A TIMELINE FOR THE PLANET click for Home Page
From Homo
erectus on, the picture becomes very confusing. I’ve read that they eventually died out
leaving no issue, but I have to say that I find this difficult to believe. Somewhere within the confusion there must be
a link.
The next big development seems to be the spear-makers
of
And around 400,000 years ago, come ‘the Butchers of
Boxgrove’, who appear to be the same people.
Very few human remains have been found, so we can’t be sure. The Boxgrove site is all that remains of
quite a large area on the south coast of
Masses of butchered bones have been found, which is
why the people who lived there got that name.
The cut marks on the bones tell a clear story of expert butchery – by
skilled butchers who had plenty of time to do a neat and thorough job.
Some scientists seem determined to denigrate all our
pre-modern ancestors. They claim that
they were all just scavengers, taking advantage of the kills of other
predators. And some of them may have
been. But the Director of the Boxgrove
project, Mark Roberts, insists that their work tells a quite different story
about the Boxgrove folk. He is adamant
that they were skilled and courageous hunters, able to tackle any size of
animal available. Some holed shoulder
blades were found at Boxgrove. One was
from a rhino, another was from a horse.
Both will have been pretty dangerous animals to hunt.
We’ll probably never know whether the spears that made
the holes were made locally, or whether they were bought from
The Boxgrove area is chalk country, so folk living
there had access to more flints than they knew what to do with. And a flint-tool factory has been unearthed
there. Huge numbers flint chippings were
found. The archaeologists were able to
put some complete flints back together again, complete with the hole that the
finished tool came from.
But the striking thing is this. There were also masses of finished hand-axes
lying around, completely unused. I’ve
not been able to find a good picture of a flint handaxe. This one is made of volcanic ‘andesite’. (The picture was taken, I believe, by Graham
Norrie.)
Now the experimental archaeologists tell us that these
handaxes are not particularly useful as tools.
If there’s work to be done, stripping a carcase for example, then it’s
quicker and easier to ‘knap’ off a few nice sharp flakes – and to discard them
when they get blunt. The Boxgrove
butchering sites contained masses of used flakes, confirming that that’s how
they did it too.
So the handaxes must have had a symbolic purpose of
some kind, and the discarded ones weren’t up to standard. Perhaps they weren’t sufficiently exquisite
to curry favour with the chief. Or maybe
they were made by young blades, and weren’t good enough to impress their
girlfriends. When I first read about
this, the author made it sound new and remarkable. But I’ve since read that the Homo erectus folk were doing exactly the
same a million years earlier (more).
It’s interesting that these guys had more primitive
wrist bones than us (the Hobbit). Although they could clearly use them for heavy
pounding and such, they would have found it more tiring than we moderns do.
Either way, these folk were clearly living the good
life, and had the time and energy to spare for frivolities. How can any scientist claim that they were
dumb?
By at least 300 ky ago, someone was making huts in
The invention of huts is a good example of the maxim
“absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” which scientists have to keep
reminding each other of. Huts are made
of ephemeral materials, wood and such.
It’s difficult to imagine our ancestors having anything else at their disposal
either, except animal bones. They could
easily have invented huts much earlier, and we may never know.
But these guys aren’t our ancestors either. The cold returned, and they spawned the
Neanderthals (more).
According to Richard Cowen (of ‘History of Life’ fame)
we Homo sapiens stem from a small
earlier group called Homo antecessor. They don’t appear to have made much of an
impact in
They also spawned us (more).
© C B Pease, February 08