A History of Ancient Britain (6 page)

Further complicating the picture is Neanderthal man. The first remains of this additional relative were found in the Neander Valley, near the town of Düsseldorf in western Germany, in 1856
and finally given the name
Homo neanderthalensis
in 1863 Some palaeontologists see Neanderthal characteristics on skulls and bones that are as much as 600,000 years old but there is more
general agreement that humans of this species inhabited Europe and Asia from around 350–400,000 years ago. More interesting than when they ‘start’, however, is when they
finish.

Neanderthals were still roaming the European continent 25,000 years ago. While that species was evolving for hundreds of thousands of years in Europe and Asia, somewhere in Africa there was one
last throw of the human dice.
Homo sapiens sapiens
– ‘wise man’, modern man – was the result, and had certainly evolved somewhere on the Dark Continent by at least
around 200,000 years ago. Not until as recently as perhaps the last 100,000 years, however, did any of us leave the homeland and make our way into other parts of the world.

Modern humans are therefore the Johnny-come-latelies of the story but their arrival in Europe by around 40,000 years ago means they encountered a sitting tenant there in the form of the
Neanderthals. For perhaps several millennia, until the last of the Neanderthals died out, for reasons unknown, our modern ancestors shared their world with a venerable old uncle of the human
race.

From his office in the Natural History Museum in London Professor Chris Stringer directs the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project. Stringer’s name is inextricably linked with the
now broadly accepted ‘Out of Africa’ theory and he understands more about the shadowy comings and goings of humans in Britain than perhaps anyone else.

If the mammoth-hunter from Paviland is the first and oldest modern man known to have lived in Britain, he was certainly not the first human. In
Homo Britannicus
–
The Incredible
Story of Human Life in Britain
– Stringer describes the discovery of the individual who is the earliest known inhabitant.

Close to the city of Chichester, in West Sussex, is a gravel quarry called Boxgrove. Along with gravel, people regularly found distinctive flint tools
called handaxes
there, and it was these that first attracted archaeologists and palaeontologists to the area.

For those who study the ancient past, the ‘handaxe’ is a talisman, the word itself almost a shibboleth. In some form they have been part of the human toolkit from the very beginning.
Handaxes developed from the crude (but effective) pebble tools used by the earliest humans for butchering meat millions of years ago on the African plains. Knock a couple of hand-sized pebbles
together and soon flakes will be removed from one of them, leaving a useful sharp edge. But by at least a million years ago this primitive technique had evolved to produce the heart-stoppingly
beautiful, teardrop-shaped tools that have been humankind’s calling card all over the Old World. With a point at one end, a cutting edge down each of the two long sides and a heavy butt for
crushing and hammering they became, according to Stringer, the Swiss Army Knives of the Palaeolithic.

Unless and until you have actually held a Palaeolithic handaxe, it is impossible to understand why they exert such power. They were made not by us, but by our distant relations, members of
wholly separate species like
Homo heidelbergensis
and
Homo neanderthalensis
, yet they fit into our hands as though made with us in mind. It is a unique sensation to pick up one of
those beautiful bi-faced stones with one hand and fit it into the palm of the other. Almost as a reflex the fingers fold around the butt, the fingertips coming naturally to rest on a barely
discernible, yet deliberately crafted asymmetric ridge that makes the holding that little bit more comfortable.

Just as the fingers of an old man’s hands at rest still curl inwards in memory of the time they spent balled into fists inside his mother’s womb, so our hands receive handaxes from
half a million years ago as though those tools were made to fill the space left empty by all the years.

Hold up your good hand and turn the palm towards your face. Relax your fingers, watch them curl towards your palm and see how your fingertips form a set of four steps rising upwards from little
finger to index: that is how they would sit along the asymmetric ridge of a handaxe. Now turn your hand until your thumb is towards your face. Look at the empty space between your fingertips and
your palm. That is the space waiting to be filled by the butt of a Palaeolithic handaxe. (People used to make things that fit.)

As well as many, many handaxes, what the scientists eventually found at Boxgrove, sealed beneath many feet of sand and fine silt, was a glimpse of a truly ancient Britain. The old land surface
was so astonishingly well
preserved it was possible to find the very spots where people had knelt down to make their handaxes. All the waste flakes created during the
crafting of single tools, removed by expert hands during bursts of activity lasting perhaps just 10 or 20 minutes, are found lying precisely where they fell. Framed by the outline of the
flint-knappers’ legs and knees, they can be reassembled to reveal the shape of the original flint nodule – and when plaster is poured into the void it makes an exact replica of the
handaxe that was the point of the exercise in the first place.

Also sealed beneath the silt are the remains of the animals those handaxes were made to butcher. Bones of bison, giant deer, horse, red deer and rhinoceros have all been recovered, many bearing
the marks made as they were cut up; others have been gnawed by scavengers like hyena and wolf. All of this was fascinating enough but then, in 1993, a very special bone indeed was brought to light
at Boxgrove. It was this that put the quarry firmly on the map of the human story. Together with fellow palaeontologist Simon Parfitt, Stringer identified it as part of a human shinbone from an
ancestor belonging to the species
Homo heidelbergensis
. It is half a million years old.

Continuing excavation nearby unearthed two human teeth and now the remains are stored together in the Natural History Museum in London. Although there are limits to how much can be deduced from
part of a shin and two teeth, they still reveal a remarkable amount about their owner, or indeed owners. Stringer explained that Boxgrove Man stood around five feet 11 inches tall and weighed in
the region of 14 stone. It is a massively constructed bone (the scale of it led to the assumption it was part of a man’s rather than a woman’s leg) suggestive of someone used to a hard
and physically demanding lifestyle. Examination of the teeth found the surfaces heavily scored and scratched and it is thought the marks were made by a sharp-edged flint tool used to hack away at
meat held between clamped jaws.

Regardless of what the bone and the teeth reveal about Boxgrove Man’s lifestyle, they are profoundly moving simply because of what and
who
they are. Given their value to science, I
was not allowed to lay so much as a finger on them. The closest I got was holding one faintly shaky hand an inch or so above the bone, but that was enough. Those remains are half a million years
old . . . half a million years. That is the kind of timeframe I have in mind when I think about mountains forming, or great rivers cutting chasms through solid rock. And yet in the Natural History
Museum
I held my hand over the few remains of a man who lived 5,000 centuries ago in an unimaginably alien Britain, the same and not the same – one that was home to
lions, hyenas and rhinoceroses.

Stringer’s AHOB project has found stone tools of even older vintage at Pakefield in Suffolk, and at Happisburgh in Norfolk. At both sites the geological evidence, together with animal
remains found in association with the tools, suggests occupation by some kind of human at least as long ago as 700,000 years. The search for the beginning of the human story in Britain keeps
burrowing deeper and deeper.

BoxgroveMan lived during the period known as the Lower Palaeolithic, the earliest part of the Old Stone Age. While it might be natural to assume that, having reached the territory of Britain,
humans of one kind or another stayed put here, in fact the truth is quite different – and altogether stranger. Boxgrove Britain was wiped away, like chalk dust from a blackboard, by the Ice
Age known to geologists as the Anglian. For 100,000 years or more, while the glaciers ground out yet more trillions of tons of rock from the landscape, gouging valleys here, lowering mountains
there, life here was utterly absent. And by the time humans returned they were not
Homo heidelbergensis
any more, as Boxgrove Man had been, but his younger relative
Homo
neanderthalensis
.

Those step-brothers and -sisters of ours are perhaps the most fascinating and enigmatic of all the skeletons in modern man’s closet. Despite more recent rehabilitation of their reputation,
still the very word ‘Neanderthal’ has connotations of the brute animal, bringing to mind a hairy, knuckle-dragging, lantern-jawed cave man.

Books and television documentaries have sought to draw a different picture, of sensitive souls in tune with nature and therefore with something profound to teach us about ourselves. The
discovery of nine Neanderthal skeletons in a cave called Shanidar, in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq, went some way towards reinvesting the species with the sensitivity and dignity their
outward appearance had for so long denied them.

Excavated in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of them appeared to have been given formal burials, even funerals, by their fellows. At least three were mature adults at the time of death
– indeed one was aged perhaps 40–50 years old, making him the equivalent of an octogenarian at least, by modern standards. Nicknamed ‘Nandy’ by the excavators, he was by any
standards a poor soul. At some point in his life he had suffered a crushing blow to the left side of his head that would almost certainly have left him
blind in that eye, as
well as facially disfigured. His right arm was withered and wasted – the result of childhood injury, disease or birth defect – and the lower bones and hand had likely been amputated at
some point many years before death. There was also a suggestion of wasting or deformity of his right leg and foot so that he would have walked with a heavy, painful limp. Despite these weaknesses,
which would have made life very difficult for Nandy, he had obviously been cared for and valued by the tribe. Unable to hunt, he was nonetheless provided for – presumably because he was
loved.

Another adult male buried in the cave had been placed in his grave lying in the foetal position. Analysis of the soil in the fill revealed unusually high levels of pollen of several different
flowering plants. It is possible the pollen was introduced to the grave long after the burial – perhaps by burrowing animals – but the possibility has lingered that those mourning the
deadman had filled his grave with flower heads and blossom, hardly the behaviour of grunting ape-men.

Despite evidence like Shanidar, first impressions last and for most people today it is hard to shake off the image of the Quasimodo, the approximation of a man pictured by those who came face to
face with that first skeleton in the Neander Valley in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Whoever –
whatever
– they were, it was Neanderthals who colonised the British peninsula of north-west Europe after the ice had retreated once more. Human remains were found in a
gravel quarry at Swanscombe, in Kent, in the 1930s. Like Boxgrove, the site of Swanscombe had attracted the attention of palaeontologists because of the regular discovery among the sands and
gravels there of beautifully worked flint handaxes. According to Chris Stringer, something of the order of 100,000 handaxes have been recovered from the Swanscombe area over the years –
testament to generations of occupation. The human remains are those of a woman who lived and died – on low-level terrain beside the river that would in time become the Thames – around
400,000 years ago.

There is not much to see of Swanscombe Woman – just two pieces of bone that formed the back of her skull – but they are those of a Neanderthal just the same. To the rear of modern
skulls there is a bump, an anchor point for the muscles of the neck. On Neanderthals the same function was performed by a shallow depression and that telltale hollow is there on the Swanscombe
skull. Comparison with other skeletons from Europe enables a more complete sketch to be drawn of this very early Kentish woman.

She would have been at least as tall or taller than an average modern woman and more powerfully built. Neanderthal men and women alike were most identifiable not by their
muscularity and width, but by their faces and heads. While the foreheads of modern humans rise almost straight up from the nose to create a domed expanse above the face, the Neanderthal equivalent
was low and flat, sweeping almost straight back into the hairline behind massively overhanging, frowning brow ridges. Rather than the protruding chin of today, the Neanderthal’s was receding
and ‘weak’ by comparison. Like Boxgrove Man, Swanscombe Woman’s teeth would likely have borne scratches resultant from holding meat and other material between clamped jaws so she
could cut at it with a sharp stone tool held in one hand. For a while it was in vogue among palaeontologists to say you could give one of those fellows a shave and a suit – or indeed some
makeup and a nice dress – and watch him or her pass unnoticed on a modern city street. Given the evidence, I still think he – and certainly she – would frighten the horses.

In 2007 geneticists extracted DNA from the bones of two European Neanderthals and retrieved from it parts of the gene that gives rise to ginger hair in modern humans. It is a separate and
uniquely Neanderthal variant of the gene, called MC1R, but similar nonetheless. Ginger hair is part of the suite of characteristics that enables people living towards the northern portion of the
planet to make more efficient use of the available sunlight for processing Vitamin D. Ginger people do better in cold climates, starved of daylight – especially in the avoidance of conditions
like rickets – than do those with dark hair and skin. Much more interestingly, though, it means that as well as imagining them as robust, muscular and beetle-browed, we can also picture many
of the Neanderthals as people with flaming red hair.