Flandrian, can be seen as a sub-phase within the Pleistocene: it began when the last glacial ended, around ten to twelve thousand years ago. Some (actually most) specialists in the Pleistocene reckon that the postglacial is nothing of the sort, that we’re living in an extended interglacial, and that there are cold times waiting in the future. There were also smaller oscillations of temperature within the major advances and retreats of the great ice sheets, and the whole cycle of cooling and warming began (with the Pleistocene period itself) around 1.8 million years ago – at least a million years before man penetrated into northern Europe.
When I was at university in the 1960s, study of the Pleistocene period was beginning to be enriched by a series of new sources of information, such as deep-sea core samples. I recall well how analyses of the temperature-sensitive plankton preserved in the Mediterranean muds off the North African coast showed a complex succession of warm and cold phases. Other information, such as deep cores through the Arctic ice, was also coming on stream. Today there are many more science-based sequences of past climates, and it is now clear that although general, global trends can indeed be discerned, the impact of individual glaciations and interglacials varied enormously in both strength and character from one area to another. I’ll focus on the area of northern Europe that was later to become Britain, and restrict myself to the last half-million years or so.
Our story starts with a memorial plaque in the chancel of the church at Finningham, a small village in Suffolk. Most tablets of this sort are erected shortly after the person’s death, but this one is very different.
(#litres_trial_promo) It commemorates the life of John Frere (1740-1807), and it was dedicated at a special service on Sunday, 8 August 1999. It is plain, uncluttered, but beautifully made. And its message is simple:
JOHN FRERE FRS.FSA who from his discoveries at Hoxne was the first to realise the immense antiquity of mankind
1740.1807
The plaque was erected by the local archaeological society, with the aid of money raised from archaeologists and others all over Britain. All involved were agreed that it was high time that the man who has been called the father of scientific archaeology was given some form of public recognition. The decision to place the memorial in the church followed a visit to the villages of Hoxne and Finningham by the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History on 22 June 1997,
(#litres_trial_promo) commemorating the reading of a famous paper by Frere to the Society of Antiquaries of London exactly two hundred years before. This paper concerned Frere’s observation of flint hand-axes in the brick pit at Hoxne, which he reasoned had been made by people ‘who had not the use of metals’, and who lived in a very remote period, ‘even beyond that of the present world’.
(#litres_trial_promo) These were extraordinarily prophetic words, given the stranglehold of religious orthodoxy that prevailed in Britain at the time.
Archaeology has given rise to some very disturbing ideas, and certainly there were few people in the late eighteenth century who were prepared publicly to support Frere’s radical notion. So life continued much as before. As a profession, archaeologists tend not to make a fuss: we’re generally polite and restrained. The 1997 visit to Hoxne and Finningham was no exception. It was organised – indeed inspired – by John Wymer, the leading specialist in the Lower Palaeolithic in Britain, who has himself excavated extensively at Hoxne.
There’s one other thing I’d like to mention about that memorial in Finningham church. Above the inscription is a replica of a flint hand-axe found at Hoxne in 1797. It’s a superb piece of craftsmanship, made by Phil Harding, who is better known as the member of television’s Time Team with the broad-brimmed hat and the rich West Country voice. During the early and mid-1990s Phil and John Wymer travelled the roads of southern Britain, carrying out an extraordinary and comprehensive survey of Lower Palaeolithic finds from the river valleys of the region. This survey resulted in seven specialised reports, which were given to local authorities to help them with planning applications, and an authoritative two-volume overview, published in 1999.
(#litres_trial_promo) This report reflects its author: it is both erudite and remarkably down-to-earth.
From the very outset of the great survey, John Wymer decided on a landscape-based approach. He wanted to see how sites and so-called ‘stray’ finds (hand-axes and other flint implements that were found on their own, without any other archaeological context) could be related to their ancient surroundings. River valleys were a crucially important component of the ancient landscape – as they are of the present-day one – and they provided a natural framework for the survey. We tend to think of the inhabitants of the Old Stone Age as ‘cave-men’, but in reality, although caves were indeed used, they don’t occur naturally in lowland river valleys, so it is likely that most people constructed shelters in the open air, probably using wood, bone and hides. Convincing archaeological evidence for such shelters has so far eluded us, but this is hardly to be wondered at: ancient equivalents of the New Agers’ bender – temporary houses made from hoops of steel pipe or green wood covered with plastic – would leave very few clues to their existence after several hundred thousand years. The uprights used to build such structures would not need to be sunk into the ground, so they would leave no trace of that commonest of all archaeological features, the post-hole. By the same token, there would be no wall foundation trenches. These shelters would not have been occupied over an extended period, as the community, which relied entirely on hunting and gathering their food, would move around the countryside, probably following well-trodden routes.
The earliest period of human settlement in what were later to become the British Isles predates the most extensive glaciation of Britain, known as the Anglian glaciation, which began around 480,000 years ago. Anglian ice covered all of Britain north of a line drawn from south Essex and the Thames estuary, due west across the country to Bristol; thereafter it hugged the southern shore of the Bristol Channel, but never truly penetrated inland into Somerset, Devon or Cornwall.
Happisburgh (pronounced ‘Hazeborough’) is about seventy kilometres east of Holme-next-the-Sea, where the so-called ‘Seahenge’ timber circle was found in 1998. Like Holme, Happisburgh is a very exposed beach, and subject to serious erosion. It has an outcrop of the so-called Cromer Forest Bed, a Pleistocene deposit which was laid down well before the Anglian glaciation. Recently, Palaeolithic flints, including a hand-axe, were found on the beach, and they appeared to be very closely associated with the Cromer Forest Bed. This would place them about 150,000 years earlier than the earliest flints yet found in Britain – i.e. around 650,000 years ago. The site is under such grave threat of destruction by erosion that any passing archaeologist should make a visit, recover anything he sees, and carefully record its position. It’s not far from where I live, and it will make an excellent spot for weekend winter expeditions – there’s something magical about finding ‘the earliest’ of anything that appeals to me enormously.
Whatever is, or is not, found at Happisburgh, there are only a handful of sites belonging to this very remote period of prehistory. There are also ‘stray’ finds of hand-axes and pebble chopping-tools along many of the river valleys of southern Britain, but these cannot always be dated with accuracy.
At this point some readers may query the presence of pebble chopping-tools in Britain, a mere half-million years ago, of a type that supposedly ceased to be made in Africa about a million years ago. Does the existence of these tools indicate that Britain was occupied over a million years ago? I don’t think it does. It’s inconceivable that large areas of a region so far into northern Europe could have been occupied at so early a date, and there’s no other independent evidence to support such an idea. Many pebble choppers are unearthed as ‘stray’ finds in river gravels, especially in Essex, which is why this British tradition of pebble tools was named the Clactonian.
Most specialists in this field are today agreed that the Clactonian is not a ‘tradition’ in its own right; in other words, these tools (if that’s indeed what they were) were not produced by a separate group of people with their own distinctive culture and identity. Most probably the choppers were made because the gravels routinely produce nice fist-sized, rounded pebbles which were too small to be made into hand-axes, but whose shape simply demanded that they be fashioned into a tool. Some fist-sized and -shaped flints can have that effect when one’s brain is in flint-knapping mode. Put another way, Clactonian choppers are examples of local adaptation and inventiveness. It’s easy to forget that people in the past weren’t aware that their toolmaking activities would later be examined in minute detail by archaeologists. So occasionally they depart from what we expect them to do. Personally, I find this explanation for British pebble tools pretty satisfying, but still a tiny doubt niggles away at the back of my brain: Clactonian-like tools do occur occasionally on later sites of the Palaeolithic, which tends to support the ‘local adaptation and inventiveness’ theory; but having said that, in general they are very early. Even if it is only a half-mystery, it’s an intriguing one, and I wonder when, or if, it will be resolved.
It’s time now to turn our attention to the south coast of England, and the site at Boxgrove, West Sussex, which is undoubtedly the most important Palaeolithic discovery ever made in Britain. It’s hard to exaggerate its significance. When one talks to Palaeolithic archaeologists their eyes light up at the mention of the quarry at Eartham, and their enthusiasm becomes infectious.
Although I only managed to go to the site once, it was almost like a religious experience. To reach the quarry one has to walk down a long, gradually sloping road. Beside me was the then Chairman of English Heritage, Jocelyn Stevens (now Sir Jocelyn), who was visiting Boxgrove to see how his organisation’s money was being spent. I was there as a member of the committee which provides English Heritage with independent advice on all sorts of archaeological matters.
Sir Jocelyn is a very snappy dresser: trousers with knife-edge creases, shoes that glisten in the sun, double-breasted coats with a rose at the lapel. He is also a rapid walker, and likes to get to the point in all manner of ways. He was very keen to see the site, which had often featured on the national news. I was keen too, but I was also in the throes of a nasty cold, and was not feeling 100 per cent up to scratch, which is why I found myself stumbling over the small cobbles in my efforts to keep pace with the great man. My shambling gait did little to improve the impression given by my less than immaculate tailoring, which owed rather more to Skid than to Savile Row. We made a strange pair. Around us were the other members of the committee, and various archaeologists and administrators from English Heritage head office in London. It was a fabulous summer morning, crisp and fine, with larks on the wing in the clear coastal air. I was almost feeling better.
I wasn’t aware of it as we walked, but the hill leading into the quarry was actually a smoothed-out ancient cliff, and it was this cliff which provided the key to the dating of the finds at Boxgrove. Most archaeological discoveries are associated with a single person. True, he or she almost invariably works with and leads a closely knit team, but it usually requires one person to provide the fire and enthusiasm which fuels the project. At Boxgrove that person was, and is, Mark Roberts.
As I’ve noted, Boxgrove frequently featured in the news, but unlike some other famous sites, it has also been comprehensively written-up. The learned, heavy-duty report was published by English Heritage in 1999.
(#litres_trial_promo) It’s a superb piece of work, but it’s fairly heavy-going and technical, aimed at postgraduate students and professional archaeologists rather than the general reader. A far more accessible account of the project, written by Mike Pitts and Mark Roberts, appeared in 1997.
(#litres_trial_promo) This is a landmark of a book that’s hard to put down, combining a good, racy narrative with accurate scholarship.
Boxgrove is so important because its very ancient archaeological finds and deposits were preserved in situ, precisely as they were left half a million years ago. When I visited, I could almost have believed that the people who made the dozens of hand-axes that still lay in the trenches had only just left, and that they would return shortly to collect one for use, as soon as they had killed the wild horse they were now out stalking. It was an eerie feeling – almost upsetting, were it not so extraordinarily exciting.
The reason Boxgrove became, in effect, a time capsule, is that the original surface on which Palaeolithic people walked was quickly buried below a mantle of quite fine-grained deposits. This material accumulated entirely naturally – as a result of normal processes such as wind-blown sand, water wash, etc. – but the result was an eventual accumulation of some twenty metres (sixty-five feet) of overburden, which protected the hand-axes and other finds which still lay where they had been dropped on the original land surface. Today Boxgrove is fifteen kilometres from the south coast, and forty metres above sea level, on the highest of a series of raised beaches. This gives some indication of what can happen when one is considering a time frame as long as half a million years. You have to think in geological, rather than human, terms – which makes the superb preservation at Boxgrove all the more remarkable.
I was astonished when I saw the condition of the hand-axes. Having knocked up a few of them myself, I’m very familiar with the look of a newly made flint implement. There’s an almost unfinished look to the things: edges are incredibly sharp and jagged, and there are clearly defined areas of ‘bruising’, perhaps where flakes failed to detach, or only partially detached. Knapping flint can also produce a distinctive, slightly sulphurous, smell, not dissimilar to that of a freshly struck match. I’ve no idea what causes it – perhaps an occasional spark, or very fine dust – but it must be familiar to anyone with more than occasional experience of flint-knapping. As I looked at those hand-axes in the ground, I could have sworn I caught a whiff of that smell – which is plainly ridiculous, but it does hint at just how superbly fresh everything was.
Boxgrove would not have featured on national television more than once had it only produced extraordinarily fresh hand-axes. Something more was needed; and what could possibly be better than human remains? The bones in question were part of a shinbone, or tibia, of a left leg, and two front teeth. The shinbone and the teeth must have come from two separate individuals, as the shinbone was found about three feet below the teeth, which were close together, and were almost certainly from the same person. The teeth had distinctive scratch-marks on their surface, suggesting that the person they belonged to had used his or her mouth to grip meat while cutting it with a flint tool. This was consistent with a build-up of tartar-like deposits on the other tooth surfaces, which is typical of people who ate a diet rich in meat. Vegetarians they were not.
The tibia came from a large person, most probably a man to judge from his build, who was about six feet (1.8 metres) tall and weighed twelve and a half stone (eighty kilos). He was muscular, and presumably pretty strong and fit. Evidence for this comes from the great thickness of the bone, which is what one would expect of a person who was used to continuous hard exercise – like, for example, hours spent out on the trail, stalking and hunting.
I’ve tried to steer clear of hominid classification because it’s both complex and constantly changing (incidentally, this is a good sign, as it shows that our knowledge about past people is growing all the time). It would appear that the Boxgrove people were distinctly different not only from modern man, but indeed from Neanderthal man, who came later. The Boxgrove finds are thought to belong to a species of hominids known as Homo heidelbergensis, after a well-preserved lower jawbone found in a quarry near Heidelberg in 1907. At present, physical anthropologists aren’t wholly agreed as to whether Homo heidelbergensis was a direct ancestor of modern man (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthal man (Homo neanderthalensis), or of just one of them, of which Neanderthal seems the most probable. Recent research, however, suggests that Homo heidelbergensis may have been one of the many ‘blind alley’ developments of mankind’s history, and that the true ancestor to both Neanderthal and modern man was another African hominid known as Homo helmei, who lived some 400,000 years ago.
(#litres_trial_promo)
The large quantities of animal bones found at Boxgrove have an equally fascinating tale to tell as the flints and hand-axes. The material accumulated on flat, mainly open ground very close to the coast, and as I read through the accounts of Boxgrove I was struck by the fact that this could have been a site almost anywhere in inland England: nowhere could I find evidence that fish, seabirds or shellfish were eaten. Mealtimes weren’t enlivened by so much as a humble dressed crab: it was meat, meat, meat – and red meat at that. This fits with what we know about other Lower Palaeolithic sites in Europe, where seafood also seems to have been ignored.
Further evidence for the consumption of meat is provided by the hand-axes. They are so superbly preserved that examining their cutting edges under a high-powered microscope reveals traces of so-called microwear – the scratches and polishes left when the tool was used in the Palaeolithic. The project’s microwear specialist gave a local butcher several replica hand-axes, made by Time Team’s Phil Harding, and asked him to butcher a deer carcass with them.
(#litres_trial_promo) Not surprisingly, the butcher had never used a hand-axe before, but even so he declared them excellent tools for the job. When he had finished, the edges of the replicas were examined microscopically, and the distinctive polish that had been produced by cutting the meat was very similar to that seen on ancient hand-axes from Boxgrove and other Palaeolithic sites.
Most of the animals that lived at or near Boxgrove would have been familiar to us today, but there were also extinct species of wolves, giant deer, bear and rhinoceros. There’s no doubt that large mammals such as deer, wild horse and even rhino were being butchered at Boxgrove. There’s also evidence to suggest that meat was removed on the bone and taken somewhere else to be eaten, presumably because the butchery sites were foul-smelling and swarming with flies – not a pleasant accompaniment to even a Palaeolithic lunch. It would seem most likely – again, there is some slight evidence to support this – that the meat was taken a short distance up the hill to the edge of the woods, where people would have stayed overnight. It was a sheltered area, protected from sight by trees and shrubs, where there would also have been abundant supplies of firewood. It’s worth noting that the butchery areas at Boxgrove did not produce evidence for hearths or fires, as one might have expected had people lived there for a prolonged period of time.
So far I’ve concentrated on what one might term simple, direct observations: hand-axes were made, animals were butchered and so forth; to what extent can one go further and ask more searching questions, of which the most obvious is: did the people who lived at the Boxgrove site have language? I firmly believe that archaeology can answer such questions, but they often need to be approached indirectly, and from several directions at the same time.
A minimalist view has been proposed by Professor Clive Gamble. This view would have it that these were very simple folk. They lived, after all, half a million years ago, and their brains were far smaller than ours. Gamble has suggested that theirs was essentially an opportunistic ‘fifteen-minute culture’ that involved an absolute minimum of planning ahead. If they could think in ways that are truly comparable with us, he argues, why on earth did it take them so long to reach northern Europe from Africa? A million years is a long time to pause and admire even the grandest of Alpine views. If we look at the evidence from Boxgrove, the minimalist would challenge whether there was actually any 100 per cent solid evidence even for hunting. One horse shoulderblade had been penetrated by something which left a neat semi-circular wound,
(#litres_trial_promo) which Mark Roberts is convinced is evidence for the use of the sort of pointed wooden spears that have been found at Palaeolithic sites in Britain and Germany, but not at Boxgrove itself (where the conditions of preservation did not favour wood). However, a minimalist wouldn’t necessarily agree with this. To my eye that semi-circular wound seems fairly convincing, but minimalists would remind us that other interpretations are also possible. Certainly, it can’t be regarded as a piece of ‘smoking gun’ evidence; it’s pretty indicative, but no more than that.
So if they weren’t hunting (which I very much doubt), presumably they were simply scavenging animals that had died naturally, or had been killed by a carnivore further up the food chain. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be any need for them to plan ahead. And if you don’t need to plan ahead, you don’t require the sophistication of language that goes with it. Just pause for a moment and reflect on how much of one’s conversation, at breakfast, for example, is spent planning for the day to come: if I take the car to do this, then you have to do that until I return; but if you take the car, then I’m left stranded, unless etc., etc. If, on the other hand, we simply bumped along, taking life and food as we found it, then everything, language included, would be so much simpler. That, at least, is the minimalist position.
In my opinion, minimalist views such as this are important because they make us keep our feet on the ground. They prevent us from building academic castles in the air. Had there been a clear-eyed minimalist standing at their elbows, I doubt whether medieval scholars would have wasted their time arguing about the number of angels that could balance on a pinhead. Having said that, I also believe in common sense and informed debate enriched by practical experience. All of which is to say that the totality of the evidence from Boxgrove seems to suggest to me that the people who lived there half a million years ago did hunt their prey, which included animals as fearsome as the rhino. This must have taken teamwork, organisation and forethought, and with them some sort of language. Let’s examine further the direct evidence for forward planning.
First, consider the distinction between hunting and opportunistic scavenging. I can see no reason why hunting should not have developed quite naturally out of scavenging. It seems a perfectly reasonable progression, just as in later chapters I will argue that stock-keeping and animal husbandry are a logical development from hunting. The problem may lie inside our own heads. In countless books and articles I’ve seen mankind’s relentless march of evolutionary progress illustrated in full colour, with crouching, ape-like hominids gradually being replaced by taller, more erect and intelligent beings until – Glory be! – modern man strides forth, head held erect and not so much as a genital in sight. Steps of progression form an important part of this pattern of evolutionary thought: from scavenging to hunting; from hunting to farming; from farming to urban life; from urban life to literacy, ‘Civilisation’, the Industrial Revolution and so on. It’s a pattern of thought that makes us feel good, but I wonder to what extent it reflects the truth, which was probably more like the way I’m writing this book: two pages forward, then one page deleted, and so on.
So, perhaps one day they hunted, and the next day they scavenged – whichever seemed the appropriate thing to do at the time. Eventually they found that hunting was both more efficient and more effective. It could also be fun – I suspect this was of equal importance as efficiency and effectiveness – and it gave young people a chance to show off their skills. Larger groups would have been needed to catch animals as massive as rhinos, and they would surely have relished not only the thrill of the chase and the reward of food at its completion, but also the teamwork required to co-ordinate so many individuals into an effective unit.
These arguments sound attractive, but are they true? Do they represent what might have happened half a million years ago? Remember, we are not discussing people like ourselves, but people with a very different brain and patterns of thinking. Most of the ideas in the previous paragraphs presuppose that the people of the Lower Palaeolithic thought more or less like ourselves; and we can’t assume that – a minimalist certainly wouldn’t. A minimalist would argue that their way of thinking differed profoundly from ours. For them thought was more to do with habit; what would seem straightforward to us – for example the logical leaps from one set of unrelated ideas to another – simply didn’t happen. I shall discuss this further in Chapter 3, but here I want to note that the way one interprets a site such as Boxgrove depends very much on one’s theoretical position. It’s no good even attempting to approach such problems with ‘an open mind’. One has to have a theoretical position and a particular set of ideas to test out. Otherwise one’s analysis lacks purpose and direction. Put another way, for ‘open’ mind, read ‘empty’, throughout.
So, what is the evidence for scavenging, or rather for persistent scavenging, at Boxgrove? As we have seen, the direct evidence for hunting is still quite slight, but it would be a mistake to assume that killing was necessarily accomplished by a sudden, massive and catastrophic wound that felled the prey on the spot – something like a javelin through the heart. In later periods of the Palaeolithic and in the subsequent Mesolithic there is good evidence that death could be very slow.
(#litres_trial_promo) The prey was wounded badly enough to bleed to death slowly. As the poor beast gradually became weaker, it would be stalked by the hunting party until it either died or was weak enough to be finished off. Certainly this pattern of hunting would help to account for the thickness of the Boxgrove people’s shinbones.
One piece of positive evidence for hunting, as opposed to scavenging, at Boxgrove is the evidence for human control of the carcasses found there. If the prey was dragged there from scavenging expeditions, one might reasonably expect to find that the initial hunters – be they bears or wolves – had left their toothmarks on the bones first. Thereafter one might expect to find the scratches left by the hand-axes that detached the meat. But this never happens. Where gnaw-marks and hand-axe marks are found together on the same bone, it is always the gnawing that comes later – presumably when the hunters had no further use for the carcass. I have to say, I find this evidence for hunting fairly convincing. But I can still hear Clive Gamble asking, ‘Why? Surely these patterns could equally well have resulted from people arriving at a kill site first, before the other scavengers arrived on the scene.’ And he could well be right. After all, there is no direct, incontrovertible evidence for human beings actually killing prey at Boxgrove.
This absence of direct evidence may in part be due to the fact that the wooden spears of the Lower Palaeolithic leave only a slight impression on bone, unlike, say, a broken-off flint arrowhead. We do, however, know that wooden spears of this period did exist. There’s a very probable contender made of yew wood which was found at Clacton, but several complete examples have been found across the North Sea at Schönongen, a site in Germany.
(#litres_trial_promo) So the evidence most certainly is out there. But it still seems to be absent from Boxgrove. Maybe I ought to reserve my position until something definite, one way or the other, turns up. But I can’t: I still find the cumulative evidence for hunting, especially as presented in the full Boxgrove report by Mark Roberts, convincing. And what is far more significant, John Wymer does too. In his preface to the full report, he is emphatic (the italics are his):
The people were hunters of large mammals; they did hunt with spears; they did retain useful objects for future use…We know that they had craftsmen among them with a concept of symmetry, if not beauty. They performed tasks that involved a division of labour and there is much to imply a social order of groups larger than usually imagined working together.
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I’ll leave it there for the time being. In Chapter 3 I’ll review the evidence for Palaeolithic social organisation, and then Clive Gamble will have a chance to give the reasons why he inclines to a more minimalist view. I find this controversy both stimulating and refreshing – not least because the people concerned are not at each other’s throats, but are all far more concerned about the broader issues lying behind Palaeolithic research. As John Wymer put it in the final words of his preface to the Boxgrove report, the topic is alive because it is ‘research into what is the most important subject confronting us: ourselves’.
I’ve tended to emphasise the quality of preservation at Boxgrove, simply because it’s so extraordinary and, for me at least, affecting. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the quantity either. Before Boxgrove, discoveries of hand-axes from this period were rare events indeed – perhaps a dozen or two each year, most of which were those archaeologically less-than-useful isolated or ‘stray’ finds. By contrast, one small area of the Boxgrove excavations revealed over 150 hand-axes, some of which were unused. Mark Roberts has suggested, quite reasonably, that these implements had been made, perhaps when a particularly good source of flint had been found, to be kept to one side and used when needed. If he is right, plainly this is evidence for forethought.
The hand-axes themselves were difficult to make, and in this respect, as we’ve already seen, they were quite unlike the earlier tools of the pebble-chopper tradition. One doesn’t simply select a suitably sized piece of flint and then remove flakes on the off-chance that one can whittle away enough, and in the right places, to produce the desired end-result. There are a number of quite clearly defined stages that have to be gone through before one can produce a finished hand-axe, starting with the removal of the softer, more granular cortex, a type of ‘skin’ or ‘peel’ that develops through time and which protects the higher-quality, glass-like flint within.
At Boxgrove there is clear evidence that many of the hand-axes used for butchery were made then and there, on the spot. There are numerous waste flakes along with the finished hand-axes, and in one instance it’s possible to see where a person sat on the ground while he knapped a hand-axe. As he worked he allowed the flakes of flint to fall into his lap and then onto the ground, making a characteristically tight pattern (about ten inches across) that can be replicated experimentally. It’s as if fifteen minutes of time had been frozen for half a million years.
Each stage of a hand-axe’s manufacture requires a great deal of manual skill to start and complete, and it also takes good judgement to know when to move from one stage to another. The hand-axes found at Boxgrove are rarely ever skewed or misshaped, and are nearly always balanced and evenly proportioned, both when laid flat and when viewed edge-on. Speaking again from personal experience, I know that it takes considerable skill and judgement to keep an eye on the proportions of two separate planes simultaneously. It’s easy to get slightly carried away when things are going well, only to realise – when it’s too late – that one’s arrowhead, or whatever else one is making, will never fly straight. I’ve watched a good flint-knapper make a hand-axe, and a large part of the time he spent turning and inspecting the piece at arm’s length, to see that everything was in balance. The discipline required, and the knowledge of the different stages of manufacture, must surely have been taught from one generation to the next – and teaching, of course, requires language of some sort.
Much of the manufacture of hand-axes requires the use of a so-called ‘soft’ hammer, which in most cases was probably made from a billet or baton of antler, perhaps a foot or slightly less long and with the diameter of, say, a cricket stump. Antler is hard, but it’s also very resilient, and doesn’t chip or flake even when hit with force. This makes it ideal for flint-working. Before Boxgrove, we suspected that antler was used for soft hammers, but couldn’t prove it. But at Boxgrove an antler billet was found with small, sharp fragments of flint still sticking into it. The worn state of that antler hammer suggests that it was used to make more than one hand-axe, and again this provides good evidence for forethought, as presumably whoever it was that owned it carried the hammer around until he needed to use it again.
Where do all these indications of forethought lead us? Did the inhabitants of Boxgrove possess a sophisticated, highly adaptable language, such as English? The evidence from those who understand and study the human brain and the inside of the bone case – the cranium – that protects it suggests that Homo heidelbergensis simply didn’t have the mental equipment to develop or use a highly sophisticated language. On the other hand, the archaeological record makes it clear that these people must routinely have used a form of language – albeit of a relatively simple type. That, it would appear, is as far as we can take matters at present.
CHAPTER TWO Neanderthals, the Red ‘Lady’ and Ages of Ice (#ulink_c756a191-2979-553a-ac6e-04b1aa0cd499)
BOXGROVE WAS OCCUPIED before the great chill of the Anglian glaciation, whose ice retreated around 423,000 years ago. Then, so far as we know, essentially the same type of lifestyle resumed. Much of the evidence for this comes not from spectacular sites like Boxgrove, but from the discovery of hundreds of hand-axes from the lowland river gravels of England. In the past these hand-axes would generally not have been systematically studied, as they would have been seen as out of context, or ‘derived’, to use the archaeological term. They were derived because they were found in gravels whose very formation – derivation – had eroded away the original settlement sites where the hand-axes had been deposited. Imagine that a series of rivers had flowed through Boxgrove, churning the material around and around. Would what was left have any archaeological value? It depends, as Professor Joad of The Brains Trust would have said, on what one means by archaeological value. And that, in turn, depends on the scale at which one is working.
Boxgrove is remarkable for the detail it provides. It’s actually possible to refit flint flakes back together, to reconstruct precisely how a Palaeolithic flint-knapper once worked for fifteen minutes. One might refer to this as the micro-scale of archaeological investigation. But one might also quite reasonably wonder what else was going on at that time so very long ago. Were there, for example, other settlements in the area, and how long did they last? These larger-scale, or macro-level, questions require a different type of information if they’re to be answered properly. However remarkable refitting flint flakes might be in itself, it won’t take us any further forward in this instance.
I mentioned that the river gravel hand-axes were ‘derived’ from earlier deposits, and this was due to the down-cutting of rivers and the reworking of the gravels lying in the floodplain. These changes in the rivers’ behaviour were caused by fluctuations in climate during the successive glacial, cold, cool and temperate phases of the Ice Ages. There was plenty of fast-flowing water around as the ice melted, then less during temperate times, and none when ice was present. And of course, each of these phases had innumerable sub-phases, which varied from one river valley to another. If you understand how the resulting sequence of gravel terraces within the floodplain formed, then you provide at least a secondary context for the hand-axes and other flints within them.
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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was a discovery that was profoundly to affect the development of archaeological thought, and not always for the better.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was more of a generalist, whereas Neanderthals were ‘domain specific’, to use a term coined by the cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
