Homo Britannicus

by Chris Stringer

  The AHOB project has been an enriching experience. The arguing that has gone on has been one its most productive aspects. What it has never become is some sort of mutual backslapping society – rather than praising each other’s work, we sometimes can’t actually agree on much at all. This has created a lively forum in which to ask questions and debate ideas. My own work on AHOB has generated more questions than answers. In terms of moving research forward, that’s immensely beneficial.

  DAVID POLLY

  David Polly, a mammalian palaeontologist and pioneer of the Internet, was a perfect choice to help us create and develop AHOB’s website and database. These provide information on the project for the public, and are an essential resource for the team members.

  I specialize in mammal evolution and phylogeny, but my role on AHOB is very different – I’m in charge of the project’s website and database.

  Originally from the United States, I graduated from the University of Texas-Austin and then did a PhD at the University of California-Berkeley on the evolution of Creodonta, an extinct group of carnivorous mammals. During my PhD I started working with collection databases, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and this new thing called the Internet. With a fellow student, Robert Guralnick, I developed one of the first hundred websites ever, the University of California Museum of Paleontology site. When the Internet first came to public attention during Al Gore’s campaign to promote the Information Superhighway, the media really picked up on our site. Being full of pictures of dinosaurs, it, along with NASA’s, was one of the few with widespread appeal. Most of the others were technical or science sites. So our profile boomed. We were featured on the cover of Science, on the official poster of the 2nd International WWW conference in 1994, and in numerous newspapers and magazines.

  In 1996, my wife and I moved to London. During my first year, I worked as the web administrator for the Natural History Museum. I left in 1997 for a lectureship in Anatomy at Queen Mary, University of London, and then transferred to a lectureship in Evolutionary Biology in 2001.

  My work combines quantitative genetics, developmental biology, and vertebrate palaeontology. I am interested in how the correlations between different parts of the skeleton and dentition influence the rate and direction of evolution. I am also interested in the effect of climate change on evolution, speciation, extinction and geographic distribution. To explore this, I compare living and fossil mammal populations. The Quaternary is particularly intriguing because many Ice Age species are still alive today, allowing palaeontological data to be compared directly with information from living animals.

  My involvement in AHOB stems from my interest in the Quaternary and my experience with databases. In 1999, when I thought I might lose my position at Queen Mary through restructuring, I started looking for research funding and discovered a Wellcome Fellowship offering grants to study the effect on life of climate change. I hoped to compile, for the first time, a database of all the published information on British fossil mammal faunas. I approached Chris Stringer and Andy Currant to discuss my ideas, but they thought the published literature was too dated to make the project viable. Soon afterwards, the Leverhulme Trust announced their new grant programme on Early Human Settlement and an ultimately successful funding bid was launched, led by Chris. The funds they granted were sufficient to build up a small team that would re-evaluate the mammal faunas, their dating, and their association with human habitation. It also allowed for the creation of a database of that information. We all thought this was an excellent idea, and the result was the AHOB project.

  So my main contribution to AHOB is running the website and coordinating the database. I’m not involved with digs or looking at the collections. Instead, I focus on recording and disseminating the wealth of information that the project generates.

  The website has two purposes: it has a public face for the project, and private space for team members. The publicly accessible part contains information about our work and key research topics, abstracts from seminars and links to related sites. The site receives more hits than I anticipated, an average of fifteen thousand every month. I receive a variety of enquiries, some from scientists who want to know more about our work, some from school students doing projects. Occasionally someone who has found a fossil will write in wanting to know if it’s a human specimen. The team members’ web area contains a notice board, published and unpublished manuscripts, an archive of technical aspects of the project, minutes of meetings, posters we’re producing, and electronic contour maps that I built using topographic information from the Ordnance Survey. People use these for research purposes and for creating illustrations.

  The database is a GIS programme that condenses the information produced by the research project. I have mapped 253 localities so far. Each site is linked to the relevant records: where it is (the National Grid co-ordinates); the Mammal Assemblage-Zone (MAZ); the Marine Isotope Stage (where known); whether archaeology is present and what cultural type it is; any other information on human presence; a broad classification of the landscape – was it a river, lake, cave; and a list of the mammal fauna. For each mammalian species the order, taxon, family, common name and authority (where the information came from) is provided.

  The database is work in progress. It will grow, as people submit their findings, to become an extremely useful research tool. It will be capable of selecting and mapping all the sites that fulfil certain criteria, so that we can search for meaningful patterns and correlations. For example, a researcher might ask for those sites that have bears, with human archaeology, in a cave, in a specific marine isotope stage. The relevant sites will appear plotted on either a simple outline map of Britain or a more complex contour map in closer focus. In 2007, the AHOB team will publish a major monograph of their work. We will compile and publish the database alongside, either online or on a CD which will accompany the monograph.

  My experience of AHOB has been somewhat different from everyone else’s. I work slightly outside the team but, at the same time, collaborate with everybody. It’s been an excellent project to work on and the outcome – an organized and reliably dated mammalian and archaeological record of the British Quaternary – is incredibly important. This will give a much sounder basis for research into the effects of climate change and its impact on both humans and animals.

  ROBERT SYMMONS

  Robert Symmons, affectionately referred to as Nobs by his friends and colleagues, was AHOB’s research assistant for the first four years of the Project. Although he variously describes himself as a dogsbody and dirt monkey, it’s widely acknowledged that he has been an indispensable member of the team. Despite his comment at the end, he recently left us for an equally wonderful job as Curator of Archaeology at Fishbourne Roman Palace. He has been ably replaced by Silvia Bello and Mark Lewis.

  I first became interested in archaeology at the age of six when my great-uncle Pete, himself a keen amateur archaeologist, showed me a small tin of Neolithic carbonized cereal seed. I had no idea that things could be that old and was instantly hooked. Aged fifteen I started working on excavations and after school spent my gap year working on digs in the UK and abroad. On one dig, in Jordan, the animal bone specialist Paul Croft got me interested in zooarchaeology. After that I went on to study for a degree, Masters and PhD at the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London. My speciality is taphonomy, the study of what happens to an animal’s bones between its death and their recovery. I’m particularly intrigued by the way bones fragment and by what happens to the bones we never find.

  Towards the end of my PhD, I had the most enormous stroke of luck. An email advertising for a research assistant to work on the AHOB project was circulated around the university. I applied and was successful. As research assistant, I try and help any member of the AHOB team in any way I can. The best thing about my job is the sheer variety. I might spend an entire day producing complex drawings at the computer or peering down a microscope, but the next day I’ll be o
ut in a field swinging a pick. There’s no chance of getting bored.

  One of my favourite jobs involves illustration. I produce maps, section drawings, site plans and diagrams for most of the team’s publications. I also enjoy getting out in the field, although some of the digs I’ve been involved with in East Anglia have been unbelievably challenging. I’ve spent over fifteen years working as a dirt monkey and never has this been such a truer description. The defining feature of AHOB sites is that they tend to be astonishingly muddy, at times up to your knees. I remember Simon Lewis trying to climb out of a trench at Hoxne using a ladder that just sank further into the mud with every step up. It took nearly half an hour to dig the ladder out. We likened it to the trenches of World War One. If Hoxne was the muddiest then Happisburgh was the coldest. The site is situated near the low tide mark, so one January I found myself standing in the North Sea, sieving mud, in bitter winds and horizontal rain whilst wearing a Russian military hat and inappropriate footwear. I thought I was going to die. But despite the privations I’ve been particularly excited about this aspect of the project. The very early sites on the East Anglia coast must rate as one of AHOB’s major contributions, although of course the work has raised as many questions as it has answered.

  When AHOB started I did a huge amount of sample processing. In fact for the first eighteen months, when people asked what I did, I was able to say, truthfully, that I picked mouse teeth out of buckets of sand. Samples are brought back from the field sites in big muddy sacks. I then put everything through a sieving machine. This is a big tank with a square sieve in the bottom that processes 10–15 kilos of sediment at a go. In the lid of the tank is a garden sprinkler to wash all the mud away, leaving sand and other particles.

  I then dry what remains in the lab, wash it with fresh water, and dry it again. Next, I run the mixture through an 8mm sieve, then a 4mm sieve, then a 1mm and 0.5mm sieve. The rest, I throw away or take down to my allotment. (The allotment’s now covered with sand from around the country. The vegetables don’t seem to be experiencing any benefit, but it might pose an interesting conundrum for a geologist one day in the future.)

  Once I’ve separated the different grades I pick out the interesting material, things such as animal bones, fish scales, insect remains, mollusc shells, seeds, chips of flint and little bits of the sieve. The smallest particles (0.5-1mm) are sorted with tweezers under a microscope, grain by grain. This is probably my least favourite job – it’s extremely tedious and you often find very little. We’ve had some volunteers working on the project, all of whom have been exceptional, and I’ve roped them in to help me with the sample sorting whenever possible.

  Other things I do include taking minutes at all the meetings, driving stuff around, and transcribing Roger Jacobi’s data to computer. Roger doesn’t use computers but writes everything out in beautifully neat longhand. His paper on Gough’s cave is 31,408 words long and it took me weeks to type but it was worth it because it’s such a brilliant piece of work.

  I have the occasional moment, sitting in a meeting or listening to others’ conversations, when I get a wonderful reality check. In all my born days I never thought I’d be involved in something so exciting and so important. This is my first job after my PhD and I think it’s fair to say I’m not a dirt monkey anymore. It’s the best job in the world.

  SIMON LEWIS

  Simon Lewis is a geologist who specializes in the Quaternary, and had already worked with many other potential members of the Project. His investigations of ancient environments provide a picture of the landscapes in which Britain’s early humans lived.

  I’ve always been fascinated by mountains and rivers and how they form and evolve over time. While studying for a geography degree this interest in geomorphology led me to focus on the Ice Ages because so many of the landscapes we see in Britain were created by glacial or cold climate processes. I decided to do a PhD so that I could continue research in this area, and I now work as a lecturer in physical geography at Queen Mary, University of London.

  My expertise is in river sediments. I look at river deposits to see what they tell us about how rivers behaved and how key variables, such as flow and sedimentation, respond to changes in climatic and environmental conditions. Some of those river sediments contain archaeology and since completing my PhD I’ve also worked on a range of archaeological projects.

  I’ve been involved with AHOB since its inception. My job is to interpret the sediments to determine a detailed stratigraphic sequence. A secure geological framework is essential as it provides a context for human occupation in terms of both environment and time.

  My first project for AHOB was to conduct investigations at Hoxne, along with Nick Ashton and Simon Parfitt. There were unresolved questions about the age of sediments and how the archaeology fitted into the geological sequence. The excavations were awful because it was so muddy, but the work was extremely rewarding as it considerably improved our understanding of the stratigraphy. Hoxne and two roughly contemporaneous sites I worked on in Suffolk, Barnham and Elveden, are all located by rivers. It seems likely that during the Hoxnian interglacial (around 400,000 years ago) humans in this region preferred to live by rivers. Watercourses would have attracted prey animals, riverine erosion would have exposed useful raw materials like flint, and river channels would have made navigating the densely wooded landscape considerably easier.

  One of the most exciting sites I have worked on is Norton Subcourse in Norfolk. This is a working sand and gravel quarry which revealed a river channel and a rather splendid exposure of sediments that, at 700,000 to 800,000 years old, relate to the very earliest part of the timespan covered by AHOB. Paradoxically, given the remit of our project, we haven’t found any evidence of human occupation at this locality, but the site is extremely important because it provides information about the landscape and environment that existed when humans started living in the British Isles for the first time. It’s a close neighbour of the Pakefield site, both in terms of geography and time. Now that the archaeology found at Pakefield has moved the earliest occupation back to around 700,000 years, this environmental information is critical. The sediment stack enabled me to build up an extremely detailed picture of the local landscape. Shallow marine gravels at the base are overlain by interglacial fluvial clays and silts, woody peat and organic silts. This is overlain by sands and gravels and finally glacial deposits from the ice age that followed.

  The climate at the time the interglacial channel was active was warm, possibly slightly warmer than today. A section of river was cut off and abandoned, forming a body of still water. Reeds and alder grew on the muddy banks and hippos wallowed in the water. We’ve also found the remains of insects, fish, birds, reptiles, small mammals, horses and an elephant, and from their coprolites there’s evidence of hyaenas.

  I worked at Lynford, another Norfolk site that dates from the younger end of the project. It is located in a working quarry and is a Neanderthal site that dates to around 60,000 years ago, the early part of the last cold stage. This was when humans first returned to Britain after what seems to be a long and inexplicable absence during the preceding interglacial. The humans shared their landscape with cold-climate animals such as reindeer, horse, woolly mammoth and woolly rhino, and they left an abundance of artefacts. It’s likely the Neanderthals hunted or at least scavenged the large mammals but as yet there’s no firm evidence of butchery. The cold climate created a harsh landscape of sedge, grasses and weeds, with no trees or shelter, which raises interesting questions as to why people chose to live there. That’s where my job ends and the archaeologists take over.

  And that’s why the AHOB project has been such a great success – because it’s a team effort. By combining the work of experts in different fields we’ve gained a much more coherent understanding of the subject. We could all answer the project’s questions individually, from our own perspectives, but by integrating our knowledge we’ve created a uniquely detailed picture.

  MIK
E RICHARDS

  Isotope studies now have a key role in reconstructing the past – we saw in Chapter 2 how oxygen isotopes in deep-sea cores have helped to unravel the complexity of past climate changes. Mike Richards is one of the world’s leading experts in the analysis of isotopes in bone to reconstruct ancient diets, and the work of him and his research team has formed an important part of AHOB.

  I was born in Zambia and grew up in Wales and Canada. I started studying archaeology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, in 1988, and later moved to the UK to do a PhD in the Department of Archaeology at Oxford. I was a Lecturer, Reader and then Professor at the University of Bradford, but am now a Professor at both the University of Durham and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. I moved to Germany halfway through the AHOB project but I travel back to the UK frequently, so I don’t feel left out at all.

  I think that there are many people about my age who first got interested in archaeology the same way, inspired by the Tutankhamun exhibit that toured Europe and North America in the 1970s. My expertise is archaeological science or the application of scientific methods to archaeology, particularly the use of chemical analysis of bone to determine past diets in humans and animals. I got into this because I didn’t want to limit myself to any particular region or period. Also, I really enjoyed the archaeological science courses I took at university, as it seemed to be a way to produce clear, unequivocal, facts about the past.