And from another site of this age we seem to have the first good evidence of the use of fire in Britain. We do not know if the knowledge of controlling fire was imported or discovered here, but it certainly must have been a significant event. Fire itself provided protection, warmth and light, potentially extending the time that people could work, talk and socialize, and as a social focus it probably also fuelled social evolution. When used to cook, fire provided health benefits because cooking kills pathogens and parasites in meat, and it can deactivate toxins in plant foods. And it indirectly influenced physical evolution too, because by tenderizing meat and softening vegetables it removed the requirement to maintain large jaws and teeth, and the powerful muscles that worked them. The site in question is Beeches Pit near West Stow, Suffolk, which has been of scientific interest for over a century, and fortunately it has been protected as it lies within Thetford Forest. Here springs emerged through underlying chalk into woodlands in a warm and damp environment, laying down fine limestone deposits called tufa, similar to travertines. Tufa is a particularly good environment for preserving shells, and seventy-eight species of mollusc have so far been identified in a unique assemblage that has no modern equivalent. Some are completely extinct, others are found today in central or southern Europe, while one has its closest modern relatives in the Canary Islands. The presence of handaxes and the flint debris of their manufacture attests that people were here, and in the same levels there is plentiful charcoal, with concentrations that seem patterned – these look like the remnants of hearths rather than natural forest fires. In 1891 Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s champion, described burnt bones of deer from the site, and recent excavations involving AHOB team members have found many further fragments of burnt bone.
Hoxne, the site of John Frere’s discoveries of 1797, is still important today. Research and excavations in the last century showed that the sequence there actually began with deposits left from an ice advance. A ‘kettle hole’ formed in the deposits where a huge block of ice was left behind by retreating ice, and then melted. This large empty space became a lake, and the lake gradually accumulated clay in its bed. As they built up, these deposits also recorded the vegetation around the lake from the pollen of plants and trees that was washed in. Microscopic study of the pollen sequence allowed the changing local environment to be reconstructed, showing a whole cycle of warming and full forest development, through to cooling and the disappearance of the trees again as ice age conditions returned to Hoxne, and the lake became part of a river system. The sequence of vegetation changes was so well represented that the site was named as the type locality for the interglacial represented there, so the Great Interglacial is now known in Britain as the Hoxnian. The plant fossils from Hoxne showed that the lake was surrounded by oak forest. However, there was one puzzling aspect in that the middle of the warm stage was interrupted by an apparently colder, drier phase, with far fewer trees. Human presence was confirmed by the discovery of handaxes like Frere’s at two different levels.
Because of the importance of Hoxne, AHOB has also excavated there, with rather surprising results. The work confirmed that, as expected, the basal deposits were glacial, followed by the warming recorded in the lakebed, leading to the formation of an alder carr (a dense and fertile wet woodland). Then the previously reported interruption occurred, shown by the intrusion of species such as dwarf willow and dwarf birch. As the deposits changed from lake to river, some warmth returned and it is only then in the sequence that artefacts were recovered by the AHOB team, at two related but distinct levels. So it seems that the human presence at Hoxne is only recorded near the top of the sediments, after the main Hoxnian interglacial sequence and not during it as had previously been believed. The handaxe makers occupied the region not when the climate was at its warmest, but later on, when it was somewhat cooler and the landscape was more open.
AHOB has re-excavated another site from this period at Marks Tey, in Essex, although this time the artefact evidence consists of just a few flakes and handaxes. Like Hoxne, the site is made up of deposits from a lake (over half a mile wide) formed in debris deposited by a previous ice advance. From pollen washed into the lake it preserves one of the most complete ancient vegetation sequences known in Britain. It began at the end of a cold stage with plants like sea buckthorn, proceeded into the following warm period with silver birch and pine, and then into a typical peak British interglacial mixed oak forest, including lime, ivy, holly, yew, mistletoe, hazel and alder. Gradually the climate and soils deteriorated as hornbeam, spruce and fir became more common, along with the exotic Caucasian wingnut, with birch and pine returning. Finally the cycle was completed with the return of grasses, wormwood and crowberry as cold again gripped the landscape. The preservation of finely layered deposits (rhythmites) that seem to reflect annual seasonal changes in water flow into the lake has even allowed the length of the warm stage to be calculated, at about 40,000 years. The site has been correlated with Hoxne because they both seem to immediately follow the same cold stage, and have very similar vegetation patterns (even down to the presence of a short, relatively treeless phase interrupting the warm period). This age has recently been confirmed through uranium-series dating of carbonates laid down in the lake sediments, suggesting an antiquity of about 400,000 years. In keeping with a lake environment, the remains of fish, shellfish and freshwater microorganisms were recovered, and remnants of swan eggshell had even been found previously. The only bones of land animals found in the AHOB excavations were of deer and wood mouse, but on the opposite side of the A12 road is a former brickworks where remains of giant beaver, bear, horse, red deer, giant ox and elephant were reported by John Brown of Stanway as long ago as 1834. So this locality probably represents an environment closer to the ancient lakeshore at that time.
The Great Interglacial – the Hoxnian – provided one of the richest environments for early humans in Britain. There was lush vegetation and plenty of game to hunt or scavenge around a profusion of rivers and lakes. Early in the interglacial the Clactonian people were in eastern England, and later on there were handaxe makers. But the warm vegetation sequence was interrupted by a phase of deforestation and erosion, which is often associated in the deposits with evidence of burning. Had a large fire burned the forests, and could humans have been responsible? It has been suggested that they may have been practising an early form of a slash and burn economy, to thin out or even destroy dense forests, and this may have backfired on them given the extent of environmental degradation it caused. But that does not seem to be the whole story, and the solution of this mystery is one focus of AHOB research.
Other AHOB research has thrown up some interesting patterns in human occupation during the Hoxnian interglacial. A number of archaeological sites began life as lakes on the landscape left by the retreating Anglian ice. Artefacts do not show straight away at these sites; they appear only when the deposits indicate a switch from lake to river. This suggests that in a heavily wooded environment, Hoxnian people were using the more open terrain along river systems as their thoroughfares through the landscape. These pathways would have had a variety of plants and animals and, in the river deposits, a ready source of rocks for stone tool-making. That certainly seems to have been a major factor in why Swanscombe was such an attractive place for both Clactonians and handaxe makers.
The fact that sites like Swanscombe contain thousands of handaxes while others from the same period have virtually none also raises the question of what these tools were really being used for. In the case of the handaxe, this is one of the most discussed questions in Palaeolithic studies. These almond- or teardrop-shaped tools were made to consistent, often symmetrical, patterns, from many different kinds of rock, for over a million years. They were made by different species of early human, and can be found in sites spread across three continents: Africa, Europe, and Asia as far east as the Indian subcontinent. Flint-knappers of today can replicate these artefacts with about 10–20 minutes of concentrated effort, bu
t it takes a long time to perfect the art, even for a modern human, and therefore some archaeologists have argued that the skill and consistency with which these tools were made must reflect the presence of a mind with our intelligence and complexity. And yet looked at another way, whether they are being made of volcanic rock to butcher an elephant beside a lake in East Africa a million years ago, or of flint to process a horse at Swanscombe 400,000 years ago, their variation in size and shape still seems limited, even rather monotonous. Thus to other archaeologists, the uniformity of the handaxe through time and space is peculiar. To them, it does not look like a product of a brain or behaviour like ours. When asked whether making handaxes so skilfully meant that early humans had language, the archaeologist Desmond Clark could only reply that if they were talking to each other, then they were saying the same thing over and over again!
In their search to understand the handaxe, archaeologists have replicated them, measured them, weighed them, thrown them, and studied them in microscopic detail to learn how they were made and, perhaps, what they were being used for. Until recently, it was generally believed that the first handaxes were poorly made but that, as human brainpower and skill improved, they became more and more refined. Thus the quality of an artefact could be used to date it – the cruder it was, the older it was, whereas if it approached an idealized type, it must have been an advanced and younger example. Recent studies, including several by AHOB members, have challenged the notion of an evolutionary sequence for handaxes, with the recognition that the local rocks available would have greatly influenced what kind of tool could be produced, and that handaxes were probably being made for a variety of reasons, and in different contexts and environments. Accordingly, even in one time and place there could have been a lot of variation in the kind of handaxes being made. It is evident from some sites that handaxes were made, and apparently discarded, in huge numbers, often looking as fresh and unused as the day they were made. Given the time and care used to make them, why were so many being manufactured and apparently abandoned, when simpler tools, even sharp flakes, might have been just as useful? And why, if the main intention was simply to produce a cutting or scraping edge, was it necessary to overdesign a handaxe with more shaping and symmetry than was required by function alone?
Although there have been quirkier takes on the function of handaxes, such as the suggestion that they were aerodynamically shaped projectiles used in hunting or defence, the popular view is that they were the Palaeolithic equivalent of the Swiss Army knife. They sat easily in the hand, they had a point at one end (or a chisel-like surface if broken across), a cutting or scraping edge down the side, and a thicker butt to use as a hammer. They were also a portable resource of raw material for making fresh flakes quickly, when these were needed. If they were well made, this was a testament to the skill of the manufacturer and his or her pride in their output. Microscopic studies of used handaxe edges suggest that they were employed for a variety of tasks including butchery, working wood and chopping plant materials, and modern experiments on elephants that had died in zoos or in the wild show that handaxes are indeed fine butcher’s tools. But experiments also show that they do not have to be shaped anywhere near as perfectly as many Palaeolithic examples in order to do their job well.
An archaeologist, Steve Mithen, and a science writer, Marek Kohn, have recently argued that there are other dimensions that should be considered to understand the enigma of the handaxe, that we must also look at its possible social role. They propose that handaxes acted as signals between males and females as to who would make a good mate – so as well as being the Palaeolithic equivalent of the Swiss Army knife, they were also a kind of status symbol. In their model, from watching handaxe manufacture and use, young females could monitor which potential partners found the best raw material, produced the nicest handaxes, and procured the best output from their use in terms of food or perhaps producing further artefacts made of wood. The way in which the males cooperated or competed in the process would have provided a further signal of their social and mental abilities. The outcome of this mate selection would have been the perpetuation of the handaxe tradition through the relative genetic success of those best suited to carry it on. And in the process, many more, and many more ‘perfect’, handaxes would have been produced than were ever necessary for their purely utilitarian function.
Whatever their function, handaxes were long-lived in Britain, manufactured by Homo heidelbergensis at Boxgrove (and Happis-burgh?) more than 500,000 years ago, by people at Swanscombe 400,000 years ago, and by their possible descendants over 300,000 years later. However, between the time of Swanscombe and the 60,000-year-old Neanderthal site of Lynford in Norfolk, we enter a portion of our ancient history that is as enigmatic and poorly known as the first appearance of people in Britain. Following the rich evidence from sites like Swanscombe, we might expect early humans to be flourishing in Britain. Instead, in this long period between 400,000 and 60,000 years ago, we seem to lose sight of them altogether for much of the time, and this puzzle is the subject of the next chapter.
CHAPTER FOUR
Deserted Britain
We saw in Chapter 1 how the first people reached Britain, then a small peninsula on the edge of the inhabited world, by 700,000 years ago. The environmental evidence from the Suffolk site of Pakefield is extraordinarily rich, but we can get only a shadowy glimpse of the early humans who lived there. That is not the case at the later sites of Boxgrove and Swanscombe, where there is extensive evidence not only of human activities but also actual remains of the people themselves. There are many sites like Swanscombe dating from the Hoxnian Interglacial, sites with thousands of beautifully made artefacts, and a strong signal of human presence. It looks as if the ancestors of the Neanderthals were making a good living from the local resources in the warm summers and mild winters of 400,000 years ago, and there seemed no obvious reason why they and their descendants should not have settled Britain permanently. And indeed it was a general scientific belief until recently that humans did persist in Britain from then on. It was thought that once humans had arrived in Britain, they would have maintained at least a foothold right through until the present day, over hundreds of thousands of years.
Even if one population replaced another, it was believed that process would have been essentially instantaneous, with no significant gap in occupation. But humans did not persist after the Great Interglacial. It came to an end, just as the preceding ones had, taking with it the lush river valleys, forests and grasslands on which the herds of horses and deer, and their hunters, relied. Ice sheets returned once again to the north-west of Europe, although this time they did not reach as far as the south of Britain. And a new pattern of episodic occupation was set in motion.
Archaeologists had long been aware that the record of human occupation in Britain was patchy, with some sites like Swanscombe and Warren Hill richly endowed with stone tools, while many others had just a handful. Judging human population numbers from counting artefacts is a hazardous business – for example, sites like Swanscombe and Warren Hill have been intensively scrutinized by collectors for over a hundred years while others, perhaps equally promising, have had much less attention. And another problem is whether a thousand artefacts in a riverbed represent the work of small groups living near the river over a period of a thousand years, or a large group working intensively over just a few days. Additionally, if the river flowed gently, small assemblages of tools could have been perfectly preserved, or if it surged fast, most of the artefacts were perhaps smashed or carried away. AHOB researchers have tried to address these problems by looking at archaeological records in the Middle Thames Valley. We saw in Chapter 3 that the Thames has deposited a staircase of terraces over the last 400,000 years, and because most of these terraces are in a densely populated region there are excellent records of their extent, depth and development. It is believed that each river terrace of sands, gravels and silts has taken about the same length of time to accumulate
, and by looking at each terrace through its whole deposition, past variations in the flow of the river through time and space are averaged out. And because the Thames terraces have been quarried, built on and investigated by archaeologists for more than 150 years, tens of thousands of artefacts have been collected for study and cataloguing. Of course many, probably most, have been moved away from their original location, and the river also picks up and redeposits much older artefacts as it cuts into ancient gravels – so all other things being equal, the number of artefacts counted as the Thames staircase of terraces is descended would be expected to increase, particularly if humans improved their adaptations and thrived through time.
But that is not what AHOB researchers found. Instead, they noted that the number of stone tools collected by archaeologists in the sequence dropped, so over the time span of the Middle Thames terraces – about 400,000–100,000 years ago – there was a dramatically decreasing signal of human presence. In fact the signal virtually vanished after 200,000 years ago, with the few artefacts present in the terrace immediately above the present Thames flood-plain arguably due to reworking from older terraces. What could this mean? The first thing to check was whether there was a bias in the samples – were some terraces bigger than others, were some more or less exposed, had some been more extensively quarried to yield a bigger sample to collectors? Many factors affected the rate and type of recovery. The majority of artefacts were collected (not excavated) by professional and amateur archaeologists who gathered them from active gravel pits or from the trenches of house foundations. This type of collecting was important from the 1850s until mechanized digging started to become common in the 1930s, as the urbanization of London took off and the pace of quarrying started to work against the observational skills of individual collectors. Another potential source of bias lay with the behaviour of the ancient humans themselves. As we shall see, there was a change in the types of tools being made over this period of time, and this meant that the archetypal (and for recent collectors highly desirable) handaxes of 400,000 years ago gave way to different-looking flake tools (which might not have been saved to the same extent by modern collectors). Additionally, if techniques of tool production changed and, for example, early humans needed to conserve their raw material to a greater extent, they may simply have discarded fewer of the tools they made. Nevertheless, even allowing for all these factors and biases, the pattern is certainly contrary to what might be expected. From about 400,000 years ago, humans seem to have had an increasingly hard time in Britain.
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