Message #124332

[Bianca]

Comings and goings



They may have looked human, but can we consider H. antecessor our ancestors? Well, not in a literal sense. As far as we know, they were the first British humans (although Stringer and his team are currently searching for evidence of older settlements), but if you are looking for an unbroken chain of habitation, the roots of the modern British people can only be traced back about 11,500 years – far later than those of our European neighbours or the native peoples of the Americas, Australia and Japan.“We knew that there were gaps, that the human inhabitation of Britain was episodic before the project began,” says Stringer, “but we wanted to test the evidence.

We now think that between 500,000 and 12,000 years ago, Britain was only inhabited by humans for around 20 per cent of the time.”Climate change seems to have been behind this episodic inhabitation. At Pakefield, H. antecessor’s stay probably lasted no more than 20,000 years before the returning ice drove them from our land for good. They were replaced by a species known as H. heidelbergensis – about 500,000 years ago they appeared to be flourishing at Boxgrove in Sussex, butchering horse, deer and rhino with beautifully carved hand axes.

Fifty thousand years later, they too had gone, driven away or to localised extinction by the onset of Britain’s worst ice age. This fate was shared by the early ancestors of the Neanderthals at Swanscombe, North Kent, about 380,000 years ago, and again by those who followed.Yet no matter how harsh conditions were, humans always found their way back.

Sometimes it’s difficult to understand why they bothered – even during the interglacial periods, the holiday-resort conditions of Pakefield were very much the exception.This was certainly the case for the Neanderthals who settled at Lynford in Norfolk some 60,000 years ago. There, along with mammoth bones and more than 40 beautifully carved flint hand axes, the AHOB team uncovered a very different environment.

Beetles again helped retell the story – more than 160 species were uncovered, including some now found only in Siberia. This was clearly a very cold climate: the researchers believe that temperatures rarely exceeded 13°C and would have dropped as low as –10°C in winter.Long caricatured as knuckle-grazing brutes, the Neanderthals have always had something of an image problem. Yet they were the dominant or only species of human in Europe for several hundred thousand years.

Clearly resourceful and adaptable, they were able to survive in a range of different climates and on a variety of diets.Like us, they buried their dead, a trait not seen in earlier humans. “To us, care of the dead is a very human characteristic,” says Stringer, “so the fact the Neanderthals were doing it indicates their ‘humanity’.”

The Neanderthals may have shared many traits with us, but researchers now believe that far from the ‘missing link’ they’ve often been portrayed as, they were actually the end of a completely separate evolutionary line.

Since the 1970s, Stringer has devoted much of his time to studying these people and their relationship with us. “The Neanderthals were too different to be our ancestors,” he begins. “During the ’70s, when I first looked at this, the general classification was that they were a specialised form of H. sapiens. I’m now convinced that they were a separate species.”