Scenes from Prehistoric Life

by Pryor, Francis;

  I was astonished by the freshness of the flints from Pakefield and Happisburgh when they were published in the archaeological press. You could tell they hadn’t been rolled around in glacial ice or river water. They were as clean and sharp as the day they’d been made – and of course that is why they are so very important. But will we ever discover an earlier site in Britain? I suspect we might find somewhere that is just over a million years old, but I would be very, very surprised if anything turns up that’s much older. And will I regret saying that? Heavens, no: I like to lay down a challenge.

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  Coastal sites like Happisburgh and Pakefield have revealed the very earliest evidence for human occupation in Britain, but they have preserved little evidence for actual in situ remains, where Lower Palaeolithic people actually performed some of the tasks of daily life. You might suppose that European evidence for such very early activity might have been revealed in a cave or a sheltered valley somewhere in France or Spain, but no: one of the earliest and best preserved has been found, excavated and fully published in England, just a short distance from the south coast, at Eartham Quarry, off Boxgrove Common, in Sussex.11 I visited the site twice in the early 1990s, while it was being dug. It was an experience I have not forgotten. To be honest, I had never been to a Palaeolithic excavation before, and by the end of my first visit I was almost overwhelmed by what I had witnessed. It took such skill: it was slow and meticulous, yet at the same time so exciting.

  There is something about watching while a student, with the most extraordinary care, concentration and lightness of touch, excavates a hand-axe from the trampled floor, where it was discarded or dropped some 500,000 years ago. It was the sheer age of the flint she was revealing that I still find so hard to accept. Indeed, that vivid memory of the young woman, completely and utterly focused on her demanding task, still manages to give me goosebumps. Quite rightly, she was completely intent on what lay at her arm’s length: our group of twenty middle-aged, mostly male, archaeologists did not concern her. I also very much doubt whether she would have noticed the tower of an old brick-built windmill high on the chalk downland of Halnaker Hill, overlooking the quarry, to the north. I have always loved windmills, and for some reason this one caught my imagination. It has stayed there, ever since.

  Halnaker Mill stands at the top of what half a million years ago would have been a seaside chalk cliff. Today, the site and quarry at Boxgrove is just under 10 kilometres (6 miles) as the crow flies from the coast at Bognor Regis. Geologists and archaeologists have been able to plot the course of the Pleistocene cliff for almost 32 kilometres (20 miles) through Sussex and into Hampshire. In places it survives some 6 metres (20 ft) high. At Boxgrove it runs along the north edge of the Eartham Quarry. I have worked in many gravel pits and almost always the sands and gravels are separated by sieving or washing, following bulk extraction of the unsorted ballast. But at the Eartham Quarry, things were different. Here, the sand and gravel pits were separate, but next to each other. This separation was entirely natural, but it took some working out: a lot of archaeological and geological thought had gone into unravelling the processes that led to those complex deposits.

  When we arrived we were shown the base of the original Ice Age chalk cliffs, which survived a few metres high, but which geologists reckoned were originally 75–100 metres (246–328 ft) high. So they would certainly have been comparable to those at Dover, at 110 metres (360 ft). The sands and gravels were deposited in two distinct episodes during the Pleistocene. The sand formed first and represents a beach that extended about 50 metres (165 ft) from the base of the cliffs. This beach would have been regularly visited by Palaeolithic people on the lookout for nodules of flint eroding out of the cliffs. We know this because occasional thin flint flakes have been found there. These were probably debris that resulted from the making of hand-axes.

  At this stage of the Pleistocene, the sea was gradually retreating. Soon, tidal sandbanks started to form south of the cliffs and these gave rise to shallow lagoons, where the water flowed more slowly. Slow-moving water hasn’t got the energy to shift the larger particles – grains of sand and fine gravel. So these start to accumulate in the form of tidal mudflats. These lagoonal muds turned out to be an archaeological gold mine, because in dry periods, when tides were low, they would dry out – and you could walk across them. And yet the cliffs behind them were still an excellent source of flint for tools. So people came here to make, or knap, hand-axes for use elsewhere. Often, the flakes of the knapping debris occurred in confined V-shaped spreads, which modern experimental work has shown is the result of a flint-worker sitting or kneeling on the ground to shape a hand-axe. Most of the debris accumulates in front and to either side of him.

  Many of the completed hand-axes at Boxgrove were removed from the site, but in one instance the knapper accidentally knocked the tip off an almost finished hand-axe. I can well imagine what he said when this happened. So he did what I would have done: he threw the broken end away in disgust, and dropped the now useless tool in with the rest of the debris. But he had come to Boxgrove to make a hand-axe and he couldn’t leave without one. So then he made another one, which he must have done successfully, because he took it away with him when he had finished. It’s not often that you get such a detailed glimpse of a moment in somebody’s life, such a very long time ago.

  Another, if anything even more extraordinary, prehistoric working area was revealed in the second quarry. This proved to be the site of the butchering of a wild horse, but most remarkably, the bone and flint debris that was so painstakingly excavated over many weeks seems to have been dropped there over just one day, half a million years ago. We don’t know how the animal was killed because most of the meat bones had been removed, but I think it unlikely that it had been dragged to the Boxgrove foreshore for any distance. It’s far more probable that it was butchered where it was killed. The animal was first skinned and then defleshed with hand-axes that had been sharpened with a single, oblique blow to one side of the tip. This technique, which requires great skill to master, leaves a razor-sharp cutting edge.

  Once the meat had been taken away, the leg bones were then removed from the horse’s skeleton and split open, by bashing with a large, rounded stone (which left distinctive impact scars on the bone), in order to remove the nutritious marrow.12 The excavators closely examined quite a large area around the butchery site, where they revealed at least a dozen clusters of flint flakes, which marked places where hand-axes had been made. The way these were arranged around the remains of the horse clearly showed that the hand-axes were made on the spot, to be used specifically for the butchering process. But the excavators were able to take the story even further.

  The dozen flint-working clusters were of two types. There were concentrations where the flakes were larger and there were anvil stones, on which the big flint nodules were held to have the initial preparatory flakes removed with rounded hammerstone pebbles, which were also still there. These flint rough-outs were then taken to other areas, where finer flakes were removed with hammers or punches of bone or antler. It seems likely that the two tasks were performed by different people: maybe younger, fitter men did the initial preparation, while more experienced flint-knappers did the final, more delicate work. Many of the hand-axes that had been used for the butchery had been abandoned and lay around the few remaining bones of the horse, which had clearly been picked clean by scavenging birds and animals, whose gnawing teeth had scraped grooves that overlaid the nicks and scratches left by the human butchers, perhaps just a few hours earlier.

  So who were these people, these ‘butchers of Boxgrove’? I won’t go into the intricacies of dating Boxgrove, because it depends on such esoteric things as voles’ teeth and whether they are rooted or unrooted. But the consensus of evidence suggests that the various lagoon deposits were laid down during a warm phase that pre-dated the largest glacial phase of the Ice Age, the Anglian – when glaciers reached as far south as London. The Anglian began
around 480,000 years ago. So the human activities at Boxgrove were probably taking place around 500,000 years ago. I can still remember how astonished the archaeological world of the late 1980s and early 1990s had been by Boxgrove’s revelations, which seemed to get better and better, year after year. By 1993, few of us suspected there was even more to come.

  It was decided to open a small trench just north of the main excavations in order to work out the sequence of overlying and intercutting layers. The Pleistocene geology was known to be complex in this part of the quarry, with many of the deposits buckled and contorted by water action. Once they had been worked out, there were plans to extend the large-scale excavations into the new area. I’ve done such preliminary research myself and it can be a lonely and seemingly thankless task, being confined to a small trench, often in the winter when the main body of the student workforce is safely out of the way at university or college. I would now try to do such work with somebody else: problems are far easier to sort out in discussion than on one’s own. But that isn’t always possible. And that was the case at Boxgrove, where the small trial trench was being excavated by a local volunteer, Roger Pedersen. Shortly before Christmas 1993, Roger discovered the fragments of a large long-bone, which had been partially crushed and moved when the ground shifted, due to waterlogging. He immediately contacted the project’s bone specialist at the British Museum, who suspected, as indeed Roger did, that it might prove to be human. And they were both right. The bone, a tibia or shin bone, was eventually shown to have belonged to a large man (or very large woman), aged about forty, some 1.9 metres (5 ft 11 in) tall, weighing about 89 kilos (14 stone).

  An extended area around the spot where the shin bone had been found was excavated in 1994 and 1995, and it proved to be remarkably rich in both flints and animal bones. Most of these, including the human bone, were found in stream channels running along the base of the nearby cliffs. It would seem that these streams were where wild animals came to drink. These included red deer, horse, bison and rhino. Many of their bones bore the distinctive cut marks left following butchery with hand-axes. Again, as with the horse butchery site, many of the animals, especially some juvenile rhinos, had had their limb bones removed. Put simply, they took the best cuts of meat home with them. But it wasn’t until the end of the 1995 season that they made another great discovery – in fact, something they had been hoping to find since Christmas two years previously.

  Long-running, large-scale excavations tend to wind down, rather than come to a sudden and dramatic end. That way, you can ensure that all the records and notes are in good order and that all the finds boxes are correctly labelled and stored in the right racks and that tools are put away, properly cleaned and in good repair. But in my experience, Sod’s Law then dictates that you make the most important discoveries of the entire season in those last few days, when many of the staff have left and when the people running the dig are feeling tired and are desperate for a few days off. And that’s what happened at Boxgrove in 1995.

  This time, the find was far smaller than the shin bone, but in many respects it was much more revealing. It was immediately recognizable as one of the two front teeth (incisors) at the centre of the lower jaw. It was found in the same stream channel, but a metre below it. And then, on the very last day of the dig, they found the other front incisor, just 1.5 metres (5 ft) away. Both were the same size, fitted together, and were from the same person. They were covered with quite a thick deposit of dental plaque, which indicates that Boxgrove Man’s oral hygiene left a lot to be desired and that he would probably have started to lose his teeth quite soon. The two teeth also carried tiny scars left by flint implements. The best explanation for these is that he would regularly grip meat in his teeth, which he would then cut off the bone with a hand-axe. These scratches went in the same direction (from top left to bottom right), which suggests he was right-handed.

  Unfortunately, the tibia shaft wasn’t sufficiently distinctive to allow Boxgrove Man to be placed within any of the known groups of early people. But the two front teeth were far more informative. They were slightly larger than those of modern man, Homo sapiens, and could best be matched with a mandible (lower jaw) found at Mauer, near Heidelberg, in Germany, in 1908. This person belonged to a group of early homininsb known as Heidelberg Man, or Homo heidelbergensis, which preceded modern man and Neanderthal man (whom we will encounter in the next Scene). Boxgrove Man was large, with a distinctive under-cut jawline that lacked any chin. He would have looked different from modern man, but there are no reasons to suppose that he was markedly less able or intelligent: I would certainly feel very challenged if asked to produce such fine hand-axes and the organization of the landscape at Boxgrove seems far from random or chaotic. I’m in little doubt that these people possessed language and used it regularly in their daily lives.

  There is an extraordinary depth and diversity to the landscapes hidden below the old shoreline at Boxgrove. They speak to me of temporality and change and the impermanence of features and places that help us to fix our role in the world – and with it our individual identities. And even in the deepest depths of prehistory, people must have regretted the demise of a much-loved place. How would Boxgrove Man have regarded the shrinking lagoons and encroaching grassland, as sea levels declined? We tend to think that people in the past judged everything from a practical perspective: were certain changes going to benefit the occurrence of wild game, or the growth of cereal crops? But in reality, they would also have had an emotional response to any changes that were happening around them. Maybe they didn’t possess language sophisticated enough to express their more profound emotions, but I strongly suspect they would have had songs and rhymes where feelings of sadness, happiness or longing lay just behind the words – and of course human eyes can express almost anything. But even when you feel at your lowest, things can change in unexpected ways; then, as now, the landscape can be full of surprises – which brings me back to that lonely windmill high on the ancient cliff at Halnaker Hill, above the Boxgrove quarry.

  Halnaker Mill was built around 1750 and continued to earn its keep, taking advantage of the strong winds off the English Channel, until it was struck by lightning in 1905 – which put it out of action. The poet Hilaire Belloc, best known for his Cautionary Tales for Children (1907), was brought up in West Sussex and even owned a mill. He was clearly distressed by the state of Halnaker Mill after the lightning strike. He saw the abandoned mill as a symbol of the rural economy, which was then in decline, following the agricultural recession of the 1870s.13 His poem Ha’nacker Mill has to be one of the saddest poems about landscape that I know. It includes lines like: ‘Spirits that call and no one answers – Ha’nacker’s down and England’s done’.

  But nothing is permanent in this world: things do change. England wasn’t done. The mill survived the Great War and was restored in 1934 and again in 2004. Today it is in the care of the County Council. And taking a rather longer view, I very much doubt if even Hilaire Belloc could have imagined the extraordinary finds that were later to be discovered far beneath his feet, at the base of those long-buried cliffs, just a short distance to the south. The poem, the mill, the buried cliffs and the finds concealed below them are all part of the same story. Those rolling green hills have so much to teach us.

  a ‘Knapping’ is the word usually used to describe the process of flint-working.

  b The word ‘hominin’ refers to all members of the genus Homo – mankind. The older term ‘Hominids’ is broader and includes great apes, such as chimpanzees. australianmuseum.net.au/hominid-and-hominin-whats-the-difference

  Scene 2

  The Persistence of Caves: Life, Death and the Ancestors (30,000 years ago–600 BC)

  Goat’s Hole Cave, Paviland – Killuragh and Sramore Caves – Robber’s Den Cave

  Archaeologists and prehistorians deal with real things and scientific data. On the whole, we tend to ignore those ‘what if?’ questions that can fascinate historians. I sometimes wonde
r, for example, to what extent British prehistory would have been altered if the Ice Age cold spells had been milder. This particularly applies to the final glaciation known as the Devensian (which lasted from c. 75,000 to 12,000 years ago). We have glimpsed what life was like during a warmer phase half a million years ago, but there can be little doubt that everything slowed down markedly during the centuries of ice when most or indeed all of Britain was abandoned for long periods.

  Recent research has produced some remarkable insights into this remote period that has proved so difficult to interpret. This work has also revealed the extent to which our own understanding of life in the later Old Stone Age (or Upper Palaeolithic) can be radically affected by quite minor shifts in the way we interpret, and reinterpret, the evidence. I shall give one example and then we must move forward to a warmer climate and a steadily growing population. But first we must visit a remote cave in the Gower Peninsula, on the coast of south-west Wales. This was where early clergyman-archaeologist Dean William Buckland discovered the skeleton of the Red ‘Lady’ of Paviland, back in 1823.

  You will have noticed that I described the body, discovered by Dean Buckland in the unusually named Goat’s Hole Cave at Paviland, as the Red ‘Lady’. I say ‘Lady’ because ‘she’ was in fact a man, about twenty-five to thirty years old. Modern science has since demonstrated that the bones are the earliest example of a modern human (Homo sapiens) yet found in Britain. The earliest modern humans evolved as a new subspecies in Africa, over 200,000 years ago.1 The clergyman who discovered the grave in the Goat’s Hole Cave was in many ways as remarkable as the bones he came across. His life, both actual and intellectual, tells us much about the spirit of the times and what it would have been like to have experienced the start of the profound shift from Creationism to science-based rationality.