Homo Britannicus

by Chris Stringer

  One of my most exciting AHOB projects has been working on the assemblage from a 60,000-year-old site at Lynford in Norfolk. An old river channel yielded an extraordinarily rich flint assemblage as well as tens of thousands of fossil bones, teeth and bone fragments, insects, plant remains and shells. The unusual density of animal remains strongly implied that Neanderthals had hunted and butchered large game there, so I investigated this theory. I found that the majority of bones and teeth were from woolly mammoths and was struck by the fact that virtually all of the meatiest limb bones were missing. Very few of the remains seemed to have been gnawed by carnivores, so I wondered whether the Neanderthals had taken them elsewhere. None of the bones bear cut marks, but mammoths had such thick hides and flesh that contact between bone and flint tool would rarely have been made. Even in experiments with modern elephant carcasses, experienced butchers leave no cut marks at all. A critical piece of evidence may be that the mammoth remains do not reflect the natural range of ages found in a modern elephant herd, where adult females and juveniles predominate. At Lynford, nearly 90 per cent of the specimens are from young to middle-aged adults and, where sex can be established, they are all male. This suggests a death assemblage pattern typically produced by human hunters. A healthy adult mammoth would have been dangerous to bring down but Neanderthals could have herded them towards cliff edges or trapped them in treacherous bogs. So although the only evidence is indirect, there are good grounds for speculating that Neanderthals were hunting mammoths. It appears that they arrived at the site ‘tooled up’ with hand-axes they had manufactured elsewhere. And living in the harsh conditions of the last Ice Age, I can’t see them passing up such a nutritious meal.

  Working on AHOB has been fantastic. The project’s strength lies in the range and diversity of experience of the team. We are accumulating an unparalleled dataset demonstrating how ancient British populations ebbed, flowed and evolved, and are gaining valuable experience in the use of novel techniques such as faunal and environmental stable isotope analysis. These methods provide an unprecedented level of detail, and have allowed us to test some of our crazier ideas about the age and environment of sites. It’s inevitable that there are differences of opinion in the project but that’s also part of the fun – it makes you think twice about the validity of your own evidence.

  I am the only woman in the core AHOB team and although this does not make a jot of difference to the way we work together, I am aware of it as I look round the table at meetings. This reflects the more general paucity of female scientists in the UK. There are quite a number of female Quaternary palaeontologists on the Continent, but I can still count my female British colleagues on the fingers of one hand. I came from an arts background but with persistence, hard work and a few lucky breaks, I have been able to make it. Now that I’m a full-time academic, I hope I can encourage my female students to follow a scientific career.

  NICK ASHTON

  As Curator of the Department of the Prehistory of Europe at the British Museum, Nick Ashton brought vital knowledge of their immense collections to the AHOB project. He has organized many of our excavations and has spent countless hours in the field, investigating the enigmas of ancient human history.

  Having been interested in history since a young age, I enrolled to study at the Institute of Archaeology. I planned to focus on medieval times but surprised myself by finding ancient archaeology more compelling. I leapfrogged the Romans, landed on the Neolithic, then drifted back in time to the Palaeolithic. I started work at the British Museum in 1983 and have been there ever since. My work focuses on the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic. My knowledge of the Museum’s collections, which are vast, has been useful to the project – targeting the right artefacts provides us with the information we need and guides us towards sites for new excavations. I should add that although I know the collections fairly well, I can’t compete with Roger Jacobi, whose brain is truly encyclopaedic. What motivates me is solving problems. Flints themselves aren’t that exciting; but what they tell us about the mysteries of ancient human history is. It’s the people that intrigue me, and the flints are a way to understand them.

  Much of my fieldwork for AHOB has focused on the earliest human occupation of Britain. In the summer of 2004 I organized a three-week dig at Happisburgh. As well as being the site’s archaeologist, I ran the dig on a day-to-day basis, contacting local landowners and council people, hiring equipment, organizing food and accommodation, roping in various specialists and co-ordinating everyone’s work. This job was the most difficult logistical challenge I’ve ever faced. The site is rather inconveniently situated underneath a cliff on a beach and exposed only at low tide. We had to get a digging machine to come every day to clear away the sand deposited by the previous high tide. Because of varying tide times, we started work at 5 a.m. on some days and lunchtime on others. To dig out, sieve and process seven tonnes of material from the site was a considerable achievement.

  Ever since a handaxe was found there in 2000, Happisburgh has been recognized as one of the earliest sites of human occupation in northern Europe. It’s also important because there’s a huge amount of environmental, plant and animal evidence directly associated with the archaeology, so we can re-create the landscape. The humans lived on the banks of a slow-flowing river, surrounded by coniferous woodland, in a climate that was slightly cooler than today’s. Large herbivores such as elephant and rhino routinely trampled the river valley’s vegetation, opening up the landscape. The people left numerous flint chips but few distinct knapping scatters, so it’s likely they manufactured their handaxes elsewhere. Presumably they used their tools to butcher the abundant local game. A key objective of the dig was to look at the stratigraphy of the sediments in order to work out the dating. Some people, like Jim Rose, think the site is very early. The faunal evidence is more equivocal so it would be helpful to recover some more animal specimens.

  I’ve also been greatly involved with work on the Hoxnian interglacial. The Hoxnian is particularly rich in sites providing good environmental data and archaeological evidence, so it’s a fantastic period in which to closely observe human behaviour and patterns of habitation. The picture that’s emerging indicates that people preferred to live by rivers rather than lakes. This makes sense: riverside environments are more dynamic, support diverse vegetation, and they are erosive environments so they provide access to flint, an essential raw material. Like lakes, they attract thirsty game. The river valleys also acted as corridors through a densely wooded landscape – the motorway system of ancient Britain, in fact. All the evidence points to a climate that was similar to or slightly warmer than today’s. We get this climatic information from the presence of certain amphibians and reptiles that are very dependent on temperature, particularly the European pond terrapin. The terrapin doesn’t brood its eggs but relies on the ambient temperature of the mud, which must reach at least 18°C in July, when the eggs hatch.

  I’ve also waded into the Clactonian/Acheulean debate in the Hoxnian. The traditional view is that these two stone tool assemblages represent different groups of people with different technological cultures. I’m not so sure. I suspect that they may have been produced by the same group of people, undertaking different tasks at different places according to their needs and the availability of raw materials. Any assemblage is shaped by a plethora of contributing factors and I think you have to examine and unravel them all before making any assumptions. Whatever the answer, I’m sure the history is more complex than has previously been thought.

  A later technology, the Levallois (Prepared Core), was introduced in Europe more or less synchronously, around 250,000 to 300,000 years ago. There are some who believe that it originated in Africa and was carried to Europe by a new species of hominid, but there’s very little evidence to support this. I’ve examined a number of sites, including Purfleet in Essex, looking at tools that represent the genesis of Levallois and which refute that claim. I’m fascinated by what Levallois can tell us as the mat
erial expression of people’s behaviours. Levallois was a more economical and mobile technology. Several serviceable flakes could be created from a single core. I think this technological advance developed in tandem with a range of social changes. The people were undergoing a process of ‘neanderthalization’ as they adapted to cooler, more open environments and became more proficient hunters. It’s possible that social groups grew larger and that with their portable tools people cooperated to exploit the abundant herbivores over larger territories.

  Another important question I’ve been working on is whether the creation of the English Channel might explain the period of human absence that started around 200,000 years ago. Collections from the River Thames terraces show that human populations gradually dwindled in the period leading up to the absence, which is surprising as you might expect population densities to increase over time. Prior to the creation of the Channel, Britain was connected to Europe. However, after the sea carved a channel through the chalk of what is now the Dover Strait, it was only during cold periods that sea-level dropped sufficiently to reconnect Britain to mainland Europe. At the moment we don’t know the date of this event, but if it happened about 200,000 years ago, it might explain the dearth of humans in Britain after this time. There is, however, a site at Crayford that may overturn this theory. This is a fantastic site that was originally excavated in the 1880s, full of incredibly fresh artefacts that fit back together like a 3-dimensional jigsaw. At the moment, everyone disagrees on its dating. If, as I suspect, it dates to around 180,000 years ago, this would have a significant impact on our thinking about the period of absence.

  AHOB has been a brilliant experience. A major part of my role has been in organizing and co-ordinating digs. I like bossing people around so this suited me perfectly! Having worked with many of the people involved before, I knew we’d all get along. By funding new field work, the project has given us the impetus to do lots of things that have only been talked about for ages. It has really pushed the research forward, with some astonishing results.

  MARK WHITE

  Mark White is another of AHOB’s experts on Palaeolithic tools. His work on Neanderthal technology has much wider implications for our understanding of human behaviour and evolution.

  I first did a degree in archaeology at University College London, then a PhD on British handaxe assemblages at Cambridge, and have been lecturing at Durham University since 1999. I specialize in Lower and Middle Palaeolithic stone tool technologies and human behaviour, and I’ve excavated at a large number of British Palaeolithic sites. At times my work feels less like archaeology and more like a minor international conflict.

  I’ve been involved with AHOB since its conception, having worked with several other core members on field projects and papers over the years. It’s been a great experience. Our work has pushed the British Middle Palaeolithic to the fore after decades of languishing in the dark. We seem to be getting a handle on the character and timing of the period.

  I particularly like Neanderthals. What appeals to me about them is their otherness. They seem so like us at one level, and yet so different at another; it’s like seeing a reflection but not quite recognizing it. I come from the school of thought that Neanderthals were more sophisticated in their behaviour than the archaeological record allows us to see. I think they were doing things to survive for which we have no material evidence. As archaeologists, we can almost never know about technologies based on organic materials. The differences between Neanderthals and modern humans would seem to be a question of degree, rather than kind.

  I’ve spent a lot of time considering the questions raised by Levallois, a particular core-working method designed to produce flakes of a more or less predetermined form which became widespread during the Middle Palaeolithic. I started off by working with Roger Jacobi and Nick Ashton, documenting all the evidence we have in Britain. Rather than confining ourselves to the nitty-gritty of technology, we’ve also been looking more broadly at the changes in human population and behaviour that appear to accompany its development.

  Some people have argued that Levallois was developed in Africa and introduced to Europe, but the evidence doesn’t back them up in my opinion. Along with Nick Ashton, I have argued that it arose locally and quite independently in Europe and spread in a piecemeal way, disappearing and reappearing several times. The work we did on the material from the 300,000-year-old site at Purfleet, Essex, seems to support this. What you have here appears to be a proto-Levallois, where the rules of the method first start coming through.

  In terms of their wider implications, the essential characteristics of Levallois cores are that predetermination and planning went into their manufacture, and that they are transportable sources of flakes, like a mobile tool production kit. Unlike the earlier Lower Palaeolithic handaxe, which moved as a tool, Levallois technology moves as potential for other tools. This might tell us something about how people were moving though their world and how they were organizing themselves. In a way, you might say that Levallois broke the tether between people and natural stone resources, liberating its makers to travel much greater distances without too great a risk.

  I’ve also been investigating the Clactonian/Acheulian issue. The stone tool assemblages from sites like Swanscombe, Little Thurrock and the eponymous Clacton do not include any handaxes. By contrast, many other Lower Palaeolithic British sites are rich in handaxes. These are referred to as Acheulean sites. The question is whether or not a real dichotomy exists. Nick and others have argued that the contrasting assemblages do not represent two separate cultures. They believe that the absence of handaxes at Clactonian sites might be explained by the local availability of raw materials or because the people were engaged in different activities. They believe that the technical differences were not produced by different populations. I bought into this quite strongly until about seven years ago when I began to accept that the Clactonian did exist and should be recognized as a distinct culture. Whether the Acheulean developed from the Clactonian, or whether separate influxes of people arrived from different parts of Europe, I really don’t know. I can’t help but speculate, but haven’t got any personally cherished solutions.

  Like everyone in AHOB, I think humans were genuinely absent for extended periods from Britain. Various explanations have been proposed, but perhaps a more interesting question is why they came back when they did. A particularly intriguing example is the return represented at the Neanderthal site of Lynford, after a possible absence of 100,000 years. If the environmental reconstructions there are correct, then the climate was cold and unstable, with extremely harsh winters. The landscape, although rich in large fauna, was treeless and inhospitable. So why it appealed as a site for recolonization is far from clear.

  The stone tools recovered at Lynford tell us a lot about the people who made them. The Neanderthals arrived at the site carrying handaxes that they had made elsewhere. Unlike the Lower Palaeolithic handaxe, which was more fixed, the edges of the Middle Palaeolithic ones were modified in subtly different ways. One edge might be fashioned as a scraper, another as a cutting edge, or they might have been notched for use as a spokeshave. There’s also good evidence that the tips of handaxes frequently snapped off and were rejuvenated. People have often said that handaxes were like Swiss Army knives – I think this is questionable for the Lower Palaeolithic, but is definitely appropriate to Middle Palaeolithic ones.

  As well as pre-manufactured tools, they probably carried blanks to enable them to produce more. They weren’t, as was once thought, moving randomly around the landscape like hapless idiots waiting for chance hunting encounters or scavenging opportunities. Instead they prepared themselves, tooled up, and moved out into the landscape with the intention to hunt. Their handaxes, with their range of different functions, allowed them to respond to different situations as they arose. In this way Middle Palaeolithic handaxes have a lot in common with Levallois: they are a form of future proofing.

  Obviously a key question co
ncerning Neanderthals is what became of them. I think they were present in Europe in incredibly small numbers to start with – there were never wall-to-wall people in the Thames Valley. Such small numbers would be extremely susceptible to random population fluctuations, so they probably experienced local extinctions all the time. This would have been exacerbated by frequent major environmental upheavals when they routinely faced the kind of dramatic climate changes to which other animals respond by either leaving or going extinct. In terms of the final push, it seems likely that modern humans were implicated in some way. It’s no coincidence that when modern humans left Africa and colonized the world, the rest of the planet’s human species died off.