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The spear throwers

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 Heidelberg, Homo heidelbergensis, about ½ million years ago. I’m not suggesting that folk weren’t throwing spears for a long time before this.  But they will have been made of wood so we’ll never know.  However the Heidelberg folk left a cache of remarkably well preserved throwing spears, and they have survived.  These are truly exquisite weapons.  A modern javelin maker would be proud to have made them.   Around that time too (I think) animal shoulder blades start appearing – with spear holes in them. 

 

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 England.  The rest has been denuded of all evidence by ice.  The area was occupied by the Boxgrove folk for several thousand years, during a warm period between ice ages.  Evidence from the plants and animals found suggests that the climate at the time was very similar to now.  Despite the warmth, Britain was attached to Europe at the time, which made movement to and fro easy. 

 

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 Heidelberg.  But there’s evidence of long distance trade from long before we would previously have believed possible.

 

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 Europe (I’ve not seen any details).   I’ve seen a report that the Japanese were making huts 200 ky earlier. 

 

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 Africa, where they must have evolved.   Most of the information about them has been gleaned from a site in Spain.  They did however spawn the spear folk, H. heidelbergensis.

 

They also spawned us (more). 

 

© C B Pease, February 08