A History of Ancient Britain (11 page)

The scale of the operation is staggering, though – as if every last hazel nut on the island had been collected in one go. ‘It shows they weren’t just living from day to day,
scraping an existence,’ Mithen added. ‘It was really carefully planned activity.’

On nearby Oronsay the team has found evidence that shellfish were being collected from the shallows on the shoreline and then consumed in
vast quantities. The scale is
testified by enormous mounds – middens – of empty shells carefully heaped and piled in one place. People returned to exactly the same spot year after year, perhaps generation after
generation, to gather and eat mussels, limpets, dog-whelks, periwinkles and the like before deliberately adding them to the midden until in time it would have been visible from the sea, a great
white pile of shells. Maybe it was a territorial marker as well – a sign to tell any passing strangers that these islands were already known.

Although the tip of a fishing spear made of red deer antler was found at Fiskary Bay, there are no red deer on Coll. The species was not on the island in the Mesolithic period and has still not
reached the place today. By contrast Islay, a larger island to the south, has always been a rich hunting ground for deer and would have been yet another stop on the shopping trip made by Mesolithic
people as they systematically obtained all they needed from the world by using boats and canoes to link many islands together into a single territory they understood intimately.

Seeing that territory, learning how it provided for every human need like some Garden of Eden, makes it hard not to envy the lives lived in that cradle. There were undoubtedly hardships. Times
when the fish did not come to Fiskary Bay, or the natural harvest of hazelnuts failed to ripen on the trees and bushes. Random fate, injury and disease too would lead to suffering like that
experienced by Cheddar Man. Imagine toothache in a world without dentists.

And yet for all that, something about the Mesolithic world of self-reliance sounds tempting and the call of it can be heard like a distant voice. As a species we lived as hunters for almost the
sum of our existence on this planet. Only during the last 10,000 years at the very most has anyone thought about farming – and all that that way of life brings. For the preceding two or three
million years we hunted, and the hunt still cries out to us.

On the mudflats of the Severn Estuary, at Goldcliff near Newport in south Wales, the hunt speaks with a human voice – many human voices dimly heard. Mesolithic people came here to this
shoreline 8,000 years ago and more. Some of them collected shellfish, or checked fish traps. Children ran along by their mothers’ sides, scattering flocks of seabirds into sudden uplifting
flight. Elsewhere, the men of the tribe ran swift and silent in pursuit of deer and other prey sheltering in the reeds and long grass by the shore.

We know all of this – about the mothers and children, the birds and animals, the hunters – because they left behind the imprints of their feet. As people
walked and ran on the soft wet silts at the water’s edge, and as birds hopped and deer and other animals picked their way, telltale prints were left in their wake. At the end of some
long-forgotten day, the tide rolled in and muddy waves gently filled the foot shapes with a layer of silt. By lucky chance the same process was repeated with every tide that followed until the
trails left by humans, birds and animals were sealed, undamaged and perfect, beneath countless thin skins, like the build-up of a laminate.

Later still the shape of the estuary was altered by a change in the route of the River Severn, and the layers containing the footprints were suddenly left behind on dry land. Peat began to form
on top of the laminated silts, protecting them even more, so that after thousands of years those prints (still no more than depressions in soft mud) were as fresh as the moment when the feet that
made them were lifted clear.

In recent years the shape of the estuary has altered once more so that the tides have been able to strip away the protective peat, eventually exposing the layers containing the prints. Professor
Martin Bell, an archaeologist from the University of Reading, is carefully recording the footprints as they appear for the first time in all those millennia and then disappear for ever, eroded by
the waves. His team of volunteers use high-pressure water hoses to blast away the final layer of liquid mud so that the imprints are briefly clean and clear. If King Canute were reincarnated as a
mild-mannered academic, he would be Martin Bell – wishing the waves would wait but accepting that the tide does what the tide does.

But in those last fleeting moments they are the most poignant sight. These are the prints of bare feet; the toes widely splayed by lifetimes spent walking unshod over all manner of surfaces.
Some are close together, made by short strides and left behind by someone strolling. Sometimes the adult prints are accompanied by those of children. Other trails show the longer stride patterns of
men running. Everywhere there are the three-toed, fleurs-de-lys of wading birds; occasionally there are the ladylike prints of deer. They are almost too much, the human footprints: looking at them,
touching them, felt like eavesdropping, or secretly watching someone in an unguarded moment. I had to stare at them but part of me wanted to look away, out of respect for privacy.

In 1978 the archaeologist and anthropologist Mary Leakey found footprints left by a man, woman and child preserved in volcanic ash on the
Laetoli Plain of Tanzania, in
southern Africa. They were made by members of an ancient species of human called
Australophithecus afarensis
, around three and a half million years ago. As well as the human trail, there
were prints left by animals – even the impressions of raindrops that fell while the family walked that day. After the little family had gone, a subsequent eruption by the same volcano buried
their prints with yet more ash, saving them for posterity.

The woman’s tracks show that at one point she paused and then veered to one side for a few strides. Leakey imagined she had sensed some danger – perhaps a predator – and that
she had felt the need to investigate. Maybe she thought briefly about suggesting a change of direction, before relaxing and rejoining her kin. ‘This motion, so intensely human, transcends
time,’ Leakey wrote later, for an article in
National Geographic
. ‘A remote ancestor just as you or I – experienced a moment of doubt.’

The Laetoli footprints have mostly been reburied, in hopes of preserving them. No such possibility exists for those much more recent footprints in south Wales. We can only appreciate them now,
before they disappear for ever.

Our ancient past is powerful magic, strong drink – even a little shot of it can snatch your breath away and make you wonder if you can, any more, believe what you are seeing. You tell
yourself over and over that these footprints are not fossils turned to everlasting stone, but marks as vulnerable as a name traced in wet sand with a stick. But it is unbelievable; they are
unbelievable.

This Britain is the house I live in. For a long time its inhabitants mistook it for a new-build, thought they were the first and only owners of someplace made just for them. James Hutton of
Edinburgh, scion of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, spotted the real depth of the foundations and realised it was a truly ancient dwelling. Then the Swiss naturalist and geologist
Louis Agassiz saw it had been knocked down and rebuilt – and while he thought the builders had come only once, rather than repeatedly, he was on the right track.

In the years since then archaeologists, palaeontologists and other detectives have found the bodies buried under the floor –
Homo ergaster
. . .
Homo habilis
. . .
Homo
erectus
. . .
Homo heidelbergensis
. . .
Homo neanderthalensis
– each evicted in turn, and all victims of time, the ultimate landlord. Then last of all, us,
Homo sapiens
sapiens
, the present tenants. Britain has been built, demolished, rebuilt, demolished and rebuilt again
and again and again. I am living now among the remodelled ruins,
making the best of it.

The time of the first settlers – those that arrived in Britain after the ice – survives in the form of tools and talismans, pollen grains and fish teeth, bones of animals and humans;
a horse’s head etched onto a rib and a cave where ghostly shadows of stags and bison and birds stand breathless in the dark, awaiting the flickering light of torches. It was a time that
lasted for thousands of years.

It also survives, most magically of all, in footprints on a beach, every trail the proof of a life. And like any trail of footprints in the mud, those lives were at the mercy of the next
wave.

CHAPTER TWO

ANCESTORS

We are haunted by history, not just as nations, but also as a species. Long before there were nations or countries there were just people. We split into groups from the very
beginning of course, as people do, based around families and tribes. But we were then and we are now all the same species –
Homo sapiens sapiens.
Caucasians, Asians, Negroes . . . just
as Labradors, Greyhounds and Mastiffs are all just dogs – so we are all simply folk, and mongrels at that.

Amidst all the ensuing complexity of race, society, religion and the rest, we have lost sight of how much we experienced together as one species. Most of the really big stuff – the making
of the people and the land – happened long before we started drawing lines and deciding who was in and who was out.

All of this – all of us – began in equatorial Africa well over a million years ago as Africans with black skins and the full suite of associated physical features. Warm-blooded
animals living in equatorial regions, those places
most exposed to sunlight, have skins that secrete melanin to protect them from the most direct daily bombardment of
ultra-violet radiation anywhere on the planet. But one of the most important functions of skin is the production of Vitamin D, which it achieves by positively interacting with that sunlight; and at
the Equator the powerful melanin shield in black skin means black people need an hour or more of sunlight each day to make enough Vitamin D to avoid life-threatening conditions like rickets. (The
Inuit people of the Arctic regions, while often darker than northern Europeans, obtain their Vitamin D – and Vitamin C, for that matter – from a diet rich in fish skin, seal liver, yolk
from the eggs of birds and fish and the raw meat and blubber of seal, walrus and whale.)

As
Homo sapiens
migrated further and further north, into Europe and parts of Asia, the daily sunlight ration was progressively reduced. Individuals in more northerly latitudes also needed
to wear clothing to keep warm – further reducing the amount of skin they exposed to the sun. Those humans with the darkest skin would have been at a disadvantage, suffering physically as a
result of an inability to produce enough Vitamin D in less sunny climes. Factor in the added complication of the kind of climate associated with an Ice Age and you have a population of
black-skinned humans facing certain extinction if they remain far north of the Equator – or rather, if they remain far north of the Equator without adapting as a species.

Fortunately for the human story it is in the nature of all species to produce mutations and in the case of modern Europeans it was, fundamentally, albinism – the congenital absence of
melanin – that made the difference and saved the day.

In fact it does not take much DNA to make the difference between black skin and white and all the tones in between: a couple of switches, thrown one way or the other, and the job is done.
Several genes affecting skin tone have been identified – some tending towards light, some dark – and the combination in any one individual, acquired by the mixing of genes inherited
from their mother and father, will determine that individual’s colour.

Anyone born with paler skin – initially as a result of mutation – would be better suited to a more northerly, colder, darker climate. The paler the skin, the less time that
individual has to spend in sunlight to process Vitamin D. As a healthier specimen he or she should, in terms of Darwinian selection, be more successful in that environment in finding a mate. It
follows that once the species ‘realised’ pale skin was an advantage in the gloomier north of the planet, so lighter individuals would be identified there as the
more compatible partners. In this way, pale people would tend to seek each other out, so that what had been a recessive mutation in a mostly dark population could eventually become a positively
dominant trait in an increasingly pale one. Males in particular would drive the trend, seeking paler and paler female partners.