Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans

First, consider the distinction between hunting and opportunistic scavenging. I can see no reason why hunting should not have developed quite naturally out of scavenging. It seems a perfectly reasonable progression, just as in later chapters I will argue that stock-keeping and animal husbandry are a logical development from hunting. The problem may lie inside our own heads. In countless books and articles I’ve seen mankind’s relentless march of evolutionary progress illustrated in full colour, with crouching, ape-like hominids gradually being replaced by taller, more erect and intelligent beings until – Glory be! – modern man strides forth, head held erect and not so much as a genital in sight. Steps of progression form an important part of this pattern of evolutionary thought: from scavenging to hunting; from hunting to farming; from farming to urban life; from urban life to literacy, ‘Civilisation’, the Industrial Revolution and so on. It’s a pattern of thought that makes us feel good, but I wonder to what extent it reflects the truth, which was probably more like the way I’m writing this book: two pages forward, then one page deleted, and so on.

So, perhaps one day they hunted, and the next day they scavenged – whichever seemed the appropriate thing to do at the time. Eventually they found that hunting was both more efficient and more effective. It could also be fun – I suspect this was of equal importance as efficiency and effectiveness – and it gave young people a chance to show off their skills. Larger groups would have been needed to catch animals as massive as rhinos, and they would surely have relished not only the thrill of the chase and the reward of food at its completion, but also the teamwork required to co-ordinate so many individuals into an effective unit.

These arguments sound attractive, but are they true? Do they represent what might have happened half a million years ago? Remember, we are not discussing people like ourselves, but people with a very different brain and patterns of thinking. Most of the ideas in the previous paragraphs presuppose that the people of the Lower Palaeolithic thought more or less like ourselves; and we can’t assume that – a minimalist certainly wouldn’t. A minimalist would argue that their way of thinking differed profoundly from ours. For them thought was more to do with habit; what would seem straightforward to us – for example the logical leaps from one set of unrelated ideas to another – simply didn’t happen. I shall discuss this further in Chapter 3, but here I want to note that the way one interprets a site such as Boxgrove depends very much on one’s theoretical position. It’s no good even attempting to approach such problems with ‘an open mind’. One has to have a theoretical position and a particular set of ideas to test out. Otherwise one’s analysis lacks purpose and direction. Put another way, for ‘open’ mind, read ‘empty’, throughout.

So, what is the evidence for scavenging, or rather for persistent scavenging, at Boxgrove? As we have seen, the direct evidence for hunting is still quite slight, but it would be a mistake to assume that killing was necessarily accomplished by a sudden, massive and catastrophic wound that felled the prey on the spot – something like a javelin through the heart. In later periods of the Palaeolithic and in the subsequent Mesolithic there is good evidence that death could be very slow.¹⁸ The prey was wounded badly enough to bleed to death slowly. As the poor beast gradually became weaker, it would be stalked by the hunting party until it either died or was weak enough to be finished off. Certainly this pattern of hunting would help to account for the thickness of the Boxgrove people’s shinbones.

One piece of positive evidence for hunting, as opposed to scavenging, at Boxgrove is the evidence for human control of the carcasses found there. If the prey was dragged there from scavenging expeditions, one might reasonably expect to find that the initial hunters – be they bears or wolves – had left their toothmarks on the bones first. Thereafter one might expect to find the scratches left by the hand-axes that detached the meat. But this never happens. Where gnaw-marks and hand-axe marks are found together on the same bone, it is always the gnawing that comes later – presumably when the hunters had no further use for the carcass. I have to say, I find this evidence for hunting fairly convincing. But I can still hear Clive Gamble asking, ‘Why? Surely these patterns could equally well have resulted from people arriving at a kill site first, before the other scavengers arrived on the scene.’ And he could well be right. After all, there is no direct, incontrovertible evidence for human beings actually killing prey at Boxgrove.

This absence of direct evidence may in part be due to the fact that the wooden spears of the Lower Palaeolithic leave only a slight impression on bone, unlike, say, a broken-off flint arrowhead. We do, however, know that wooden spears of this period did exist. There’s a very probable contender made of yew wood which was found at Clacton, but several complete examples have been found across the North Sea at Schönongen, a site in Germany.¹⁹ So the evidence most certainly is out there. But it still seems to be absent from Boxgrove. Maybe I ought to reserve my position until something definite, one way or the other, turns up. But I can’t: I still find the cumulative evidence for hunting, especially as presented in the full Boxgrove report by Mark Roberts, convincing. And what is far more significant, John Wymer does too. In his preface to the full report, he is emphatic (the italics are his):

The people were hunters of large mammals; they did hunt with spears; they did retain useful objects for future use…We know that they had craftsmen among them with a concept of symmetry, if not beauty. They performed tasks that involved a division of labour and there is much to imply a social order of groups larger than usually imagined working together.²⁰

I’ll leave it there for the time being. In Chapter 3 I’ll review the evidence for Palaeolithic social organisation, and then Clive Gamble will have a chance to give the reasons why he inclines to a more minimalist view. I find this controversy both stimulating and refreshing – not least because the people concerned are not at each other’s throats, but are all far more concerned about the broader issues lying behind Palaeolithic research. As John Wymer put it in the final words of his preface to the Boxgrove report, the topic is alive because it is ‘research into what is the most important subject confronting us: ourselves’.

I’ve tended to emphasise the quality of preservation at Boxgrove, simply because it’s so extraordinary and, for me at least, affecting. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the quantity either. Before Boxgrove, discoveries of hand-axes from this period were rare events indeed – perhaps a dozen or two each year, most of which were those archaeologically less-than-useful isolated or ‘stray’ finds. By contrast, one small area of the Boxgrove excavations revealed over 150 hand-axes, some of which were unused. Mark Roberts has suggested, quite reasonably, that these implements had been made, perhaps when a particularly good source of flint had been found, to be kept to one side and used when needed. If he is right, plainly this is evidence for forethought.

The hand-axes themselves were difficult to make, and in this respect, as we’ve already seen, they were quite unlike the earlier tools of the pebble-chopper tradition. One doesn’t simply select a suitably sized piece of flint and then remove flakes on the off-chance that one can whittle away enough, and in the right places, to produce the desired end-result. There are a number of quite clearly defined stages that have to be gone through before one can produce a finished hand-axe, starting with the removal of the softer, more granular cortex, a type of ‘skin’ or ‘peel’ that develops through time and which protects the higher-quality, glass-like flint within.

At Boxgrove there is clear evidence that many of the hand-axes used for butchery were made then and there, on the spot. There are numerous waste flakes along with the finished hand-axes, and in one instance it’s possible to see where a person sat on the ground while he knapped a hand-axe. As he worked he allowed the flakes of flint to fall into his lap and then onto the ground, making a characteristically tight pattern (about ten inches across) that can be replicated experimentally. It’s as if fifteen minutes of time had been frozen for half a million years.

Each stage of a hand-axe’s manufacture requires a great deal of manual skill to start and complete, and it also takes good judgement to know when to move from one stage to another. The hand-axes found at Boxgrove are rarely ever skewed or misshaped, and are nearly always balanced and evenly proportioned, both when laid flat and when viewed edge-on. Speaking again from personal experience, I know that it takes considerable skill and judgement to keep an eye on the proportions of two separate planes simultaneously. It’s easy to get slightly carried away when things are going well, only to realise – when it’s too late – that one’s arrowhead, or whatever else one is making, will never fly straight. I’ve watched a good flint-knapper make a hand-axe, and a large part of the time he spent turning and inspecting the piece at arm’s length, to see that everything was in balance. The discipline required, and the knowledge of the different stages of manufacture, must surely have been taught from one generation to the next – and teaching, of course, requires language of some sort.

Much of the manufacture of hand-axes requires the use of a so-called ‘soft’ hammer, which in most cases was probably made from a billet or baton of antler, perhaps a foot or slightly less long and with the diameter of, say, a cricket stump. Antler is hard, but it’s also very resilient, and doesn’t chip or flake even when hit with force. This makes it ideal for flint-working. Before Boxgrove, we suspected that antler was used for soft hammers, but couldn’t prove it. But at Boxgrove an antler billet was found with small, sharp fragments of flint still sticking into it. The worn state of that antler hammer suggests that it was used to make more than one hand-axe, and again this provides good evidence for forethought, as presumably whoever it was that owned it carried the hammer around until he needed to use it again.

Where do all these indications of forethought lead us? Did the inhabitants of Boxgrove possess a sophisticated, highly adaptable language, such as English? The evidence from those who understand and study the human brain and the inside of the bone case – the cranium – that protects it suggests that Homo heidelbergensis simply didn’t have the mental equipment to develop or use a highly sophisticated language. On the other hand, the archaeological record makes it clear that these people must routinely have used a form of language – albeit of a relatively simple type. That, it would appear, is as far as we can take matters at present.

CHAPTER TWO Neanderthals, the Red ‘Lady’ and Ages of Ice

BOXGROVE WAS OCCUPIED before the great chill of the Anglian glaciation, whose ice retreated around 423,000 years ago. Then, so far as we know, essentially the same type of lifestyle resumed. Much of the evidence for this comes not from spectacular sites like Boxgrove, but from the discovery of hundreds of hand-axes from the lowland river gravels of England. In the past these hand-axes would generally not have been systematically studied, as they would have been seen as out of context, or ‘derived’, to use the archaeological term. They were derived because they were found in gravels whose very formation – derivation – had eroded away the original settlement sites where the hand-axes had been deposited. Imagine that a series of rivers had flowed through Boxgrove, churning the material around and around. Would what was left have any archaeological value? It depends, as Professor Joad of The Brains Trust would have said, on what one means by archaeological value. And that, in turn, depends on the scale at which one is working.

Boxgrove is remarkable for the detail it provides. It’s actually possible to refit flint flakes back together, to reconstruct precisely how a Palaeolithic flint-knapper once worked for fifteen minutes. One might refer to this as the micro-scale of archaeological investigation. But one might also quite reasonably wonder what else was going on at that time so very long ago. Were there, for example, other settlements in the area, and how long did they last? These larger-scale, or macro-level, questions require a different type of information if they’re to be answered properly. However remarkable refitting flint flakes might be in itself, it won’t take us any further forward in this instance.

I mentioned that the river gravel hand-axes were ‘derived’ from earlier deposits, and this was due to the down-cutting of rivers and the reworking of the gravels lying in the floodplain. These changes in the rivers’ behaviour were caused by fluctuations in climate during the successive glacial, cold, cool and temperate phases of the Ice Ages. There was plenty of fast-flowing water around as the ice melted, then less during temperate times, and none when ice was present. And of course, each of these phases had innumerable sub-phases, which varied from one river valley to another. If you understand how the resulting sequence of gravel terraces within the floodplain formed, then you provide at least a secondary context for the hand-axes and other flints within them.

John Wymer’s survey of the river gravels unravelled the sequence of terraces of all the major river valleys of southern Britain, and for that alone it is notable. The results of the survey ‘provide incontrovertible evidence for the presence of human groups during intermittent occupations in all the major valleys, over a time span of some half-million years’.¹ The survey also revealed extensive evidence for occupation in areas outside the major river valleys, such as around lakes, on the coastal fringe and in the chalk downland. It’s difficult at this stage even to hazard a guess at the British population during a warmer period of an interglacial, but I imagine that a low-level flight across the country would have detected the smoke from at most one or two fires. In 1972, the eminent archaeologist Don Brothwell estimated that the population for Britain as a whole at any one time during the Lower Palaeolithic would have been less than five thousand.²

So far we have been dealing with the longest period in British prehistory, the Lower Palaeolithic. Now we must move forward, and rapidly, if we are to keep to our schedule. The next significant stage starts shortly after 250,000 years ago and is known as the Middle Palaeolithic. Initially it would appear that occupation – or the evidence for occupation – during this period is slight, and this was doubtless due to adverse climate conditions. But unlike the previous period, the evidence from elsewhere in Europe is very much better. This is a shame, because it was a time of very considerable interest.

I started the previous chapter with some thoughts about the very earliest recognisable hominids, and perhaps the best way to span the half-million or so years that now confront us is via them (the hominids) and us (modern man, or Homo sapiens). In other words, we shall rapidly trace the story of human evolution and development, insofar as it affects what was shortly to become Britain. The other approach would be via the flint implements and other archaeological remains that were left behind.³ The problem here, however, is that there is a wealth of material which can be discussed and classified in various ways, depending on one’s archaeological interests and background.⁴ Sometimes one can become too introspective: it’s easy to be more concerned with flint implements, and what they may have been used for, than with the people who actually made and used them. I shall stick to flesh and blood – to people.

In the previous chapter we saw how early hominids moved out of Africa, and took a very long time indeed finally to colonise northern Europe. We then took a closer look at the site at Boxgrove, where possible ancestors of modern man and the Neanderthals butchered their meat and made flint tools for the purpose. It’s those two descendants – or possible descendants – of the people at Boxgrove who will concern us here. We will start with perhaps the most famous name in archaeology: Neanderthal man (Homo neanderthalensis).

The Neanderthals have not always had a good press, and I often wonder how they would have reacted to some of the things that have been said (or worse, painted) about them. A recent (and hugely expensive) television series and its spin-off book were at pains to be objective about them, and they succeeded admirably.⁵ But things haven’t always been so well done: there’s something about the Neanderthals, and our treatment of them, that ultimately mocks ourselves. When it comes to our closest, deceased relatives, historically we can’t seem to get it right. Perhaps they’re just too close to us.

The story of the finding of bones in the Neander valley (or thal) near Düsseldorf in 1856 is well known.⁶ It was a discovery that was profoundly to affect the development of archaeological thought, and not always for the better.⁷ Quite soon after the initial discoveries at the Feldhover Cave, other, earlier finds were recognised as people of the same type, or species. Neanderthals have been found over most of Europe and western Asia – but not, interestingly, in Africa; presumably because they had become so well adapted to cooler climates that they didn’t fancy crossing the Sahara desert. Actual hard-and-fast evidence for Neanderthals in Britain was only found very recently. They lived in this vast stretch of the globe for a very long time indeed, and during some of the coldest episodes of the Ice Ages, between about 130,000 and thirty thousand years ago. As we will see, the Neanderthals were on the earth for considerably longer than modern man (Homo sapiens) has yet managed.

Happily, there’s no shortage of Neanderthal bone to work with, and as a result we have a pretty good idea of what they would have looked like. For a start, they were absolutely human, and would not have given rise to those ill-bred stares in Oxford Street, although when first confronted with one, I suspect I might have registered that they came from somewhere a long way away. In the days when such questions were not considered sexist in academic circles, I once asked a colleague who specialised in the Palaeolithic whether he thought he’d fancy a young Neanderthal woman. He replied: ‘You bet I would, but I’d make myself scarce when her brother arrived.’ They were thick-set and quite heavily built, with stout bones that showed signs of having supported a very active body. The face was characterised by strong brow ridges above the eyes and a forehead that sloped backwards far more than ours. The lower face and jaw was more prominent, which tended to disguise the fact that the chin profile was weak.

Reading this through, I’m struck by the fact that I’m judging the unfortunate Neanderthaler as if he were an aberrant modern man. He might say of us: they have domed, baby-like foreheads which, when combined with a receding jawline and spindly limbs, gives them an awkward, insubstantial and unbalanced appearance.

Neanderthals had a larger brain than modern man, not just in relation to their somewhat larger body mass, but absolutely. I suppose we’re bound to say this, but there is no evidence that this larger brain gave them more intelligence. Indeed, the bare fact that they failed to survive the evolutionary rat-race – given no help whatsoever from Homo sapiens – tends to support this view. It has been suggested that the principal difference in the way the two species thought was that modern man was able to lump his thoughts together.⁸ He was more of a generalist, whereas Neanderthals were ‘domain specific’, to use a term coined by the cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen.⁹ Put another way, Homo sapiens was better at integrating concepts: he could identify similarities in supposedly unrelated spheres (the way that Newton could see how a falling apple and gravity were part of the same phenomenon). I remember reading that remarkable book by Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (1964), in which he maintained that all great intellectual insights came as a result of making links between different spheres (he termed them ‘matrices’) of thought. It would now seem that this ability to cross-reference and reintegrate is something unique to our species, and it led directly to the development of sophisticated language. Neanderthals, on the other hand, are believed to have maintained more rigid or impermeable pigeonholes in their brains: different realms of thought stayed apart from each other. In some respects this was good: it gave focus and discipline, as their magnificently executed flintwork attests. But so far as is known it doesn’t seem to have given rise to art (as opposed to decoration plain and simple), or to more complex symbolic expression.

There were other things that distinguished Neanderthals from modern humans. Plainly these ideas are tentative, but it’s worth noting that drawing conclusions about ancient behaviour from dry bones, flints and, crucially, the contexts of their discovery is a major achievement of Palaeolithic archaeology. The concept of ‘context’ is fundamentally important to archaeology.¹⁰ Essentially it refers to the way that different artefacts, bones and other finds relate to each other. Thus, the dagger found protruding from a dead man’s ribcage tells a very different story to the dagger tucked into a dancing Scotsman’s sock. The dagger may be constant, but the context – which provides the meaning – isn’t. The word can also be used in a more specific archaeological sense, which loosely correlates with ‘layer’ or ‘deposit’. So, in an ancient settlement, for instance, the soil (and the finds therein) that filled an abandoned ditch would form a different archaeological context to the ashes and charcoal in a nearby hearth.

Using such contextual information, it would appear that the children of Neanderthal parents grew up faster, and achieved their independence more rapidly, than their Homo sapiens equivalents.¹¹ Maybe this was a result of their large brains and focused way of thinking, but it could have had a downside, too. Without prolonged exposure to their parents’ acquired experience and wisdom, the younger generation would have been forever reinventing and rediscovering things that their parents knew perfectly well. This would undoubtedly have affected the pace and dynamics of social development within the group as a whole. As we will see later, change in Homo sapiens society is by its nature slow, but in the case of the Neanderthals it must have been even slower. This would have put them at a considerable disadvantage compared with the more adaptable communities of Homo sapiens – especially in periods when the natural environment around them was changing rapidly.

One should resist the temptation always to put theories and observations on past behaviour into modern terms, but I can’t help thinking that the Neanderthal thought-process may have been similar to the overfocused approach of obsessive trainspotters or stamp collectors. Their hobbies lack interest or appeal for me, because they are devoid of most social context. Don’t get me wrong – I love steam trains, but I’m far more interested in their drivers and firemen and where they would have taken their summer holidays. I have lately observed a certain philatelic tendency creeping into archaeology, both professional and non-professional: an obsession with sites, dates, artefacts and other minutiae – at the expense of the original people and the stories that lay behind them. It’s all very Neanderthal.

It is clear that the Neanderthals ate a great deal of meat, which they undoubtedly hunted effectively, using a variety of techniques and tactics. As we have seen, their bones were robust and thick-walled, which indicates that their lives were extremely active. Dr Paul Pettitt, a notable authority on the subject, put it well: ‘Neanderthals lived fast and died young.’¹² I don’t want to give the impression that Neanderthals were thugs, because the facts do not support that. Far from it, there is much evidence (mainly from Europe and the Middle East) to suggest that they cared deeply about death and the dead: burials were deliberately placed in dug graves, and bodies were sometimes accompanied by grave goods and red ochre – a natural powder-based mineral paint. Neanderthals took considerable care over the burial of children and older, physically disabled people, who would not have been able to survive outside what must have been a small, robust but nonetheless caring community. Sadly, as we will see shortly, our Neanderthal cousins were to learn that small, caring communities don’t last long when the competition for survival begins to hot up.

The Middle Palaeolithic is the name given to the period dominated by Neanderthal man. As we have noted, Britain was sparsely occupied especially during the earlier years of the period; I know of only one find of Neanderthal-style bones here (teeth and lower jaw fragments from two individuals), from Pontnewydd Cave, in north Wales. I say Neanderthal-style bones because although they have Neanderthal characteristics, their date is very early indeed (around 240,000 years ago), so they are perhaps best seen as coming from people who were ancestral to the true Neanderthals. But Pontnewydd Cave also had another, far subtler, archaeological secret to reveal.

The cave was superbly excavated by Dr Stephen Aldhouse-Green of the National Museum of Wales, in Cardiff. I first met Stephen when he was excavating open-air (i.e. non-cave) sites that were threatened by the construction of the New Town at Milton Keynes, in Buckinghamshire. At that time I was also working on open sites threatened by a New Town, at Peterborough, and we kept in close touch. Stephen’s approach was meticulous: everything was carefully planned and plotted, and his excavations were a model of neatness. When I returned to my own sites, which seemed to spread across acres of eastern England in an organic, amoeba-like sprawl, I envied his neatness and precision. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that archaeology can have different styles and approaches. In that respect it’s like art or design: there’s more than one way to approach a site or a given research objective, and very often the one chosen will reflect the personality and academic outlook of the people, or person, concerned. Stephen has always been meticulous and precise, which is absolutely essential in his line of Palaeolithic research, and was ideally suited to the excavation of the Palaeolithic caves and rock shelters he became interested in when he moved to Wales.¹³

He has examined a number of Welsh caves, and has found evidence for the presence of Palaeolithic people in or near them; but so far there is no convincing evidence for large-scale occupation in the manner of, say, Boxgrove. Sadly, Stephen has found no classic Flintstone-style cave dwellings, complete with hearths, floors and surfaces where families actually lived their day-to-day domestic lives. One reason for this might have been that other, rather fiercer animals, such as bears and hyenas, chose the caves for themselves. They were mainly used in the short term, as lookout spots during hunting, or as overnight stopping-off points. Gnawing on prey bones and other telltale signs suggest that at least one site, Priory Farm Cave, above the Pembroke river, was a hyenas’ den; even so, it produced evidence (in the form of flint tools) for human beings, albeit from our next period, the Upper Palaeolithic. Stephen’s research at Pontnewydd and other Welsh caves has shown that the river gravels do not tell the entire story: that large areas of upland Britain could have been occupied during warmer phases of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic, but all the archaeological evidence has been removed – in effect planed off – by subsequent glaciers.

Neanderthal people would not have arrived here until about sixty thousand years ago, during the second half of the last glaciation; this probably reflects the fact that Britain lay close to the northern limit of their distribution. The trouble is that, with the rather strange exception of Pontnewydd Cave, there was until very recently indeed no clear evidence for Neanderthal bones in Britain. So Pontnewydd Cave is potentially very important. Its location is unusual too, as it is currently the most north-westerly Earlier Palaeolithic site in Europe. The European landscape would have been very different then to that of today. It was largely open and treeless, steppe-like, with enormous expanses of grassy plain that extended into Asia. In Britain, as elsewhere, people mainly hunted large mammals, such as mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bear, spotted hyena, wolf and wild horse. It’s no wonder that their own bones often carry signs of injury similar to what a modern rodeo rider might expect. It was a challenging diet.

I mentioned that there was no clear evidence for the presence of Neanderthal people in Britain until ‘very recently indeed’. The latest discovery was announced in June 2002, about two months after I had completed the first draft of this book. The site in question is in Thetford, Norfolk, and is one of those commercial excavations that have become such an important part of the modern archaeological scene.¹⁴ Initial reports suggest that the bones and tools from the Thetford quarry are about fifty thousand years old, and were found close to a group of ponds which were used as watering places by Neanderthal people and their animal prey, which consisted of mammoth (bones of three or four animals), woolly rhino (a tooth) and reindeer (antler). Along with the bones, and most probably associated with them (using the word in its strictly archaeological sense), were eight hand-axes and 129 pieces of worked flint. Subsequent excavations have revealed many more bones, flint implements and hand-axes, some of them in mint condition. There are also clear signs that much of the mammoth bone had been cut up with flint tools. Was this a Boxgrove-style butchery site, or perhaps, better still, a settlement of some sort? We don’t know at this stage, but David Miles, Geoff Wainwright’s successor as Chief Archaeologist at English Heritage, is wildly excited. It’s a dream of a site, even if it hasn’t (yet) produced human bones.