Homo Britannicus

by Chris Stringer

  The limestone in which the Banwell Bone Cave formed is an outlier of the Mendip Hills, and there are many similar bone collections dominated by bison and reindeer in the region from caves, gullies and open slope deposits. So what does this signify, and how did they accumulate? Bison and reindeer both form large herds, so could the animals have been trying to shelter in the cave, or could they have fallen through a hole in the roof? This seems unlikely, firstly because the cave has a relatively narrow entrance and small chambers, and an unbroken roof. But more importantly, even from the initial crude excavations, it was seen that the bones at Banwell were almost always jumbled up; neighbouring ones could not readily be reassembled into skeletons, so the carcasses were already decayed and broken up by the time they were deposited.

  The most likely scenario, based on similar events today, is that massive herds of bison and reindeer were migrating across a landscape with deep snow, which obscured dangerous ground – a cliff, a ravine, even a particularly deep pocket of soft snow. Many of the animals became trapped, died, and decayed. In the spring melts, the bones fell or sludged into the cave, and as long as the landscape remained unchanged, the process could have been repeated over many winters.

  The environmental picture we get from Banwell and sites like it is an unremittingly bleak one, a cold and windblown Britain similar to northern Scandinavia today, untouched by human presence. Yet other sites from around this time such as Cassington, near Oxford, and Isleworth in West London have beetle remains suggesting that it was sometimes much warmer, and yet there were still no signs of people. The Neanderthals were certainly across the Channel River in Belgium and France, and were occupying La Cotte de St Brelade in Jersey, where they lit fires and even left their remains in the form of thirteen teeth – the only late Neanderthal fossils from the whole of the British Isles. Did they cross the Channel River, and we have not yet found or recognized the evidence, or were they unable to? These are puzzles that AHOB is still investigating. Whatever the answers, within 15,000 years of the severe conditions represented at Banwell, people were definitely back in Britain, perhaps the first human inhabitants for over a hundred millennia. They were Neanderthals, and they occupied midland and southern Britain for much of the next 30,000 years, although there were many changes and challenges to come, and not just from the climate.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Neanderthals and Us

  The Neanderthals have had an image problem over the years, and brutish behaviour is often still called ‘Neanderthal’. Before Africa yielded up really ancient potential ancestors, the Neanderthals were often pushed into the position of ‘missing links’, portrayed as hairy and bestial, with stooped gait, long arms and grasping big toes. Yet in the 1970s the pendulum had swung so far in the opposite direction that they were instead depicted as ‘flower people’, and our immediate ancestors. The American anthropologist Carlton Coon famously remarked that if a Neanderthal could be washed and shaved and dressed in a business suit, he would pass unnoticed on the New York subway (I usually comment that this probably says more about the New York subway than it says about Neanderthals!). But research over the last ten years is at last giving us a realistic view of these fascinating predecessors as close relatives who were as human as we are, but in their own unique way. Over a period of several hundred thousand years in Europe and western Asia, the Neanderthals developed their own bodily (and no doubt behavioural and social) characteristics, in an evolutionary history largely separate from our own.

  Because, like us, they had developed the habit of burying their dead, their remains in caves have been saved from erosion and damage, and lay awaiting excavation by archaeologists. Unfortunately only scraps have been found so far in Britain, but using more complete fossils from sites ranging from Gibraltar to Uzbekistan we can build a detailed picture of their bodies and constitution, how they grew, lived and died. They were relatively short, wide-shouldered, wide-hipped and barrel-chested – yet their posture and gait was essentially the same as ours. Their build looks more suited to short powerful bursts rather than endurance running, which perhaps fits with the idea that they were mainly confrontational hunters, getting to grips with their prey at close quarters, using short-throw or thrusting stone-tipped spears. In turn, this may explain why their skeletons not only show plenty of wear and tear from a demanding life-style but also healed wounds and fractures, particularly in the upper part of the body and head. This injury pattern is matched quite closely by that of rodeo riders, who also regularly have to confront untamed large mammals (although personally I believe some of the injuries could also reflect a high level of interpersonal violence).

  If anything, the Neanderthal skull was even more distinctive than the body that went with it. The braincase was large, but long and low, without the domed forehead of modern humans. Within it was a brain of very large size, but of unknown quality compared with our own. Neanderthal faces were dominated by an enormous nose (high, wide and projecting), accentuated by swept-back cheekbones and a receding chin. The large eye-sockets were overshadowed by a double-arched and prominent brow ridge. This visage is so idiosyncratic that it can be recognized even in fragmentary fossils, and the beginnings of its development can be seen in the youngest Neanderthal children.

  The Neanderthals are found across Europe and the Middle East, and they evolved through a time when the climate was dominated by cold. However, although their short and stocky body shape seems suited to the cold, they were not just people of the ice ages. They are certainly found fossilized with reindeer and mammoths 50,000 years ago in Germany, but also alongside elephants and hippos 120,000 years ago in Italy. Yet, as we have seen, they did not get to Britain when that kind of fauna spread here during the last (Ipswichian) interglacial; they must have lacked the capability to cross the nascent English Channel. Instead we have to wait until about 60,000 years ago for the first traces of their return in over 100,000 years, and that evidence takes us back to Norfolk. And what a different scene it now was from the balmy climate of Pakefield at the start of our story, some 650,000 years earlier.

  Amateur archaeologist John Lord lives in Norfolk and, with his wife Val, demonstrates Stone Age life, wearing skin clothing and making and using replicas of ancient artefacts. For several years he kept a watching brief on a working gravel pit near the village of Lynford, since it had occasionally produced fossil bones and Palaeolithic tools. But in 2002, the pace of discovery suddenly accelerated, and it was clear that the quarrying had reached a rich seam of mammoth bones. Soon afterwards he and AHOB Associate Nigel Larkin found the first of numerous beautiful small flint handaxes. English Heritage agreed to fund the Norfolk Archaeological Unit in mounting a rescue dig before the evidence was lost to science. AHOB members and associates took part in the excavations and have been involved in the work at every stage, and Lynford has developed into one of the most important Palaeolithic sites in Britain. Approximately 2000 kg of samples were removed for processing and a rich harvest of pollen, plants, molluscs, insects and vertebrates has been recovered.

  Sixty thousand years ago, an ancient forerunner of the modern River Wissey snaked over the landscape, laying down gravels and silts, in turn capturing and abandoning ponds and lakes. A channel fluctuated between flowing and still water, and on its banks and in its waters the bones of twelve species of mammal, fish, and several birds and amphibians accumulated, along with an astonishing assemblage of 160 species of beetle. Of these, twenty-one are not found in Britain today and can be found as far away as Siberia, but they included dung beetles and some carrion beetles, suggesting that large mammals were using the channel/lake as a watering hole, and that some were also dying there. The mammal remains were dominated (over 90 percent) by the bones, teeth and tusks of nine juvenile and adult mammoths, but also represented were woolly rhino, reindeer, horse, bison, fox, wolf, hyaena and brown bear. The plant

  fossils showed that the landscape was mostly grassland and acid heath or bog, with at best a few birch trees, while the lake w
as bordered by sedges and bulrushes. However, plants like bilberry, chickweed, meadow rue, thistle and dandelion paint a somewhat less bleak picture. Combining the environmental evidence from beetles and snails suggests that the average summer temperature climbed to 13°C, several degrees colder than Norfolk today, while winters were much more severe, averaging well below –10°C.

  Remarkable as the environmental evidence from Lynford is, the significance of the site rests on the combination of mammoth bones and stone tools, the only such association yet found in Britain, and rare across the whole Neanderthal world. There are nearly 500 artefacts, including forty beautifully made small handaxes in shiny black or dark blue flint, and flakes that are mainly from the final stages of manufacture. This suggests that the Neanderthals were travelling to the area with nodules of flint that had already been knapped close to their final form, and they then produced exactly what they needed on the spot. The tools show quite a high incidence of damage and breakage, which perhaps reflects their use on recalcitrant large mammal bones. We can imagine small Neanderthal groups moving westwards across Doggerland (land now submerged by the sea), tracking reindeer herds as they migrated along rivers into Britain, and finding themselves at Lynford. At times wind chill would have been severe, and the lack of trees and therefore wood for fuel or shelters would have posed severe problems that they had to solve in order to survive. Perhaps they lit fires of dried reeds and mammoth dung, and like the occupants of La Cotte de St Brelade burnt mammoth bones when the fires were sufficiently hot. Like Neanderthals in Russia, they may even have used mammoth bones and tusks, covered by animal skins, to produce basic windbreaks. And it is difficult to think that they did not have at least rudimentary skin or fur clothing and snowshoes to cope with such bleak conditions.

  So what were the Neanderthals actually doing at Lynford? That is a more difficult question as, although some of the handaxes were found amongst mammoth bones, none of the bones show direct evidence of butchery in the form of cut marks. In itself this is not surprising, since modern butchery experiments on dead elephants in zoos and the wild has shown that, with the sheer mass of meat, tools may never cut through to the bone. However, some of the Lynford bones show impacts and breakage that occurred when they were fresh, and some woolly rhino and reindeer teeth show fractures that suggest the jaws may have been split to extract marrow. In addition, compared with the numbers of mammoth skulls, teeth, jaws and tusks, there is a distinct lack of meat-bearing limb bones – had they been carried away by the Neanderthals for meat or fuel? Further study may throw more light on these questions, but we can guess that in difficult times the Neanderthals could not have afforded to turn their noses up at large quantities of meat, in whatever form it came. Perhaps they were actively hunting mammoth, as is suggested by the discovery of a yew spear tip amongst elephant ribs at the last interglacial site of Lehringen, in Germany. But what is also interesting is that many of the Lynford mammoth bones show evidence of disease or injury, particularly in the ribs and backbone. Were these weaker animals that had died near the Lynford lake or, because of their weakness, were they sought out as prey by hyaenas, wolves or Neanderthals? If the Neanderthals were well organized they could certainly have got their share of the plentiful resources provided by a dead mammoth or rhino, and perhaps they even took advantage of a natural cold store, returning regularly to the lake to exploit frozen or thawing mammoth steak.

  The evidence from Lynford is in line with work on Neanderthal diet carried out by AHOB members, and obtained through analyses of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in fossil bones. The method is based on the principle of ‘you are what you eat’, since the foods we eat leave their characteristic chemical signatures in the bone we lay down during our lives. If bones are well enough preserved they retain these signatures, which can be read through laboratory analyses to indicate the proportion of plant, meat or fish foods consumed by the owner of the bones before they died. Neanderthals in central and northern Europe certainly appear to have been highly carnivorous and at the top of their food chains, comparable with beasts such as the hyaena, and they would have needed to be in places like Lynford, when plant resources would not have been sufficient for much of the year. But further south, on the Mediterranean coasts of Italy and Gibraltar, we get a very different picture of Neanderthals apparently happily subsisting on a diet of baked tortoise, rabbit, and seafood such as mussels. Clearly they were resourceful and adaptable people.

  The deposits at Lynford have been dated by the luminescence method to about 60,000 years ago, and we have no sound evidence of the predecessors of these people in Britain after about 200,000 years ago. For that we have to cross the Channel River system to France, or Doggerland, to sites in northern Europe where we know the Neanderthals did survive for at least parts of the intervening period. But in the brief windows of glacial warming (if Lynford can be called that), the Neanderthals made their comeback, and soon after this we find them associated with similar animals and a comparable climate in the Creswell region of Derbyshire, at Pin Hole and Robin Hood Cave, in Hyaena Den Cave at Wookey in Somerset, and far across Britain in Coygan Cave, Carmarthenshire. We get further glimpses of their occupations at classic sites like Kent’s Cavern and Paviland, usually in the form of small hand-axes with rather flat butts. These are similar to French examples from what has been called the Mousterian of Acheulian Tradition (though a lineal connection to much more ancient handaxe industries is very doubtful), but this may indicate Neanderthal connections between Britain and south-west France at this time.

  Things started to change about 40,000 years ago. New stone tools known as leaf points, because of their lanceolate shape, appeared in Britain, and instead of similarities with France, the most obvious parallels are found in Germany and Poland. And 35,000 years ago, there were further changes, on an accelerating scale. Even though the Neanderthals were surrounded by bone, antler and ivory, they made little use of these materials to make tools, since they are hard to work without pre-treatment or specialized tools like chisels, burins or gouges. Yet after this period, bone points start to appear in British sites, along with the small stone tools used to make them. These specialized manufacturing tools were made on long, thin blades of flint, and they mark the arrival of the Upper Palaeolithic in Britain, soon after it had spread across Europe. This watershed in human behaviour was also marked by the appearance of the first known representational art in the form of carvings, engravings, and painting on cave walls. Beautiful little figurines of animals and strange humans with lion heads were made in Germany from the intractable medium of mammoth ivory, along with flutes manufactured from swan bones, while deep in the cave of Chauvet in France, whole processions of woolly rhinos, lions and horses were brilliantly drawn in charcoal. And in Goat’s Hole Cave in South Wales, a man was buried with red ochre pigment and ivory ornaments, whose partial skeleton would be excavated 27,000 years later by William Buckland and mistakenly called The Red Lady of Paviland. He was a modern human like us, and part of the population known as the Cro-Magnons, after the French discovery of 1868. They first appeared in Europe about 40,000 years ago, and physically they were essentially like us, but somewhat larger bodied and (like Neanderthals) somewhat larger brained too. Compared with Neanderthals, they were taller and more linear, with narrower hips and shoulders, and body proportions more like people who live today in hot dry conditions – perhaps a clue to their ultimate origins. The first of the Cro-Magnons must have encountered their long-lost cousins, the Neanderthals, as they spread across Europe, and what happened in those meetings has inspired novelists and fuelled scientific arguments for over a century.

  The first fossil human ever excavated systematically, from Paviland, was also the earliest known example of a particular burial tradition practised by the Cro-Magnons who made the Gravettian culture across Europe between about 25,000 and 30,000 years ago. The body was placed extended and close to the cave wall, with rods and bracelets of ivory, and perforated periwinkle shells that were probab
ly once part of a necklace. A mammoth skull and stone slabs may also have been placed there at the same time, although this is unclear now, and we do not know if the red ochre was painted on the skin or clothing of the man, or was sprinkled over the body as a final gesture. The man in question was a young and apparently healthy adult but at some way short of 6 feet (1.90 m) was relatively small by the standards of strapping early Cro-Magnon men. His skull was also missing, perhaps because of erosion by the encroaching sea. At about the same time as the Paviland man was interred, a