A History of Ancient Britain (7 page)

Swanscombe Woman shared her part of the land that would become Britain with a whole array of animal species including deer of various kinds, wild boar, bison and horse. She would also have been
familiar with the sight of elephants, lions, monkeys and rhinoceroses. Her Britain was as outlandish and unfamiliar to us as her face.

The Neanderthals who buried their dead in Shanidar Cave were alive around 60,000 years ago, endless millennia after their counterparts in Kent. The Swanscombe bones are so much older they can be
assigned to a time when
Homo neanderthalensis
was still evolving, still becoming the new species of human that would populate Asia and Europe for hundreds of thousands of years before the
arrival of modern people. But clearly the
Neanderthals became a success story in their own right. Though the popular image has them clad in ragged animal skins and scraping
an existence in the shadow of creatures like woolly mammoths, in an ice- and snow-bound world, their remains have also been found in the context of much warmer climates, in Europe and in Asia. To
some extent they were as adaptable as us – though perhaps not quite so good at moving between climatic and environmental extremes.

In Britain the warm interglacial known by Swanscombe Woman is referred to as the Hoxnian, after the discovery of handaxes and ancient animal bones at Hoxne, in Suffolk, in the late eighteenth
century. No human remains were found but the similarity of the tools, and the bones of animals that were presumably butchered with them, makes it clear both sites were occupied by the same kind of
people, living the same way. There are plenty of other sites too, from the same period around 400,000 years ago, suggesting that the British climate then, and the animals that thrived in it,
provided good living for successive generations of Neanderthals. But for palaeontologists like Chris Stringer, the frustration lies in what apparently happened next.

After thousands of years of warmth, the cold returned again to the land – extreme cold. The Neanderthals, like the
Homo heidelbergensis
people of Boxgrove before them, were driven
off, out of Britain. Given the severity of conditions during an Ice Age this is not in itself a surprise; the frustrating mystery is that, having been deserted at the end of the Hoxnian
interglacial, Britain apparently remained devoid of human life for the next 300,000 years and more. At the very least, no physical evidence to the contrary has yet been found.

When Neanderthal remains are found again in Britain, they date from no more than 50–60,000 years ago. Often ephemeral, they testify to people living in a tougher world, a Britain cold
enough to suit beasts like the woolly mammoth. Long before Paviland became a last resting place for a modern man 33,000 years ago, the cave appears to have provided shelter for Neanderthals. At
some later point both species shared Europe, and presumably Britain as well.

Rather than
Homo sapiens
, the very earliest modern humans are known to archaeologists and palaeontologists as
Cro-Magnon Man
. Named after the remains of five individuals found in
1868 in a rock shelter in the French Dordogne called ‘Abri de Cro-Magnon’, they are like us in every way that matters – fully modern. But like the first edition of a book, or the
first
marque of a new model of car, there is something a little bit special and more desirable about these oldest of us. They should perhaps be considered our elders . . .
and the best of us.

Cro-Magnons were a little taller than us, longer-limbed and slightly more robust – the sort of people who, were a few of them to walk into a twenty-first-century gathering, would turn
every head in the room and make even the alpha-males lower their eyes in deference. It was Cro-Magnons who shared the world with Neanderthals for a time and saw the last of them die.

What they made of one another, those unlikely bedfellows, can only be guessed at. But while the Neanderthals themselves have most certainly gone, something remains that has unsettled us ever
since. In his novel
Dance of the Tiger
the Finnish palaeontologist Björn Kurtén imagined Neanderthals as the inspiration for the trolls that populate Scandinavian myth and
folklore: so that a people who lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years are relegated to the role of monsters, alive only in children’s stories where they terrorise billy goats
– before being bested even by them in the end.

Kurtén might be at least partly right. The Neanderthals must have been remembered by generations of Cro-Magnons, and later in the folklore of
Homo sapiens
, long after the last of
them was gone. But surely they went into the lore of the tribe as something more enigmatic and meaningful than just dull-eyed oafs?

It seems to me the memory goes deeper than tales of trolls. The Old World’s ultimate creation myth after all has, in some of its earliest pages, profound stories of the young dispossessing
the old, stories of betrayal of rightful heirs by younger kin – stories, in effect, of one people displacing another. Something happened in the past – something that left the modern
human race with a guilty conscience, troubled by an ancient wrong; and it has never been forgotten, or forgiven.

James Hutton, Louis Agassiz, William Buckland – like scores of otherwise enlightened thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – were weighed down by the immovable object
of The Bible. Away from the rarefied atmosphere populated by radical thinkers, the vast majority of Britons (and Europeans besides) held that all a person needed to know about the world was
contained within the pages of one good book.

The world knows better now of course and has replaced religious dogma with science. But it bears remembering that Bible stories are still part of
what has been remembered
and their contents should not be dismissed out of hand. The creation myth contained in the Book of Genesis is likely much older than the unknown hand or hands that first wrote it down. Long before
the invention of writing, the story must have been passed generation to generation by word of mouth. Something of it, some fragment at least, must really have happened; some echo of real events and
real people must have inspired it.

In Genesis, Chapter 25, Rebekah, the wife of Isaac, falls pregnant with twins. God tells her she has in her womb: ‘two manner of people . . . and the one people shall be stronger than the
other people; and the elder shall serve the younger’.

The first to be born, the rightful heir, is called Esau. His body is covered with red hair and even as he is being lifted up from the bloodied sheets his younger brother’s hand reaches out
from within their mother to grab hold of the elder’s heel. This is Jacob, hairless and grasping, and smooth in every sense of the word.

‘And the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment . . . ’. Is this a memory of the people who came before, known to us as Neanderthals, many of whom according to the DNA
evidence were red-haired? While Neanderthals, perhaps red and hairy, lived in caves like Shanidar, were there smooth-skinned Cro-Magnons living nearby in tents and similar shelters, watching the
decline of their neighbours like the later acts in a long-running story, and failing to intervene.

As Esau and Jacob grow to manhood, they are clearly different. Hairless Jacob is ‘a plain man, dwelling in tents,’ while his brother Esau is ‘a cunning hunter, a man of the
field’. In the end, the more sophisticated, more modern Jacob uses guile and treachery to trick his elder brother out of what is rightfully his – their father’s blessing and
worldly goods.

Is this simple tale, of one modern-living man dispossessing the wild hunter, a memory of ancient times when Cro-Magnons and the rest of more recent humankind displaced the older Neanderthals,
robbing them of their entitlement to the world? Is the truth of it all even there in the background of daily life today, drifting ghost-like in the things we know, and think, and say . . . even
laugh about: ‘Ginger people! D’you know what they are?’ asks Al Murray’s Pub Landlord. ‘Our aborigines . . . that’s what! GINGERIGINES! Look at ’em . . .
they were ’ere first. All this is theirs!’

Eenie, meenie, miney, mo . . . vestigial remnant of a counting system – one, two, three four – in a lost language that predates every ‘British’ tongue
known to linguists. It survives because of memory – trapped like a bug in amber. The Pub Landlord’s rant might also retain a germ of truth.

The hitherto unsuspected years, revealed by Hutton and others during the Scottish Enlightenment, are gradually being populated in Britain by examples of Earth’s many and varied experiments
with mankind. Some left their tools behind at Pakefield in Suffolk and at Happisburgh in Norfolk, at least 700,000 years ago. More of the same spent some of their years at Boxgrove in West Sussex
200,000 years later, and at least one of their number stayed behind for good. Neanderthals came and went and came again, subject always to the whim of the ice. Much more recently the Cro-Magnons
joined them here and in the rest of Europe. It is reasonable as well to imagine the younger incomers learning much about surviving the increasingly cold environment by watching and mixing with
their older relations. If that happened then the Cro-Magnons assumed the wisdom of the Neanderthals along with everything else.

Some have speculated that there might have been inter-breeding of the two species but that has always seemed unlikely to me, given the manifest physical differences. Would the one really have
found enough attractive in the other? Even if there were young born to mixed couples, it is just as likely the genetic differences between the species would have doomed those children to sterility
– in the same way that mules are born the infertile offspring of mating between horses and donkeys.

If the ultimate extinction of the Neanderthals invoked guilt in the minds of the Cro-Magnons, it was wiped away at first by the coming of yet another Ice Age. This incursion into Britain by the
glaciers of the Devensian – two-thirds of a mile deep at the height of it all, 20,000-odd years ago – is the event that separates us from all of that past. It was the world of the Red
Laddie of Paviland that ended with its onset – a climate change so cataclysmic it makes our modern fears about the consequences of global warming seem, by comparison, like hysteria brought on
by the prospect of light showers in the afternoon.

It was not just Britain that was affected of course. All across northern Europe the story was more or less the same. The whole planet was colder, in fact, but in the north the effects were
particularly brutal. Hardy though those bands of nomadic hunters were – men and women like the Red Laddie and his family – the depths to which the climate plummeted were too great to be
endured. Britain was nothing but a frozen wilderness crushed beneath the glaciers, and by the time the Ice Age reached its peak 21,000
years ago humankind was effectively
evicted from much of the continent. Pockets of population survived, in the south of France and Spain and perhaps further east in the area occupied today by the Mediterranean. For the most part,
though, even the best-equipped creatures – like the woolly mammoth – were unable to cope and fled in the face of the ice.

For thousands of years it was the same – a winter so long it would have made the Ice Queen’s hold on Narnia look like nothing more than a few bad days.

It was not until around 16,000 years ago that conditions eased a little, and Britain and the rest of northern Europe entered a period of relative respite – and in this context the word
‘relative’ is important. Conditions in Britain were still unspeakably cold by our standards but the ice did retreat to the extent that a few groups of hunters were able to contemplate a
return to this most northerly peninsula of western Europe. Word must have reached those surviving hunting communities in their boltholes in the south and gradually, like the light of dawn creeping
tentatively into the dark, humankind ventured onto our land once more.

From 14,000 or so years ago people were living all across southern Britain – in and around caves in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, in the Creswell Crags area near Sheffield in south Yorkshire,
at Kent’s Cavern in Devon as well as at just less than 30 other known locations, all of them in England. The tools and other evidence they left behind have been grouped together into the
‘Creswellian Culture’ and it has much in common with the lifestyle of folk of similar vintage living in southern Europe around the same time and even considerably earlier. On the other
side of the English Channel similar material is described as ‘Magdalenian’ – after finds in La Madeleine rock-shelter in the Dordogne.

After the mighty handaxes of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic, some of the Creswellian toolkit can appear fairly uninspiring at first glance. The modest little blades and points of flint
knocked off a prepared ‘core’ are regarded by archaeologists, however, as a mark of sophistication, and of technological advance. While a handaxe was a single tool used for many jobs,
by the Creswellian period of the Upper Palaeolithic craftsmen were making specialised equipment for specific tasks. They were also making exquisite harpoon points from mammoth ivory and needles and
awls from the bones and teeth of other animals. Marine amber from the coast of the North Sea and even further afield was also being collected, by a people used to ranging over vast territories in
search of raw materials. The amber was
made into beads for jewellery, things that show these people had the time and the inclination to make decorative items just for the joy
of it. There are also sometimes so-called ‘batons’ of carefully worked reindeer antler which, while they may have had some practical function, seem just as likely to have been carried
purely as status symbols.

Back where they had presumably come from, in south-west France perhaps, or southern Spain, some of the people had been in the habit of expressing themselves in breathtaking art. In hundreds of
caves – most famously at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain – artists conjured entire herds of bulls and horses; woolly mammoths and rhinos and the rest of the animals that shared
their world, with palettes of colour prepared from natural pigments.