Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans. Francis Pryor
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