LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

      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.²²

      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.²³ 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.²⁴

      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.²⁵ 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.²⁶ (There are also some shorter, and perhaps more accessible, accounts widely available.²⁷)

      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.’²⁸ 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 1949.²⁹ 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

Скачать книгу