The condition has peaks which cause a rapid degeneration of his muscle sensors and then it goes quiet and nothing much happens for a while; but a complete recovery is not a possibility and the bones are slowly disintegrating. These days it’s a struggle for him to walk at all and he can’t use a stick because there is no muscle resistance in his arms. It is, he says, ‘a very restricting condition’ but he appears to accept it.
When he was first diagnosed he was still living near Pakefield, married and with a daughter. He was told that walking in sand or wading through water was good for his muscles and so he took to going on little expeditions along the coast. He enjoyed the quiet meeting of the land with the ocean and in winter, once you’d gone a bit of a distance from the path, you’d be surprised to see another human being anywhere about. He began to notice the whiteness of little bones embedded within the darker stretch of the cliff and that was how everything started.
He explored other stretches of the coastline. One summer he was in West Runton, where he met a man who collected things from the Cromer Forest Bed, and after that he went there whenever he could, filling bags with material from the cliff and bringing them home for sieving and identification with a magnifying lens. His collection grew: fish bones, the tiny jawbones of shrew and vole, shark teeth, the best part of the palate of a dog, the leg bone of a stork. He took the more interesting items to the Norwich Museum for identification and gave them anything they wanted to keep in their collection. As a matter of principle he never sold his finds to dealers.
At this point, sitting on a sofa, an old dog sleeping in its bed close to the big television screen, two tame ferrets in the kitchen, a French Lop rabbit pottering about in the front entrance hall, Bob’s wife Jean busy upstairs, photos of his daughter getting her Classics degree on the shiny dresser, I rummaged in my bag and produced the three items I had brought with me for identification. First was the little fossil I thought must be a chrysalis, but Bob examined it briefly and said it was nothing special, just part of a fish vertebra, rolled smooth when Covehithe was an estuarial offshore bank. A triangular piece of bone I found a few days earlier is a bit of mammoth’s leg that must have been washed into a river and then probably smashed by the sea. The white flint pick, also from Covehithe, is about six thousand years old at a guess, a bit worn, but never mind, it’s nice. I liked the straightforwardness of his analysis and the sense that he seemed to be seeing what had happened in a far-distant time as if it was happening now.
He suddenly abandoned palaeontology and moved on to politics with hardly a transition. ‘You always need to follow the money, I learnt that in banking. There is always someone behind someone in politics, the puppet master.’ And then he said that if he won a couple of million he’d be sorely tempted to buy a Scottish island and live there in isolation with Jean and the animals.
We returned to prehistory. He had become obsessed with the idea that there were more archaic species in Pakefield than in West Runton and then he read Memoirs of the Geological Survey: The Geology of the Country near Yarmouth and Lowestoft, published in 1890, and that mentioned the Unio river bed and gave him the clue he needed. He knew that vole teeth can be used for dating a site because they breed and evolve at such a speed, and in a deposit which he thought must be part of the Unio river bed he had found vole teeth with two roots coming off them, which made them much more ancient than the voles at West Runton, where the teeth are permanently growing and have no roots. ‘It was a dead giveaway,’ he said, ‘adding an extra hundred thousand years to the age of the deposit, just like that.’
He knew if he found worked flints in that same river deposit, it would prove the earliest occurrence of human activity in this country and would rewrite history. He started working with his friend Adrian, ‘the unsung hero of the story’. Adrian is autistic: very awkward and silent and then he says odd things that make people nervous in his company, but he and Bob got on well, they accepted each other’s difficulties and shared a fascination with fossils, although Adrian was more interested in the Jurassic.
This was in the late 1990s, early 2000s. The two of them would go to the river bed area of the beach during the winter months. Bob wasn’t strong and he would just prop himself up on the sand and watch and sort out the material as it was brought to him. Adrian always had a bottle of brandy and blackcurrant juice against the cold and he’d wade out into the sea, to sieve the gravel where a river had once flowed. Nothing could stop him, he’d go on working in a howling gale, even if the waves were coming in waist-high. He’d go on like that for hours.
It was near the end of 2001 and Adrian had the sieve filled with a residue of stones and small mammal remains which he was about to throw away when Bob stopped him. ‘I ran my hand through the top and I saw this flint that had what is called a bulb of percussion, and a cutting edge like a scraper. I knew at once it had to be a man-made fracture. It was as if I’d been expecting it, but still it was quite a thing to know you’re the first person to touch it since Pioneer Man came over from Europe.’
Bob contacted the Keeper of Quaternary Mammals at the Natural History Museum with whom he had been in touch before. He put the flint in a little package and sent it to London by post. He showed me the letter he received in reply: You appear to have hit the jackpot…It is a beautiful flake, certainly human in origin. It is also as fresh as a daisy. Thank you very much for saying we could keep this piece.
He knew he needed to move forward slowly and carefully. He arranged a meeting in the Jolly Sailors pub on the clifftop above the site, with Adrian and Paul Durbridge who was the flint expert. It was Paul who said that from now on they should do proper documented exploration.
So for a whole day every week, for the next seven weeks, they went back to the same area. At that stage Bob could hardly walk, but the two others would park the car just above the footpath and then they’d help him with his shuffling progress to the sandy shore. Paul prepared a section of cliff leading from where they had found the flint in the sea and he and Adrian dug it and sieved it, while Bob examined what they had found and took home anything that seemed interesting so that he could dry it out on newspaper and begin the work of sorting it under strong magnification.
In the seventh week they found twenty more worked flints and, most importantly, Bob found the core from which they had been originally cut. This was crucial because it proved the flints had been cut here, in this place and nowhere else. But still they knew that in spite of taking photographs of all the stages of excavation and of the artefacts as they were first discovered within the cliff, they might be suspected of fiddling the evidence and so they decided to contact the Natural History Museum again to inform them what was going on. ‘As if by magic’ a whole team of experts arrived the next weekend: there was one who specialised in mammal bones, one for flints; one for climate analysis along with a sedimentologist and a dating specialist. They put everything in sacks and then they were gone.
The Pakefield flints, along with the accompanying core, were shown to be seven hundred thousand years old, which made them the earliest evidence of human habitation in Great Britain, although that date has since been overridden by the footsteps and finds further along the coast at Happisburgh. An article was published in Nature describing the finds and Bob and Paul’s role in the work was acknowledged, although no mention was made of Adrian sieving the sea, which Bob found a pity.
And then Bob’s health deteriorated, Paul was diagnosed with cancer and Adrian developed shingles which left him with a lot of pain and even blinded him for a while and so none of them had the time or the energy to put their minds to anything much.
Bob paused to think back to what those flints had meant to him. He said when he found the first one he could suddenly see a small group of people he wasn’t expecting to find in that period of the palaeontology, but there they were. And then when he found the other flints and the core he said it was ‘a snapshot in time…I envisa
ged a family group at a stream bank. They catch a small animal and they make small tools to butcher it up and then they leave. Only a day or two, and they were gone.’
Along this stretch of the coast there was no flint material big enough to make axes, just pebbles that could be turned into little tools like the ones he’d found, and it never ceased to amaze him that these people could survive in such a hostile environment, having to compete with hyenas and lions and facing so many other dangers. He still often saw them in his mind’s eye, sitting down by the stream, making those flints. He felt it was a privilege to be a witness to an hour or so in their distant lives.
He had noticed that people like him with physical trouble, or like Adrian with his autism, are drawn to this sort of work. ‘It’s highly relaxing. You create your own reality and step into it, into another world. It recharges your brain.
‘It’s funny to think,’ he said, as our conversation came towards its end, ‘that the waste dump on the other side of the road to the Pontins holiday camp stands on part of the Unio river bed and so all that modern rubbish is lying on top of the remains of early man.’
Time Song 5
Two point five million years ago
in Africa
and being human meant
hitting a stone with another stone
to make a sharp edge:
Homo habilis and rudolfensis.
One point eight million years:
smaller teeth,
bigger brain,
a more upright stance,
longer legs – better suited for running –
and a hand axe:
Homo erectus.
Still one point eight million,
in a village in Georgia,
under the soil
on top of a hill
alongside scimitar-toothed cats
and other extinct creatures:
five thick-boned skulls,
four lower jaws,
fragments of skeleton
and a few stone tools:
also Homo erectus.
One million years:
the Chasm of the Elephant
in northern Spain,
fossils of Homo antecessor,
also known as
Pioneer Man.
Nine hundred thousand years
and Britain is a peninsula
on the north-western fringe
of the Eurasian continent.
Two great rivers
cross a floodplain:
the Bytham and the Thames,
and in the mud
beneath much later glacial debris:
human footprints.
Pioneer Man has arrived here.
Seven hundred thousand years
and thirty miles to the south
in the lower reaches of the Bytham River:
a little collection of worked flints,
along with the core from which they were struck:
Pioneer Man again.
Six hundred thousand years,
and evidence in mainland Britain
of brief, low-density occupations,
until the Ice Age four hundred and fifty
thousand years ago,
which left much of Europe desolate.
Four hundred thousand years
and early Neanderthals:
in Spain’s Chasm of the Bones:
short, stocky and barrel-chested,
large nose, large eye sockets, low forehead,
the braincase bigger than ours.
A people equipped with clothing and fire,
their bones often broken and badly healed,
they carry stone-tipped spears
for thrusting and throwing
at close quarters.
Sixty thousand years:
after another length of human absence
due to the spread of ice and bitter cold,
the Neanderthals return
across the Mammoth Steppes
of the North European Plain,
across Doggerland and into Britain.
As well as clothes from skins,
they probably have strong footwear,
maybe even snow shoes.
They take shelter where they can find it,
make windbreaks with mammoth bones,
fires from dried grasses and mammoth dung,
use wood for the handles and shafts
of their stone tools.
Forty-three thousand years,
and on the move
out of Africa,
Homo sapiens,
like us but more sturdy,
larger body and brain.
They make complex tools:
weapons tipped with points
fom carved antlers
delicate bladelets, very sharp,
and art, decorative and realistic,
but they can’t stay in the north
because of the gathering cold.
Seventeen thousand years
and reindeer move across the land
that emerges from under the ice
during the summer months.
They are followed
by Homo sapiens.
Based on Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story by Rob Dinnis and Chris Stringer, Natural History Museum, 2014. The recently opened Moesgaard Museum of Prehistory in Denmark is dominated by a great black staircase and as you walk up or down it, you pass three-dimensional models of human beings in the stages of their long history. There’s an ape-like creature at the bottom and Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair at the top; they all have skin that looks like real skin and an expression of friendly but abstracted empathy in their eyes that makes them appear like benevolent but still-dangerous zombies.
12
The British Museum Prehistory storeroom is a run-down-looking industrial building on a narrow side street in the East End of London. I rang the bell and was let into a dark entrance hall caught somewhere between the 1930s and the 1970s. Threadbare carpets; metal radiators painted several times over in brown gloss paint; the smell of old dust. I needed to fill out a form stating my name, the name of the person I was seeing and the time of my arrival. My appointment was at two and according to my watch and the clock on the wall it was now exactly that. ‘No, no, it’s three. That clock is wrong. It hasn’t been put back yet,’ said the man overseeing my form-filling. I showed him my watch and tried to make a joke, but the joke fell flat. I realised that he had forgotten to put the clock back and he didn’t find it funny to think that someone else had climbed on to a chair and done his work for him.
My appointment was with Nick Ashton, Senior Curator of the Palaeolithic Collections. We shook hands formally and then he grinned and throughout our meeting he was both shy and outspoken, young boy and old man in equal measure. He led me up grey and lugubrious staircases and through a warren of corridors and rooms, all of which needed locking and unlocking. There was a lot of silence and no sign of anyone else in the building.
Several rooms contained those metal stacks on wheels that you sometimes find in large libraries. They save space by making a solid wall that can be pulled apart to reveal a narrow passageway. Instead of books, the stacks contained layer upon layer of labelled wooden drawers. Nick opened some of them to show me what they held. Stone and bone, horn and ivory, bits of blackened wood or reed, all worked by human beings. There was something poignant about the objects, if that is the right word. They were like thousands of bird specimens in a natural history collection; by which I mean it was as if these objects had once been alive, flying through the air, gripped in th
e hand, cutting or thumping into flesh or bone and now they lay as still and quiet as death itself.
Such a huge span of time was contained here, in an anonymous building flanked by designer studios, art galleries, architects’ offices, and all the rest of the new wealth of London. This was old wealth, crammed into the darkness. Things that had been offered as gifts to the earth or to the water; things that had been buried to honour the bodies of the dead; things that had enabled people to hunt and to survive.
When I first contacted Nick I’d said I’d like to see some Mesolithic artefacts from the site in Yorkshire called Star Carr, as well as the flints from Pakefield. Now he apologised and said he didn’t have much because it was on display, but he collected two drawers of stuff along with a drawer of flints, and carried them like a waiter with a tray into a room where there were several grey-topped tables, a swivel office chair with what looked like a bite taken out of the foam rubber of its seat, bookcases and video surveillance.
We sat down and started talking. His first interest was medieval archaeology, but he began to move back and back in time because he realised the deeper you go, the more interesting it becomes and the real questions about what it means to be human lie in prehistory. The Neanderthals were at the heart of it all, they held the secret.
He spoke of the perfect coincidence of finding the footsteps at Happisburgh. He was there with Martin Bates and the others who were involved in uncovering them as the rain fell and the waves rushed in. Nine hundred thousand years ago and there was no doubt about the age of this layer of sediment. A few flint tools found close to the footprints helped with the dating and there was evidence of large mammals that died out eight hundred thousand years ago alongside newly evolving species that had just appeared, like the one Nick calls the Comedy Elk because it had such absurdly big antlers. The evidence from beetle fragments and other time dating showed that by this period the winters were very cold, making the area an inhospitable world as far as humans were concerned and yet here they were, a little band of pioneers, way beyond their natural boundaries.
At first it was thought that the footsteps belonged to a group of adult male hunters, who must have moved as far south as the Mediterranean coast with the approach of winter, but then it was shown that the footsteps indicated a residential family group who could never have travelled such long distances. So how did they manage? Did they have hair growing over their bodies, which helped to keep them warm? Maybe they knew how to use fire better than had previously been thought, even though there is nothing to prove the idea. During the winter they must have needed meat, so were they scavengers competing with the hyenas, or hunters competing with the big cats and the wolves? Perhaps most important of all: were they the only ones so far away from anywhere, or were there others who left no trace of their passing?
Time Song Page 6