Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans

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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) (There are also some shorter, and perhaps more accessible, accounts widely available.

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.