Homo Britannicus

by Chris Stringer

  The first step towards archaeology was the recognition that shaped stones, found when digging ditches or foundations, or ploughing fields, were not ‘ceraunia’ (thunderbolts) or elf shot but were actually tools shaped by ancient humans. Around 1590 Michele Mercati (Director of the Vatican Botanic Gardens) illustrated ceraunia, which we now recognize as stone tools ranging in age from 5,000 to 30,000 years old. But he broke with convention in saying that while most men believed that ceraunia were produced by lightning, he considered they had been ‘broken from very hard flints in the days before iron was used for the follies of war’. Mercati was largely ignored, but sixty-five years later the Frenchman Isaac de la Peyrere was less fortunate when he wrote that ceraunia were the work of a pre-Adamite race of man – his books were publicly burnt in Paris in 1655. Around the same time, in Britain, Sir William Dugdale argued in his History of Warwickshire that such stones were ‘weapons used by the Britons before the art of making arms of brass or iron was known’. This idea that there could have been a Stone Age before metal was discovered or used was reinforced as collections of artefacts brought back to European museums from colonies during the ages of exploration and

  enlightenment showed that there were peoples still alive who used stone rather than metals to make tools.

  Possibly the first British description of a specific ancient stone artefact was of a handaxe. In 1715, John Bagford reported that an antique dealer, Mr Conyers, had found a ‘British weapon’ and the tooth of an elephant near what is now Gray’s Inn Road in London. Bagford imagined that it had been the spear point of an ancient Briton who had used it to kill one of the Roman emperor Claudius’s elephants. At the end of the same century John Frere of Norfolk sent some flint implements that he had found just across the Suffolk border at Hoxne to the Society of Antiquaries in London. In an accompanying letter he said, ‘if not particularly objects of curiosity in themselves, [these] must… be considered in that light from the situation in which

  they were found.’ Frere observed that they had been found in undisturbed deposits twelve feet deep with strange animal bones, and presciently reported that ‘the situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed; even beyond that of the present world’. We can now recognize these as 400,000-year-old flint handaxes, but most of Frere’s contemporaries in Britain were still content with biblical timescales for prehistory. Sir Thomas Browne spoke for the majority when he wrote in 1635, ‘Time we may comprehend,’ tis but five days elder than ourselves, and hath the same horoscope with the world.’ In 1650, using Old Testament genealogies, Archbishop Ussher calculated a date for the creation of the Earth and Man that received wide currency and was even inserted in the margins of subsequent editions of the Bible: 4004 BC. This meant that Man had then been in existence for less than six thousand years, and similar calculations showed that the post-Flood world had been in existence for only some four thousand years.

  By about 1820, a more complex model was developing that suggested there had been successive ‘creations’ of living things, each one destroyed by a separate Flood. During the European ‘Age of Enlightenment’, between about 1750 and 1820, a wealth of knowledge about the natural world not only began to accumulate in private collections and public museums, but was also investigated systematically for the first time. The seeds were sown for the revolutions in geology and biology that were to follow a few decades later. Rather than rely on the voices of biblical and classical authority, antiquaries (the archaeologists of the day) began critically to compare the evidence they observed with the ancient sources of their education, and natural philosophers (the scientists of the day) began to look at life and the universe in completely new, and analytical, ways. Geology was still in its infancy but some scientists recognized that the biblical accounts might not be telling the whole story. A few tried to reconcile the developing fossil record with the different days of creation, while others developed a catastrophic explanation for the geological succession.

  In 1771, Father Johann Esper discovered human bones underlying those of extinct animals in the Gailenreuth Cave near Bayreuth in Germany. In a 1774 publication he asked himself, ‘Did they belong to a Druid or to an Ante-diluvian or to a Mortal Man of more recent times? I dare not presume without any sufficient reason these human members to be of the same age as the other animal petrifactions. They must have got there by chance together with them.’ The most influential French geologist and naturalist of the time, Baron Georges Cuvier (nicknamed ‘The Pope of Bones’), argued that the human bones had indeed become mixed with the more ancient fossil ones. Even easier for Cuvier to dismiss had been the 1731 claim by Professor Johann Scheuchzer of Zurich, who believed he had uncovered the ‘bony skeleton of one of those infamous men whose sins brought upon the world the dire misfortune of the deluge’. Cuvier showed that the fossil ‘Homo diluvii testis’ (human witness of the Flood) was in fact the remains of an extinct giant salamander! He believed there had not been just one flood but several, each destroying a world that God had created earlier. Since humans were only present during the last of these (the Noachian Flood), it was hardly surprising that the biblical account was incomplete. This also meant that human bones could not have been fossilized during the earlier geological events and Cuvier strongly opposed any attempts to prove otherwise.

  As influential in Britain in the 1820 s as Cuvier was in France, the Reverend William Buckland, Professor of Geology at Oxford University and later Dean of Westminster, brought the beginnings of a scientific approach to the study of fossil bones from British caves. In Reliquiae Diluvianae (‘Relics of the Flood: observations on the organic remains contained in caves, fissures, and diluvial gravel, and on other geological phenomena, attesting the action of an universal deluge’), he argued that superficial deposits of sands and gravels were evidence of the global Great Flood. Like Cuvier he favoured the idea that there could have been earlier creations and floods, but that human remains would not be found in flood deposits (diluvium) except, perhaps, near the location of the Garden of Eden, after humans had been created. A brilliant but eccentric man, Buckland carried out some of the first proper investigations of diluvial deposits in caves, and excavated one of the first fossil human skeletons known to science, although the evidence was subjected to his own idiosyncratic interpretation. He must have been an extraordinary sight, travelling the length and breadth of Britain for his geological and mineralogical studies, astride a horse and dressed in top hat and professorial gown.

  Buckland’s view that geology was not only consistent with the Book of Genesis, but would also prove its truth, was reinforced by the conclusions he drew from his excavations at Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire. Quarrymen had exposed a cave entrance and were using ‘cattle bones’ from the cave to stabilize muddy tracks. Buckland, however, had heard that these bones were peculiar and very numerous; were they perhaps the remains of creatures drowned in one of the great deluges? He set about exploring the complex web of cave passages, sampling and excavating as he went, and everywhere he found diluvial deposits packed with fossil bones. In keeping with his expectations, there were no human bones, but he found the remains of over twenty species of mammal, some native to Britain, some very exotic, and some quite extinct: they included deer, elephant, hyaena, lion and hippopotamus. Big game from Africa is very familiar to us now from zoos and wildlife documentaries, but this was not the case in 1821, and their discovery in a cave in Yorkshire was considered quite extraordinary. How such a peculiar mixture of creatures had arrived there was a challenging question – whether caused by a flood or not. One obvious but naive answer to this assemblage of alien bones would have been to assume that they had been washed from afar by the swirling flood waters. Buckland, however, made a brave scientific leap and argued that the bones represented animals that were alive at the same time in or around the cave. When the catastrophic Flood arrived, their remains outside the cave had been swept away but, in its deepest recesses, they had survive
d destruction.

  The modern science of taphonomy is the study of the processes that occur from the time an organism dies to its burial and potential fossilization: these processes can include the manner of death, decomposition, movement, burial, and chemical alterations. Buck-land was one of the pioneers of this science, although the Russian scientist Ivan Efremov did not coin the term until some 120 years later. Buckland noted that many of the bones in Kirkdale Cave were broken into small fragments and apparently had been gnawed, and he also noted that one of the most common animals represented as a fossil was the hyaena. He wrote to a colleague about the behaviour of modern hyaenas: ‘As we know they do not dislike putrid flesh, we may conceive they took home to their den fragments of those larger animals that died in the course of Nature, and which from their abundance in the Deluge gravel we know to have been the Antediluvian inhabitants of this country.’

  Not only was Buckland an early practitioner of taphonomy, he was also one of the first to conduct proper taphonomic experiments. He started by feeding various parts of animals to a Cape hyaena that was brought to Oxford in a travelling circus, and observing what was regurgitated from one end of the animal or

  dropped out of the other. Not content with the limitations imposed by the circus owner, Buckland imported his own hyaena from Africa, first intending to kill it and dissect its stomach contents and skeleton. But he could not bring himself to do this and kept Billy, as he named it, as a pet for the next twenty-five years until its death. Billy performed his taphonomic tasks admirably, disturbing dinner party guests by chomping whole guinea pigs under Buckland’s sofa, and there was soon a fine collection of chewed, regurgitated and defecated bones to compare with those found in Kirkdale Cave.

  Buckland described the results of his excavations and experiments to the Royal Society in 1822, and published Reliquiae Diluvianae a year later, both to much acclaim. His work was of such popular interest that in 1825 another cave full of fossil bones was opened to the public in Banwell, Somerset. Profound lines by the landowner George Law, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, were written on the wall at the entrance:

  O thou, who, trembling, viewest this cavern’s gloom,

  Pause and reflect on thy eternal doom,

  Think what the punishment of sin will be

  In the abyss of eternal misery.

  Here let the scoffer of God’s Holy Word

  Behold the traces of a deluged world,

  Here let him in Banwell Caves adore

  The Lord of Heaven. Then go and scoff no more.

  Banwell Bone Cave and its wonderful accumulations of fossils have taken on a new significance now, and will be discussed again in Chapter 4. But very different writing was already on the wall for Buckland and his views in the form of Uniformitarianism, the principle of which had been articulated by James Hutton in 1785: ‘No processes are to be employed that are not natural to the globe; no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle.’ Buckland was aware of its growing influence, and argued in Reliquiae Diluvianae that it was impossible to attribute accumulations of deposits and bones ‘to the effect of ancient or modern rivers, or any other cause, that are now or appear ever to have been in action, since the retreat of the diluvian waters’. In other words, the processes observed in the modern world simply could not be applied back to the extraordinary conditions of the Flood and pre-Flood worlds. As Buckland started to lose ground in the face of new discoveries and a new generation of investigators, the challenges of interpreting evidence to fit his theories grew. In 1823 he even discovered a human skeleton at Goat’s Hole, Paviland, in South Wales, in apparent association with mammoth ivory. We now know that this ‘Red Lady’ was in fact the 30,000-year-old burial of a Cro-Magnon man accompanied by red ochre pigments and ivory grave goods (see Chapter 5), but Buckland argued that it was the skeleton of a woman dating from Roman times, whose fellow tribesmen had dug up fossil ivory from the cave floor and fashioned it into jewellery: ‘She was clearly not coeval with the antediluvian extinct species.’

  Along with catastrophists like Cuvier and Buckland, there were other geologists who had gained their knowledge from engineering projects such as mining, quarrying and canal-building and who for entirely practical reasons created classifications of the different rocks they encountered. In 1759 Giovanni Arduino (known as ‘the father of Italian geology’) wrote a letter in which he proposed a three-part division of the succession of rocks: Primitive or Primary; Secondary; and Tertiary. In 1799 the civil engineer William Smith (Arduino’s English equivalent) began a classification of rocks that culminated in the publication of ‘Strata Identified by Organized Fossils’ in 1816, describing and mapping thirty-two superimposed layers of British rocks, each with their own index fossils. But the greatest revolution in geological thought came from a lawyer who was first inspired by Buckland’s lectures to switch to geology and then increasingly began to challenge his teacher’s views. As we shall see later, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published in 1830, gathered a huge amount of evidence in favour of Hutton’s Uniformitarianism. He argued strongly that the present (not the Bible) is the key to the geological past.

  A similar challenge to the primacy of biblical history was being mounted around the same time by archaeologists in Denmark who began to build up the framework of a succession of different technological ages that is still in use today. In 1813 the historian Vedel-Simonsen argued that ‘the weapons and implements of the earliest inhabitants of Scandinavia were at first of stone and wood… later copper… and only latterly, it would appear, iron. Therefore from this point of view, the history of their civilisation can be divided into an age of stone, an age of copper and an age of iron.’ Six years later Christian Thomson confirmed this division of different prehistoric periods when he arranged the collections of the Danish National Museum for display, and chose three successive Ages of prehistoric technology: Stone, Bronze and Iron. His views soon began to be influential in Britain, especially after an English translation of his Museum guidebook was published.

  The Three Age system gave prehistory a depth and breadth well beyond that provided by the authority of the Bible or the accounts of Roman authors. When the Romans arrived in western Europe they had indeed encountered Gauls, Ancient Britons and Druids, but these were all peoples of the Iron Age, and there were at least two more ancient human worlds before theirs: the Bronze Age, and the even more ancient Stone Age. How ancient no one could yet say, of course.

  One of the pioneers of British archaeology who began to flesh out the Stone Age and, tentatively, challenge Buckland’s antediluvian views was a Catholic priest based at Torre Abbey in Devon. Father John MacEnery began digging in Kent’s Cavern in Wellswood (now part of Torquay) in 1825, and soon broke through a floor of stalagmite to find stone tools associated with the bones of rhinoceros, sabre-tooth cats and other extinct animals. From his own accounts we can sense the struggle between excitement and scientific rigour as he examined some of the first finds: ‘On tumbling it over, the lustre of enamel... betrayed its contents. They were the first fossil teeth I had ever seen, and as I laid my hand on them, relics of extinct races and witnesses of an order of things which passed away with them, I shrank back involuntarily. Though not insensible to the excitement attending new discoveries, I am not ashamed to own that in the presence of these remains I felt more of awe than joy. But whatever may have been the impressions or the speculations that naturally rushed into my mind, this is not the place to indulge them – my present business is with facts.’

  MacEnery was regularly in touch with Buckland about the progress of the excavations, and the Professor visited the cave on several occasions, even publishing some of the finds in support of his antediluvial theories. But when MacEnery wrote to him about publishing findings that appeared to demonstrate the contemporaneity of humans and antediluvian species, Buckland argued that ancient Celts must have dug oven pits in the stalagmite floor of the cave, and that some of their tools had worked their w
ay down into the antediluvian deposits below. Although MacEnery continued the excavations under very difficult conditions for another ten years, he was so discouraged by Buckland’s dismissal of the evidence that he abandoned publication of his findings: ‘It is painful to dissent from so high an authority, and more particularly so from my concurrence generally in his views of the phenomena of these caves.’ Fortunately his manuscript was saved and eventually published in 1859, when he finally got the recognition his insight and dedication deserved – but sadly that was already eighteen years after his early death, which was almost certainly accelerated by his years of work in the damp and dark depths of the cave.

  Another West Country man, William Pengelly, took up the torch for British prehistory as it slipped from MacEnery’s dying grasp. Pengelly was born in Cornwall but had relatives in Torquay, where he helped to found its Natural History Society in 1844. Two years later he would continue MacEnery’s excavations at Kent’s Cavern but his most important work began in 1858, work that was finally to extinguish Buckland’s fading antediluvial theories. In that year, above the Devon fishing village of Brixham, a quarryman’s crowbar fell down a crevice into a pristine cave. When the quarry owner John Philp enlarged the hole and squeezed down it, he found himself beneath a continuous ceiling of stalactite, crawling on ancient cave sediments. Cleaning the deposits under candlelight revealed hordes of fossilized animal bones, and he soon opened the ‘Bone Cavern’ at Brixham to the paying public. Pengelly realized the potential of a sealed and untouched site to resolve the question of the association of humans and antediluvial animals once and for all, and attempted to negotiate with Philp for permission to excavate the cave properly.