Читать книгу Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans - Francis Pryor - Страница 9

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.

The Neanderthals were the great survivors of the Ice Age world, and they made a far wider variety of flint tools than are found in the Lower Palaeolithic. Some are most beautiful, and show an extraordinary degree of skill and control. To my eye they also show that Neanderthals could create and appreciate, if not art, then craft of the highest order. The principal archaeological ‘culture’ of Neanderthal man is known as the Mousterian, after a series of overhanging rock shelters at a place called Le Moustier, in south-western France. Before we go on, perhaps I should say a few words about what I mean by the term archaeological ‘culture’, and how it differs from what we are used to in our own, living culture.

An archaeological culture is essentially an attempt by archaeologists to define a culturally distinct group of people, using any evidence left to us by the passage of time.¹⁵ Inevitably this means that, for example, Palaeolithic cultures tend to be very much larger and more broadly defined than those of later prehistory, for the simple reason that Old Stone Age artefacts are few and widely dispersed. Clearly there are problems in this: could we, for example, distinguish archaeologically between the different cultures of, say, nineteenth-century Wales and western England? I doubt it, but we could probably discern broad differences between the rural populations of eastern and western Britain. The landscape was different, in particular field systems were different, and people used regionally distinctive styles of tools, ranging from ploughs to bill-hooks.

This is the fleeting image – the chimera – that we are trying to pin down when we define an archaeological culture from groups of similar finds, animal bones, house types and so on. Ideally there should be a hard core of items that consistently occur together, and there should not be too much blurring at the edges, because by and large true human cultures tend to stop and start, rather than merge. This reflects the fact that societies have internal workings – that marriage, for example, tends to be restricted within a given culture – and that people need to speak languages or dialects that they all understand. Religion also provides barriers that most people find very difficult to cross. As I write these words, the barriers being erected by the world’s religions seem to be growing daily. It’s depressing, but it brings me to another aspect of archaeological cultures and their behaviour.

Professor 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 the mule. This, of course, would help explain why Neanderthal genes appear to be absent from our own genetic make-up.

As I have already noted, although bona fide Neanderthal bones are so far lacking in Britain, their culture, the Mousterian, was certainly present, and their hand-axes have been found at a number of cave, rock-shelter and open sites, mainly in southern England, but also in East Anglia, south Wales and the midlands.²²

I want now to move forward to what one might term our own time – the world of the earliest truly modern man, known as Crô-Magnon man, after a rock shelter at Les Eyzies in southern France which produced particularly good collections of bones.²³ Crô-Magnons were not identical to us, and if I may return for one final time to that slightly strained Oxford Street analogy, they would not inspire sideways glances from even the most ill-mannered of passers-by. But they were different from us nonetheless, with slightly larger brains (maybe this reflected their larger body size), larger teeth and somewhat flatter faces. Physical anthropologists, such as Chris Stringer in his African Exodus, feel that the tall and relatively thin frames of early Homo sapiens betray the fact that they evolved in the warm, tropical climates of Africa, rather than in Europe.²⁴

One of the best-known examples of Crô-Magnon man in Britain is the so-called Red ‘Lady’ of Paviland Cave, on the Gower Peninsula of south-west Wales. I put the word ‘lady’ in quotes because ‘she’ was in fact a he. His story is altogether most unusual, and is well worth repeating. Like many archaeological tales it is caught up with contemporary intellectual and political controversies.

Dean William Buckland, the first excavator of the Red ‘Lady’ of Paviland, came across some of ‘her’ bones in 1823. He had been invited by the landowner to investigate the cave at a time when he was attempting to reconcile the field evidence of geology with the Biblical account of Creation and Noah’s Great Flood – surely a futile pursuit if ever there was one. But in many ways Buckland was a most able and remarkable man. He was the first Reader in Geology at Oxford, and was later appointed Dean of Westminster. Sadly, he took the clerical line, and backed the wrong horse when it came to the Great Flood. Nor was he by any means adept at creating snappy titles: his discovery of bones and other items at the Goat’s Hole Cave, Paviland, was published in 1823 as Reliquiae Diluvianae: or Observations on the Organic Remains contained in Caves, Fissures, and Diluvial Gravel and on other Geological Phenomena attesting the action of an Universal Deluge.²⁵ He considered that the Red ‘Lady’ was Roman, and that the bones of extinct animals found around ‘her’ dated to a time before the Great Flood. One could say he got it as wrong as it was possible to get it.

It is of course only too easy to take the work of men like Buckland out of the context of their times. True, he failed to find a link of any sort between the lowland river gravels of Britain – patently water-derived deposits – and the Biblical Flood; and he allowed his powers of reason to be overruled by his emotional acceptance of a theological doctrine which was never meant to be taken literally, even when first written. But the fact remains that he did go into the field to find empirical evidence to support his views, at a time when most clerics would never have left their libraries. He also took the work of science seriously; and although he certainly didn’t intend it, by doing what he did and by promptly publishing his results, he ultimately helped release geology from the grip of the Church. And he did discover a most remarkable burial, complete with loosely associated Palaeolithic flint implements.

What is the modern view of the Red ‘Lady’ and the archaeological deposits from the Goat’s Hole Cave? Stephen Aldhouse-Green has just edited what he himself has entitled A Definitive Report, and I’m confident it will survive the test of time rather better than Dean Buckland’s Reliquiae Diluvianae.²⁶ (There are also some shorter, and perhaps more accessible, accounts widely available.²⁷)

Buckland’s report concluded that the body was that of a Roman scarlet woman, or ‘painted lady’, whose business was to look after the carnal needs of Roman soldiers from a camp nearby – which we now know is Iron Age anyway. All round, it was an excellent story for a man of the cloth to concoct. But the truth was more remarkable than fiction. In the words of Stephen Aldhouse-Green, ‘When the “Red Lady” skeleton was found, it was the first human fossil recovered anywhere in the world.’²⁸ The burial of the body recalls that of the Lagar Velho boy. The Paviland body was that of a young Crô-Magnon man aged twenty-five to thirty, about five feet eight inches (1.74 metres) tall, and probably weighing about eleven stone (seventy-three kilos). His build and weight were somewhat smaller than the average for such early Homo sapiens, and radiocarbon dates have shown he was alive around twenty-six thousand years ago – again, pretty well contemporary with Lagar Velho.

The molecular biologist Brian Sykes, writing in the definitive report, describes how DNA extracted from the bones can be related to the commonest ancestry extant in Europe. This strongly suggests that the current population of Britain arrived in these islands in the Palaeolithic, and did not spread here seven thousand years ago with the arrival of Neolithic farmers from farther afield. As we will see later, it was most likely the concept of farming that reached us, rather than a wholesale migration of farmers.

I’ll describe the details of the Red ‘Lady’s’ burial in a moment, but first I must say a few words about radiocarbon dating, which will become a regular feature of our story from now onwards.

Radiocarbon dating was invented by Willard F. Libby, a chemist at Chicago University, in 1949.²⁹ The idea behind the technique is straightforward enough. Libby was researching into cosmic radiation – the process whereby the earth’s outer atmosphere is constantly bombarded by sub-atomic particles. This process produces radioactive carbon, known as carbon-14. Carbon-14 is unstable and is constantly breaking down, but at a known and uniform rate: a gram of carbon-14 will be half broken down after 5730 years, three-quarters broken down in twice that time (11,460 years), and so on. Libby’s breakthrough was to link this process to living things, and thence to time itself.

Carbon-14 is present in the earth’s atmosphere – in the air we all breathe – in the form of the gas carbon dioxide. Plants take in the gas through their leaves, and plant-eating animals eat the leaves – and carnivores, in turn, eat them. So all plants and animals absorb carbon-14 while they are alive. As soon as they die, they immediately stop taking it in, and the carbon-14 that has accumulated in their bodies – in their bones, their wood or whatever – starts to break down through the normal processes of radioactive decay. So by measuring the amounts of carbon-14 in a bone, or piece of charcoal, fragment of cloth or peat, it is possible to estimate its age.

But there are problems. First of all, cosmic radiation has not been at a uniform rate, as Libby at first believed. Sunspots and solar flares are known to cause sudden upsurges of radiation. Nuclear testing has also filled the atmosphere with unwanted and unquantifiable radiation. If these problems weren’t enough, the quantities of radiation being measured in the radiocarbon laboratories around the world are truly minute, especially in older samples, such as those from Paviland Cave. Efforts have been made to quantify the way in which radiocarbon dates deviate from true dates, using ancient wood samples that can be precisely dated to a given year AD or BC. This process is known as calibration, and is now widely accepted in archaeology (I’ve tried consistently to use calibrated radiocarbon dates in this book). All this uncertainty means that radiocarbon dates are usually expressed in the form of a range of years – say 1700 to 2000 BC, rather than a single central spot-date of 1850 BC.

A by-product of radiocarbon dating are the figures known as the ‘stable isotope values’ of carbon and nitrogen. These provide very useful information on the general nature of an individual’s diet when the bone was being formed. It would appear that fish and seafood formed a major part of the Red ‘Lady’s’ diet. Today the sea is close by Goat’s Hole Cave, but in the Upper Palaeolithic it was about a hundred kilometres away. Of course, fish could have been caught in rivers closer by, but such a very ‘fishy’ diet surely suggests regular access to the sea – and with it a way of life that must have involved a great deal of travel. The contrast with Boxgrove, which was closer to the sea, but where there was no evidence for fish-eating, is remarkable; but then, so too is the huge time-span (roughly 480,000 years) that separates these two Palaeolithic sites – it’s easy to forget that the Palaeolithic takes up about 98 per cent of British prehistory.

There are remarkable aspects to the Paviland burial which illustrate some of the far-reaching changes that were in the process of transforming humanity. That may sound grandiloquent, but the Upper Palaeolithic was the first period in which many of the defining characteristics of modern civilisation become apparent. Put another way, without the social and intellectual developments of the period, what was subsequently to be known as civilisation would have been impossible. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the achievements made by the people of the Upper Palaeolithic period. We may not always be aware of it, but we owe them an enormous amount.

There is far more to Paviland than just the famous burial. The cave floor also produced numerous flint implements and the by-products of their manufacture, together with charcoal and ash, all of which were found in contexts that must predate the burial. Radiocarbon dates suggest that this earlier occupation preceded the Red ‘Lady’ by three thousand years (i.e. about twenty-nine thousand years ago), and there is evidence that the cave was intermittently occupied both before and after that date, as well as after the Red ‘Lady’ burial. This extended use would indicate that the Goat’s Hole Cave was well known to people at the time.

The Red ‘Lady’ burial was accompanied by a mammoth ivory bracelet and a perforated periwinkle pendant, numerous seashells and some fifty broken ivory rods. Marker stones were placed at the head and foot of the grave. The staining, which most people regard as being derived from heavily stained clothes or wrapping, still colours the two ornaments and the bones, but there is a colour difference between the bones of the arms and chest and the hips and legs – which perhaps suggests that the young man was buried in a two-piece garment of some sort. The feet were only lightly stained, which would indicate that he wore shoes. The ochre, a natural product, was obtained locally. The body was headless, and it’s quite possible that it was deliberately buried in this way – other headless burials are known from this period – but the removal of the head could also have taken place later: perhaps it was carried away by the sea, which is known to have broken into the cave. The archaeological term for disturbance of this sort, which takes place after a deposit, such as a burial, has been placed in the ground, is ‘post-depositional’. It can sometimes take a great deal of skill to distinguish between an action that took place when a body was placed in the ground and a subsequent, post-depositional, effect. It’s something I always have in the back of my mind when I’m excavating.

Paviland Cave also revealed three remarkable bone spatulae. They are small things, roughly six inches (fifteen centimetres) long, and are beautifully shaped, with unusual curves and bulges that don’t seem to make immediate practical sense. As well as the spatulae, there were a number of worked pieces of mammoth ivory, including a well-known perforated pendant that was thought to have formed part of the burial assemblage. Radiocarbon now shows that these objects were slightly later than the Red ‘Lady’ burial, and indicates that the cave was repeatedly used between about twenty-five and twenty-one thousand years ago.

To sum up, there was a main phase of settlement in the cave around twenty-nine thousand years ago, with intermittent occupation both before and after. Then came the burial, at twenty-six thousand, and later use of the cave between twenty-five and twenty-one thousand years ago. It’s no wonder that Paviland Cave is the richest Upper Palaeolithic site in Britain – but does this pattern of use and reuse tell us anything more about the site? I believe that the Goat’s Hole Cave was a special place of some sort. If archaeologists have a fault it is to describe everything they find as special, unusual or remarkable. That’s because it is to them personally, who have spent weeks, months or years slaving away at whatever it might be. But is it to the world in general? In the case of Paviland it most certainly is, for the following reasons.

Paviland Cave lies at the extreme northern edge of the Early Upper Palaeolithic world, and it was used remarkably late in the sequence, when the climate was getting very chilly. Those unique bone spatulae and the episode of mammoth-ivory working happened at a time when the climate was rapidly deteriorating and evidence for settlement elsewhere in Britain was virtually unknown. If we also bear in mind that nearly all well-preserved occupied cave sites have extensive living areas outside the cave itself, and that those at Paviland have been removed by the postglacial rise in sea levels, then the use of the cave so far into the developing glaciation, or mini-Ice Age, is truly remarkable – and demands explanation.

Let’s look at the artefacts before turning to the burial itself, and first at those strange, red-stained mammoth-ivory rods discovered by Dean Buckland.³⁰ They don’t appear to have any practical purpose, other perhaps than as blanks for ivory beads, but as there’s no indication that any had been notched or cut up prior to being more closely worked, that idea can probably be rejected. That leaves us with the archaeologist’s catch-all explanation for anything he can’t understand: ‘ritual’, or religion, to use a non-jargon term. If we do decide to invoke religion as an explanation, we shouldn’t do so on negative grounds alone; it always helps if we can provide some positive evidence that supports the suggestion. And in the case of these peculiar ivory rods there is a positive suggestion, but it comes from an unexpected source.

In 1981 the anthropologist J.D. Lewis-Williams published a detailed study of the rock paintings of a southern African people known as the San.³¹ Like the communities of the Upper Palaeolithic, the San were hunters. Their realm was the Kalahari desert, and they lived in small, mobile groups of a few dozen people. Their houses were light and temporary, as befits a highly mobile lifestyle, and their religion was based around shamans and rock art. The San used ochre-painted rods, very similar to those from Paviland, in their religious ceremonies. This could just be coincidence, but the close similarity of the way that the two sets of people were organised and lived their lives does give it greater weight. The red colour of the ochre plainly recalls blood, and with it the symbolic expression of animal or human life-force. It goes without saying that the sight (and meaning) of blood was an everyday occurrence to a hunting people.

As for those three oddly-shaped, but beautifully made, bone spatulae, they’re unique in Britain, and probably in western Europe. The closest parallels for them are in Moravia, or the plains of Russia, where they occur in context dates of twenty-four to twenty thousand ago – precisely contemporary with the later use of Paviland Cave. So what are they? They may have been used to perform a useful purpose of some sort, but then the same can be said, for example, of the Christian paten and chalice – the platter and goblet used in the Eucharist. The workmanship employed on the spatulae is wholly exceptional, and if we compare them with similar items from contemporary sites on the Russian plain it’s possible to see links, for example, with highly stylised images of the female form.³² While not necessarily objects of veneration in their own right, these decorated spatulae could have been closely involved in religious ceremonies. It’s certainly very odd that three were found together. This would suggest deliberate disposal, or laying to rest after use, rather than casual loss in the normal course of daily life. As we will discover shortly, by this late time in the Paviland sequence we are drawing ever closer to the last great glacial maximum of eighteen thousand years ago, when conditions outside the cave were becoming extremely cold. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that some fairly strong incentive must have been required to tempt people so far north. As Professor Richard Bradley and others have shown,³³ certain places, and the stories attached to them, had extraordinary pulling power for people in the past – and of course in the present too: Lourdes springs immediately to mind.

I find in my own work in the East Anglian fens that the shape and form of the modern landscape can often mask patterns and landforms that would have been obvious in prehistory. In the fens this has been caused by the wholesale drainage of the past three centuries, which has lowered the land surface and shrunk peats, so that areas that were once high are now low, and vice versa. Something similar applies at Paviland Cave, which today sits just above the high-tide mark. In the Upper Palaeolithic the sea level was massively lower than it is today, when the waters of the Bristol Channel have inundated a broad coastal plain. But at low tide it’s still possible to stand on the floor of the drowned coastal plain and look up towards Goat’s Hole Cave, just as people would have done twenty-six thousand years ago. It’s a very striking and affecting sight; but more important than that, it’s a setting that accords well with the situation of comparable important places in the religious and mythological lives of people with shamanistic religions – people like the San.³⁴

There’s always a danger of delving into ethnographic and anthropological literature and doing a Little Jack Horner: inserting a thumb to select a plum, whilst ignoring less palatable fruit that doesn’t happen to fit with our ideas. This was the fatal flaw of many late-Victorian writers, who would assiduously comb through a vast range of anthropological writing, classical authors and travellers’ tales, selecting plums to bolster a particular theoretical view of the world. Sir James Frazer, one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology, was guilty of this academic sin,³⁵ and today very similar things are done at the weirder extreme of so-called ‘alternative’ archaeology (the realm of ley lines, Atlantis, aliens, UFOs, etc.). If you pull a huge array of plums out of their original contexts it becomes easy to draw far-fetched conclusions, particularly with regard to things as imprecise as simple landscape features like lines of posts, or stones or pebbles. So the great ceremonial straight ‘roads’ on the high plains of southern Peru could be compared, for example, with Neolithic cursus monuments in lowland Europe (I shall have more to say about these later). It seems not to matter that each is taken out of context to ‘prove’ that ancient people were in regular contact over immense distances, or came from the same alien or extra-terrestrial source. To return to the earlier analogy, plums are being pulled out of two quite separate pies, whereas it’s the pies themselves that ought to be looked at.

To return to those ivory rods, it’s reasonable to seek illustrative parallels from a culture that is comparable in other respects to that at Paviland, but one should also be on the alert for other uses of rods in that culture – perhaps to support a temporary roof, or whatever.³⁶ More to the point, one should beware of drawing parallels that are too specific – and the use of ochre-stained rods within a ritual might well be such a case. Only time will tell. On the whole, it’s safer and ultimately wiser to seek broader parallels that might help explain why and how people chose to do different things. A good, and very relevant, example are the criteria that lie behind the selection of special places by recent societies that practised shamanistic religion. That might help explain why Goat’s Hole Cave was selected for special treatment. This takes us back to the low-tide mark at Paviland.

Viewed from here, Goat’s Hole Cave ‘appears as a south-facing cave clearly visible from some distance and set into the high cliffs of a promontory defined, on either side, by slades or valleys’.³⁷ It’s a very striking landmark, and there are anthropological accounts of shamanistic mythological beliefs that link caves in such striking positions with, for example, the creator of mountains, or the spirits of mountains. In one wonderful Siberian account, caves are seen as the holes left by the great mammoth who created the mountains; caves in mountain or hillsides are particularly interesting because they can be seen as a stage or resting place on a mythical ladder between Heaven, earth and the Netherworld. Shamans would have performed the ceremonial tasks of climbing and solemnising the various stages of this symbolic ladder.³⁸ Given this context, the Red ‘Lady’ burial can be seen to fit into an established sequence of possibly regular visits to a very special place.

Clive Gamble has already been mentioned as a prehistorian with an extraordinary ability to stand back from the detail of a subject and see things from an unusual or unexpected angle. Writing about the social context of Upper Palaeolithic art, he pointed out that societies may have been organised in small groups, but this did not mean that their concerns were entirely parochial. Far from it. In a paper written in 1991 he provided convincing evidence that people at this time were in communication over extraordinarily long distances.³⁹ Those three bone spatulae, with their close parallels on the plains of Russia, surely reinforce his theory. The physical expression of this communication would have been in the form of ceremonial exchange of important objects, such as the spatulae. These ceremonies would have served to reinforce social ranking within the various societies that took part. I would imagine that the spatulae were given to an important person, most probably a senior shaman. It’s worth noting that such long-distance communication would have been very much more difficult had Britain not been physically united with mainland Europe.

Earlier I said that the Upper Palaeolithic was the period in which many of the defining characteristics of modern civilisation first become apparent. In his 1991 paper Clive Gamble showed how art in the Upper Palaeolithic was far more than just a matter of beauty, whether of carved objects or painted cave walls. This, of course, was the period of the famous cave paintings at places like Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain.⁴⁰ Sadly, in Britain we still lack such extraordinary finds, but we do know from smaller, portable carved objects (such as those spatulae) that people here used, appreciated and made art. What did art and its appearance in the Upper Palaeolithic signify? To quote from Clive’s paper:

Art for me is…a system of communication and includes a wide range of mediums and messages. As an act of social communication it is defined by style which…has its behavioural basis in a fundamental human cognitive process: personal and social identification through comparison. Consequently [art] style is not just a means of transmitting information about identity but is an active tool in building social strategies.⁴¹

This is very important, because it dismisses commonly heard simplistic views such as, for example, that cave art was merely something done to give good luck in the hunt – the equivalent of tossing a coin in the fountain. That’s rather like saying that Michelangelo’s masterpiece was painted simply to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – classy, hand-painted wallpaper. In part it was, but it was also a great deal more than that: among many other things it was a profound restatement of the aspirations that lay behind the later Renaissance – and that’s just scratching the intellectual surface.

What we’re witnessing in the Upper Palaeolithic is very complex, but it probably includes the elaboration, if not the development, of languages that were sufficiently sophisticated to express the ideas and symbolism lying behind the art, because an image devoid of any written or spoken textual reference is hard to comprehend. This is particularly true if the image is being introduced to people who are not familiar with the culture or part of society in question. As a European, for example, I can admire the execution of Japanese art, but I find much of its meaning and the philosophy behind it incomprehensible. In such circumstances explanation is essential. Recently the newspapers carried a story of how an installation by Damien Hirst was collected up and thrown away, along with the rubbish, by the gallery’s cleaners on the morning after the opening party. It consisted of empty Coca-Cola cans and other debris and, according to the newspaper I read, had a market value of £40,000. The artist, to his credit, thought it all very amusing. The point is that the textual reference, whether written or explicit, was missed by the cleaners. The art had lost its context, and with it its meaning and distinctiveness. Whichever way one looks at it, there had been a failure in communication. So into the bin it went.

The Red ‘Lady’ of Paviland belonged to the first or earlier part of the Upper Palaeolithic, which is separated from the later part by the last (and hopefully final) great glacial cold period, which began around twenty-five thousand years ago. During its coldest phase, about eighteen thousand years ago, large areas of northern Europe (including what was later to become Britain) were uninhabited. About thirteen thousand years ago, occupation of the areas abandoned to ice and freezing-cold tundra was resumed.