As touched on before, the reason why Britain has such warm summers and, especially given its position, such mild winters is the action of the Gulf Stream, also known as the Atlantic Drift, or Atlantic Heat Conveyor. This current transports warm subtropical ocean waters from the Caribbean up to north-western Europe. When these waters have finally given up their warmth, they either flow back along the Greenland and Canadian coasts, or sink into the deep Atlantic circulation heading back south. So today, the polar front that marks the junction between arctic and non-arctic waters lies beyond Iceland. But on many occasions in the past 100,000 years, for reasons that are still not fully understood, the Gulf Stream has completely shut down and the conveyor has rapidly swung into reverse, surrounding Britain with the freezing waters its latitudinal position would otherwise dictate. The polar front migrated towards the Equator, often lying as far south as the coast of Portugal, and even feeding icebergs into the Mediterranean. But after a few thousand years, the warm flow was restored again until a further interruption, and these oscillations back and forth had a huge effect on the climate of Britain and western Europe. What is as remarkable as the number of times this climate switch was turned on and off is the rapidity with which it sometimes happened. Layers of compacted snow in the Greenland ice cap have been laid down annually, and these layers give very precise information on the state of the atmosphere (and oceans) at the time. Astonishingly, some of these extreme oscillations happened over only about ten years.
I worked with colleagues in the Stage Three Project at Cambridge (focusing on MIS 3, roughly 60,000–25,000 years ago) to look at detailed climate records in Greenland and Italy and investigate how this instability might have stressed the human populations of Europe (whether Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon). We assessed only low temperatures and rapidly changing temperatures in our investigation (although many other aspects of the weather were undoubtedly fluctuating too), but we showed that the effects peaked in a prolonged period dominated by cold and instability, around 30,000 years ago. We concluded that two factors were predominantly responsible for Neanderthal extinction in western Europe: the arrival of a competing human population, and the unstable climate. Left to themselves, the Neanderthals might have got through the worst of the climatic changes, as they had clearly managed to before, by going extinct locally and surviving in refugia to the south (a ‘refugium’ is a place of refuge where conditions are not so severe). They would have bounced back whenever things improved. Alternatively, in a stable environment to which they were adapted, they might have been able to compete with the newcomers effectively, and perhaps would still be with us today – an extraordinary thought. But in such unstable times, with severe climate swings happening even within the lifetime of a single Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon, it would have meant survival of the most resourceful and adaptable at a time when environmental change must have been at its most challenging. The Cro-Magnons surely suffered badly too, and we know that even they succumbed in Britain about 25,000 years ago. Yet maybe with the aid of better technology, housing, clothing, infant care and wide-reaching social networks, they somehow got through the bad times in refugia further south, and we find them coming back from the Continent about 15,000 years ago, as the next chapter shows. The unlucky Neanderthals, however, never returned.
CHAPTER SIX
What they Gorged in Cheddar
As we saw in previous chapters, the Devensian was the last cold stage in Britain, and it reached its peak about 21,000 years ago. The Last Glacial Maximum, as the event is known globally, was a major event in shaping the world as we know it. The growth of huge ice sheets changed the Earth’s climate in terms of atmospheric and ocean circulation, rainfall, and a huge drop in temperature, and where the glaciers sculpted the Earth or shed debris or melt waters, they formed the landscapes we know today. Most of the extra ice that formed was in the large ice sheets that descended from the Arctic, of which the Greenland ice sheet is now the only significant remnant, but glaciers also spread on every high mountain range, including those in the South American and African tropics. The Laurentide ice sheet covering north-eastern America was the largest glacier complex in the northern hemisphere, with an astonishing ice volume of some 35 million km3 (8 million cubic miles), and south of it huge lakes of melt water formed, of which the Great Lakes are just the latest example.
By comparison the Scandinavian ice sheet was only about 6 million km3, but nonetheless was more than 2 kilometres (1.25 miles) thick, 400 kilometres (250 miles) wide and about 300 kilometres (200 miles) long (north to south), extending west into the Norwegian Sea, south across Denmark and the North German plain and Poland, and east into Russia.
In Britain the major ice accumulation ranged from the mountains of West Scotland to the uplands of Wales, and at its peak it reached what is now Swansea, Wolverhampton and Lincoln. Only parts of the Midlands and southern England were totally free of ice, but they still suffered frozen soils and landscapes of dust formed from ground-up rocks, scoured by winds from the front of the ice caps. Even the volume of the small British ice sheet was about 800,000 km3 (200,000 cubic miles), and it was up to 1.5 kilometres (1 mile) thick. The British and Scandinavian ice sheets may have merged in the north, but an ice-free corridor of cold desert over 100 kilometres (70 miles) wide separated the ice masses where the North Sea is now.
The huge expanses of ice and snow cover accentuated the global temperature drop by reflecting back the sun’s rays, and the amount of water locked up in the ice and snow caused a drop of some 125 metres in global sea level compared with today. While the spread of deserts and arid steppes forced many warmth- and moisture-loving species of plants and animals in the middle of continents to retreat into refugia, others migrated across the vast newly exposed shelves of land around the world’s continents. These briefly created the largest land bridges of the recent past, allowing many species of plants and animals to migrate between land masses and islands to where they are found today. In Britain, though, the severity of this period seems to have been too much even for the resourceful Cro-Magnons to cope with, and as the north of Britain sank under the effects of an ice cap a kilometre thick and weighing millions of tons, the few remaining people disappeared from the desert-like tundra south of the ice, either following the migrating herds back across the land bridge to the Continent, or dying out as they tried to cling to their homelands.
About 16,000 years ago, the climate of western Europe suddenly took a turn for the better, the ice retreated, and rich herds of game migrated back, followed by the late Ice Age hunters who lived off them. One British site in particular tells us who these people were, and how they briefly thrived during what is known as the Late Glacial Interstadial: Gough’s Cave. This show cave lies on the southern side of Cheddar Gorge in Somerset. Once it was probably the richest Palaeolithic site in Britain in terms of the density and number of finds preserved, but sadly only a part of what was discovered survives today. Nevertheless it still has the largest collection of late Upper Palaeolithic material – both artefacts and fossils – from a British cave, and in the last fifteen years a research team who now form some of AHOB’s core membership has led a concerted effort to extract the maximum information possible from what survives. This effort has given us a wonderful, if sometimes disturbing, insight into the life and times of Britain’s inhabitants near the end of the last Ice Age.
To understand the recent history of Gough’s Cave, we need to return to the 1800s, when commercial rivalry in the West Country beauty spot of Cheddar Gorge led rival proprietors of show caves to try and outdo each other in what their caves had to offer the visiting public, even to the extent of buying in stalagmites from other caves to build fake ‘fairy grottoes’. For most of that century Cox’s Cave, with its beautiful formations, held sway, until Richard Gough, a nephew of the discoverer of Cox’s Cave, purchased the lease on a cave known as the Great Stalactite Cavern. Realizing his site, despite its imposing name, could not match Cox’s, he searched for new opportunities in th
e Gorge. In 1890, fifty yards to the east, he started to open out the entrance of another cave, which until then had been only a minor tourist attraction as well as, at times, a gambling den and a cart shed. The site was known to have produced fossil bones in a visit by the Geologists’ Association in 1880, but even in 1899 the report of a visit by the Bath Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club concentrated on the frugality of their lunch rather than what was seen. Nevertheless Gough and his two sons had been very busy, since the Wells Journal of 1892 reported that to expose stalactite formations further back in the cave, they had removed some 500 tons of sediment. From this had been collected ‘a large quantity of bones and teeth of extinct animals, besides a lot of flint knives and bone instruments, on which he [Gough] sets great value’. Despite this value, by 1898 a further 500 tons had been quarried away. Perhaps the spoil that was wheel barrowed out was dumped nearby; if it lies somewhere under the present road through the Gorge, the rich finds it must have contained may one day be recovered.
Work has continued to develop Gough’s Cave as a tourist attraction right up to the present day, and this has led to many important discoveries, some intentional and well-recorded, others accidental and without context. Almost all have come from the Vestibule, close to the present metal gates just within the entrance of the cave, where daylight would still have reached the hunter-gatherers who camped there. Shortly after Richard Gough died in 1902, interest in the site was heightened by a discovery made during the lowering of the floor to deal with flooding. This was the skeleton of a young adult male known as Cheddar Man, in the location now known as Skeleton Pit or Skeleton Rift. When Cheddar Man was found, there were claims that he was the long-sought earliest Englishman, with exaggerated dates of 40,000 to 80,000 years old, but none of the tools found in the cave give any hint of such an antiquity, and as we will see he lived, in fact, at the beginning of the Holocene, the recent geological phase in which we are living now. Nevertheless, as we will also see, he does have a special British importance.
Those who first studied the flint tools from Gough’s realized that they were Upper Palaeolithic and specifically resembled those of the Magdalenian industry of France, which dated from near the end of the last Ice Age. The similarity was enhanced by the discovery of an artefact known as a bâton, made from a perforated reindeer antler, typical of the Magdalenian. The stone tools also resembled those known from other British sites such as Robin Hood Cave at Creswell Crags (Derbyshire) and Kent’s Cavern in Devon. This led the eminent British archaeologist Dorothy Garrod to recognize a specific British industry she named Creswellian for the stone tools from these sites.
By 1931, at least 7,000 stone artefacts had been recorded from Gough’s (unfortunately even most of these have since been lost), as well as tools made of bone, antler and ivory, including a second bâton made from reindeer antler, and the sharpened shin bone of an arctic hare with grouped notches along its edges. What these were used for can only be guessed at – the hare bone would certainly have been a good skin and fur piercer for making clothes, while the function of the bâtons remains an enigma. They were once assumed to be the emblems of chiefs that hung round their necks or waists (bâtons de commandement), but they are spirally grooved and worn by use where they have been perforated by a large round hole. This suggests they could have been used for working leather or fibres, for straightening wood or even bone and ivory (possible if it was steamed or heated). Perhaps they were even used as a pulley or a device for corralling animals, as AHOB member Andy Currant has suggested – imprints of ropes are known from the famous French Magdalenian cave of Lascaux.
As well as these functional artefacts Gough’s Cave has, over the years, produced evidence that suggests the site might have had some more special meaning for its inhabitants. These finds include a piece of animal rib that from its appearance must have been kept and handled for many years. On one side it is marked with scores of lines along its edges, like a pocket ruler, while on the other it has many diagonal intersecting lines forming a criss-cross pattern, into which the iron oxide pigment red ochre has been rubbed. There are also pieces of Baltic amber that must have been carried at least from the present area of the North Sea – perhaps once items of jewellery. The presence of the amber so far from its source suggests that either these people were very mobile, or they had long-distance trading networks. Mobility is also implied from study of the flint used for tools at Gough’s – it most probably came from Salisbury Plain, some 70 kilometres (45 miles) away.
Many of the animal remains from Gough’s Cave show signs of modification by humans using flint tools. Some of this is no doubt the accidental by-product of dismembering a carcass, but in other cases such as the working of hare bone points there was certainly an end product in mind. The fossil animal bones help to paint a vivid picture of Somerset near the end of the Ice Age. There were large herbivores such as horse, red deer and the extinct giant ox providing meat on the hoof, while smaller animals such as badger, arctic hare and birds such as black grouse, ptarmigan and partridge were also consumed when available. One of the bird species, whooper swan, was even used as a source of bone, probably for making needles. There are a few other notable species such as the saiga antelope, now found on the arid steppes of central Asia, and two species of lemming, but the expected cold climate species of mammoth and reindeer are in fact only represented by worked material such as bâtons and spear points that could have been carried from elsewhere. Finally, and especially intriguingly, wolf bones had been identified from Gough’s. However, AHOB researchers have noted how small these ‘wolves’ are compared with the large size of ice age wolves and consider this to be the first British evidence of domestication, as these are actually dog bones. European researchers have made similar claims for Magdalenian sites in Germany, where they were apparently used in the hunting of wild horses. There is no doubt that dogs would have been valuable allies in the struggle for survival, and we can envisage a mutually beneficial relationship gradually developing with tolerance between humans and stray wolves, or orphaned cubs being adopted, and then used selectively to breed strains with the desired submissive and cooperative qualities.
The climate at the time Gough’s Cave was first occupied can be reconstructed from plant and beetle remains some 15,000 years old, preserved in a small lakebed at Llanilid in South Wales. The beetles were studied by AHOB Associate Russell Coope, and from the present-day preferences of the species concerned average summer temperatures must have been as high as those of Britain today. But the winters were much colder, and it was also much drier. Combining this with the animal species preserved at Cheddar, we can imagine treeless moorland on the top of the Mendip Hills, descending into bushy scrub. Finally there would have been a narrow zone of tree-cover along the southward slopes and in sheltered valleys such as the Gorge, providing wood for fuel and artefacts. Where there was no shelter or surface water, the lowlands would have been grassed, giving excellent pasture for the wild horses that are the most common large mammals in the cave deposits. Because of its location in the landscape and its shape, Gough’s Cave was in many ways an ideal home base for bands of hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago. The River Yeo emerges at the nearby Risings, and, as just mentioned, the cave was well placed for the exploitation of a variety of plant and animal resources. At the time it was occupied, it probably led straight out into the Gorge, providing plenty of opportunities for ambush, or to drive game against the steep walls. Despite the depth of the Gorge, the large and arched entrance would have let in sufficient daylight for people to group and work within the shelter of the cave. Although relatively dry at the mouth, it would have had convenient sources of water further inside for drinking and cooking. The relative coolness of the cave might also have been useful for storing meat during the warm summer months.
As already mentioned, the animal with by far the largest number of surviving bones and teeth at Gough’s is horse, and the remains show extensive damage in the form of cut marks to remove m
eat, and breakage to extract marrow and brains. One particularly characteristic pattern is the fracturing of the teeth of the lower jaw caused when it was split for marrow. Horses were taken at all ages, so it seems the hunters had the pick of their prey. Although the collection of bones and teeth surviving is a biased one, dominated by the parts that would have been noticed during unsystematic collecting, most parts of the skeleton are represented, suggesting that horses were killed near the cave and that the occupants had the whole carcass available to process. Cut marks on the teeth and bones of both horses and red deer come from skinning, butchery, and the stripping of tendons and ligaments – the latter could have been used as thread for fastenings, or even as rope. Even horse hooves seem to have been removed from the hoof-core, perhaps to extract glue from the keratin, so little seems to have been wasted. However, although there are traces of burnt bone, charcoal and heated stones in the cave, it appears that much of the meat was eaten raw.
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