Homo Britannicus

by Chris Stringer

  The palaeontologist Brian Gardiner of King’s College, London, has argued that the staining procedures in Hinton’s materials were the same as those used in the Piltdown assemblage, and thus that Martin was the forger. His motive might have been revenge following a quarrel about departmental payments due to him or perhaps he, like several others, had taken a personal dislike to Smith Woodward. Shortly after the exposure of the forgery, Hinton indicated in conversations, interviews and correspondence that he had long had suspicions about Piltdown and may even have known who was behind it. He certainly had the geological knowledge and access to materials to produce the forgeries, whether in league with Dawson or not. But there are now several additional reasons to suspect that Dawson was not merely the innocent victim of the malice or trickery of others. As mentioned already, he was the only figure present throughout the main events, and the strange ‘discoveries’ at Piltdown II can only be laid at his door. Additionally, there is now plenty of other evidence that Dawson was not the straightforward solicitor and honest amateur scientist he seemed. He was involved in a chain of actual or likely forgeries of fossils and archaeological objects, and in misrepresentation or plagiarism of the work of others. His motive for Piltdown was probably scientific and personal ambition, and knowing the field well he was able to create material that closely matched prevailing ideas and scientific agendas.

  But what about Hinton? His attitude towards Piltdown both before and after the exposure was suspicious, and the contents of the trunk show he was experimenting with the faking of fossils – was this to create his own forgeries or to show how Piltdown could have been done? This brings us back to the extraordinary ‘cricket bat’, the last significant find at Piltdown I. Letters and interviews show that Hinton was well aware of the forgeries at Piltdown and, from the similarities with material in Hinton’s trunk, I think he made and planted this absurd object to warn the forger(s) that the game was up. To his horror, instead of terminating the whole Piltdown saga, this bizarre piece was heralded as the world’s oldest bone implement. Under this scenario, Piltdown II followed as Dawson’s reaction to the contamination of the original site. He then fell ill and died before he could properly develop a new Eoanthropus somewhere else.

  Of the original protagonists, only Sir Arthur Keith, Hinton and Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and palaeontologist who had helped at the site and found the canine tooth, were still alive when the fake was exposed in 1953. Poor Keith lived to see both his favoured claimants for the earliest Britons – the putative eolith-maker from Piltdown, and the handaxe maker from Galley Hill – eliminated by new finds and new techniques. But he also lived to see and study the real thing, a discovery made a few hundred feet away from the spurious site of Galley Hill. There in the Barnfield Pit at Swanscombe, where thousands of handaxes had been found, parts of a skull were excavated in 1935 and 1936 that at last showed what the handaxe makers of Britain looked like.

  This chapter has covered a lot of ground. John Frere’s 1797 speculation that the handaxes he had found came from ‘a very remote period indeed; even beyond that of the present world’ was elaborated during the following hundred years into a deep and complex prehistory, one with a succession of warm and cold stages, a sequence of stone tool industries, and the beginning of a fossil record of human evolution that conceivably stretched back half a million years or more. Barely two hundred years after Frere’s discovery, recent finds from Suffolk have taken the human story in Britain back to an even more remote time, one that is unquestionably beyond that of the present world.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The First Britons

  We now believe that the early humans represented by Eugene Dubois’s finds from Java – known as Homo erectus – had evolved in Africa and started to spread from there nearly two million years ago, the first species definitely known to have done so. Initially these early humans were thought to have spread eastwards to China and Indonesia, keeping to subtropical and tropical environments that were familiar to them. But from 1991 new finds started to be made in western Asia, in Georgia, at a site called Dmanisi. The site lay under a ruined medieval village, but the archaeologists digging it were puzzled to find a rhinoceros tooth in the wall of the cellar in one of the buildings. Palaeontologists identified this tooth as an early Pleistocene fossil, and further excavations showed that a much more ancient site made up the hill on which the village had been built.

  This work yielded many more fossils, including scimitar-toothed cats and other large predators, as well as giant ostriches. It also produced a chinless human jawbone. Georgian scientists and American collaborators argued that the site was nearly two million years old, which many experts found difficult to accept. However, further research has backed up these claims, placing the date at about 1.7 million years, and producing five small-brained human skulls, three more jawbones, and many other parts of the skeleton. So primitive humans were living in western Asia, close to the eastern borders of Europe. The stone tools they were using were as basic as those made by their presumed African ancestors from two million years ago – sharp but simple pebble and flake tools, made with one or two blows of a hammerstone.

  If people were in western Asia over 1.5 million years ago, why did they leave Africa, and how and when did they first arrive in Europe? It used to be thought that the first move out of Africa must have been fuelled by changes in behaviour, bigger brains, or better tools, but it is difficult to discern such developments in the evidence preserved at Dmanisi. Certainly some of the animals there, including large carnivores and giant ostriches, had also spread from Africa, and it may well be that the Georgian environments were not that different from those of North Africa. Additionally, two of the large African-derived carnivores were scimitar-tooth cats, and these specialized animals lacked the teeth to strip a carcass clean of its meat, or break the thicker bones of their prey. Ancestral humans in Africa are thought to have undergone a change in physique about two million years ago, evolving a more human body shape, with longer legs powered by reshaped muscles and tendons, and a well-defined neck and waist. It has been suggested that this physique evolved to help early humans get to dead animals before the scavenger competition by endurance running. Humans cannot run very fast, but we are (when fit!) steady but supreme longdistance runners, and we can envisage early H. erectus scanning the horizon for the first sign of vultures circling a dying or dead animal, and then making off towards it. Getting ahead of the hyaenas and jackals and fending off the vultures would have guaranteed a good supply of meat, whether the carcass was a natural death or the victim of a predator.

  Medium-sized social carnivores such as hyaenas and wolves have large hunting and scavenging ranges, and as archaeological evidence suggests that human ancestors in Africa increasingly switched to carnivory about two million years ago, perhaps this alone was enough to push the expansion of early human ranges out of Africa. Some experts have calculated that a switch to meat and an increase in body size documented in the fossil record at this time would have necessitated a ten-fold increase in feeding range compared with their supposed African ancestors. While dependence on particular plant resources would have limited expansion, switching to meat eating meant that humans could follow the herds and even switch food species as the need arose.

  Three ancient routes into Europe have been proposed: the most obvious one is via western Asia – either from the Caucasus (including modern countries such as Armenia and Georgia) or from the Levant, the corridor connecting north-east Africa and western Asia (including countries such as Israel and Syria). Two other possible and more direct pathways from North Africa into southern Europe have been proposed, via routes across the Mediterranean. The more westerly one might have been from what is now Morocco into what is now Spain or Gibraltar, while a central one might have led from present-day Tunisia to Italy via Sicily. These last two routes would have been easier if the sea level was affected by the periodic growth of the ice caps, lowering the Mediterranean and exposing more land,
with additional islands between. However, there were never continuous land bridges between Africa and Europe in these two regions, so any early human pioneers contemplating such a journey would have required a raft. So most experts believe that the eastern route into Europe from western Asia was by far the most viable and probable, and this region does have evidence of human occupation from over a million years ago such as Ubeidiya in Israel and Dmanisi, already mentioned. In addition, there is evidence of the spread of mammals that had originated in Africa from western Asia into Europe such as large predators and a baboon-like monkey. But comparably early archaeological evidence from Europe is either absent or at best highly contentious. It has been claimed that artefacts from sites in France and southern Spain date from over a million years ago, but many experts are doubtful of the artefacts, the dating, or both. So when did humans first arrive in Europe, and in Britain?

  The general belief has been that humans, emerging from their African homeland, would have taken a long time to find ways of coping with the very different environments of Europe, and in

  particular northern Europe, where average temperatures were lower, growing seasons and winter days shorter, and winter conditions much more severe. Behavioural adaptations such as skin clothing, making shelters and building fires, would all have helped in the north, but archaeological evidence suggests that these innovations came later in the European record. Many archaeologists also believed that people then were poor hunters, and would have only been able to scavenge, rather than hunt, anything larger or fiercer than a rabbit. Thus early humans would have had to loiter in the background while lions, hyaenas, vultures or wolves got their fill, and then were left to scrape the bones and break open the most inaccessible parts of the carcass with their stone tools to extract any remnants of marrow. With fierce competition from a range of formidable carnivores, humans would have needed much better technology and social organization before they were able to survive in areas like Britain, or so it was argued.

  The 1935 discovery of the Swanscombe skull in a Kent gravel pit had been a landmark for archaeology and human fossils in Britain, particularly as Piltdown edged ever closer to the palaeontological dustbin, but it also seemed to confirm humans in Britain as definite latecomers. Britain was at the end of the migration routes of those first colonizers: the Mauer jaw suggested that people might have reached as far north as Germany during a first wave of advance about half a million years ago, but there was no evidence that they had reached Britain until after the massive ice advance called the Anglian, dated about 450,000 years ago (see next chapter), which pushed the River Thames southwards to its present course. As we shall also see, things began to change in 1993 with the discovery of human remains at Boxgrove, near Chichester, that seemed to predate the Anglian ice advance. This suggested that people actually were in Britain about 500,000 years ago, around the same age as Mauer. The records show us what animals they may have eaten, what tools they used and, in the case of Boxgrove, how they made and deployed them. But as for more details of their adaptations, for example whether they had camps, or used fire, the sites are silent – the evidence is simply not there.

  Were these, in fact, the oldest records of humans in Europe? That certainly was the predominant opinion about ten years ago, encapsulated in the views of two Dutch scientists, Wil Roebroeks and Thijs van Kolfschoten, in what became known as the Short Chronology. In summary, the argument went that from 500,000 years ago there was clear evidence of a human presence in the form of well-dated artefacts such as the handaxes from Boxgrove, well-stratified butchered bones and, most unequivocally, the human fossils from Boxgrove and Mauer. But before that, the evidence was either sparse or poorly dated, and in the case of human fossils, non-existent. Diligent searches for over a century in the pre-Anglian deposits of Norfolk and Suffolk had yielded up many thousands of fossil mammal bones, a smattering of dubious eoliths, but no credible butchered bones or human fossils. Good evidence only appeared just before the Anglian glaciation of about 450,000 years ago, not in East Anglia itself, but further south at Boxgrove and, perhaps, the lowest levels of Kent’s Cavern, dug so long ago by MacEnery and Pengelly, dated by their association with fossils of a water vole called Arvicola terrestris cantiana, as was also the case at Mauer. Roebroeks and van Kolfschoten argued that this was the situation throughout Europe. Humans may have evolved in Africa by two million years ago, and spread eastwards to China and Indonesia by a million years ago, but European conditions were much more challenging and less suited to a primate of tropical origins, at least until human adaptations were finally up to speed in coping with those challenges, something not achieved until about half a million years ago.

  But the Short Chronology has since had to give way twice, first in southern Europe, and then, with the work of AHOB, further north as well. There is now strong evidence that humans were in fact in southern Europe much earlier than 500,000 years ago. In southern Spain, at Orce, some archaeologists believe they can date stone tools as far back as 1.5 million years, but these claims remain highly controversial. From a later date, a fossil human braincase with large brow ridges, resembling both H. erectus and H. heidelbergensis, has been discovered in deposits on a hillside in central Italy at Ceprano. It derives from levels which elsewhere contain simple stone tools (no handaxes), with an approximate date of 800,000 years. From a similar age, but with somewhat better dating, the Atapuerca Hills in northern Spain have produced fragmentary human fossils of several adults and children. This is an open site called Gran Dolina, exposed by an old railway cutting through the Sierra de Atapuerca, and it is filled with earthy sediments containing bones and stone tools. The layer containing the human fossils and associated stone tools (again simple ones, not handaxes) lies immediately under a level that records the last time that the Earth’s magnetic poles underwent a major switch in orientation (this is discussed further in the next chapter) – a switch which has been dated at about 780,000 years ago. Furthermore, these human fossils were definitely associated with the primitive vole Mimomys, rather than its descendant Arvicola, so something known as the vole clock signalled a greater age than Boxgrove or Mauer. The vole clock is based on the evolutionary transition between the primitive and extinct vole called Mimomys savini and the water vole Arvicola terrestris cantiana. Mimomys had molar teeth with closed roots, whereas the molars of its descendant, Arvicola, are open-rooted and ever growing. Early sites in Europe (such as Orce and Gran Dolina) have Mimomys, while later sites (like Mauer and Boxgrove) have Arvicola fossils.

  The Gran Dolina fossils include the bones of the forehead and face of a child, fragments of jaws, teeth, arm and foot bones, and even a kneecap, and most show marks that suggest they were cut by stone tools. While we might have attributed such damage to burial practices if we were dealing with recent humans and their complex behaviour, this seems unlikely for early humans, leading to the suggestion that these individuals were the victims of ancient cannibals, whether of their own or another group. Early studies of the fossils led the Spanish workers who have studied the bones to propose that they represented a new species of human called H. antecessor, Pioneer Man. They originally argued that this species evolved in Africa from H. ergaster, where it went on to give rise to H. sapiens, while the population that spread to Europe eventually gave rise to the Neanderthals. Thus antecessor was the last common ancestor both of our species and the Neanderthals. However, some of the team have recently rethought these ideas and now believe that features in the face, jawbones and teeth may indicate that antecessor is more closely related to fossils of H. erectus from China. They argue that an alternative scenario has antecessor in Europe, with its basic tools, being replaced by populations of heidelbergensis that originated in Africa and spread from there, bearing handaxe tools. It is these people who would then have been the ancestors of the Neanderthals, not antecessor, which died out.

  Finds from Italy and Spain thus successfully challenged the Short Chronology, but one of its originators, Wil Roebroeks,
argued that the model still held true for northern Europe, where good evidence of human occupation before 500,000 years ago, and before Arvicola, was still lacking, despite nearly 200 years of careful searching in regions such as East Anglia. But it is there that new and critical evidence has finally emerged. This breakthrough has come about because of an unrelenting and, for some people, catastrophic advance of the North Sea across parts of the coasts of Norfolk and Suffolk. The last fifteen years have seen a dramatic increase in this erosion, with arguments raging over the causes and what can be done about it. Greatly increased dredging for sand and gravel offshore, improved coastal defences in some regions deflecting erosion to other areas, global warming increasing the frequency and the strength of storms – all these have been implicated at times, and all may indeed be contributing. But whatever the reason, an old Norfolk coastal village called Happisburgh (local pronunciation Haysborough) has seen its cliffs cut back viciously with houses, roads and the lifeboat ramp lost to the sea, and the creation of a new bay over 500 metres wide. This tragedy for the local inhabitants has been accompanied by the exposure of long-buried deposits in and under the cliffs that date from before the Anglian ice advance of about 450,000 years ago.

  A few years ago, in a muddy deposit on the foreshore exposed only at low tide, a local archaeologist uncovered a beautiful handaxe made of black flint, and bones of deer and bison. By then, AHOB researcher Simon Parfitt had studied a collection of mammal bones purchased by the Natural History Museum in 1897, including some from Happisburgh. The collection was made by one of the greatest accumulators of fossil evidence from East Anglia – the geologist Alfred Savin, after whom several of the species represented have been named, including the vole Mimomys savini. One find was particularly significant as it was the foot bone of a bison, and it had multiple cut marks on it, marks that had not been noticed over the previous hundred years when it had sat in a museum drawer.