Homo Britannicus

by Chris Stringer

  Over the years of controlled and uncontrolled excavations in the cave, more human bones were recovered at Gough’s, including the skulls of an adult and a child, but until recently it was unclear how, if at all, they related to the remains of Cheddar Man found in 1903. However, excavations near the cave entrance led by Roger Jacobi, Andy Currant and myself have thrown considerable light on this question. In 1986 Roger had been checking some crumbling cave sediment, thought to be old spoil, under the wall of the cave near Skeleton Rift, when he found a human tooth. Further investigations produced more teeth, and over the following few years a series of small excavations were carried out. These showed that this small pocket of deposits had been undisturbed for some 14,000 years, and this has led to a whole new chapter in the story of Gough’s Cave and its importance to the ancient occupation of Britain.

  The excavations also showed how rich a site Gough’s Cave must have been before it was decimated from 1890 onwards. One of the first finds were the jawbones of an adolescent boy, into which the teeth that Roger had found fitted perfectly. Subsequently a piece of frontal bone was discovered that refitted on to a more complete adult’s skull found some sixty years earlier, showing that this remaining little pocket was indeed the same age as the earlier finds. But the most complete and disturbing of the finds was made by Andy Currant: an adult skull cap on which could be seen a series of cut marks across the side walls and brow. These marks were so well preserved that their direction and angle could be reconstructed to show that the skull had been held in someone’s left hand while they cut with a stone tool in their right hand, apparently to scalp the man in question and to cut through muscles holding the lower jaw. On further inspection, it turned out that all of the human skulls and jawbones found in the Creswellian layers (but not Cheddar Man) had been cut with flint knives. What story lay behind these disquieting discoveries?

  The management of Cheddar Caves, who had kindly facilitated

  our work there, naturally wanted to publicize the finds and emphasize the continuing scientific importance of their cave. At the ensuing press conference, we tried to cover the various possible scenarios of defleshing for ritual burial, social consumption of the remains of close relatives, crisis cannibalism (where starving individuals are forced to eat human flesh in order to survive), and cannibalism following violent encounters. The media, of course, only had ears for one version of the story, and a series of lurid headlines soon followed, including ‘Stone Age Brits Ate Kids’, ‘Not So Gorgeous’ and ‘What They Gorged In Cheddar’. This also led to appearances on a children’s breakfast TV show with one of the skulls, probably impacting the sensibilities and appetites of watching parents more than their offspring. However, detailed study of the material has revealed a more complex series of possibilities. My research with a colleague Louise Humphrey suggests that the Creswellian human material from Gough’s represents a minimum of five individuals: a young child of about three at death, two adolescents (one probably male), and two adults, one of whom was male. If the human bones and teeth are those of some of the inhabitants of the cave, the presence of a young child suggests that these included families, but if the material was brought in from elsewhere, this is less certain. The individuals concerned were large-bodied, muscular and big-toothed by modern European standards, but their teeth were relatively unworn and in good condition, with no signs or markers of stress during growth, or disease.

  Study of damage to the bones by archaeologist Jill Cook, and by AHOB Associate Peter Andrews and his Spanish colleague Yolanda Fernández-Jalvo, showed that most of the limb bones were fragmentary and had been deliberately smashed, the rib cages had been opened up, and damage to a neck vertebra even suggested that one individual had been beheaded while lying face down. In deciding whether cannibalism had occurred in such an assemblage, Peter and Yolanda examined four main criteria. Allowing for anatomical differences, were animal bones (assumed to represent food debris) and human bones treated the same in terms of the methods of butchery? Were there similar patterns of breakage in the long bones that might have facilitated marrow extraction? Were there similar patterns of post-processing discard? And was there evidence of cooking, and, if so, was it applied equally to both animal and human remains? Because of bias in the way the collections were made (the animal bones were mostly gathered unsystematically and almost randomly, while the human remains mostly consisted of parts of the head and jaws that would have been easily recognizable, as well as ones we had excavated carefully), examination of the first three criteria was difficult. Nevertheless, comparing the treatment and disposal of the most common large mammal remains (horse and deer) showed patterns comparable to each other and to the human remains, thus supporting the case for nutritional cannibalism. This even extended to details of the dismemberment of the head from the jaws, of tongue removal, and jaw breakage to extract marrow (although for the fourth criterion, there is little evidence of cooking on any of the bones).

  Jill Cook of the British Museum has instead suggested that many of the marks and damage on the human bones were produced by trampling as the bones lay on the cave floor, and she has questioned whether cannibalism would ever have been necessary on nutritional grounds. Instead, if it happened at all, it could have taken place as part of a funerary ritual. Some peoples today dismember and lay out bodies on platforms, to be eaten by vultures, while others dig up the corpses of loved ones, strip off the flesh, and rebury them. Roger Jacobi accepts the reality of the processing marks on the human bones, but thinks that these procedures might have been carried out to produce manageable packaged transport of bodies to the cave, perhaps in bags, if group members had died away from their home base. One surprising result of the radiocarbon dating of the animal and human bones found in the surviving pocket of sediment next to the cave wall is the wide span of the dates, covering over a thousand years. This might suggest that the accumulation represented a redeposition, perhaps as part of a final act of site cleaning before the cave was eventually abandoned. In which case, both the animal and human accumulations resulted from repeated episodes of human occupation, accompanied by disposal of both the animal and human dead.

  As we saw in the last chapter, characteristic levels of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in different foods we eat (plants, meat, fish) are taken up into our bones, and hence carry signatures of our diet. Isotope analyses carried out on some of the Gough’s Cave Creswellian human bones by a team led by AHOB member Mike Richards are particularly interesting. These revealed that the people concerned had consumed mainly animal protein, consistent with hunting and carnivory. While the isotope signature indicated that the Cheddar people were certainly high up the meat-eating food chain compared with a contemporaneous arctic fox also sampled, the signal expected from the consumption of grass-feeding horses was not present, and suggested instead that deer, giant ox or perhaps even other carnivores were the regular prey of these people. Interpretation of the results is compounded by uncertainty as to whether the human remains were of the cave residents, thought to have been primarily horse-hunters, or from a different group of humans brought in from elsewhere to be processed and presumably eaten. And there is one extra complication: if human flesh was regularly eaten, it might have overprinted an isotope signature from the consumption of horsemeat.

  At the time of the Creswellians, sea level was lowered over 75 metres and Britain was joined to Europe by a wide land bridge, which would have included the rich plains and hills of Doggerland now lying under the North Sea. The nets of trawlers have been dredging up the bones of Ice Age mammals such as mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, horse, deer and reindeer from 20–50 metres deep for at least 200 years, and occasionally flint, bone and antler tools are also found. When Gough’s Cave was occupied, similar peoples were living in Holland, Belgium, Germany and France, but the northern lands were always more sparsely settled and human groups probably had to be very mobile to make the best of scattered resources and migrating game. The particular distinguishing features of Creswel
lian flint work include a lack of very small tools and the dominance of particular kinds of blades, blunted along one edge and often abruptly chipped across the ends – thought to be spear points. The closest parallels with those on the Continent are from sites in Holland and Belgium and it may well be that these were actually the same people migrating seasonally or through their lifetimes to and fro across Doggerland to the Midlands and West Country. This possibility is reinforced by the amber present in Gough’s, which could have come from the Baltic or from glacial erratic material pushed southwards by ice into the hills of Dogger-land. The fact that the similarities lie to the east rather than the south suggests that the Creswellian colonizers of Britain descended from Magdalenians who had already moved north and responded to a rapid climatic warming that marks the beginning of the Late Glacial Interstadial about 16,000 years ago.

  Another significant difference between the European Magdalenian sites and their Creswellian equivalents, such as Gough’s Cave,

  has been the lack of figurative art in the British sites, either in the form of portable engraved or sculpted pieces, or art on cave walls. The only definite examples known were the engravings on rib bones of a human figure from Pin Hole Cave, and a horse from Robin Hood Cave, both in Creswell Crags (a limestone gorge running east to west and forming part of the border between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire). It was assumed that this difference reflected the relatively impoverished and challenging conditions in which the early Britons had to live, or the greater sophistication of their continental neighbours. But in 2003, there was a major breakthrough in our knowledge of British cave art, giving a more sensitive and human dimension to the Creswellians than the images of possible cannibalism at Gough’s Cave. Three Palaeolithic archaeologists, two British (Paul Pettitt and Paul Bahn) and one Spanish (Sergio Ripoll), considered that such art might exist somewhere on a British cave wall, and could have been missed in previous inspections. With the benefit of their previous experience in locating and studying cave art, they began a careful survey, fortuitously starting at Creswell Crags. On their first morning they noticed some apparently non-figurative marks in Robin Hood Cave, and other marks, including what looked like an animal’s head, in Mother Grundy’s Parlour. Next they visited the unpromising locality of Church Hole, one of the less famous of the Creswell caves. With the benefit of highly directional lighting, they scoured the cave walls and to their astonishment, despite the distraction of recent graffiti, soon recognized the engraved shape of a large animal, about 45 centimetres (20 in) long – apparently an ibex.

  Pettitt, Bahn and Ripoll believe they have now identified some ninety possible engravings on the walls of Church Hole, many of them just patterns of lines, but including depictions of horse, bison, bear, birds and women. Further study suggests that the first engraving identified is actually that of a stag, not an ibex, which fits better with our knowledge of the British Ice Age fauna of the time, in which ibex is unknown. As with much of the cave art on the Continent, it seems that natural undulations in the cave wall suggested the shape of a particular animal to the artist, who then amplified this by engraving ears, eyes or muzzles. But there are also stylistic peculiarities in the art, since most of the representations comprise only parts of the animal, primarily the head or fore-quarters, and two bison heads are so similar that they were surely produced by the same hand. As with all remarkable discoveries in archaeology, it is always wise to consider alternative explanations such as, in this case, more recent forgery. But the style of the art and the species represented are certainly consistent with Magdalenian examples from Europe, and final proof that the art was ancient has come from uranium-series dating of cave flowstone covering parts of the stag, by Alistair Pike of Bristol University, giving an age of over 13,000 years. The Church Hole finds are significant for many reasons, beyond their age and what they depict. First, they suggest that careful searches of other British sites may reveal similar, or perhaps even more spectacular, examples of cave art. Second, they show commonality with European finds to the south and east, suggesting that human groups at this time were indeed linked across what is now the North Sea and the Channel. Third, this country has at last been added to the distribution map of decorated Ice Age sites in Eurasia that stretches from Portugal to the Urals. The most northerly known decorated cave has moved some 450 kilometres (280 miles) from Gouy, near Rouen, to the British Midlands, and the sparse portable objects at Creswell have at last been richly augmented.

  Summer temperatures in the early part of the Late Glacial Interstadial were as high as those in Britain today, but it was not to last, for we know from plant and beetle remains that within two thousand years the climate had got wetter, but the temperature had dropped by at least 4°C. These changes seem to have led to the spread of birch forest in Britain, and this in turn would have forced horses to migrate to more open steppe. Evidence for human occupation soon peters out at Gough’s with the disappearance of their favourite prey, and we see a change throughout England in the animals and the human occupation patterns. In the latter stages of the Late Glacial Interstadial the large mammal fauna consisted of woodland animals such as red deer, roe deer and elk, but there are also reindeer and wild cattle. And while at the time of Gough’s two thirds of known Creswellian sites were in caves compared with settlements in the open, in the latter part of the Late Glacial Interstadial that ratio was reversed. With the arrival of the Late Glacial Interstadial, it looked as if the Earth was at last emerging from the chill of the Last Glacial Maximum into an interglacial, but the drop in temperature that the last of the Creswellians began to suffer was to get even worse. Soon after 13,000 years ago, the Earth plunged into a final and severe cold snap known as the Younger Dryas stadial, named after the alpine/tundra wildflower the Mountain Aven or Dryas octopetala that characterized this period in Scandinavia (as the Latin name suggests, this shrub has a flower with eight petals). To judge from annual layers in the Greenland ice cap, the mean annual temperature dropped by about 15°C in both Greenland and Britain in some ten years, and this big chill was to last over a thousand years. It is believed that the warm conveyor belt of the Atlantic Ocean shut down completely for the last time in human history, but the effects on climate of this chill were global, not only causing the return of ice caps to Scotland and the Lake District, but affecting regions as far away as South America, the Antarctic and New Zealand. While its effects on the hunter-gatherers of Britain were severe or even catastrophic (it is unclear whether any survived here), in terms of human history there were more positive effects, as it is possible that these changes also catalysed the populations of the Middle East and the Far East to begin the domestication of plants and animals.

  About 11,500 years ago, the Younger Dryas ended as abruptly as it began. Subtropical waters once again fed the Gulf Stream, and northern Europe rapidly thawed out. Forests quickly regained the ground that they had lost to the cold and aridity, and within two thousand years most of the ice sheets were gone. From one extreme to the other, the Earth’s climate became even warmer and moister than today for several thousand years. In the north, forests grew closer to the Pole than they do now, while further south, much of the Saharan desert was wet and verdant, with hippos and crocodiles swimming where now there are only vast sand dunes. This phase, known as the Holocene Optimum, occurred between about 9,000 and 5,000 years ago. The hunter-gatherers of Europe who had adapted to the relatively open conditions at the end of the Ice Age now faced new challenges. Animals such as mammoth, cave bear, spotted hyaena and lion, part of the European scene for hundreds of thousands of years, died out locally or globally as dense forests spread across much of western Europe, accompanied by forest-loving animals such as red deer, brown bear and wild boar. As people adapted to the new conditions, they changed their technology, and this marks the transition from the Upper Palaeolithic (for example the Creswellians) to the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), with a tool kit of small stone tools – microliths – many of which must have been mounted on w
ooden handles, and the spread of the bow and arrow.

  A site that illustrates how well early Mesolithic people in Britain managed this transition is Star Carr near Scarborough in Yorkshire. As the last glacial ice retreated, it created lakes of melt water in many places, and one of these was in what is now the Vale of Pickering. The former Lake Pickering is now carr (waterlogged soil with reeds and alders) and its thick deposits of silts and peats have been under excavation on and off for some fifty years. Sealed by peats, an occupation surface with dense concentrations of Mesolithic artefacts of both stone and wood and associated bones has been wonderfully preserved, dating from about 10,500 years ago. The wet conditions conserved many wooden tools, and nearly 200 barbed points of bone and antler, as well as jewellery in the form of stone and amber beads, pierced deer teeth, and thousands of small flint tools. These were dominated by chisel-like burins, presumably for working the considerable quantities of bone and antler found there. At the edge of the ancient lake, amongst reeds, a 6-metre long wooden platform of worked timbers had been built, the oldest such structure known. The individual timbers were skilfully split, from trunks of either poplar or aspen, to form planks up to 3 metres long and about 3 centimetres thick. The only technology available for this in the Mesolithic would have been stone axes and hammers, and stone, antler or wooden wedges. Studies of the many charcoal and burnt wood fragments at the lake-edge suggested that the occupants repeatedly burnt the reed swamp zone to keep their route to the lake clear or to make hunting easier.

  During the Star Carr excavations, extraordinary finds were made: twenty-one worked red deer skulls still with the stumps of their antlers, and all with a pair of holes through the back of them. These must have been headdresses, tied through with a leather thong, and were originally thought to have been worn by hunters as a disguise. The wooden platform was thought to be a mooring for boats, an interpretation supported by the discovery of what seemed to be a wooden paddle. But despite the rich finds from Star Carr, there was little evidence of fishhooks or, indeed, of fish bones. So an alternative explanation for the platform is that it was actually a walkway for depositing offerings in the lake as part of religious ceremonies. In this interpretation, Star Carr was not only an important 10,500-year-old Mesolithic occupation site, but also a ritual centre for people who held the lake sacred. The antler headdresses were probably not worn during hunting, but instead were part of a costume for ceremonies, or perhaps were even offerings thrown into the lake.