Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans. Francis Pryor
been penetrated by something which left a neat semi-circular wound,17 which Mark Roberts is convinced is evidence for the use of the sort of pointed wooden spears that have been found at Palaeolithic sites in Britain and Germany, but not at Boxgrove itself (where the conditions of preservation did not favour wood). However, a minimalist wouldn’t necessarily agree with this. To my eye that semi-circular wound seems fairly convincing, but minimalists would remind us that other interpretations are also possible. Certainly, it can’t be regarded as a piece of ‘smoking gun’ evidence; it’s pretty indicative, but no more than that.
So if they weren’t hunting (which I very much doubt), presumably they were simply scavenging animals that had died naturally, or had been killed by a carnivore further up the food chain. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be any need for them to plan ahead. And if you don’t need to plan ahead, you don’t require the sophistication of language that goes with it. Just pause for a moment and reflect on how much of one’s conversation, at breakfast, for example, is spent planning for the day to come: if I take the car to do this, then you have to do that until I return; but if you take the car, then I’m left stranded, unless etc., etc. If, on the other hand, we simply bumped along, taking life and food as we found it, then everything, language included, would be so much simpler. That, at least, is the minimalist position.
In my opinion, minimalist views such as this are important because they make us keep our feet on the ground. They prevent us from building academic castles in the air. Had there been a clear-eyed minimalist standing at their elbows, I doubt whether medieval scholars would have wasted their time arguing about the number of angels that could balance on a pinhead. Having said that, I also believe in common sense and informed debate enriched by practical experience. All of which is to say that the totality of the evidence from Boxgrove seems to suggest to me that the people who lived there half a million years ago did hunt their prey, which included animals as fearsome as the rhino. This must have taken teamwork, organisation and forethought, and with them some sort of language. Let’s examine further the direct evidence for forward planning.
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