A History of Ancient Britain (13 page)

In the new island Britain – one haunted by waters – everything that happened next happened after that flood. Though they could not have realised it at the time the survivors, those
left behind, were changed. They were the descendants of hunters who had walked north and west onto a promontory of land in pursuit of game. They had been what their forefathers were, pioneers of
the north-west frontier of Europe. But those who watched the wave recede were islanders now. They had been made separate by that new sea; perhaps they had been made a little bit special by it as
well.

The Mesolithic did not end with a tsunami 8,000 years ago. Far from it: that way of life would continue for yet more thousands of years. No doubt, even as the wave was
smashing inland in the east, families were strolling by the sea at Goldcliff, in south Wales, unperturbed and unaware, leaving yet more footprints for posterity. Separated from calamity by enough
distance, they would have known nothing of the event. The same would have been true for most of the population of Britain. The wave withdrew and life for those beyond its reach continued as before.
Soil scientists believe that by the time of the disaster the British climate had been in slow decline for many centuries, becoming progressively wetter, so that what had been rich woodland turned
into swampy marshland. This may have encouraged a move away from the interior and towards the coastlines, where the marine environment could be more successfully exploited for food – a
migration that might have exposed even more of the population to the devastation of the wave. What had certainly changed, though, was Britain’s place in the world. From now on anyone new, and
anything new, would have to make the trip here in a boat. And that has made all the difference.

The risen waters did not destroy everything they touched either. In fact a site being excavated by archaeologist Garry Momber has been preserved precisely because it has spent the last 8,000
years at the bottom of the Solent.

While the sea level was around 40 feet lower than today, the Isle of Wight was part of the dry land connecting Britain to France. The Solent itself would have been a valley, with a river running
through it from west to east. Work by Momber and his team during the last decade or so has revealed that a technologically sophisticated Mesolithic population lived in and around that valley
– and that they used the river as rather more than a source of food.

Known as Bouldnor Cliff, the site first attracted attention in the 1980s when divers identified traces, 30–40 feet down, of ancient woodland and also peat deposits. In 1998 the Hampshire
and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology (HWTMA) began an underwater survey of the location and found, in a burrow dug out by a lobster of all things, some telltale pieces of worked flint. Their
appetites whetted, the marine archaeologists redoubled their efforts and found more and more evidence of stone tool-making – but this was as nothing compared to what was to come.

They expected to see stumps of ancient timber sticking out of steep banks of sediment (it was, after all, evidence of ancient woodland that had
brought them to Bouldnor
Cliff in the first place); but as their eyes grew accustomed to the near-zero visibility of the Solent they began to spot signs that some of the wood had been cut, and even shaped, by stone tools.
What has been discovered was therefore rather more than an ancient hunting camp. According to Momber it is nothing less than the oldest boat-building yard in the world.

I was the most novice of novice scuba divers when I joined the HWTMA team for the removal of one particularly interesting piece of timber from Bouldnor Cliff. Having qualified the week before,
it was with more fear than excitement that I stepped off the back of a gently wallowing dive boat into cold choppy water that looked more like broccoli soup than sea. As instructed by my dive-buddy
Donny I swam, or rather dog-paddled, over to a nearby buoy, from which descended a fluorescent yellow line attached to a weight on the seabed 30 or 40 feet below. Rising and falling on the swell,
feeling vaguely claustrophobic in a full face mask, I asked myself why on earth I was putting myself through it. The sound of my own, tight breathing was deafening.

So far so awful, but then I had to begin expressing the air from my dry suit – the air keeping me bobbing, safely, like a cork, on the surface – so that the lead weights on my
webbing could do their job of taking me to the bottom, through steadily darkening, green murk. The bad visibility in that soup was disorientating to say the least. The density of sediment suspended
in the water was not uniform; rather clouds of it drifted along on the current like banks of mist so that sometimes I could make out Donny’s reassuring shape and sometimes he simply vanished,
leaving my eyes trying to focus on nothing at all. Arrival on the seabed was another surprise. Since I could see almost nothing in any direction, including downwards, I got no warning of the bottom
until my fins hit the sediment – kicking up yet more muck to cloud my vision.

But as I turned around and began to get my bearings, I heard my breathing begin to slow to a more normal pace. I had, at least, arrived. I was on the seabed, breathing normally and all at once
it began to seem just about manageable. My anxiety about diving was suddenly replaced by the need to make sure the underwater cameraman would get the shots he needed in the brief time available. I
convinced myself the worst was already over. Momber appeared from within the swirling clouds and gestured that we should follow him back along another yellow line leading off into nothingness. For
no reason I could explain now, I felt quite calm – even
energised by the currents of cold water flowing around us.

The thought occurred then that my earlier disorientation and near-panic in the blinding gloom had been appropriate. Part of me had always known the ancient past was another world –
somewhere almost out of reach – but that was just a figure of speech. Now I was actually in another world, experiencing how difficult it is to make the crossing, to grope in the dark for some
clue, some landmark to show the way.

We arrived at the spot where Momber had been working prior to our arrival. Just as an archaeologist would on dry land, he was using a four-inch pointing trowel, but in this instance he was
peeling soft grey sediment from the sea floor. Clearly visible was a pitch-black piece of waterlogged timber. It was about the size of a man’s thigh and even through the clouds of sediment
the tool marks on its surface were plain to see. He freed it from the mud, loaded it into a plastic crate (of the sort bakers use to deliver loaves) then used a sac filled with compressed air from
his own tanks to raise the whole lot towards the surface.

No sooner had our cargo disappeared into the murk above than Donny tapped my shoulder and signalled it was time for us to leave as well. In a reversal of the routine for descending, we pumped
enough air back into our dry suits to let us make slow progress up towards the light. A full 15 feet below the surface we halted, letting our bodies get used to the change in pressure, before
finally completing the trip and breaking through to the world of the present.

Back on the dive boat we examined our lump of timber, so recently returned to the air after eight millennia on the seabed. It bore obvious marks of ancient carpentry that Momber said made it
likely they were parts of a log-boat. He produced other pieces, collected during previous dives, which had clearly been shaped and carved. Even to my untrained eye one of them, some eight inches
long and the thickness of a woman’s forearm, looked exactly like a gunwale – the top edge of the side of a rowing boat. Parallel grooves, carefully carved and running along both long
sides, were obviously the work of a craftsman.

The anaerobic conditions of Bouldnor Cliff have preserved other organic material – including, incredibly, fragments of string identical to the sort John Lord had taught me to make from
twisted fibres on Coll. It is one thing to find stone tools on a Mesolithic site – but to recover, as well, the items those tools were themselves used to make is nothing short of astounding.
Had the site not been submerged beneath the sea – had
Britain remained attached to Europe by dry land so that the present-day Isle of Wight was just part of the
mainland – then all of the timber and the rest of the world’s oldest boatyard would have decayed and disappeared long ago.

What Momber and his team are revealing is a glimpse of the sophistication and complexity of Mesolithic life. It should not be surprising – people had lived off the land for hundreds of
thousands of years and needed more than campfires and sharp stones to exploit the full potential of their environment – but it is all too easy to forget they had learned to make life rich,
comfortable and satisfying. Boats for navigating the rivers and coastlines may have been close to the least of it. We do not know what we are missing – the comforts of Mesolithic home –
because we simply do not find it.

But while the millennia in Britain since the end of the Ice Age had seen the continuation of traditions and skills that would not have been unfamiliar to Neanderthals, let alone Palaeolithic
Cro-Magnons, elsewhere the world had moved on. By the time bands of hunters were walking across Doggerland 10,000 and more years ago, curious to see what lay ahead of them over the horizon to the
north-west, an entirely new way of living was being pioneered back in the east. In the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia and the Levant, in western Asia, people were by then experimenting with the
idea of collecting and planting wild seeds, and of using pens and fences to limit the movement of herds of wild animals.

Thousands of years before Britain became an island, farming was enabling people to settle down and build towns and villages in the territories that would one day become the countries of Iran,
Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Turkey. It seems almost inconceivable but while people in Britain and much of western Europe were still firmly in the middle of the Stone Age
– hunting red deer and wild cattle, building middens of empty shells and sleeping in tents made of ripe-smelling animal hides – in a cradle of civilisation far to the east folk were
moving closer to the modern world of permanent homes and settled villages, a world made possible only by the surplus food that comes from the growing of crops and the husbanding of animals.

Archaeologists have been theorising, for a century at least, about how and why farming came to replace hunting, gathering and fishing. On the face of it, farming is a life of grinding toil, a
repetitive, limited diet and the ever-present threat of disease caused by constant proximity to too many
unsanitary people. The tedium is enlivened only by the very real
possibility of a failed harvest followed by famine and death. Compared to the life of the hunter-gatherer-fisher, cooking venison, beef and fish over roaring fires, harvesting wild foods and moving
always to fresh ground and new horizons, it seems to have little to offer. And yet it became and still is the basis of the society we live in today.

The almost complete lack of British Mesolithic skeletons, coupled with the absence of much in the way of ‘perfect’ Neolithic skeletons, has made it hard to compare the two lifestyles
in terms of their respective effects on health. But what evidence does exist suggests farmers did not live longer than their hunting predecessors. Hunters had access to a wide variety of game and
wild food. Their highly mobile way of life, while tough on the elderly or the disabled, would have kept people lean and fit. Theirs was a low-fat diet – consisting mostly of gathered fruit
and vegetables supplemented with occasional meat – and although they would have faced random seasonal shortages from time to time, the general absence of fat from their diets would have made
them less likely than farmers to contract ailments like cancer of the bowel and breast, diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Always moving away from their own waste, as opposed to having it pile up
around them, would also have helped keep them well.

The switch to farming has in fact been described as a step backwards for human health. As people settled in villages and as families grew larger on a diet of porridge, bread and occasional meat,
sanitation – or rather the lack of it – would have been a real problem. Build-up of rubbish and waste would have attracted vermin. People would suddenly have been at greater risk from
contracting diseases from one another and from their animals (tuberculosis, for example, is thought to have been non-existent in humans before they started living close to cattle). As fertile areas
became crowded, some people would have been forced onto more marginal land where the risk of crop failure and therefore malnutrition and starvation would have increased. And while farmers would
have been able to rely on plenty of cereal, at least during good times, such foods contain much less iron than meat. Compared to hunters, they would have been more exposed to iron deficiency and
its consequences for health.

Farming was even a pain in the back teeth – quite literally. Wheat and the like were ground into flour on rough stones called querns, and the grit that would have ended up in the bread and
other foods would have taken a heavy toll on farmers’ dental health. It is all there in the nutshell of ‘the
daily grind’ – the hours that had to be
spent every day preparing enough food for the family, food that even wrecked their teeth. Farming sounds like a tough sell.

Many archaeologists and other scientists now believe that climate change holds the key. It is thought the end of the last Ice Age was followed, 11,000 or 12,000 years ago, by a ‘climatic
optimum’ of good weather that encouraged the growth, in the lands of the Fertile Crescent at least, of reliable wild harvests of grasses related to wheat and barley. Lulled into a false sense
of security by this time of plenty, hunters and gatherers dropped their guard and settled down a bit, believing they could rely on such natural bounty year on year. In effect the crop domesticated
the farmers rather than the other way round.