Homo Britannicus

by Chris Stringer

  No human bones were found at Star Carr, but if we return to the Cheddar region, finds from there give us a picture of Britons during the Mesolithic era about 10,000 years ago. The skeleton of Cheddar Man, mentioned already, was found during blasting in the entrance of Gough’s Cave around Christmas 1903. Early press coverage and reports greatly exaggerated the age of the find, and his death was variously attributed to starvation, rock fall or drowning; it was also said that his diet was probably roots and grains and that he was incapable of walking upright. In fact he appears to be a rare example of a Mesolithic burial, and recent studies suggest that he was a young man in his early twenties when he died. Like his predecessors in the Creswellian, his skull was long-headed and had strong muscle markings, but his brow ridge, jaws and teeth were smaller than in the earlier finds. Like the Creswellians, his teeth were relatively unworn and in good condition, without decay or indicators of stress during growth, but he had his wisdom teeth. This is in contrast to two of the three Creswellian jawbones, which show an unusual feature most common in oriental people of today – they lack their third molars. Such a feature is thought to be an evolutionary response to dental overcrowding, as jawbones have got smaller. Teenagers occasionally do not develop any wisdom teeth, and in a situation where dental overcrowding could lead to dental infections and death, those individuals would have been somewhat more likely to survive, and pass on that feature to their children. In contrast to the muscularity of his skull, Cheddar Man’s body was lightly muscled and his pelvis was rather feminine in shape. He was not tall, at about 166 cm (5ft 5in), but the lower parts of his arms and legs were relatively long, as in the early Cro-Magnons, proportions thought by some anthropologists to be a hint of warm climate evolutionary origins. Cheddar Man appears healthy from his skeleton, apart from one noticeable feature: on his right forehead there is an oval pit that marks the site of a bone infection, perhaps the result of an injury, or perhaps originating from his sinuses. This infection would have formed an open wound, oozing pus, and would certainly have been debilitating, perhaps linked with fever and general malaise, but it is not known whether it killed him.

  A cave 5 kilometres (3 miles) from Gough’s, in the Mendip Hills of Somerset, has given us further information about the Mesolithic inhabitants of Britain. Aveline’s Hole has recently been revealed as the earliest dated cemetery in Britain, used for burials over a period of several hundred years, and as a rare decorated cave, with engraved patterned lines on its walls. Before its discovery in 1797 the cave appears to have been sealed for some 10,000 years, and when opened there were more than seventy skeletons lying ‘promiscuously’ on the cave floor. Somewhat more controlled excavations in the early twentieth century found flint tools, animal bones and the fragmentary remains of twenty-one more individuals, including what appeared to be a ceremonial burial on a hearth, with red ochre, deer teeth used for necklaces, and even some fossil ammonites. Sadly, a bomb that fell on Bristol in 1941 destroyed most of this remarkable collection together with the excavation records, but the surviving bone fragments indicated that there were adults, young children and two infants. As with Cheddar Man, these people were small and slightly built, but in contrast to the Gough’s finds, there were signs of growth stress in the teeth and skeletons, indicating childhood illness or poor nutrition. One adult arm fragment also showed the kind of distortion that comes from repetitive strong activities such as paddling a canoe, or throwing missiles in hunting or fighting. The animal bones in the cave indicated that red deer, wild boar, wolf, lynx and bear may have been hunted for food or their pelts. Isotope analyses of the surviving bones and teeth suggest that the Aveline’s people were indeed meat eaters, and as with the archaeological evidence from Star Carr, there was no evidence of fish in the diet. Dried mud inside one of the Aveline’s arm bones still contained pollen, indicating a relatively open landscape with birch, pine and grasses.

  At this time sea levels had not yet risen enough to re-detach Britain from the Continent or to form the Bristol Channel and, at 80–100kilometres (50–60 miles) from the coast, Gough’s Cave and Aveline’s Hole were considerably further inland than they are today. We saw from Star Carr that these early postglacial settlers were impacting and interacting with their environment through the removal and use of timber and the firing of reeds, but this was only on a tiny scale compared with what was to follow. Nevertheless, the people of the Mesolithic began the modification of our landscape that has culminated in Britain’s green and pleasant land. Given the story of interrupted occupation we have seen repeated many times through more than half a million years of human history in Britain, is there at last a genealogical link, however tenuous, between the pioneers who began to enter the peninsula of Britain as the ice finally retreated some 11,500 years ago and the Britons of today?

  One line of evidence we can turn to is DNA. In the last chapter, we saw how a special kind of DNA, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), has been recovered from ten Neanderthal fossils, confirming that these ancient humans represented a separate genetic lineage from everyone alive today. As we also saw, mtDNA has been used to reconstruct the early evolution and global dispersal of modern humans, and all of us alive today fall into one of the ‘haplogroups’ descended from the original African mtDNA female ancestor’s genetic material. The different haplogroups of Europeans have been identified by the letters H–K and T–X, and the geneticist Bryan Sykes of Oxford University took this a stage further by giving them women’s names since, by implication, each of the founders of the haplogroups would have been an Ice Age woman, one of the daughters (many generations removed) of the hypothetical African Eve. Sykes has imaginatively called these Seven Daughters of Eve Helena (she supposedly lived in the Pyrenees), Jasmine (Syria), Katrine (Venice), Tara (who apparently had the good taste to live in Tuscany), Ursula (Greece), Valda (Spain) and finally Xenia (the Caucasus Mountains), although he admits that their precise places of origin are almost as fanciful as the names he has given them.

  Using an average mutation rate for mtDNA, it is possible to estimate (with a fair margin of error) the approximate time of origin of the different haplogroups or, as Sykes calls them, clans. U(rsula) would be the most ancient, deriving from some of the first Cro-Magnons, about 45,000 years old, and now present in about 11 percent of people all over Europe, particularly in the northwest. X(enia) is the second oldest of the seven European clans, dating from about 25,000 years ago, from just before the Last Glacial Maximum, with about 7 percent of Europeans. H(elena) is the largest and most widespread of the European clans, dating from about 20,000 years ago and representing about 41 percent of Europeans, especially common in the Basques of northern Spain and southern France. V(elda) is of similar age but is present in only about 4 percent of native Europeans, mainly in the north-west, including in the Saami people of Norway and Finland. T(ara) is most common in southern and western Europe, especially the western parts of the British Isles, and represents about 10 percent of Europeans. K(atrine) also shows a frequency of around 10 percent, dating from about 15,000 years ago, now most common in the Alps and central and northern Europe. J(asmine) is the second largest of the European clans at about 12 percent, and the youngest in origin, at about 9,000 years ago. Sykes believes this clan originated in the Middle East among early farmers and spread across Europe with the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic (New Stone Age). He has since added one more, called Ulrike and related to U(rsula). Although originating at about 18,000 years, this strain is present in only about 2 percent of Europeans, and is found mainly in northern and eastern Europe.

  In 1995, Bryan Sykes began working with me in an attempt to recover ancient DNA from the Cheddar fossils, both from the Creswellian layers and from Cheddar Man. Animal bones were tested first and registered that DNA was preserved, so an attempt was made on one of Cheddar Man’s foot bones, but without success. In 1997, a different approach was used. The base of the crown of one of his molar teeth was drilled in a ‘clean’ laboratory, and the resulting tissue extr
acts were biochemically amplified (copied many times over) to see if human DNA could be identified. The preliminary results received wide publicity through a television series on archaeology, since it transpired that Cheddar Man apparently had DNA of haplogroup U(rsula), and moreover, when local samples were collected in Cheddar village, there were a number of close matches to the sequence, including the mtDNA of the headmaster of the local primary school, Adrian Targett. The results have been discussed widely, but with much misrepresentation or misunderstanding. The one thing we can be pretty confident about is that Targett had not received his mtDNA from Cheddar Man. As we discussed earlier, mtDNA is passed down through females, and thus even if Cheddar Man had fathered children none of them would have inherited his mtDNA. Any link between Cheddar Man and Targett would have to have been through a common female ancestor, at minimum through Cheddar Man’s mother (and then a sister), but much more likely through a female ancestor who lived even further back in time, and probably elsewhere – perhaps on now submerged territory such as Doggerland, or even on the mainland of Europe.

  And there is one more complication. Since 1997, a great deal more work on ancient DNA has been carried out, and this shows how serious a problem contamination is. Every person who has touched the Cheddar fossils could have left their DNA on them as well, whether in the form of skin flakes or even spittle, as they talked. However carefully the extraction process is carried out, and however clean the lab, the amplification process is so good at locating and copying minute strands of DNA that any contaminants will be copied, as well as any genuinely ancient DNA. If Cheddar Man had DNA as different from recent Europeans as the Neanderthals were, it could certainly be distinguished. But as we have seen, in terms of their mtDNA, recent Europeans have all descended from the same few women, and this means we can no longer be sure that the Cheddar Man result is authentic evidence of a direct link back to his Palaeolithic ancestors (and forward to his living clan member Adrian Targett) rather than the result of contamination by one of the 11 percent of fellow Europeans who carry the same mtDNA type today. But these doubts should not obscure the very real significance of Cheddar Man to British history. He is not, of course, the oldest human inhabitant of Britain, by hundreds of thousands of years. But as we have seen, the stone tool makers of Pakefield, the butchers of Boxgrove, the Swanscombe woman, all represent people whose hold on British soil was so vulnerable and tenuous that their descendants lost their grip on settlement within a few thousand years. And because they were part of an early dispersal from Africa that did not give rise to modern humans, they have no descendants anywhere in the world today. Even the modern human tribes of Cheddar Man’s predecessors in Gough’s Cave, a few thousand years earlier, whose butchered bones lay close to his, were apparently swept away when the Younger Dryas brought the ice caps back to Britain. They have no continuity in Britain with the Britons of today, either. It is only when we arrive at the Holocene, the 11,500-year-long interglacial that we live in today, that we can really speak of an unbroken chain of people who connect to their descendants on this island. And Cheddar Man is probably one of those links in the chain, whether his DNA shows it or not. While he and his contemporaries lived in a peninsula of Europe, this was not to last, for as the melting of the glacial ice caps accelerated, sea levels rose all over the world. About 9,500 years ago the Irish Sea and the Strait of Dover began to open up, and by about 7,000 years ago, the last vestiges of a land bridge between Britain and France were submerged. The effects of the rise in sea level were compensated for in glaciated regions by the lifting of the weight of the ice caps. These had depressed the northern land masses by hundreds of metres, and the bounce-back following their melting is still occurring today. Since the end of the Ice Age, eastern Canada has risen some 900 metres, Scandinavia 700 metres and eastern Scotland 250 metres: this may explain why skeletons of whales and seals have been found 30 metres above present water levels in the Firth of Forth. Scandinavia has been rising by about 1 centimetre a year, and even shorelines occupied by the Vikings are now some 8 metres above sea level.

  Isotope data produced by AHOB member Michael Richards and colleagues show that European Cro-Magnons were using more aquatic and marine resources than Neanderthals did, yet the evidence from Gough’s Cave and Star Carr does not seem to show this, beyond the presence of the bones of some water birds. However, another British site at the end of the Ice Age gives us the first evidence of the really intensive use of marine resources. Mike, working with AHOB and other colleagues, conducted an isotope analysis of human bones from Kendrick’s Cave near Llandudno in north-west Wales. The Kendrick’s people lived at about the same time as the Creswellian inhabitants of Gough’s, but at the very limits of the range of people at that time. Like the people at Gough’s they hunted horses, but isotopes in their bone collagen suggest that they could have been getting as much as a quarter of their protein from the sea, in the form of fish, shellfish and marine mammals such as seals.

  This level of reliance on the sea is exceptional for the Old Stone Age, but five thousand years later, early in our present interglacial, such dependency was widespread across western Europe, from Scotland and Denmark in the north to Portugal in the south. In some sites, massive accumulations of shellfish middens and isotope data suggest that marine foods could have made up almost all of the diet. Some experts see this Mesolithic reliance on a single resource base (the sea) as a prelude to the similar narrowing that followed in the subsequent Neolithic period, with the switch to agricultural and pastoral foods. Evocative traces of the importance of the coasts and estuaries to the Mesolithic people of Britain are preserved in trails of footprints that can be seen today in the estuaries of the Severn and Mersey.

  Eight thousand years ago the Severn Estuary did not exist and the river flowed through a forest-covered plain into a bay near what is now the island of Lundy. At Goldcliff, when the Bristol Channel tides are very low, beautifully preserved footprints of cranes, deer, aurochs and humans are briefly exposed. The shoeless human prints belong to adults and, particularly, to children, and there are clearly many exposed footprint surfaces layered one on top of the other, perhaps even representing annual cycles of flooding and drying out of the salt marshes. Pollen, wood and preserved traces of vegetation paint a vivid picture of an environment where the sea was encroaching over vast areas, causing the death of large numbers of trees, the trunks of which survived like upright corpses. Direct evidence of the diet of the people who made the prints comes from butchered bones of wild boar and aurochs, as well as eel bones and burnt raspberry and elderberry seeds, indicating in that case autumn occupation. Even human intestinal parasites have been recovered from these layers, suggesting defecation. There are also charcoal, burnt reeds and larger pieces of burnt wood, showing that where there were surviving forests, they and surrounding reed beds were probably being cleared by burning (as at Star Carr). The footprints fade out from the time the sea level stabilized about 6,700 years ago, with salt marsh giving way to reed swamp, and then the return of trees in a fen woodland. A slightly later series of hundreds of prints has been found near Formby Point at the mouth of the present Mersey Estuary, with a wider range of animals represented, including once again crane, aurochs and deer, but also unshod horse, dog or wolf, wild boar, sheep or goat, and wading birds such as rail and oystercatcher. The quality and length of the human trails are so good that long toenails are indicated on some prints, and estimates of height and walking speed can be made on others. Some individuals (men?) were about 1.65metres (5ft 5in) tall, and somewhat smaller individuals (women?) 1.45metres (4ft 9 in), while again many children were represented. Patterns of the prints suggest that women and children may have been collecting razor-shells and shrimps, while males were travelling faster near red deer and roe deer tracks. Whether this was hunting, trapping, or the beginning of animal management is unclear.

  But the evidence from several of these Mesolithic sites of larger and perhaps more settled aggregations of people, a greater
concentration on particular animal or marine resources, and the beginning of landscape modification in the form of clearing and burning all herald changes which would become even more pronounced in the succeeding and final stage of the Stone Age in Britain – the Neolithic or New Stone Age. In the following and last chapter, we will look at how humans have increasingly impacted and manipulated their environments, and what this means for the future of Homo britannicus.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Our Challenging Climates

  The early occupation of Britain was often a precarious business, as we have seen. The climate of this green and pleasant land has suffered many slings and arrows, such as the major glaciations of 450,000 and 20,000 years ago that stripped the land bare and covered much of it with an ice sheet up to a mile thick. But long before that, at least 700,000 years ago, people had arrived in a climate warm enough to have subsequently been nicknamed the Costa del Cromer, when pond tortoises, water chestnuts and hippos thrived here. As glaciations grew in their severity, Britain was repeatedly given up to the ice, with at least seven abandonments of settlement by pre-Neanderthals, Neanderthals and, finally, modern humans. In between, there were benign interglacials when people were able to establish themselves, and one 125,000 years ago when, despite the inviting conditions, the English Channel blocked any attempts at colonization.