About a year ago, I was given a meaty challenge by one of my keenest readers. (Well, my son actually – he politely reads the posts, to please his mother). He said he’d got a pretty good handle on the history of Britain, from the celts onwards. But what came before them was a bit of a blur. Hence his request for a post on the human occupation of our islands, from the very earliest times. Graciously, he said I could stop at the arrival of the celts, around 1,000 BC.
What a tall order! I’ve been struggling with this over the year. Regular readers will know that my posts are all about the old stuff that’s physically out there to see and wonder about. (Academic, theoretical history is fascinating, just not for this blog). But I struggled with describing what’s still there to be seen from way, way back.
The Million Year Clock
I learned that the first evidence of humans on these islands goes back a million years or so. How on earth can you visualise such a gigantic span of time, and pinpoint the timings of that evidence? An added complication – scientists and archaeologists constantly debate about time frames. That’s understandable, considering that dating methods aren’t precise. I fretted over this post, pencilling, erasing and re-penciling the timings, as one piece of academic opinion contradicted or updated another.
So, here’s my solution: a time clock of the past million years. Imagine the start point as 11.00pm in the evening. Every added 10 minutes represents around 80,000 years, until we get to midnight, and the date where BC flips to AD. We’ll plot the evidence on the clock at the times roughly agreed by the experts. For context, the celts arrived in Britain very late in the day – around a minute to midnight, on our pretend One Million Year clock.
This first post will cover just the first 58 minutes or so of our virtual hour – the period known as the Old Stone Age – or the Paleolithic age, if we want to get technical.
A history clock
Phew, that’s the hard part done. Now for the fun – let’s look at what we have. First thing though, stop thinking about Britain as an island. On our theoretical clock, we didn’t finally detach from mainland Europe for the last time until well under a minute to midnight – around 6,000 BC. Prior to that, we were just the north-western part of the great continental hunting grounds. For almost a million years, humans didn’t swim or sail to get here. They walked: to hunt, eat and move on, following the seasons. They were nomads, with no permanent settlements.
Second thing, the weather was all over the place – no change there! Over our million years, Britain’s landmass endured four main ice ages, at least one of which was so severe that no-one could live here at all for many thousands of years. And in contrast, between those ice ages, temperatures rose so high that sub-saharan creatures such as hippos lived and thrived here. Of course, this explains why Brits habitually equip themselves with sun hats, fur coats and umbrellas, ready for any eventuality.
As the ice melted and re-froze, over and over, sea levels rose and fell. The size of our landmass increased and reduced, and at times we were cut off from the great continental plain, only for a land bridge to reappear again. (As an aside, writing this last sentence reminded me of the apocryphal British newspaper headline: “Fog in Channel : Continent cut off ”. No-one knows if it’s true or not. I wouldn’t like to bet either way).
Normal for Norfolk – Happisburgh. Time: 11.02 pm (c. 950,000 BC)
So, where do we find evidence of our first humans? The Norfolk coast, actually, Happisburgh, to be exact. (It’s pronounced “Hazebrur”. Yes, I know). In 2013, sharp-eyed observers spotted a set of fossilised human footprints, visible at low tide. They’d been protected by a layer of sand for a million years, but a heavy storm had washed away the sand, exposing the prints. Scientists frantically photographed the prints in 3D, racing against time before the sediment washed away. These are the oldest human footprints discovered in the world outside Africa, where of course hominids like us had first evolved, around 2 million years ago.
Scientists think that there were around 5 individuals, both adults and children. You can even detect the outline of some toes. They were probably gathering seafood from the estuary of a river, rather than on a coastline – the geography would have been very different from today. They were human, but not our own species – they were probably homo antecessor, the common ancestor of sapiens and neanderthals.
Hmmm. Was I cheating a bit there, to give you evidence that’s no longer there, only digital footprints? Maybe.
OK, let’s look at what’s actually still tangible…
Sedimentary, my dear Watson
Incidentally, it’s no coincidence that much of the evidence we’ll examine comes to light in the south eastern side of the country. It’s because most of the rocks there are sedimentary: layer upon layer of pulverised rocks and shells. Basically, mud. What’s more important – if you find artefacts buried within layers of sediment, those geological layers allow you to date the artefacts with accuracy – an archaeologist’s dream. What’s an archaeologist’s nightmare? A worked flint just lying on top of a ploughed field – there’s no reference point by which to date it.
Silly Suffolk- Pakefield. Time: 11.15 pm (c. 700,000 BC)
In 2000, a man walking his dog along the beach at “Hazebrur” again, found a flint hand axe. At the time, archaeologists celebrated it as the earliest example found in northern Europe, tentatively dated by reference to the sediments around it, to around 500,000 BC. You can see it on display in the Norfolk Museum.
A bit further south, a couple of amateur archaeologists read about the find further up along the coast, and decided to explore their own patch, around the foreshore at Pakefield in Suffolk. Why the foreshore? As any amateur fossil collector will tell you, the beach is the place to look, especially once the winter storms have washed away a few layers of sediment.
And in 2001, amateur diggers Paul Durbidge and Bob Mutch struck gold – or rather flint. They found a magnificent worked flint flake, used as a tool. Professionals later excavated a further 31 tools from the site. Because the flints were buried, they could be dated from the surrounding sediment. They were fashioned around 700,000 BC, around 200,000 years older than the Happisburgh flints.
But wait! In archaeology, even with a million year time-span, things can change rapidly. Subsequent analysis of the sediments around the Happisburgh axe site now date it around the same time as the Pakefield flints. And so the competition for the oldest artefacts continues.
Animal magic
Equally as interesting as the Pakefield and Happisburgh flints, are the animal remains uncovered near those tools. We’re talking mammoths, lions, giant beavers, rhino and bison. Spotted hyenas, sabre-toothed cats, wolves and bears. Not necessarily all were food sources for our early humans. In fact, none of the animal bones found there so far show signs of butchery; archaeologists are still looking for that evidence. Many of these animals must have predated upon those early humans. Our amateur Pakefield volunteers even found lion and hyena droppings. There were also plentiful remains of smaller creatures such as bats, squirrels, hamsters, beetles and – voles! – of which more later.
Sussex-ful excavations- Boxgrove. Time: 11.30pm (c 500,000 BC)
Let’s move south from East Anglia to Sussex by the sea. Not far from the coast, near Chichester, lies the hamlet of Boxgrove. There in 1974, archaeologists started excavation of a marvellous palaeolithic site. They found flint tools, and animal bones – many from the same exotic menagerie found in East Anglia. But with a difference: the bones of a horse showed clear signs of butchery. What’s more, the archaeologists found their probable butchers – the oldest human remains found in the UK, at half a million years old. A tibia from a male, and two teeth, perhaps from the same person, although they were buried a metre or so deeper than the tibia. Later, DNA analysis however suggests the teeth might have belonged to a neanderthal. Again, the remains were not homo sapiens, but certainly from ancestors or cousins of our species.
And, fortuitously, the Boxgrove diggers also found the remains of voles…
“Vole Clocks”
These early humans were partial to a plump vole or two, judging by the number of vole bones found at various sites. A tasty morsel, no doubt, after a hard day’s hunting. By good fortune, they can provide a valuable dating resource to archaeologists. How? Voles are a species that evolve rapidly, to adapt to changing environmental conditions. As temperatures rose and fell between the Ice ages, vole physiology changed, adapting to changes in their food sources. Although not of pinpoint accuracy, it gives archaeologists another tool to date finds, if the sediment in which they’re buried has been disturbed. A bright spark of course then named them as “vole clocks”. All because of that clever Mr. Darwin and his great evolutionary theory.
The clock ticks towards midnight…
Swanscombe, Kent. Time: 12.35 pm (c 400,000 BC).
In Swanscombe, Kent in 1936, “Swanscombe Man” came to light. Or at least part of him – two pieces of fossilised skull. After analysis however, “He” turned out to be a “She”. (Scientists’ own prejudices often get in the way of science, of which more later…). The remains were probably neanderthal.
Swindon, Wiltshire. Time: 12.47pm (c 200,000 BC).
Let’s move up-country to Wiltshire, to the railway town of Swindon. In 2017, an intrepid team of archaeologists started digging at a promising site in a quarry. They found a neanderthal hand axe laying on the ground. So, the team did what they do best, and dug. Only to uncover the tusks and bones of a small herd of mammoths: adults, infants and at least one baby. The jury’s still out as to whether any of the bones show signs of butchery. But they did also find scraper tools, typically used by neaderthals to scrape meat from bones. Currently, the archaeologists are fighting the quarry owners for continuing access to the site. Commerce waits for no man.
Blowing hot and cold. TIme: 12.47 pm- 12.56pm (c200,000 BC- c60,000 BC)
The neaderthals dominated for many thousands of years. But then… the cold. Nothing thrived during the glacial ice ages, as the absence (to date!) of any evidence of human habitation suggests. Temperatures warmed again, around 125,000 BC, the sea levels rose and the British landmass was cut off from the continent. Neanderthals didn’t make it across the bridge in time. But many animals did – as one archaeologist pointed out, it was warm enough again to find hippos in the Thames!
And then around 60,000 BC, yet another ice age. Sea levels fell again, and neanderthals could return, and then, at last ! – modern humans.
Kent’s Cavern, Devon. Time: 12.57 pm (c 44,000 BC)
We’ve had a long, long wait until we come across any remains of our own specific human species. Modern humans are relative newcomers, travelling across the land bridge as the climate warmed again. In the 1920s, archaeologists found the first known modern human remains in a limestone cave in Devon. It was the upper jawbone of a homo sapiens. You can see it in the museum in Torquay.
The Red Lady of Paviland Time: 12.57 pm (c 40,000 BC)
Finally, here’s an object lesson on how science can go wrong, due to the unconscious prejudices of the scientist. In 1868, an Oxford professor and church dean, William Buckland, was rootling around in Paviland on the Gower peninsula in Wales. He unearthed part of an ancient human skeleton. It was deliberately coated in red ochre (a naturally occurring pigment), and was adorned with ivory ornaments and beads, and a seashell necklace, with a handful of periwinkle shells by the thigh, where a pocket might have been. The care given to the body’s burial, along with its decorations suggests a belief in an afterlife. Buckland deliberated, and duly pronounced that the skeleton was that of a female Roman prostitute. Accordingly, he named her “The Red Lady”.
All well and good, except that he had the sex wrong, and was out by around 38,000 years. The remains were actually of a male hunter-gatherer from the very tail-end of our Paleolithic story. It was dated by flint tools found near the body. Buckland’s strong Christian beliefs got in the way of science: for him, no human remains could possibly be older than Noah’s flood, as chronicled in the bible. And what man wears a necklace? So Buckland reasoned that the remains must be female, and must date from after the time of Noah. Science is only as good as the objectivity of its practitioners. The ivory ornaments by the way, … were carved from the tusks of a mammoth.
Hiding in plain sight
In under a (virtual) hour, we’ve sped through a million years, around the landmass that would become Britain. We’ve come to the end of the old Stone Age, and found some marvellous human things – their remains, the bones of the animals they hunted, and even the tools they used. You can see these exhibits for yourself, along with countless others, in any UK history museum worth its salt.
What do these finds tell us about the people that lived here, during those million years? That they were simple nomadic hunters. They had no permanent dwellings, they hunted and moved on. Probably they viewed this land as one of many hunting grounds, following the weather, following the herds, across the land bridge. They were like us, but not exactly us. For many hundreds of thousands of years, neanderthals were the dominant species here: why exactly did they die out, and homo sapiens emerge as dominant? That’s for another post. But my next will cover the last few minutes to midnight on our Virtual Clock, when the old nomadic hunting life changed completely.
There’s Stone Age stuff still out there, waiting to be found. Your best bet is on the beach, by a sedimentary rock cliff, especially after a bit of rain (be careful though – not too near, soggy cliffs are notoriously unstable !). But plenty of fossils, flint tools and arrowheads are also spotted and bagged by walkers, having a wander across a ploughed field…
A few years ago, I took the long-suffering Mr. Albion for a beach-combing walk by the seaside at Walton-on-Naze in Essex. “It’s supposedly famous for shark teeth fossils”, I said. “But I think they’re really hard to find”.
“Like this one?” he replied..
