Tamed

by Alice Roberts

  From the Levant to the Solent

  The complexity of human society that already existed, before agriculture, before civilisation as we know it, helps us to understand how ideas – and materials – travelled around, and rippled out.

  Archaeology provides us with wonderful insights into the connectedness of ancient societies. The shared iconography between Göbekli Tepe and other archaeological sites as far east as Çayönü in south-eastern Anatolia and Tell Qaramel in north-west Syria shows just how far cultural links stretched across the Near Eastern landscape: Çayönü and Tell Qaramel are about 200 miles apart. The multiple centres of origin for domesticated species across the lands at the eastern end of the Mediterranean blow the idea of a small ‘core area’ out of the water, but also attest to cultural connections and systems of exchange that allowed ideas – and seed corn – to travel widely. The Neolithic didn’t emerge in a corner of south-east Turkey; it was born from multiple, connected centres stretching across the Middle East and beyond: domesticated einkorn has been found on Cyprus, dating to 8,500 years ago – just as early as those sites in the old ‘core area’ of northern Mesopotamia.

  And then, just 500 years later, we have that DNA fingerprint of einkorn from the submerged Mesolithic site under the Solent. How did that wheat travel all the way from the eastern Mediterranean to the fringe of north-western Europe, all those thousands of years ago? We’re familiar with the trade networks that extended across the Roman Empire, two thousand years ago. Archaeology has revealed extensive trade existed earlier – in the Iron Age, even going back into the Bronze Age and the preceding Neolithic. But long-distance trade amongst small, isolated bands of hunter-gatherers eking out a living in the Mesolithic or Epipalaeolithic? That surely seems like a step too far.

  Well, it might do until you take a look at examples from much more recent history. The Native Americans of the Northwest Coast maintained trade links across a huge area, spanning hundreds of miles – exchanging goods, gifts and marriage partners. These links were fundamental to power and prestige. In Australia, pre-European colonisation, the exchange networks of aboriginal communities stretched from coast to coast, right across the continent. And archaeologists are finding more and more evidence of raw materials and finished objects being carried over long distances across Europe in the Mesolithic. Flint from the coast travels some 50 kilometres inland in Brittany; axes made from Norwegian dolorite turn up in Sweden; flint blades from Lithuania turn up nearly 600 kilometres away, in Finland; amber from the eastern Baltic also makes its way to Finland; graves in the late Mesolithic Vedbæk cemetery in Denmark contain pendants made from the teeth of elk and aurochs – both species that were locally extinct at the time. Of course, an object may have changed hands several times over those distances. The distribution of such widely travelled goods implies that people were moving around both by land and by sea. Archaeologists believe that Mesolithic people were making voyages of up to 100 kilometres – probably using dugout canoes with outriggers. The acquisition of exotic materials seems to be linked to the development of a change in society in northern Europe, as egalitarian hunter-gatherer communities become more interested in status. Society becomes stratified – the world’s oldest class system begins to emerge. It’s not quite Downton Abbey, but archaeology starts to reveal a distinction between high- and low-status individuals: rich and poor. Some elaborate Mesolithic burials from around the Baltic Sea contain exotic items – presumably acting as symbols of social status.

  Just as social stratification may have played into the origin of agriculture in the Middle East, it may have eased the transition in the north and west. If you’re only focused on basic subsistence, you can be quite insular. If you’re interested in acquiring exotic goods, and status, then you need to connect with the wider world. And the Mesolithic people across Europe appear to have been much more connected than we’ve previously assumed.

  Mesolithic networks of exchange – of materials, ideas and people – meant that the hunters and foragers of the west were already communicating with the first farmers in the east. By 6,500 years ago, farming groups were well settled in the Danube Valley. Hunter-gatherers to the north – still living a Mesolithic way of life – borrowed pottery, T-shaped antler axes, bone rings and combs from their Neolithic neighbours to the south. They probably traded furs and amber in exchange. Nevertheless, 8,000 years ago is still extremely early for a trace of einkorn in a Mesolithic settlement on the north-west fringe of Europe. The Ice Age had only lately loosened its grip on these northerly latitudes.

  The warming climate at the end of the Ice Age had an impact on the environments of the Middle East – but an even more profound effect in north-western Europe. This was where the ice sheets had descended, holding the northern part of the continent in a frozen grip for thousands of years. To the south of the ice itself, a large swathe of land had been treeless tundra. Local populations of warm-adapted species – including humans, bears and oak trees – went extinct where the ice sheets and tundra dominated.

  Cousins in the south clung on, in still-habitable refugia in the south of France, Iberian Peninsula and Italy. When warmth returned, and the ice sheets retreated, much of northern Europe was left covered with sandy sediments from the rivers that flowed from the melting ice, and finer till left by the glaciers themselves. Sedges, grasses, dwarf birch and willow colonised the fresh landscape, transforming it into steppe tundra. After the chill of the Younger Dryas had passed, by 11,600 years ago, birch, hazel and pine began to spread northwards again.

  By 8,000 years ago, the landscapes of northern Europe – including the peninsula that was Britain – had become enfolded in woodland, with lime, elm, beech and oak. The forests were full of life – aurochs and elk, wild pig, roe and red deer, pine marten, otters, squirrels and wolves, and plenty of wildfowl. Coastal waters were teeming with molluscs, fish, seals, porpoises and whales. Mesolithic people made good use of these resources – they were hunter-fisher-foragers. Armed with bows and arrows, and accompanied by dogs, they hunted animals on land. Kitted out with canoes, nets, hooks and lines, and fish traps, they pulled fish out of seas and rivers.

  Humans started to recolonise northern Europe at the tail-end of the Younger Dryas, reaching Britain by 9600 BCE. The first colonisers didn’t even need to get their feet wet. Sea levels during the Ice Age had been as much as 120 metres lower than today. As the ice melted, the sea level rose – but the first plants and animals returned to repopulate Britain when this soon-to-be island was still firmly connected to mainland Europe.

  The classic picture, emerging from the archaeology, has been of small, mobile groups of hunter-gatherers – moving frequently, leaving little trace. Mesolithic sites are, typically, very modest in size and only briefly occupied. But at Star Carr in Yorkshire, recent excavations have revealed the existence of a surprisingly large Mesolithic settlement. A platform of worked timber extends along some 30 metres of the lake edge at this 9,000-year-old site. The whole area covers almost 2 hectares – 20,000 square metres. In such a large, sedentary community, it’s very likely that society was hierarchical to some extent.

  Even if there were small, mobile bands of hunter-gatherers roaming north-west Europe during the Mesolithic, it seems that – at least in some places – human society was becoming more complex. In this context – with the existence of larger, more settled, more complex and more well-connected groups than has been previously assumed – the discoveries at Bouldnor Cliff seem less astonishing perhaps.

  Lying at opposite ends of England, Star Carr and Bouldnor Cliff both suggest that we’ve probably underestimated the complexity of the early Mesolithic in Britain. And, just as in the Middle East, social complexity appears to have preceded the adoption of agriculture, not to have flowed from it. Mesolithic lifestyles were quite variable: some communities seem to have been quite sedentary; others were developing seafaring – shown by the trade in obsidian around the Mediterranean as well as evidence for deep-sea fishing.

  And
yet the 8,000-year-old einkorn DNA at Bouldnor Cliff still seemed like a bolt out of the blue. Traditional methods of investigation – archaeology and botany – show domesticated einkorn appearing all over Mesopotamia, and spilling over into Cyprus, nine to ten thousand years ago. The Neolithic rippled across Europe, from east to west, reaching all the way to Ireland by some six thousand years ago. Einkorn was being grown in the middle Danube basin by 7,500 years ago. Einkorn had reached Switzerland and Germany over five thousand years ago. But the spread of the Neolithic seems to have been even more rapid along the Mediterranean coasts. Particular types of pottery seem to arrive as part of the Neolithic package at early sites in western Europe, spreading along the coasts. Recent excavations have revealed the presence of Neolithic farmers as far west as the south coast of France – by 7,600 years ago. These early French farmers had pottery, domestic sheep, emmer wheat – and einkorn. With definitive evidence of einkorn in France just 400 years earlier than the trace at Bouldnor Cliff, the gap seems to be closing. No one’s suggesting that the Bouldnorites were early farmers – but they were connected to the wider world. Agricultural produce from the near continent was making its way into Britain before the arrival of farming itself.

  The tale of the einkorn at the bottom of the sea opens our eyes to new possibilities, and surely reminds us not to be dogmatic about our reconstruction of the past. It’s difficult – if not impossible – to find the earliest example of anything, anywhere. Genetics is now joining the armoury of archaeological tools and enabling us to draw out the tiniest, buried clues. Dates are being pushed back. That taste of wheat, perhaps even of bread – of a new way of life – had reached the coast of southern England earlier than anyone had thought possible.

  Imagine being a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer, camped at Bouldnor. One day, you’re visited by voyagers, people from a faraway tribe who you see from time to time. When they arrive, you offer them hospitality – they sit down to eat a meal of roast reindeer meat with you. They bring something else to the table – something quite different to the foods you could gather near home: hard little seeds. The visitors show you the seeds can be ground down, mixed with water, rolled and flattened in the hands, then cooked on the flat stones in the hearth. You eat something new and delicious that night: flatbread. This is what people at the other end of the long sea eat all the time, the voyagers tell you. These little seeds came originally from vast grasslands in the Sumerlands, the land where the sun rises.

  We’ll probably never know how that wheat got to Bouldnor, and indeed whether it was made into porridge or bread and eaten there. But it certainly makes you wonder whether those Mesolithic hunter-gatherers knew anything about this other way of life, that was inexorably creeping closer, along the coastlines of Europe. Could they even have imagined that the grains in that bread had been deliberately grown rather than gathered? And yet there would come a time, not too many centuries hence, when even the forests of Britain would give way to fields.

  3

  CATTLE

  Bos taurus

  Brindled cow, bold freckled,

  Spotted cow, white speckled;

  Ye four field sward mottled.

  The old white-faced,

  And the grey Geingen

  With the white bull

  From the court of the King,

  And thou little black calf, suspended on the hook,

  Come thou also, whole again, home.

  Twelfth-century Welsh poem

  The riddle of the long-horned beast

  I write anywhere I can. I take my laptop everywhere with me, and I write on trains, planes and in taxis. I write in hotel rooms when I’m off for meetings or filming. I sit in cafes and write, when I’m away in cities. But the place where I feel that writing flows out of me best is at home. I sit in the bay window of the cottage and type away. I can glance up at my garden, filled now with splashes of early-autumn colour – with all manner of domesticated species that I have planted there for no other reason than that they look beautiful. The echinacea and rudbeckia are in flower – like gems of yellow and purple-pink amidst the greenness. My roses are blossoming again, clambering over the rose arch and clinging on to a lingering warmth.

  The field beyond my garden stretches off, framed in the distance by copper beech trees – more dark purple than coppery now. And in that green field, dark shapes moving in the morning mist, are the cattle. They hang together in a loose herd, eating and eating their way through the day, tearing up the lush green grass that has grown again after haymaking. They’re all young males. Sometimes startled and rushing from one end of the field to the other. But mostly quite still and serene. I look up as I’m trying to straighten my thoughts out and pull together the threads of this story, and I find their presence calming.

  Even though these cattle are actually young bullocks, a few with quite formidable horns, I’ll walk across their field without too much trepidation. They rarely show much interest in humans in their environs – unless it’s the farmer in his truck. Later in the year, as autumn tips into winter, he’ll drive his Hilux into the field and throw hay bales off it. The bullocks will run over to follow the truck, eager for the sweet taste of old hay. They can move fast when they want to. But mostly they are still, or moving slowly, mowing the grass, step by step. I won’t take a path through the herd – that would be foolish. But I’m happy to venture into their field. Only on one or two occasions have I felt intimidated enough by a specific bullock to retreat, slowly, back to the gate and out.

  These creatures are huge compared to me – ten times larger and heavier, at some 600 kilograms. Adult bulls can weigh twice that. But the ancient ancestors of cattle – the aurochsen, ‘ur-oxen’ – were even bigger, with the largest estimated to have weighed as much as 1,500 kilograms. You have to respect the audacity of any hunter-gatherer prepared to take that on: not just to hunt these huge animals, but to catch them and try to tame them. The skull of an aurochs on display at the Museum of London, with its formidable, metre-wide pair of horns, makes that moment of sheer, crazy bravery even more astonishing.

  Our Ice Age ancestors shared the landscape with these huge beasts. Hunting them is one thing – but how did such an enormous, intimidating animal ever become domesticated?

  The Formby footprints

  I drove over the dunes in my old VW van – a Type 25 Syncro equipped with four-wheel drive – and down on to the beach at Formby. This was my trusty camper van, bought from my dear friend and mentor, archaeologist Mick Aston. It was pretty on the inside – I’d painted Hokusai-style waves on the plywood interior. The outside was good-looking too, in bright metallic green. But it meant business: it had a sump protector; it had that four-wheel drive that could get you out of large holes on beaches (tried and tested); its cousins had crossed the Sahara.

  And so – with the blessing of the National Trust – I had no qualms about driving my van over the dunes and down on to the beach. I followed the ranger in his Land Rover. The van grunted a little as we drove up the side of a dune; I could feel the power shifting, but the wheels didn’t spin. We were filming there – the very first series of Coast for BBC2. Production had not reckoned on the wind and rain that might blight our filming. The van became a refuge. It was warm and dry. I could even offer the crew and contributors cups of tea, brewed up on the tiny gas hob.

  When the day brightened up, we emerged out of the van to survey the beach and plan our capture of it for the small screen. It’s such a vast stretch of sand. It was almost impossible to see to the ends of it.

  Formby Beach is the southern continuation of Southport Beach – where, on 16 March 1926, the ex-fighter pilot Sir Henry Segrave broke the world land speed record, in his bright red, four-litre Sunbeam Tiger, nicknamed Ladybird. His top speed was just over 152 miles per hour. Just a month later, the record was broken, but Segrave won it back in 1927, smashing it again in 1929 – this time at Daytona Beach in Florida. The photographs from the race day in 1926 capture the excitement of the moment, wi
th a crowd gathered on the beach. Some onlookers climbed up on the dunes to get a better view of Segrave in his Ladybird.

  But it’s not just racing cars that tear up the sand here. Every spring tide brings with it energetic waves which surge right up and crash on the sand, clawing it back, exposing deeper layers of sediment underneath. It was these deep layers that had drawn me to Formby. I’m peripherally interested in raw geology, but when the traces of animals and humans start to appear in these media of sand and mud, silt and stone – that really piques my interest. And this is why I was there – to film those ancient silty sediments, under all that fine sand. A land speed record from ninety years ago was too recent to register. A blink of the eye; just yesterday. What I wanted to see was traces of the past from thousands of years ago. I knew they were here, on this beach.

  In March 1989, retired schoolteacher Gordon Roberts was walking his dog along the sandy shore when he noticed strange impressions in newly exposed, deep silty layers. They were the right size and shape and spacing to be footprints. He looked more closely. That’s exactly what they were. Gordon found more and more footprints. He wasn’t completely taken by surprise, as local people knew that these traces turned up from time to time on the beach. But, perhaps rather curiously, no one seemed to have taken much notice of them.