A History of Ancient Britain by Neil Oliver Read Free Book Online

Boxgrove. Along with gravel, people regularly found distinctive flint toolscalled handaxes
there, and it was these that first attracted archaeologists and palaeontologists to the area.
    For those who study the ancient past, the ‘handaxe’ is a talisman, the word itself almost a shibboleth. In some form they have been part of the human toolkit from the very beginning.
Handaxes developed from the crude (but effective) pebble tools used by the earliest humans for butchering meat millions of years ago on the African plains. Knock a couple of hand-sized pebbles
together and soon flakes will be removed from one of them, leaving a useful sharp edge. But by at least a million years ago this primitive technique had evolved to produce the heart-stoppingly
beautiful, teardrop-shaped tools that have been humankind’s calling card all over the Old World. With a point at one end, a cutting edge down each of the two long sides and a heavy butt for
crushing and hammering they became, according to Stringer, the Swiss Army Knives of the Palaeolithic.
    Unless and until you have actually held a Palaeolithic handaxe, it is impossible to understand why they exert such power. They were made not by us, but by our distant relations, members of
wholly separate species like Homo heidelbergensis and Homo neanderthalensis , yet they fit into our hands as though made with us in mind. It is a unique sensation to pick up one of
those beautiful bi-faced stones with one hand and fit it into the palm of the other. Almost as a reflex the fingers fold around the butt, the fingertips coming naturally to rest on a barely
discernible, yet deliberately crafted asymmetric ridge that makes the holding that little bit more comfortable.
    Just as the fingers of an old man’s hands at rest still curl inwards in memory of the time they spent balled into fists inside his mother’s womb, so our hands receive handaxes from
half a million years ago as though those tools were made to fill the space left empty by all the years.
    Hold up your good hand and turn the palm towards your face. Relax your fingers, watch them curl towards your palm and see how your fingertips form a set of four steps rising upwards from little
finger to index: that is how they would sit along the asymmetric ridge of a handaxe. Now turn your hand until your thumb is towards your face. Look at the empty space between your fingertips and
your palm. That is the space waiting to be filled by the butt of a Palaeolithic handaxe. (People used to make things that fit.)
    As well as many, many handaxes, what the scientists eventually found at Boxgrove, sealed beneath many feet of sand and fine silt, was a glimpse of a truly ancient Britain. The old land surface
was so astonishingly wellpreserved it was possible to find the very spots where people had knelt down to make their handaxes. All the waste flakes created during the
crafting of single tools, removed by expert hands during bursts of activity lasting perhaps just 10 or 20 minutes, are found lying precisely where they fell. Framed by the outline of the
flint-knappers’ legs and knees, they can be reassembled to reveal the shape of the original flint nodule – and when plaster is poured into the void it makes an exact replica of the
handaxe that was the point of the exercise in the first place.
    Also sealed beneath the silt are the remains of the animals those handaxes were made to butcher. Bones of bison, giant deer, horse, red deer and rhinoceros have all been recovered, many bearing
the marks made as they were cut up; others have been gnawed by scavengers like hyena and wolf. All of this was fascinating enough but then, in 1993, a very special bone indeed was brought to light
at Boxgrove. It was this that put the quarry firmly on the map of the human story. Together with fellow palaeontologist Simon Parfitt, Stringer identified it as part of a human shinbone from an
ancestor belonging to the species Homo heidelbergensis . It is half