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

a million years old.
    Continuing excavation nearby unearthed two human teeth and now the remains are stored together in the Natural History Museum in London. Although there are limits to how much can be deduced from
part of a shin and two teeth, they still reveal a remarkable amount about their owner, or indeed owners. Stringer explained that Boxgrove Man stood around five feet 11 inches tall and weighed in
the region of 14 stone. It is a massively constructed bone (the scale of it led to the assumption it was part of a man’s rather than a woman’s leg) suggestive of someone used to a hard
and physically demanding lifestyle. Examination of the teeth found the surfaces heavily scored and scratched and it is thought the marks were made by a sharp-edged flint tool used to hack away at
meat held between clamped jaws.
    Regardless of what the bone and the teeth reveal about Boxgrove Man’s lifestyle, they are profoundly moving simply because of what and who they are. Given their value to science, I
was not allowed to lay so much as a finger on them. The closest I got was holding one faintly shaky hand an inch or so above the bone, but that was enough. Those remains are half a million years
old . . . half a million years. That is the kind of timeframe I have in mind when I think about mountains forming, or great rivers cutting chasms through solid rock. And yet in the Natural History
MuseumI held my hand over the few remains of a man who lived 5,000 centuries ago in an unimaginably alien Britain, the same and not the same – one that was home to
lions, hyenas and rhinoceroses.
    Stringer’s AHOB project has found stone tools of even older vintage at Pakefield in Suffolk, and at Happisburgh in Norfolk. At both sites the geological evidence, together with animal
remains found in association with the tools, suggests occupation by some kind of human at least as long ago as 700,000 years. The search for the beginning of the human story in Britain keeps
burrowing deeper and deeper.
    BoxgroveMan lived during the period known as the Lower Palaeolithic, the earliest part of the Old Stone Age. While it might be natural to assume that, having reached the territory of Britain,
humans of one kind or another stayed put here, in fact the truth is quite different – and altogether stranger. Boxgrove Britain was wiped away, like chalk dust from a blackboard, by the Ice
Age known to geologists as the Anglian. For 100,000 years or more, while the glaciers ground out yet more trillions of tons of rock from the landscape, gouging valleys here, lowering mountains
there, life here was utterly absent. And by the time humans returned they were not Homo heidelbergensis any more, as Boxgrove Man had been, but his younger relative Homo
neanderthalensis .
    Those step-brothers and -sisters of ours are perhaps the most fascinating and enigmatic of all the skeletons in modern man’s closet. Despite more recent rehabilitation of their reputation,
still the very word ‘Neanderthal’ has connotations of the brute animal, bringing to mind a hairy, knuckle-dragging, lantern-jawed cave man.
    Books and television documentaries have sought to draw a different picture, of sensitive souls in tune with nature and therefore with something profound to teach us about ourselves. The
discovery of nine Neanderthal skeletons in a cave called Shanidar, in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq, went some way towards reinvesting the species with the sensitivity and dignity their
outward appearance had for so long denied them.
    Excavated in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of them appeared to have been given formal burials, even funerals, by their fellows. At least three were mature adults at the time of death
– indeed one was aged perhaps 40–50 years old, making him the equivalent of an octogenarian at least, by modern standards. Nicknamed ‘Nandy’ by the excavators, he was by any
standards a poor soul. At some point in his life he had suffered a