More recent studies suggest yet another possibility. My doctoral research in 1974 compared measurements of the Swanscombe bones with those of modern humans, Neanderthals, and other fossils. In overall shape, Swanscombe was certainly not modern, with short, flat parietal bones, and a skull that was relatively broad across the base – in these respects it was most similar to Steinheim and to early Neanderthals such as a 125,000-year-old skull from Saccopastore in Italy. Such resemblances were confirmed when it was independently noted by the French researcher Jean-Jacques Hublin and the American researcher Albert Santa Luca that in the middle of the occipital bone Swanscombe had a small pit, called a suprainiac fossa. This pit, of uncertain function, lies at the upper edge of the attachment of the neck muscles, and while it is very rare in modern humans or human fossils, it is found in all known Neanderthals in which this part of the skull is preserved, and in Steinheim.
However, the strongest support for the Neanderthal affinities of Swanscombe comes not from Steinheim, but from discoveries a thousand miles to the south, near Burgos in northern Spain. During the 1800s a British mining company blasted a deep railway cutting through the rolling hills of the Sierra de Atapuerca, an eccentric act that would be frowned on today for its damage to the surrounding countryside. However, that railway cutting serendipitously opened up geological sections that have given us completely new windows into the world of the first Europeans. We have already looked through one of those windows, where 800,000-year-old fossil remains were found at Gran Dolina. But one cave in the hills had been providing a challenge to the young men of the region for centuries – they would impress their girl friends by descending into its depths and emerging with shiny cave bear teeth. The piles of cave sediment that they brought out accumulated near the entrance until in 1975 an expert on cave bears, drawn to the spot by news of the finds, began to inspect them. As well as the remains of cave bears, he spotted something very unexpected – a fossil human jawbone. This was the first find from what has become known, for very good reasons, as the Sima de los Huesos, the Pit of Bones. As I know from my own descent in 1992, to get to the Sima takes over an hour of real caving, crawling, clambering, and using ropes. The final descent is made by a small chain-link ladder that dangles and spins into the darkness of a 15-metre deep hole. At the bottom of the ladder is an unprepossessing chamber so small and remote that visitors use up its oxygen in a few hours, and must vacate it regularly for the air to replenish itself.
When systematic excavations began in the 1980s it was found that cave bear bones were concentrated at one end of the chamber, and human bones at the other. After fifteen years of dedicated work under the most trying conditions (a steady temperature of 13°C, but a humidity of 100 per cent), the team working in the Sima have now recovered over 4,000 human bones and teeth from the Pit, remains representing about thirty men, women and children. Every part of the skeleton is there, but the sample is an unusual one. Judging by variation in the size and strength of the bones, and the stage of maturity they show, there are about equal numbers of males and females, but very few young and old; most were adolescents and young adults. Why there are so many, and how they ended up deep down a little chamber in a huge cave, are still unsolved mysteries. Some of the bones show signs of chewing by large carnivores such as lions, and this has led to speculation that the bodies of these people first lay elsewhere in the cave, perhaps the result of a natural catastrophe or an epidemic. They were chewed over by carnivores and later on were sludged in a jumbled mass by mudflows down into the Pit during wet phases of the cave’s history. This would not only explain the chew marks but also why the bones of the skeleton are not represented in the proportions we would expect if complete bodies were decomposing in the Sima itself. However, the hypothesis put forward by most of the Atapuerca excavation team involves other humans throwing the bodies of their dead down into the Pit, in order to dispose of them. While there is no evidence that anyone ever lived in this part of the cave, there certainly was an ancient entrance, now blocked, much nearer to the Sima than the current opening on to the Atapuerca hills. And human involvement is suggested by the discovery of a well-made handaxe manufactured from a distinctive pinkish rock – the only artefact found associated with the bones in the Pit. Was this an offering to honour the dead?
However the bones found their way into the Pit, they give us a wonderful view of what the people of Europe were like at the time Swanscombe woman was living alongside the ancient Thames. They were strongly built, both in terms of their muscularity (judged by the development of the pits and marks where muscles attached) and their bone thickness, especially in the legs. Many of the different bones can be reunited to create composite skeletons, and these show that a male individual known from a complete hip and leg bones was about 1.75 metres (5ft 9in) tall, and must have weighed over 95 kilograms (210lb). Females were nearly as tall, about 1.7 metres. Many of the large sample of teeth display markings that indicate growth disturbances in early childhood, perhaps from the time of coming off the breast and switching to solid foods. They are often heavily worn, but show no signs of decay, and we know from grooves between the back teeth that these people probably used toothpicks of wood or bone. The teeth themselves are somewhat larger than the average today, especially the front ones (incisors), and from wear and scratch marks on them we can see they must have often used their clenched incisors as an extra hand, to hold and cut or manipulate meat or vegetable matter. The bones generally give no clue about how these people died, although a number show signs of healed head injuries. However, the best-preserved skull (number 5) is especially informative, with some thirteen possible injuries, and signs of serious inflammation of the face, which probably spread from abscesses in the teeth. In this case, the elderly man or woman probably died from the infection. A number of the skulls show signs of arthritis in the jaw joints, and one had diseased ears, and as a consequence may have been deaf. But overall, the skeletons are surprisingly healthy, with few other signs of injury or disease.
The heads of these people contained brains that, like Swans-combe, fall into the modern size range, although skull 5, at 1125 ml capacity, was very small. In modern people, the two hemispheres of the brain are asymmetric, and the shape differences can be correlated with handedness. The Atapuerca brain shape suggests that they, too, were predominantly right-handed, and this can be confirmed both by the greater size and muscularity of arm bones from the right side, and from the direction of the cut marks on the front teeth, where flint tools sometimes must have cut through whatever was being clamped in the jaws. The size of the brain gives little indication of its quality, but the preservation of the Atapuerca fossils is so good that there is another clue in the tiny bones of the middle ear – preserved in specimens such as skull 5. Using comparisons with modern data, it seems that the ears of the Atapuerca people were most receptive to the same frequencies as our own, perhaps an indication of the presence of speech.
In other respects the people of the Sima were very different from us. Their skulls were long and low, with jutting brow ridges over the eyes, and their jaws were strongly built, and chinless. At the back, the occipital bones show signs of the same little pit that we find on Swanscombe and on every Neanderthal – the suprainiac fossa. So it is likely that Swanscombe and the Atapuerca people were related to each other, and to the Neanderthals. We do not know what the face of the Swanscombe woman was like, although Steinheim gives us a clue, but the Sima samples show quite a range in shape. All the faces are large and broad, but some are rather flat, while others show a beaky nose, very like that of the Neanderthals.
When the Atapuerca fossils were first found, their age was estimated at about 250,000 years, similar to figures that used to be given for the Great Interglacial and for Swanscombe. However, we now think that both are actually about 400,000 years old. In the case of Atapuerca, this has come from uranium-decay dating of stalagmites which cover the Sima levels containing the human fossils. In the case of Swanscombe, the revision
has come from new ways of dating the origin of the Thames staircase, as we discussed earlier. Although the Sima sample tells us so much more than Swanscombe or Steinheim can about the people of that time, the site itself contains virtually no evidence of the climate or possible adaptations of the people whose fossils are preserved there. For that we will turn back north again, to Britain and Germany.
The landscape around Swanscombe when Swanscombe woman lived there would have looked familiar to us in many ways, once we strip off the vestiges of recent human ‘civilization’. The ancient River Thames, miles wide, meandered over a lush floodplain, carving out and then abandoning many channels. In its waters lived freshwater mussels, and other mollusc species found today in the Danube and in rivers in India. There were also pike, eel, perch, salmon, dolphin and two types of beaver, and above the river hunting for fish were birds such as cormorants and osprey. In places there were marshy backwaters blanketed in reeds, in other places thick deposits of dried mud with grassland, inhabited by badger, marten, rabbit, hare, shrews and voles. Above the riverbanks were woodlands, with many of the trees we consider native to Britain today such as oak, alder and hazel. Emerging from the trees to drink or feed would be red deer, roe deer and fallow deer, although the fallow deer were unusually large and distinctively antlered. Animals that survived in the wilds of Britain a thousand years ago such as wild boar and wolves were also present, as well as herds of horse, bison, the now-extinct giant ox and giant deer. But added to these were much more exotic forms, some of which we might think would be more at home on the savannahs of East Africa than what is now the vicinity of the Dartford Tunnel. They included straight-tusked elephant, two kinds of rhinoceros, lions, and macaque monkeys. These mammals form one of the key assemblages of British interglacial mammals: the Swanscombe Mammal Assemblage-Zone.
Beneath the gravels that contained the Swanscombe skull and thousands of handaxes is a distinctive deposit of sand and silt called the Lower Loam that represents an earlier stage in the formation of the site. The Lower Loam seems to have been laid down in still or even stagnant water that dried out periodically, and at these times game and people walked across it, even leaving their footprints. Fossil remains of rhinoceros and the characteristic fallow deer were excavated, and the full antler development of the deer showed that they all died in the autumn or winter, as they shed and grow new antlers every spring. What is especially fascinating is that the people did not make handaxes. Instead they produced an industry based on flake tools known as the Clactonian, originally identified at the Essex site of Clacton-on-Sea, some 65 kilometres (40 miles) north of the present Thames estuary. This difference in behaviour has generated much discussion, including within AHOB. Were these essentially the same people as we find later at Swanscombe, but just making different kinds of tools for some reason, say for working wood rather than butchering animals? Or were they people who had an entirely separate way of living and working, who either did not know how to make handaxes, or chose not to, for reasons of tradition? And if they were there before the handaxe makers at Swanscombe, did they give rise to the later inhabitants, did they die out, or did they survive and live alongside them?
The climate and environment at the time of the Clactonian people at Swanscombe looks much like that prevailing when Swanscombe woman lived thousands of years later: warm, with grassland and trees and many of the same species of animal. But there are further clues to the nature of the Clactonian from a site about a mile away from Swanscombe, at Ebbsfleet. Large-scale excavations there for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and associated engineering work since 1997 have been accompanied by archaeological investigations and, in 2003, just as the work was finishing, the skeleton of a straight-tusked elephant was found surrounded by about a hundred stone tools – Clactonian tools. As at Swanscombe, pollen and other evidence suggested that this Clactonian occupation was early in the warm part of the same interglacial period, in other words about the same time as the Swanscombe Clactonian. But the association of Clactonian tools and a large mammal skeleton was very significant because it had previously been suggested that handaxes were the preferred tools for butchery at this time, yet there are none at Ebbsfleet. So this evidence seems to support the idea of distinct populations with distinct traditions. That might also be indicated from the neighbouring and perhaps contemporaneous sites of Barnham and Elveden in Suffolk, where Clactonian tools and hand-axes are preserved separately, but in comparable environments.
A chance discovery in 1911 at Clacton-on-Sea provides another insight into the way of life and capabilities of the Clactonian people. In waterlogged sediments that contained animal bones and Clactonian artefacts, a sharpened point made from yew wood had astonishingly been preserved. Microscopic study showed that it had been carefully shaped and had perhaps been hardened in a fire. The artefact was broken and less than a foot (30 cm) in length, which meant it could be interpreted as a spear point, a digging stick or even a snow probe (comparable to ones used in recent times by the Inuit in Alaska to search for frozen carcasses buried under snow).
The idea that it may represent a hitherto unrecognized, but important, component of Lower Palaeolithic technology has been strengthened by the discovery of wooden tools from a coal pit at Schöningen in Lower Saxony in Germany. This site, dated to between 350,000 and 400,000 years ago, has yielded eight partial or nearly complete wooden spears about 2 metres long, together with a shorter implement sharpened at both ends, perhaps a throwing stick, and smaller pieces of burnt wood. The spears were carefully worked from spruce and were found amongst some twenty horse skeletons, preserved by a unique mixture of acidity and alkalinity in the local soils. According to the German archaeologist Hartmut Thieme, who rescued them from destruction by mining machinery, they are carefully shaped and balanced like modern javelins, and thus were throwing spears. However, the American palaeoanthropologist Steve Churchill has argued that the spears are simply too heavy and stout to be throwing spears, and anyway, without stone tips, they would have hardly pierced the thick hides of large herbivores. Instead, he suggests, they were thrusting spears that would have been used in close proximity to the prey. These are important considerations because killing at a distance (using javelins, slings, or bows and arrows) is much less dangerous and less physically demanding. Churchill suggests that this was a development of only the last 50,000 years or so of human evolution. My AHOB colleague Andy Currant thinks that the Clacton and Schöningen spears could have been used as goads to corner and wound an animal, and might also have been important in keeping the competition (other carnivores and scavengers) at bay.
Unfortunately, neither the Clacton nor the Schöningen site had any fossil human remains associated with the wooden spears, but a roughly contemporaneous German site near Weimar does preserve some skull pieces to compare with those found at Swanscombe and Atapuerca. The Steinrinne quarry near the village of Bilzingsleben has been mined as a source of travertines (water-deposited limestones) for several centuries. Fossil bones were found there in the sixteenth century and in 1818 Friedrich von Schlotheim found a skull encrusted in limestone, now sadly lost. Small stone tools began to be recognized in the travertine deposits, and in 1971 systematic excavations by the Halle Museum of Prehistory, and later by the University of Jena, began.
The travertine beautifully preserves the evidence of ancient vegetation, even delicate twigs and leaves, and we know that the local environment was warm and wet, with mixed oak woodland bordering a lake and springs. Animal fossils include fish, toads, snakes, birds and mammals such as straight-tusked elephant, rhinoceros, horse, three species of deer, lion, wolf, macaque monkey and giant beaver. Teeth and fragments of at least three human skulls were soon discovered and these have been reconstructed to show a long and primitive-looking braincase, with a very strong brow ridge at the front, and an angled rear. For some scientists, this is an example (perhaps the only one) of a European form of Homo erectus, but I think it is more likely to be related to European fossils such as those
from Mauer, Boxgrove and the Greek cave of Petralona. There is no doubt that the skull bones do look more primitive than those from Swanscombe, and most of those from Atapuerca, even though the remains are all estimated to be around 400,000 years old. And while the skull level at Swanscombe produced thousands of handaxes, and the Pit of Bones at Atapuerca produced only one significant artefact – a handaxe – the sites of
Clacton, Ebbsfleet, Swanscombe Lower Loam, Schöningen and Bilzingsleben all lack handaxes. It is tempting to suggest that ancestral Neanderthals like those known at Swanscombe and Atapuerca made handaxes, while the survivors of an earlier European lineage carried on flake tool industries such as the Clactonian and the tools found at Bilzingsleben. Intriguing as this is, it is speculating beyond the evidence we have so far. But given the continuing puzzle of the Clactonian, this is not an impossible scenario, and we await the discovery of a Clactonian fossil human in Britain.
Returning again to the handaxe makers of the Great Interglacial in Britain, unique insights have come from careful restudy by AHOB of finds from the Foxhall Road site, near Ipswich, excavated between 1903 and 1905. The stone tools were re-examined, along with the recently rediscovered archives of the dig, and the new study suggests that the site was initially a small lake or pond that later became part of a major river system. Unique clusters of distinctive handaxes, perhaps left around a small campfire, show that each handaxe maker had their own particular style. These differences could be due to their experience or their skill, but it is remarkable that the personal imprint of individuals from the Palaeolithic can be recognized some 400,000 years later.
Homo Britannicus Page 9