Homo Britannicus

by Chris Stringer

  Very much a Del Boy of his time, Philp demanded the enormous sum (for those days) of £100, quite beyond the means of the Torquay Natural History Society. Fortunately, Pengelly had connections in high places and invited the distinguished geologist and palaeontologist Hugh Falconer to visit the site, after which Falconer

  was able to persuade the Geological Society of London and the Royal Society to sponsor the excavations. Meanwhile Philp printed and displayed posters all over Devon: ‘The “Ossiferous Cavern” recently discovered on Windmill Rea Common will be exhibited for a short time only, by Mr. PHILP, who has just disposed of it to a well-known scientific gentleman. Those who delight in contemplating the mysterious and wonderful operations of nature, will not find their time, or money mis-spent, in exploring this remarkable Cavern, and as the fossils are about to be removed, persons desirous of seeing them had better apply early...’

  With a curious public and the financial support of two of the most prestigious academic societies in Britain, Pengelly must have felt the weight of expectations as he began to excavate in the Brixham Bone Cavern. Within a few weeks, however, the team had collected not only a large number of fossil bones but also the first flint tools in association with them. Aware of his responsibilities, Pengelly developed a new recording system that he was to apply fully when he later returned to excavate in Kent’s Cavern. His techniques required each specimen to be examined in place before removal, and its position accurately determined. When the usual approach was to pickaxe straight into the richest deposit and then bucket or wheelbarrow the finds away en masse, his methods were far ahead of their time, and his records are still used to reconstruct the stratigraphy and position of important finds from his excavations. In September 1858, Pengelly and Falconer’s results were presented at a meeting of the British Association in Leeds, stating that they had found clear evidence of stone tools in association with the bones of hyaena, rhinoceros and other antediluvian species. Public and scientific interest was now primed for the even more remarkable events that were to unfold in the following year.

  In Europe, events had been taking a parallel course, and Falconer and the geologist Lyell were keeping watchful eyes on developments there. Around 1830, work in French and Belgian caves had also turned up apparent associations of extinct species and artefacts. Pierre Tournal, working in the cave of Bize in the Midi region of France, not only found evidence of stone tools with the bones of cave bear, rhinoceros, hyaena and reindeer, but even carving on reindeer antlers. He noted that the finds showed signs of gradual and natural deposition in different layers, rather than by the action of a catastrophic flood. Near Liège in Belgium, Philippe-Charles Schmerling, a doctor of Austrian origin, worked in a number of caves beside the River Meuse. Like MacEnery and Pengelly, he found stone tools and fossils of extinct species such as rhinoceros and mammoth beneath unbroken stalagmite floors but, unlike them, he also found intermingled human remains in four of the caves. Making careful observation of the condition and preservation of the human bones, he was confident that ‘the human bones were buried at the same time and by the same causes as the other extinct species’. Moreover, he added, ‘Even if we had not found human bones in circumstances strongly supporting the assumption that they belonged to the antediluvian period, proof would have been furnished by the worked bones and shaped flints.’

  Schmerling’s most famous finds were made in the Engis Cave between 1829 and 1830, where he discovered two partial human skulls. Although direct radiocarbon dating now suggests that one is actually less than 10,000 years old, another (the skull of a child) was finally recognized in 1936 as belonging to a Neanderthal. The development of its teeth suggests that it was less than four years old at death, so the skull had not yet developed its characteristic adult shape, a shape that became known only after 1856. Charles Lyell visited Schmerling’s excavations and cited them in the third edition of his Principles of Geology in 1834, but at that time he and most other scientists were still cautious about what the discoveries signified. Thirty years later, and sadly long after Schmerling’s death, Lyell made amends and paid rich tribute to his great persistence and discoveries: ‘at length, after finding leisure, strength, and courage for all these operations, to look forward, as the fruits of one’s labour, to the publication of unwelcome intelligence, opposed to the prepossessions of the scientific as well as of the unscientific public… we need scarcely wonder, not only that a passing

  traveller [Lyell] failed to stop and scrutinise the evidence, but that a quarter of a century should have elapsed before even the neighbouring professors of the University of Liège came forth to vindicate the truthfulness of their indefatigable and clear-sighted countryman.’

  It was the work of a Frenchman that finally pushed waverers like Lyell from their fence-sitting about whether humans were really contemporary with the fossils of extinct animals. Jacques Boucher de Perthes, a customs officer at Abbeville on the River Somme, had begun collecting handaxes from the river gravels in 1836, and ten years later he published Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes, in which he claimed that the stone tools were in association with antediluvian fossil bones. ‘In spite of their imperfection, these rude stones prove the existence of man as surely as a whole Louvre would have done,’ he argued. At first, his findings were questioned or ignored, but by the 1850 s they had fomented and catalysed a fierce debate on both sides of the Channel. He received unexpected support in 1854 when one of his strongest and most distinguished opponents, Dr Jérôme Rigollot, announced that in searching for disproof he had instead made similar finds at St Acheul, near Amiens.

  Then in 1858 Hugh Falconer took a winter trip to Sicily to improve his health. With Pengelly’s discoveries fresh in his mind, he called in at Abbeville to see de Perthes’ evidence, and was greatly impressed by the association of ‘flint hatchets’ and elephant molars. He invited Joseph Prestwich, a fellow member of the Geological Society of London, and the archaeologist John Evans to visit Abbeville and St Acheul with him in 1859. On his stomach-churning ferry voyage to France, Evans had written, ‘Think of their finding flint axes and arrow-heads at Abbeville in conjunction with bones of Elephants and Rhinoceroses 40 ft below the surface in a bed of drift… I can hardly believe it. It will make my ancient Britons quite modern if Man is carried back in England to the days when Elephants, Rhinoceroses, Hippopotamuses and Tigers were also inhabitants of the country.’ But Evans and Prestwich were completely won over by what they saw, and May and June 1859 provided a fever pitch of academic presentations at the Royal Society, the Royal Institution and the Society of Antiquaries in London. Falconer publicly supported the claims of de Perthes and Rigollot, Pengelly reported the results of his excavations at Brixham, and Prestwich presented a paper ‘On the Occurrence of flint implements associated with the remains of animals of extinct species in beds of a late geological period at Amiens and Abbeville and in England at Hoxne’. Evans added a discussion of the stone tools and a few days later exhorted the people of Britain to find more evidence, saying, ‘This much appears to be established beyond doubt, that in a period of antiquity remote beyond any of which we have hitherto found traces, this portion of the globe was peopled by Man.’ At last Frere, Tournal, Schmerling and MacEnery were vindicated: whether under stalagmite floors in caves or deep in river or lake sediments, flint tools were clearly present in association with the bones of extinct (antediluvial) animals. Lyell was in the audience at the Royal Society meeting and finally followed suit publicly when he addressed the Geological Section of the British Association in Aberdeen later in the same year, stating that he was ‘fully prepared to corroborate the conclusions… recently laid before the Royal Society by Mr Prestwich’.

  The year 1859 was thus critical for our understanding of human prehistory. Despite a few waverers and doubters, the tide finally turned in favour of the concept of humans as part of an ancient world inhabited by distinct and extinct faunas, and the floodgates were opening. The publication of Charles Darwin’s book On t
he Origin of Species came in November. In his later autobiography Darwin confessed that he fully understood the implications of his ideas for human origins as far back as 1838, but that he was also aware in 1859 of the lack of supporting fossil evidence: ‘Although in the Origin of Species, the derivation of any particular species is never discussed, yet I thought it best, in order that no honourable man should accuse me of concealing my views, to add that by the work in question “light would be thrown on the origin of man and his history”. It would have been useless and injurious to the success of the book to have paraded without giving any evidence my conviction with respect to his origin.’ Nevertheless, the ramifications of stating that all species were linked by common descent was there for all to see. Four years later, in 1863, Lyell showed the extent of his conversion to a long time scale for humans in The Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man and Thomas Huxley boldly went much further on human evolution than Darwin could have in 1859, in Man’s Place in Nature. In 1865 Sir John Lubbock (later Lord Avebury) of the British Museum published Prehistoric Times and extended Christian Thomson’s three ages of technology into four. He recognized that the Stone Age was of two kinds: an older period of flaked tools such as those found by Frere, Pengelly and Boucher de Perthes, and a later period of polished artefacts like those found in Danish burials, Swiss lake dwellings and the chambered tombs of Britain. He coined the terms Palaeolithic for the Old Stone Age, and Neolithic for the New Stone Age, both of which preceded the Bronze and Iron Ages. This chronology became widely accepted, but there were still many unanswered questions about the Stone Age. What kind of Britain could have been inhabited by such strange mixtures of creatures as hyaenas, reindeer and hippopotamus? How long ago was the Palaeolithic, and how long did it last? And what kind of people made the stone tools that Frere, MacEnery and Pengelly had excavated?

  Answering those questions required a concept of recent Earth history that involved neither catastrophic floods nor a Britain that was just a slightly older version of that of the nineteenth century. In particular it had to explain how Britain could have been inhabited by animals that then were found only in the Arctic (reindeer) and the tropics (hippos). During the first half of the nineteenth century, just such a concept had in fact been emerging. And, in this case Dean Buckland can be seen as a progressive and enlightened figure rather than a religiously inspired opponent of new ideas. His view had been that the superficial deposits of the Earth (diluvium) had been produced by the Noachian Great Flood. But some geologists recognized that even on the tops of hills and mountains there were exotic rocks transported far from their place of origin. The idea grew that they might have floated to these places trapped in icebergs that had been displaced in the Flood. As the icebergs melted, they dropped their loads of ‘erratics’, and the material so deposited became known as drift. However, in the early 1800 s some naturalists and engineers working in regions of Europe such as the Alps had noticed that drift deposits were still being produced where there were mountain glaciers.

  In 1829 a Swiss civil engineer, Ignaz Venetz-Sitten, had recognized that landscapes well beyond the Alps seemed to show signs of glacial erosion and deposition, and in 1836 a Swiss amateur geologist, Jean de Charpentier, took a doubting young zoologist called Louis Agassiz to see this evidence. Agassiz, a former student of Cuvier, was soon converted from a diluvial to a glacial model for the creation of drift deposits. Buckland had invited him to Britain to study fossil fishes in 1834, and Agassiz now returned the compliment by inviting him to Switzerland to examine the glacial evidence. To his great credit, Buckland not only quickly acknowledged that Agassiz’s interpretations were valid, he also said that he had seen similar formations in parts of Britain where there had been no ice in historic times. As they both realized, this meant that the Ice Age was not just a local phenomenon, and Buckland invited Agassiz back again, this time to visit Scotland and look at possible glacial landscapes. In 1840 Agassiz gave papers on both fossil fish and glaciers at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Glasgow and was soon ready to publish his observations showing that Scotland must once have been completely covered by ice. These observations included the sculpting of the landscape with valleys showing a characteristic U-shaped profile, rocks that had been scratched by passing glaciers, accumulations of huge numbers of erratics, and the presence of moraines (deposits of drift dumped in front of expanding ice caps).

  Buckland’s support certainly helped the acceptance of Agassiz’s ideas in Britain, and he even converted his old student Charles Lyell to the idea. Nonetheless, both Buckland and Agassiz were still biblical creationists at heart, and neither believed in a great antiquity for humans, nor in Darwinian evolution. And Agassiz became so obsessed with the concept of an Ice Age that he saw its effects everywhere, even as far as the Amazon River. Equally, he was not able to abandon all of Cuvier’s catastrophism. He wrote in 1866, ‘The gigantic quadrupeds, the Mastodons, Elephants, Tigers, Lions, Hyenas, Bears, whose remains are found in Europe from its southern promontories to the northernmost limits of Siberia and Scandinavia… may indeed be said to have possessed the Earth in those days. But their reign was over. A sudden intense winter, that was also to last for ages, fell upon our globe; it spread over the very countries where these tropical animals had their homes, and so suddenly did it come upon them that they were embalmed beneath masses of snow and ice, without time even for the decay which follows death.’

  Although Agassiz was able to convince important figures like Buckland and Lyell of the validity of his Glacial theory, it was evident to others that there had not been just a single worldwide Ice Age – things were clearly more complex than that. In 1854, the Swiss geologist Morlot suggested that there were two glacial stages separated by a warmer diluvial stage, and in Britain James Geike suggested in his 1874 book The Great Ice Age and its Relation to the Antiquity of Man that there had been a series of alternating glacial (cold) and interglacial (warm) stages. By 1909, two researchers Albrecht Penck and Eduard Bruckner proposed in their book Die Alpen im Eiszeitater (The Alps in the Ice Age) that there were four glacial stages in the Alps, which they named after Alpine rivers (in increasing age) Würm, Riss, Mindel and Günz, with intervening warmer stages called Riss-Würm, Mindel-Riss and Günz-Mindel, respectively. As we will see, this division liberated geology and archaeology from the straitjacket of Agassiz’s single great Ice Age, but eventually the four-ice-age system became a straitjacket of its own, as scientists applied the Alpine model globally, despite growing evidence for even greater complexity in past climate change.

  The term Quaternary (‘Fourth’) has become popular for the period of Earth history containing the glaciations and extending up to the present day, following on from the three stages Arduino had named in 1759 (Primary, Secondary, Tertiary). Lyell proposed the alternative term Pleistocene in 1839 from the Greek words for ‘most’ and ‘recent’. Yet another term was added later to cover the period we live in today following the ice ages: the Holocene (‘wholly recent’). Thus the Quaternary is equivalent to the Pleistocene + Holocene. In the rest of this book we will use Pleistocene to cover the period of time from about 1.8 million years ago to the end of the last Ice Age, about 11,500 years ago, at which point we come into the Recent or Holocene. The Pleistocene is also nearly synonymous with the Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age), but we know that early humans were actually using stone tools in Africa more than two million years ago, so the Palaeolithic extends back beyond the Pleistocene into the preceding Pliocene.

  In 1867 Gabriel de Mortillet, a Professor of Anthropology in Paris, further developed the divisions of the Palaeolithic, based on layered deposits in caves and river gravels where different types of stone tools and associated animal remains could be sequenced in time in relation to each other. He argued that these represented epochs of increasing age in the Palaeolithic and named them after typical sites in France such as the Magdalenian (after the cave of La Madeleine = Reindeer Age); Mousterian (after Le Moustier Cav
e = early part of Cave Bear-Mammoth Age); Chellean (after the river deposits of Chelles = period of the straight-tusked elephant). Later these Stone Age periods were grouped into a new three-part classification of the Palaeolithic: the blade tools and art of the Magdalenian became part of the Upper Palaeolithic; the flake tools of the Mousterian became the Middle Palaeolithic; and the handaxes of the Chellean (similar to those found by Frere and Boucher de Perthes) became the Lower Palaeolithic. But fossils to show who made these different tools were remarkably slow in arriving, and in some cases they were positively misleading.

  We now know that Buckland’s finds from Paviland and Schmerling’s from Engis include genuine Pleistocene fossils, but at the time they were either misinterpreted or ignored. Similarly, in 1848, a strange-looking skull was found after blasting in a limestone quarry below the sheer north face of the Rock of Gibraltar. But it was not properly examined for another fifteen years. In the meantime, some other peculiar bones were found in Germany that were eventually recognized for what they were – the remains of an ancient European people, the makers of Middle Palaeolithic tools. Near the town of Düsseldorf, the River Düssel runs through a small limestone valley that in the 1800 s was peppered by cave openings. Named after the poet and hymn composer Joachim Neander, the Neanderthal (Neander Valley) began to be extensively quarried in 1854, and two years later, the clay filling one of the caves (Kleine Feldhofer Grotte – the small cave near the Feldhof Farm) was being thrown 60 foot down to the valley floor. Bones thought to be those of cave bears were seen as they were being dumped, and they found their way to a local teacher and natural historian, Johann Carl Fuhlrott, who recognized that they were actually human. In 1857 both he and an Anatomy Professor at the University of Bonn, Hermann Schaaffhausen, published descriptions of the Neanderthal human skullcap and partial skeleton. Schaaffhausen said that the bones ‘exceed all the rest in those peculiarities of conformation which lead to the conclusion of their belonging to a barbarous and savage race’, and he regarded them ‘as the most ancient memorial of the early inhabitants of Europe’.