A History of Ancient Britain (5 page)

Denied any other means of dating his discovery, he allowed his religious convictions, coupled with his knowledge of history, to provide an explanation that made sense to him: ‘that the
date of these human bones is coeval with that of the military occupation of the adjacent summits, and anterior to, or coeval with the Roman invasion of this country’.

But in 1823 Buckland was wrong – in his view of the Red Lady as in so much else. Rather than a Biblical flood, the Reverend’s world was under threat from the tide of scientific
thought rising from, among other sources, Hutton’s
Theory of the Earth.
He fought the good fight for another decade and a half until finally the weight of evidence made him change his
mind. It is greatly to his credit – and ultimately evidence of his love of unbiased observation – that he finally went with the flow.

Buckland had become aware of the work of Louis Agassiz, particularly that on fossil fish, and in 1834 he invited the young Swiss scientist to come and study the British collections. Then, in
1838, he visited Switzerland and saw for himself the evidence of glaciation in the Alpine valleys. By the time he accompanied Agassiz on his momentous tour of the Scottish Highlands, Buckland was
already persuaded by the idea that a hitherto unexpected Ice Age had shaped much of Britain and Europe in ancient times.

But while he accepted some alterations to his world-view, he remained committed to a divine creation of Man – and a relatively recent one at that. He was, after all, a product of his times
and that he nonetheless investigated his surroundings as diligently as he did is more deserving of praise – for all that his endeavours left us – than of criticism for his failure to
see the world through our eyes. Had it not been for his efforts in Goat’s Hole, for example,
the so-called Red Lady of Paviland and the animal remains that accompanied
the burial might not have been available for study by the twenty-first-century world. For this service to science at the very least, Buckland is owed an enormous debt of gratitude.

The Red Lady is kept today as part of the collections of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and is now in the care of Professor Jim Kennedy. There was no skull even when Buckland
was excavating the find, but enough of the skeleton has survived to enable modern scientists to go much further towards understanding that most enigmatic and significant of burials.

‘Within a few decades of Buckland’s death, people re-examined the skeleton,’ said Professor Kennedy. ‘They looked at the shape of the pelvis, the shape of the long bones
– and in particular the shape of the articulation surfaces [of the joints]. And on the basis of those features, any anatomy student today would recognise this as the skeleton, not of a young
woman, but of a young man.’

Not a Red Lady then but a Red Laddie, who had come to die sometime in his early twenties. Much more importantly, as it turns out, further forensic analysis has made it possible to determine just
how long ago that Red Laddie breathed his last.

Like every other scientist who lived and died before 1949, Buckland had not the advantage of radiocarbon dating. Until that momentous breakthrough, archaeologists generally made assumptions
about the age of excavated items – human bones and every other class of artefact – based on the context in which they were found. Items were ‘older’ than those unearthed
above them in a trench and ‘younger’ than any found beneath. This is and was the principle underpinning so-called ‘relative dating’.

But in 1949 the American chemist Willard F. Libby noticed something special about one of the building blocks of life on Earth. All living things here are made primarily of the element carbon. A
tiny proportion is formed in the planet’s upper atmosphere when cosmic rays from the sun bombard nitrogen atoms, transforming them into carbon – and not just common-or-garden variety
carbon, but rather
radioactive
carbon. This magical ingredient, in the form of carbon dioxide, then dissolves in the oceans and enters the food chain via photosynthesis by plants.

Libby’s genius was to notice that at the moment a living thing dies, the radioactive carbon within it (known as C14) begins to decay and break down, reverting to nitrogen once more.
Crucially for archaeologists set on
determining the age of objects, C14 always decays at the same rate. Exactly 5,730 years after something dies (or, more particularly in the
case of an archaeological find like the Red Laddie, some
one
) only half the original amount of C14 remains within them. After a further 5,730 years there will be only half as much again
– and so on, at exactly the same rate of decay until, after perhaps 60,000 years, the remaining amount of C14 is just too small to measure.

Libby realised that by counting the proportion of atoms of C14 remaining in an object made of organic material – a piece of wood, antler, skin or bone – it would be possible to
determine exactly how long ago it had died.

A team of archaeologists at Oxford University, led by Dr Tom Higham, has subjected a tiny sample of bone from the Red Laddie to precisely this process. The painstakingly counted C14 atoms
discovered within revealed he died a little over 33,000 years ago. He was therefore the first modern human being – someone exactly like us – who lived in the land we know as
Britain.

The Red Laddie’s Britain was a very different place, to say the least. Louis Agassiz rightly saw a world shaped by ice but he never learned the whole truth of it. During the most recent 30
million or so years of our planet’s history, glaciation has been at work. Even today its causes – the reasons why Earth has sometimes hurtled through the universe as a giant snowball
– are not fully understood.

The seemingly random descent into an Ice Age may be partly a result of the shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun. More than four billion years ago when Earth was a relative newborn, still
a glowing, cherry-red ball of molten rock, something of similar size thumped into it like a giant fist. The force of the punch knocked out a mass of molten material that later solidified to form
the Moon – and also jolted Earth out of kilter so that rather than sitting in an upright position as before, it reeled slightly backwards.

In spite of the blow, despite being juddered out of true by many degrees, the planet kept spinning. More importantly in terms of the conditions that enable continent-wide ice flows to form, the
impact also changed Earth’s orbit from a circular path into an oval form best described as an ellipse; and so during the course of our year-long waltz with a star we are sometimes close to
our dance partner, sometimes further away. It seems that when other conditions on Earth conspire we are sometimes long enough out of the spotlight to let the ice take an unshakeable hold.

The northern hemisphere in particular has known the violence of the
ice again and again during the last three million years – long, cold glacials interspersed with
shorter, warmer interglacials.

The uncomfortable truth is that we are presently enjoying one of those summer holidays from the ice – and have been for the past 11,500 years or so. During the last 750,000 years the
glacial cold spells have tended to be longer and more severe than ever before, each one lasting for an average of 100 millennia. The most recent – the one spotted by Agassiz – was at
its peak just 21,000 years ago. What he identified was almost literally just the tip of the iceberg.

The Red Laddie and his fellows looked up at Yellow Top and the rest of Paviland from an utterly different world. He lived and died during a time classified by archaeologists as the Upper
Palaeolithic – towards the end of the Old Stone Age – and may have shared his version of Europe with just a few tens of thousands of people. In his time, 30,000-odd years ago, it was a
landmass on a downward spiral towards another Ice Age. Great sheets of ice were advancing from the north and, with so much water locked up inside them, the sea level was significantly lower than
today. Although the Paviland caves are on the coast now, 33,000 years ago the sea was perhaps 70 or 80 miles further away. Paviland looked out, not over rolling waves but across a low-lying plain
that stretched far off into the horizon and beyond.

The land now known as Britain was not an island then, but a peninsula of north-west Europe peopled by nomadic hunters in thrall to the animals upon which their very existence depended. The
beasts moved in great migratory herds, reindeer and wild horse – and also another species, parts of which had been buried near the young man’s grave in Goat’s Hole Cave. For the
skull, bones and ivory recorded by Buckland had come not from any tropical elephant, but from a tundra-dwelling Ice-Age mammoth.

In his report of his excavations at Paviland, in
Relics of The Flood
, Buckland included a careful plan that clearly showed the ‘elephant’ skull lying close by the human
skeleton. But sometime not long after their discovery, the animal’s remains became separated from those of the more infamous Red Laddie and for the best part of two centuries they went their
separate ways. For almost all of that time the mammoth bones were presumed lost. Only when curators in a Swansea museum began going through the contents of some long-neglected boxes, in 2009, did
the light of day fall upon the beast once more. Mammoth tusks and bones were found, together with around 300 other animal bones collected from Goat’s
Hole just before
Buckland arrived – undoubtedly parts of the same skull he featured in his excavation plan – and during the filming of
A History of Ancient Britain
the young man and his mammoth
were reunited for the very first time.

Now those red-hued bones and blackening ivory suggest a story more moving by far than the good Reverend’s harlot. Instead they speak of tragedy and grief – and an attempt by
thoughtful, imaginative people to move beyond loss. Perhaps a hunting party tracked a lone mammoth across terrain they knew well . . .

They had wounded it already, many times, with stone-tipped spears. And there was dark blood in its tracks, from someplace deep. Patience was what mattered now – that and the stamina to
stay close, bring it to bay and finish it. This was land their fathers and mothers had roamed before them, in endless pursuit of the herds – and its contours and landmarks, its scents and
sounds were as familiar as each other’s faces. It was also unforgiving. It had been cold for longer than memory and they sensed rather than saw the towering mass of the cliff face high above
them, pitted with caves and all but invisible through the snow-laden wind. It was here in its familiar shadow they hoped to corner the beast once and for all. Perhaps the storm should have warned
them – persuaded them to call off the hunt until the weather eased just a little. But the folk of the tribe were hungry and the kill was close – a kill that would bring warmth to all
souls. Then all at once the ground shook and their would-be prey was among them, weakened and in agony but raging and deadly dangerous nonetheless. Taken by surprise, the hunters briefly scattered
like snowflakes, all but one. Before they could make sense of the chaos, the favourite was felled. He was the one they loved best of all their number and now he was dead at the feet of the beast.
Enraged, they surrounded the monster as it stood over their fallen son and brother, and buried their spears in its sides again and again – finally reaching vital organs and dropping it to its
knees. It was over quickly then. Two deaths separated by moments, moments that made all the difference. Later, with the favourite cold and their anguish still warm, they climbed with his body to
the cave mouth. Others bore a separate burden and they huffed and panted under its weight. In times past the tear-shaped cave had sheltered them for nights and days and now it would be his
sanctuary for all eternity. Inside, away from the wind and snow, they dug his grave. They laid him gently down and placed the head of the one that had killed him close by. Let any who passed this
way remember what had happened – know that there was eternal rest here for the man and the beast together. Two spirits
united in a shared death. Then, on this furthest
outreach of Europe, the Red Laddie’s family and companions bade him a final farewell and left him behind for ever . . .

Fanciful? Certainly. But fantasy? Not necessarily. Three hundred centuries ago a young man was buried in a cave at Paviland and a mammoth skull was laid nearby. Neither accident of Biblical
flood nor Romano-British morality brought those two together. Rather what was left behind in Goat’s Hole Cave all those years ago was some mother’s son; and those that buried him there,
safe from the wind and the world, were at pains to leave him with ivory tokens for his amusement and a mammoth skull for his headstone. The rods may have had some practical function but seem more
likely to have been ceremonial, worn or carried by someone special. The periwinkle necklace and other items of jewellery look like gifts too, from people who loved him in life as well as in death.
These were modern human beings – the same as us in every way. We are separated from them only by circumstances and time. We do them – and ourselves – a disservice if we do not see
the Red Laddie of Paviland, his keepsakes and his mammoth for what he is: one of us.

When Buckland unearthed his Red Lady of Paviland in 1823, it was hardly the first discovery of one of modern humankind’s ancestors. Down through the centuries people have found, from time
to time, fragments that have come to be understood as characters from earlier pages of the human story. In total, the number of known fragments of our most ancient ancestors still do not add up to
much – but they have been just numerous enough to let palaeontologists follow them all the way back to the beginning.

Humankind has always originated in Africa. It is our home. There have been several species of human over the millennia, as though Earth conducted experiments and trials to see what kind works
best. As far as palaeontology can tell, the first actually to leave the warmth of the nursery and head out into the rest of the world was
Homo erectus
– upright man – who began
spreading north, east and west, into Asia and Europe, just less than two million years ago. In ways not yet fully understood – and certainly lacking consensus among palaeontologists –
Homo erectus
was subsequently joined on stage by a closely related species called
Homo heidelbergensis
. Named after a jawbone found near the city of Heidelberg, in south-west Germany,
in 1907,
Heidelbergensis
seems either to be descended from
Erectus
or from some earlier, more primitive species that is a common ancestor to both – perhaps
Homo habilis
,
handy-man, or
Homo ergaster
, workman,
both of whose faint traces are also found in Africa, Europe and Asia from time to time. The paucity of physical evidence of any
of these species recovered from around the world so far means that certainty is as elusive as the people themselves.