Homo Britannicus

by Chris Stringer

  There is a much more hopeful example of how things can change for the better through recognition of an environmental problem and concerted international efforts to deal with it. Chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) have been widely used in domestic sprays, refrigeration, air conditioning, and other industrial processes. However, scientists argued that the use of these was affecting the atmosphere, as when they were released they broke down into damaging elements, especially chlorine. The Earth has a layer of ozone gas high in the stratosphere, which protects us from exposure to dangerous levels of ultraviolet rays from the sun. But in 1985 a large hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica was seen from satellite images. It was evident that CFCs were primarily responsible for this ozone depletion, and that ultraviolet penetration was increasing as a result. For once, the world’s nations came together quickly to create two global treaties by 1989, to which nearly 200 countries are now signatories. As a result, the production and use of CFCs is being phased out with the development of alternatives, and the recycling of existing sources such as old refrigerators is under tight control. The ozone layer is recovering, although it is being carefully monitored for any signs of further damage. Of course this success was a case where lines of action were clear, and where the most influential nations pulled together for the common good. In the present situation the US government, in contrast, appears to be in denial about the reality of global warming and our role in it, preferring to talk about long-term technological solutions to any problems. President George W. Bush’s chief climate adviser, James Connaughton, has said he does not believe anyone could forecast a safe level of greenhouse gas emissions, and cutting them could harm the world economy. But there is hope that this short-term thinking will change for the better with Bush’s departure, and there is now a groundswell of scientific and popular opinion in America about the scale of the problem and the need to address it.

  If we look back at our early history it is clear that human populations only ever had a tenuous grip on their homelands. In our ancestral home of Africa, the main threat came from changes in rainfall and vegetation, and the knock-on effects these had on water and food. In northern Europe, the dominant factor would have been temperature, and particularly winter temperature. As we have seen, Britain was colonized by human populations at least eight times in 700,000 years, but seven of those were ultimately unsuccessful in the face of severe climate change, with only the occupation beginning about 11,500 years ago continuing to the present day. On the other side of the inhabited world, on another island, a strange and diminutive human species had by then come to the end of its long life. The ancestors of Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the ‘hobbit’, had apparently settled the island of Flores in Indonesia at least 800,000 years ago, and this species then evolved in splendid isolation in a tropical environment, far from the climatic vicissitudes of northern Europe. Yet that stability was wrecked by something completely different from climate change – a massive volcanic eruption 12,000 years ago devastated the whole island and seemingly brought this fascinating experiment in human evolution to an end. So contingency (chance) has always been a major factor in shaping the course of human evolution. The difference now is that we are largely responsible for the major uncertainties facing our species and life on the planet.

  Looking at human history, which populations have coped best with rapid climatic or environmental change, and how did they do it? The species Homo erectus lasted over a million years, putting our recent emergence and ‘success’ in the shade by comparison. But that longevity was achieved by dispersal and diversification in small numbers across a wide swathe of the tropics and subtropics of the Old World, such that climatic and environmental insults would only ever hit part of the human population rather than all of it. Our much larger numbers and the threat of major climate change across the whole planet means that we are in a very different situation.

  The first people we know to have persisted through major changes in conditions were the Neanderthals, and we find them alongside remains of hippos and elephants in Italy, and mammoth and reindeer in Britain. They were highly mobile and moved across the landscape in small numbers to exploit a range of plant and animal resources. But when the climate changed rapidly it seems they found adapting quickly enough a problem, and when times were hard, they retreated to sheltered and more stable refugia in regions like the Dordogne and southern Europe, bouncing back if and when things improved.

  Some of the Cro-Magnons fared better, and the Gravettians of 27,000 years ago were able to survive in harsher climatic conditions than the Neanderthals. They seem to have been more flexible and able to switch mobility patterns, at times settling in large camps with stable supplies, at other times dispersing and diversifying to gather scattered and varied food resources. They evidently had good buffering from extreme weather in the form of efficient fires, sewn skin clothing and tents, and the addition of nets to trap small game may have allowed the whole community – men, women, young and old – to participate fully in hunting activities for the first time. But the extensive spread of so-called Venus figurines at this time across Europe and Asia, as far east as Lake Baikal, gives a further clue to the success of these Cro-Magnons: their wide social networks. While Neanderthal social groups probably stretched their contacts over miles, through sending social messages in the forms of symbols and trade, the Cro-Magnons straddled continents. This gave them the potential to exchange mates, information, resources and ideas over wide areas and increased their effective group sizes enormously, all important when local resources were unpredictable and it might be necessary at times to rely on the support of neighbours to bale you out.

  Of course the Gravettians in Europe probably only ever numbered in tens of thousands, rather than millions, and they only had to worry about crossing social and geographical, rather than political, barriers. However, the importance of cooperation rather than conflict in challenging times is a lesson for Europe and the world today. As stress builds up in the face of serious environmental changes, the continent could go in two different directions, following examples 27,000 years apart: Gravettian (flexibility and cooperation) or Balkan (factionalism and conflict). If we do not cooperate for the common good, we will certainly sink separately (in some cases literally, as sea levels rise). If we can face the challenges of global warming together, we can look to a new and more hopeful future. Britain was joined to Europe for most of its prehistory, although if sea levels rise it will become even more isolated physically. But in terms of a common future, we must extend our social networks of shared purpose a lot further than did the Gravettians who buried the ‘Red Lady’ of Paviland. The future of Homo sapiens across the whole world is now as precarious as Homo britannicus ever was in that small peninsula of Europe called Britain, and the destiny of the whole world, not just our survival, depends on us.

  While it may be true that human kind cannot bear very much reality, one hopeful sign is the way the debate about climate change now has a very high profile. The shocking events of 9/11 happened the month before AHOB began its work in 2001, and my reaction to it then (on the Edge website, which debates scientific issues) was concern about the effect it would have on global priorities: ‘I… fear that the world will forget the even greater threat we all face from global warming. If we do not start to face up to this threat properly, the chaos that will ensue over the next century as half the Earth tries to relocate to find food and water will make these recent events, awful as they are, pale into insignificance.’ When I began to plan this book two years later, one of my main objectives was to bring the reality of future climate change, and our central role in it, to public attention. Things have changed for the better in the last four years, if not in significant actions to really address the threat, at least in a general recognition of the immense scale of the problems we face. Scientists, politicians, rock stars and media figures like David Attenborough are all prepared to acknowledge the reality, but it is now up to every one of us to do something about i
t if humans everywhere are not to share the fate of so many generations of Homo britannicus who were unable to cope with their changing world.

  1 This picture taken in March 2006 shows how erosion at Happisburgh in Norfolk is destroying houses and roads at an accelerating rate.

  2 William Buckland (1784–1856) dressed for fieldwork, with his famous blue collecting bag.

  3 A 700,000-year-old hyaena jaw from Pakefield in Suffolk.

  4 Some of the ancient but still razor-sharp flint flakes found at Pakefield.

  5 ‘Roger’ – the famous fossil shinbonen found at Boxgrove in December 1993.

  6 A red deer antler containing flint fragments, used as a hammer to make handaxes at Boxgrove.

  7 Part of a rhinoceros pelvis – one of four butchered rhinos found at Boxgrove.

  8 The shape of this remarkable scatter of flint debris at Boxgrove shows where someone squatted down and made a flint handaxe. The heavier flakes fell close to his or her legs, the smaller ones scattered further away – then the knapper got up and carried the handaxe off, leaving the profile of their legs preserved for 500,000 years.

  9 Local resident Mike Chambers found this beautiful black flint handaxe at Happisburgh while each walking in March 2000.

  10 A beautifully made flint handaxe from Boxgrove.

  11 Stone tools covering 350,000 years of the British Palaeolithic: a prepared core about 200,000 years old;

  a small Middle Palaeolithic (Neanderthal) handaxe;

  a small handaxe from Swanscombe dating from about 400,000 years.

  12 The River Thames has accumulated vast and complex sediments in the London region over the last 400,000 years: the youngest and lowest fill the present river channel (Holocene Channel Infilling); those from the Floodplain Terrace include deposits from thelast (Ipswichian) interglacial, and are about 120,000 years old; while the Middle Terrace includes material from about 200,000 years ago. This aerial view shows how the present river has truncated older Floodplain deposits and also shows (dotted area at the left) where the Trafalgar Square Floodplain material containing hippo bones has cut into older Middle Terrace sediments.

  14 The author recording a sample at Westbury in 1977.

  15 Hippos amongst dense delta vegetation in Botswana. East Anglia must have witnessed similar scenes 700,000 years ago.

  16 Sunlight on a glacier in the Antarctic. Many miles of coastline would have looked like this in Britain 450,000 years ago.

  17 A line of African elephants march through grasslands. Even larger straight-tusked elephants trailed across Britain in each interglacial over the last 500,000 years.

  18 The Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia. Heavily forested landscapes like this may have obstructed the early human colonization of Britain.

  19 Flooded fields in Cheshire, UK. The Foresight Future Flooding report published by the Department of Trade and Industry predicts that annual damage from flooding in the UK could rise from £1 billion to £25 billion during the present century.

  20 An internal view of the three skull bones from Swanscombe (top to bottom): the right parietal (found in 1955), the occipital (1935) and left parietal (1936).

  21 The strange assemblage from Banwell Bone Cave includes a giant bear, probably an even more formidable predator than the polar bear. The top of its humerus (above) is compared with the whole humerus of a brown bear (left).

  22 Lynford in Norfolk has an association of mammoths and Neanderthal archaeology that is unique in Britain. Here the huge tusk of an adult mammoth is under excavation.

  23 This stuffed mammoth from the Siberian permafrost was excavated at Yakutia in 1903, and exhibited in the St Petersburg Museum of Zoology. There is still an extensive trade in mammoth tusks from the region today.

  24 The skulls of a Neanderthal (La Ferrassie 1, left) and Cro-Magnon (Cro-Magnon 1, right).

  25 This mammoth, engraved on part of a tusk, was found at La Madeleine in 1864 and was one of the first relics to show that the Cro-Magnons were indeed contemporaries of the mammoth in France.

  26 This bâton made of reindeer antler was discovered during our excavations at Gough’s cave in 1991.

  27 An incomplete Creswellian engraving of a bovid (bison or wild cattle) dating from around 13–14,000 years ago, from Church Hole, Creswell.

  28 The people of Star Carr made beautiful harpoons of red deer antler.

  29 Amber, transported from the Baltic or found in deposits from the previous ice advance, was made into beads at Star Carr about 10,000 years ago.

  30 A beautifully preserved footprint at Formby, perhaps that of a teenager or woman.

  Appendix: The AHOB Team

  In the book I have regularly referred to ‘AHOB members’ and ‘AHOB research’ without giving details of the team that carried out the work. In fact the project has fourteen members who collaborate closely and meet regularly to discuss AHOB and its progress, and sixteen associate members who form a further collaborative network with the AHOB team. This appendix, prepared from interviews conducted by the science writer Sarah Lazarus, gives AHOB members (and one associate member, as an example) the opportunity to talk in their own words about AHOB and their role in the project, starting with me.

  CHRIS STRINGER

  I’m a research leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum, London, Director of AHOB, and the author of this book.

  My interest in human evolution started at primary school. I was fascinated by fossils, and at the age of nine or ten did a school project on Neanderthals. My interest grew throughout my school years but I had no idea that you could actually work in this area, so I planned to study medicine. I had a place at medical school lined up, when I chanced upon University College London’s prospectus. It was arranged alphabetically, and Anthropology was on the first page.

  The course offered archaeology, human evolution, genetics and social anthropology. Suddenly medicine seemed much less appealing. So I phoned the college, was invited for an interview, and offered a place. Much to the amazement of my teachers and parents, I dropped medicine and took up this subject, which I had only just learnt existed.

  I finished my degree in 1969 and wanted to carry on studying human evolution, but in those days you needed the best possible degree to get a grant. In the meantime I was offered a temporary job at the Natural History Museum by the then head of Anthropology, Don Brothwell, whom I had met whilst visiting to look at their fossil collections. The job lasted nine months after which, in the absence of further opportunities, I was planning to do teacher training. But a couple of weeks before I was due to start, Don got a call from the University of Bristol. They had spare funding for a PhD for someone working on human evolution. Don recommended me, so I abandoned the teaching idea and instead took up this opportunity in Bristol, where I examined the relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans in order to assess whether or not Neanderthals were reasonable ancestors for our own species. The data I accumulated strongly suggested they were not. They were too different – they had their own evolutionary line and had developed their own specializations.

  After my PhD it was touch and go again, but something else came up trumps. A post for a human evolution researcher was advertised at the Natural History Museum. Don Brothwell offered me an interview, I got the job, and I’ve never left. I’m now a research leader in Human Origins, an informal group of anthropologists based in the Department of Palaeontology. My research covers human evolution over the last million years. I’ve done a lot more work suggesting that Neanderthals were not our ancestors, and from about 1984 I was drawn into the developing ‘Out of Africa’ debate, and I’ve been in the middle of that ever since.

  Andy Currant and I have worked together at the Museum since I arrived here in 1973, and our first joint project was to excavate caves in the Gower Peninsula. In the 1980s we started working with Roger Jacobi at Gough’s Cave at Cheddar, and then in the 1990s Boxgrove became a focus of research. In 1993 the human tibia turned up and I started studying that with Simon P
arfitt. So my collaborative network gradually expanded, and by the time AHOB came around, many of my working relationships had been established for years. In 1996 I joined a new Cambridge-based initiative called the Stage 3 Project. This looked at the period when Neanderthals died out and modern humans took over in Europe (between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago). The Stage 3 strategy was to get a team of scientists from different disciplines to study every aspect of the problem. There were plant, animal, human evolution and geology specialists amongst others. That experience showed me how a team could bring different strengths and knowledge to a project, and achieve something that was much greater than the sum of its individual parts.