Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans. Francis Pryor
Ian Hodder is extraordinarily dynamic, and produces books at the rate of one or two a year. Most tend to be very theoretical – indeed, Ian was one of the pioneers of ‘theoretical archaeology’, which gained a firm foothold during the latter 1960s and the seventies, and is now a permanent fixture.16 Ian and his followers steered archaeology away from what had previously been a practical, functional, quasi-scientific way of thinking. That was, they argued, a flawed approach, because it assumed that cultural behaviour could be predicted, and that it followed a series of rules or laws, none of which have yet been successfully defined. One example will suffice. Suppose we excavate a male burial in which we also find a gold-encrusted sword and jewelled spurs. The functional archaeologist would conclude that the person was a warrior prince, and that the society he came from was probably very hierarchical, with powerful warriors and humble, serf-like footsoldiers. Ian and others pointed out that that reading was altogether too simple. It ignored the fact that we often act in a symbolic way, which expresses what we want to believe rather than the reality which frames and colours the real world. Thus the aristocracy of England are traditionally buried without grave goods, symbolising the belief that all are equal in the eyes of God. A naive functionalist archaeologist might interpret English graves as indicating that British society was, and is, egalitarian – which is patently absurd, because it ignores the symbolism that objects and their contexts can express.
By drawing analogies with modern tribal societies, Ian Hodder was able to show that in times of social and economic tension the boundaries between different cultural groups became better defined and more closely guarded.17 A modern parallel would be the national boundaries of Europe in, say, 1935 compared with today. Before the war, to cross a border meant producing passports, submitting to a customs search, and so on; today, if you are driving, your shoe barely rises off the accelerator. And of course the world of modern European politics is very much more stable than it was in 1935. In archaeological terms, Hodder reasoned that cultures with clearly defined edges – for example, where one style of pottery stops sharply, and another starts with equal abruptness – were possibly co-existing in a state of tension. In times of peace, people would be less worried about maintaining their own identities at the expense of much else, and there would be more cross-border trade; as a result, boundaries would soon lose their clear definition.
This brings us, in a roundabout way, to the relationship between the cultures of Neanderthal and modern man – each of which was defined with stark clarity. It used to be thought that the two groups of humans co-existed in relative harmony, and that the demise of the Neanderthals was a result of external or internal forces – perhaps a failure to adapt to changing environmental conditions, combined with feuding between different groups in the face of declining resources. However, it looks increasingly probable that although the Neanderthals were excellent hunters of the biggest big game imaginable, they were no match for their two-legged foes in the form of Homo sapiens. As Paul Pettitt has written:
For too long we have regarded the extinction of the Neanderthals as a chance historical accident. Rather, where Neanderthals and modern humans could not co-exist, their disappearance may have been the result of the modern human race’s first and most successful deliberate campaign of genocide.18
When feeling depressed, I sometimes wonder whether the ability and instinct to carry out genocide isn’t one of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens. The ruthless use of force against the last real competitor we’ve ever had to face up to gave us the edge to survive in the Later Ice Age world. Without it, who knows – we may well have perished. Seen in the crudest Darwinian terms, it may have been legitimate thirty thousand years ago; but we still can’t shake the habit off.
This brings me to a question I am frequently asked. Did modern man and Neanderthals interbreed, or were they too busy fighting to have time for what one might consider to be more human pursuits? Had I been asked that question before 1999, my answer would have been a firm ‘no’, based on some substantial evidence. But it now appears that the picture is more complex.
The original bones from the Neander valley were scientifically dated to around forty thousand years ago. This made them relatively late, but within the known Neanderthal age-range. Then samples of DNA were extracted, and these showed that the original Neanderthal was by no means a close cousin of modern man. In fact the DNA from the bones, when compared with our own, showed a difference which the scientists considered represented a divergence of some half a million years. In other words, the two groups had a common ancestor who lived at the time of, say, Boxgrove. According to the DNA, there had been no genetic contact since then. This seemed to confirm the theory that the two groups had lived very separate lives, and did not interbreed.
But now we cannot be so certain. In June 1999 Paul Pettitt wrote another article for the popular journal British Archaeology, in which he gave the first details of a remarkable burial that had just been excavated at a rock shelter at Lagar Velho, in Portugal.19 The bones were from a boy who had been buried about twenty-four thousand years ago. In theory this was at least five to six thousand years after the last Neanderthal had settled in the Iberian peninsula. He had been buried with some ceremony: he wore a shell pendant or amulet around his neck, and the edges of the grave were marked out by stones and bones. Also in the grave were articulated bones of red deer and rabbit – presumably placed there as offerings. The grave contained a layer of red ochre, from dye which coloured either the boy’s clothes or his shroud. Red ochre burials are known from other sites of this period across Europe and into Russia, and I shall have more to say about one of them, from south Wales, shortly.
The real interest in the Lagar Velho boy lies in the anatomical form of his bones, which are clearly those of Homo sapiens, but also reveal a number of distinctively, and very strongly marked, Neanderthal features. Anatomically, there can be no doubt whatsoever: his ancestors had interbred with Neanderthals, and not just once, but regularly and over a long time. It would be impossible to account for so many Neanderthal features any other way. What are the wider implications of this discovery? Did the two groups of humans routinely interbreed everywhere? We don’t know, but probably not. Spain and Portugal may be a special case, as there does seem to have been a persistent ecological border zone (known as the Ebro Frontier) between the two groups along the northern edge of the Iberian peninsula.
It would seem that modern humans took their time to penetrate south of the Ebro Frontier, possibly because they were better adapted to the cooler conditions of the north. But whatever the root causes might have been, Neanderthals persisted for some time in Spain and Portugal, and it would appear that even though the end result for one group was extinction, for extended periods relations were more friendly than genocidal. The impression we get is what one might expect of human interactions at any time. In some areas the genocide was swift, efficient and ruthless; in others the two groups continued to live side by side for several millennia, and the ‘genocide’ may not have been deliberate, but more the sad consequence of an inevitable process. As groups of Neanderthals became more widely separated, mates would be harder to find, and the population would decline further. It was a process that in the end took some ten thousand years to complete.20
The evidence provided by a particular form of DNA, known as mitochondrial DNA (see Chapter 5), which is passed on via the female line, suggests strongly that Homo sapiens is not a direct descendant of Homo neanderthalensis.21 So how on earth does the Lagar Velho boy fit in with this? The leading authority, Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at Oxford University, has suggested that the Lagar Velho boy may be the human equivalent of a mule – a cross between two closely related, but different, species: horse and donkey. The mule is tough, strong and hardy, but sterile, because its parents do not share the same number of chromosomes (horses have sixty-four, donkeys sixty-two). We don’t know yet, because the Lagar Velho boy’s DNA has not been examined, but Bryan Sykes reckons that if he was indeed a cross between a modern human and a Neanderthal, then he might well have been sterile, like