A History of Ancient Britain (8 page)

They are works so visceral, so potent they could only ever have been executed by painters who knew their subjects like they knew their mothers and brothers. It is even unlikely they saw as
clear-cut a division between themselves and the great beasts as we do – rather they were depicting kindred spirits. Illuminated by flickering flames – as many must have been, since they
are painted in chambers beyond the reach of natural light – the painted animals seem almost to move or at least to breathe. The illusion is heightened by the way the artists used the contours
of the living rock to give their work the appearance of three dimensions.

The Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe was a tradition that lasted for perhaps 20,000 years and it will always be rightly described as primitive. But it is upon those anonymous artists’
shoulders – giants’ shoulders – that later masters like Picasso were able to stand. The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: ‘After Altamira, all is decadence.’

For the longest time it was believed, particularly by French and Spanish archaeologists and palaeontologists, that no such artistic talent had permeated as far as Britain. Surely any vagabonds
who had reached so far into the frozen wilderness could only have evolved a culture so starved and so pared back to the basics of survival, it could never have supported anything as sophisticated
as art? For much of the twentieth century this assumption was borne out by the absence of suitable discoveries here.

Until the twenty-first century, the only bona-fide artwork known from Creswellian Britain was the etching of a horse head on a sliver of rib bone. Despite its size (just two or three inches in
length) it is still a wonder to behold. A whole sequence of thoughts – the thoughts of an Ice Age artist – are there on the bone along with the horse. He or she had first to select the
raw material and then, in the manner of a canvas, the surface of the bone was cleaned and polished in readiness for the making of the image itself. With just a few perfectly
judged and executed lines, the likeness of a galloping horse has been made to leap into life, whole and breathing. The hairs of the mane stand erect like hackles raised in fear or excitement; the
nostrils are flared as though by effort, the eyes wide and blazing. Despite the lack of space, the artist has even managed to suggest the animal’s plunging forelegs.

At some point after completing it, the artist deliberately defaced the work – by scratching across it a series of lines and then snapping the bone in two. Perhaps it was dissatisfaction
with the finished piece, or an attempt to influence future events. Either way, to hold that artwork is to hold some few moments, some of the thinking of a person who lived in Britain more than
13,500 years ago.

Sliver of a thing that it is, the horse head rib bone makes a person wonder what else the artist achieved. How much of his or her portfolio has been destroyed by bad luck and time? Imagine some
Europe-wide catastrophe in the sixteenth century had destroyed every last work by Michelangelo, so that only a single crumpled scrap of paper survived, bearing a sketch made of a handful of lines.
Imagine that was all we had of him. Then apply the same thought to whoever sketched that galloping horse while the Ice Age waxed and waned. What became of his Sistine Chapel, and his David?

That little treasure from so-called Robin Hood’s Cave, within the Creswell Crags, was for long the sum total of Palaeolithic art in Britain. Then in April 2003 archaeologists and cave art
specialists Paul Bahn, Paul Pettitt and Sergio Ripoll began surveying the caves’ interiors.

From outside the caves look almost too good to be true. Facing each other across the floor of a wide, limestone gorge – self-contained residences cut into both cliff faces so that each
cave’s inhabitants had neighbours either side and across the way as well – Creswell Crags appears for all the world like a prehistoric Coronation Street. It is easy to imagine lives
lived there long ago, the smell of fires, the sounds of voices as people went about their business.

The caves were first occupied by Neanderthal people 40–50,000 years ago and then again by Cro-Magnons around the time of the end of the last Ice Age; and given that the tip of the ice
sheet terminated just 30 miles north of Sheffield these are closer to the sharp end than any other known sites of human habitation in Britain.

The caves have attracted tourists for well over a century and it was the Victorians who gave them their fanciful names: Church Hole, Mother Grundy’s Parlour, Pin
Hole, Robin Hood’s Cave. It was inside Church Hole, an unpromising, irregularly shaped chamber, that the three archaeologists made the discoveries that secured Britain a place on the world
map of Palaeolithic cave art. Using directional lighting to cast the cave walls into shadow, they first of all spotted what they assumed to be an engraving of an ibex. It was a stunning moment for
the trio. Far beyond the known limits of such ancient creativity, in the literal shadow of the Devensian ice, a beautifully rendered work by a skilled artist had finally come to the attention of
the modern world. Having seen one, it was suddenly much easier for Bahn and his colleagues to pick out the rest – as many as 90 individual engravings in Church Hole alone.

It bears pointing out that even when standing in front of the best of them – perhaps the awe-inspiring depiction of a bison, the head and forequarters of the beast taking advantage of a
natural bulge in the rock wall to give added vitality and power to the piece – they are still hard to see. Maybe they were once more obvious, the lines deeper and casting sharper shadows, or
picked out with pigments to give the colours of life. But there is no doubting their quality, or their great age. Now correctly identified as a stag, the ‘ibex’ was partially covered by
cave flowstone (much the same material that forms stalactites and stalagmites). Some of this was removed and dated, by a technique called uranium-series, to reveal the stag was cut into the rock
more than 13,000 years ago.

Church Hole Cave is a gallery of wonders. On part of the ceiling is an engraving that initially defied identification – in no small part because there was no way to tell at first how to
view it, which part was the top and which the bottom. Then in a moment of clarity Bahn realised he was looking at the body, neck and long curving beak of a wading bird called an ibis. As with the
bison, the artist – perhaps the same artist – had used the natural curves of the rock to suggest much of the bird’s body and even the rough outline of the beak. He or she had then
skilfully augmented what was already there to create the finished form. Modern sculptors talk about sensing a shape within an uncarved block and feeling the urge to free it by the act of carving.
According to Bahn that sensation is as old as humanity: ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Because in fact one of the most characteristic features of cave art all over western Europe is
constant use of natural shapes in the rock.’

As at Lascaux and Altamira, the artists at Creswell Crags were inspired
to depict the animals they saw around them – that provided their food and the raw materials
of daily life. There are nearly as many theories explaining the meaning of cave art as there are artworks. At the very least they reveal the timeless desire that is always within the hearts and
hands of some people, to make realistic representations of the world. But at least some of it must have been inspired too by the need to try and make sense of that world and even to influence
it.

At least one artwork found by Bahn and his fellows was made by an artist seeking to make contact with someone or something sensed but not seen. The engraving itself has been interpreted by Bahn
as a series of long-necked birds, beaks pointed upwards. It is small, a few inches square, and as hard to see as the rest, but located in a spot where no one would ever have been able to appreciate
it. Church Hole reaches deep into the limestone, narrowing all the while like a tadpole’s tail. Much of the natural build-up of flowstone has been dug out to make the passage deeper and
access easier, but in Palaeolithic times it would have taken great effort and intent to penetrate all the way back to the site of the engraving.

Picture a tunnel a couple of feet high, a couple of feet wide, reaching back into velvet darkness. Around 13,000 or 14,000 years ago an artist, presumably equipped with a lamp as well as a
drawing tool, squeezed and wriggled as far into the crawl space as he could before cutting out his artwork. Having completed the job, and unable to turn round, he shuffled feet-first back into the
light, condemning his engraving of a flock of birds to a presumed eternity out of sight. We have only speculation to explain whom it was for, why it was ever made. Bahn pointed out that there is an
important percentage of cave art, all over western Europe, deliberately located in hard-to-reach spots. ‘Palaeolithic people put themselves through this to leave images which are clearly not
for human consumption,’ he said. ‘They’re making them for something else, something non-human to see – maybe a god, a spirit, an ancestor . . . the forces of
nature.’

Whatever its deeper meaning (if indeed it ever represented any more than art for art’s sake) the Creswell art was made during a relatively brief time – known to geologists as the
Late Glacial Interstadial – when the ice had retreated, to some extent at least. Around the same time there were artists in Creswell Crags, people of a similar sort were accustomed to using
Gough’s Cave in Somerset’s famous Cheddar Gorge. They sheltered or lived in it, kept fires, made and used tools, butchered their kills. As well as the same types of artefacts, small
blades and points, and amber from the
North Sea, archaeologists also recovered human bones. Some of these made headlines across the land when it was realised they bore cut
marks and the apparent evidence of butchering, and there has been much speculation ever since about what might have motivated people to dismember and perhaps even eat the flesh, bone marrow and
brains of their fellow human beings.

Newspaper readers of the modern world live lives that are, in the main, kept antiseptically clean of death and corpses. We are generally unfamiliar with the sight and smell of dead animals, far
less of dead people, and so it is hard to imagine living comfortably, side by side with death in all its forms. The thought of coming into contact with a corpse, let alone its consumption, fills
most of uswith fear, even revulsion – but all the evidence suggests these are modern responses.

In the still-recent past it was customary to see, even to handle the dead bodies of family members, in preparation for funerals, and in the ancient past corpses were left in the open to decay,
to be picked back to clean bones by birds and scavengers before collection for burial or other storage. Our ancestors were also in the habit of revisiting their dead again and again, and the skulls
and other bones of loved ones might well have been treated as affectionately as though they were still alive.

All of this has to be considered when attempting to explain precisely what happened to some human bodies in Gough’s Cave 15,000 years ago. It may have been simple cannibalism –
making use of human meat when no other was available. But any number of rituals and beliefs may have been at play as well. The notion of communion with a loved one, by eating of his body and
drinking of his blood, may be much, much older than 2,000 years. The human remains from Gough’s Cave should do nothing more than add to the fascination of trying to imagine life in the shadow
of the ice.

The sins of that past, if sins they were, would shortly be washed away in any case. Life had been good for perhaps two or three thousand years, and the hunters had taken what they needed from
the herds of deer, horse and wild cattle that roamed the fertile grasslands of a land abruptly freed from beneath two-thirds of a mile of ice. But it could not and did not last. Around 13,000 years
ago, while the animals engraved in the walls of the Creswell Crags were still freshly cut, the climate rapidly deteriorated once more. During the course of as little as a few years the temperature
plummeted and Britain was gripped by a time known as the ‘Big Freeze’.

This was the so-called Younger Dryas, when the land disappeared once
more beneath rapidly advancing ice sheets. Soon it was as bad again as it had ever been – and it
was no localised event. Viewed from space the planet must have presented quite a spectacle, mindlessly, merrily whirling on its way around the sun and yet clad now in a steadily growing mantle of
white. From both poles the sheets advanced, ice carving and grinding all the while and adding the finishing sculptural touches to the landscapes of today.

Severe for Britain it certainly was – for Scotland in particular where the glacier again achieved a depth of more than two-thirds of mile – but also brief. By 11,000 or so years ago
the worst was over, the ice was in headlong retreat leaving behind the landforms we see now.

And as the ice retreated, ushering in the geological period called the Holocene (just the latest spell of warm weather the planet has known in the midst of its incessant Ice Ages, our time),
humankind advanced to fill the empty spaces. The first of them would have arrived dry-shod over a now long-vanished territory called Doggerland – presently submerged beneath the North Sea and
the English Channel but then a vast expanse of low-lying dry land. During the glacial periods so much water was locked up in the ice sheets that the sea would at times have been more than 100 yards
below present levels and the outlines of the planet’s continents would have been unrecognisable. For aeons, the tide was most definitely out.

At first it was a brutal, brutalised landscape of bare rock and melt water. Anyone hardy, or foolhardy, enough to travel north as far as the present-day Central Belt of Scotland 11,000 years ago
would have arrived at the foot of the retreating glacier. A great thaw was under way and, trapped beneath the still-enormous weight of the ice, torrents of water were subjected to pressures so
colossal they cut gorges and ravines through solid rock.