First humans arrived in Britain 250,000 years earlier than thought

[Golethia Pennington]

First humans arrived in Britain 250,000 years earlier than thought

Archaeologists digging on a Norfolk beach found stone tools that show the first humans were living in Britain much earlier than previously thought


    * Ian Sample, science correspondent
    * guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 July 2010 18.04 BST
    * Article history

Archaeologists explain how flint tools and other artefacts found on the Norfolk coast reveal how the first Britons lived. Video: Nature Link to this video

A spectacular haul of ancient flint tools has been recovered from a beach in Norfolk, pushing back the date of the first known human occupation of Britain by up to 250,000 years.

While digging along the north-east coast of East Anglia near the village of Happisburgh, archaeologists discovered 78 pieces of razor-sharp flint shaped into primitive cutting and piercing tools.

The stone tools were unearthed from sediments that are thought to have been laid down either 840,000 or 950,000 years ago, making them the oldest human artefacts ever found in Britain.

The flints were probably left by hunter-gatherers of the human species Homo antecessor who eked out a living on the flood plains and marshes that bordered an ancient course of the river Thames that has long since dried up. The flints were then washed downriver and came to rest at the Happisburgh site.

The early Britons would have lived alongside sabre-toothed cats and hyenas, primitive horses, red deer and southern mammoths in a climate similar to that of southern Britain today, though winters were typically a few degrees colder.

"These tools from Happisburgh are absolutely mint-fresh. They are exceptionally sharp, which suggests they have not moved far from where they were dropped," said Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London. The population of Britain at the time most likely numbered in the hundreds or a few thousand at most.

"These people probably used the rivers as routes into the landscape. A lot of Britain might have been heavily forested at the time, which would have posed a major problem for humans without strong axes to chop trees down," Stringer added. "They lived out in the open, but we don't know if they had basic clothing, were building primitive shelters, or even had the use of fire."

The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, overturns the long-held belief that early humans steered clear of chilly Britain – and the rest of northern Europe – in favour of the more hospitable climate of the Mediterranean. The only human species known to be living in Europe at the time is Homo antecessor, or "pioneer man", whose remains were discovered in the Atapuerca hills of Spain in 2008 and have been dated to between 1.1m and 1.2m years old.

The early settlers would have walked into Britain across an ancient land bridge that once divided the North Sea from the Atlantic and connected the country to what is now mainland Europe. The first humans probably arrived during a warm interglacial period, but may have retreated as temperatures plummeted in subsequent ice ages.

Until now, the earliest evidence of humans in Britain came from Pakefield, near Lowestoft in Suffolk, where a set of stone tools dated to 700,000 years ago were uncovered in 2005. More sophisticated stone, antler and bone tools were found in the 1990s in Boxgrove, Sussex, which are believed to be half a million years old.

"The flint tools from Happisburgh are relatively crude compared with those from Boxgrove, but they are still effective," said Stringer. Early stone tools were fashioned by using a pebble to knock large flakes off a chunk of flint. Later humans used wood and antler hammers to remove much smaller flakes and so make more refined cutting and sawing edges.

The great migration from Africa saw early humans reach Europe around 1.8m years ago. Within 500,000 years, humans had become established in the Mediterranean region. Remains have been found at several archaeological sites in Spain, southern France and Italy.

In an accompanying article in Nature, Andrew Roberts and Rainer Grün at the Australian National University in Canberra, write: "Until the Happisburgh site was found and described, it was thought that these early humans were reluctant to live in the less hospitable climate of northern Europe, which frequently fell into the grip of severe ice ages."

Researchers led by the Natural History Museum and British Museum in London began excavating sites near Happisburgh in 2001 as part of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project and soon discovered tools from the stone age beneath ice-age deposits. So far, though, they have found no remains of the ancient people who made them.

"This would be the 'holy grail' of our work," said Stringer. "The humans who made the Happisburgh tools may well have been related to the people of similar antiquity from Atapuerca in Spain, assigned to the species Homo antecessor, or 'pioneer man'."

The latest haul of stone tools was buried in sediments that record a period of history when the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field was reversed. At the time, a compass needle would have pointed south instead of north. The last time this happened was 780,000 years ago, so the tools are at least that old.

Analysis of ancient vegetation and pollen in the sediments has revealed that the climate was warm but cooling towards an ice age, which points to two possible times in history, around 840,000 years ago, or 950,000 years ago. Both dates are consistent with the fossilised remains of animals recovered from the same site.

"Britain was getting cooler and going into an ice age, but these early humans were hanging in there. They may have been the remnants of an ancient population that either died out or migrated back across the land bridge to a warmer climate," said Stringer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jul/07/first-humans-britain-stone-tools

[Boreas]

By Mike Pitts, The Guardian, UK.

To brave a climate similar to that of southern Scandinavia today, the first Britons living at Happisburgh some 950,000 years ago must have been surprisingly clever.

I remember standing in the Boxgrove quarries 15 years ago, marvelling not just at the astonishing preservation of an ancient landscape with scenes of hunting and butchery, but that it was all 500,000 years old – 200 millennia before we had thought early humans had first reached Britain. Five years ago the story moved round the coast from Sussex to Suffolk, where the discovery of tiny flint tools at Pakefield told us humans were here a further 200 millennia ago. Now that history has taken a third stride back for possibly yet another 200,000 years.

Yet at Happisburgh, it's not just the age that makes these finds so exciting. In fact, we're getting used to this rapid ageing, and there's every reason to think that before long we will be talking about early humans in Britain a million years ago. What has really surprised researchers – and was partly responsible for delayed publication of these new finds as earth scientists debated whether or not they'd got it right – is the context in which the pieces of flint were found.


The world in which these hominins lived was not one in which large game herds were on tap and in which the weather was always toasty – conditions archaeologists had come to accept as the basic requirements for early humans, the ones which limited expansion around the world once they had left Africa. Happisburgh has exceptional preservation of organic remains – not just bones, but insects' and plants' remains, including pieces of wood and pollen grains. All these describe a landscape and climate that was more like southern Scandinavia today than the Mediterranean.

The northern latitude contrasts with other Early Pleistocene archaeological sites, which all lie at least 8 degrees further south. As if to emphasise the significance of this, at Happisburgh the artefacts are not found at a time of deciduous woodland. They were made when conifer forest and grassland had replaced oaks as the climate cooled before an era when glaciers covered the land.

This undermines the traditional view that early hominins moved back and forth with herds of large mammals on which they depended for food, sticking to a warm climate. The new evidence suggests they were capable of adapting behaviour as the world changed around them. We have no evidence how they did this, but strategies must have included changes in how they gathered food.

The northern forests would have challenged a genus that hitherto had spent most of its time in regions less marked by seasonal change. At Happisburgh the hominins are likely to have eaten more plants in summer and more meat in winter – and then hunting or scavenging in shorter days, and sometimes extreme cold.

The key to survival may have been the mix of habitats around a river. We might imagine them not braving mammoth and bison, but collecting roots, shellfish and seaweed, and tracking grazing animals such as deer coming down to the water to drink.

And in the winter it got cold – several degrees colder than a modern winter in Norfolk. Surely they must have worn some clothing, and made artificial shelters. Perhaps, even, they had mastered the use of fire (charcoal was found at the dig, though we do not know what caused the wood to be burnt – it could come from natural fires).

The actual flint artefacts are rare, simple and small. But the story they tell is profound. Even this long ago, early humans were substantially cleverer than modern chimpanzees. And with a track record of underestimating early human capabilities, archaeologists are likely to turn up more finds to reinforce that view.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jul/08/first-britons-clothes-shelters-fire


Video;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2010/jul/07/flint-tools-first-britons

Homo Britannicus
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7303/full/466189a.html