LITMIR.BIZ

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many of the animal bones found in the cave, which surely are the residue of food preparation and consumption. Perhaps soft parts of the head – especially the brain – could have been eaten, as still happened very recently in New Guinea, where it is believed that ceremonial cannibalism of this sort is a means of transferring experience and wisdom from the dead to the living. Maybe. We just don’t know.

      It is clear, however, that the bones at Gough’s Cave were expertly and carefully treated, and this suggests that the way in which the body was disposed of may have involved more than one stage. In many human societies the transition from the world of the living to the next world is a gradual process.⁷ There are many reasons for this: it allows the bereaved immediate family more time to mourn their loss, it gives far-flung relatives time to reach the funeral, and it provides a prolonged period of ceremonial during which the myths and legends that bind the community together can be learned, rehearsed and repeated by everyone. Death, like other so-called rites of passage such as birth, puberty and marriage, was a time when societies, tribes and families could meet, celebrate or commiserate, just as we do to this day.

      There are many forms of multi-stage burial, cremation or exposure. The latter is the process, sometimes known as excarnation, whereby the flesh is removed by birds or other natural means. The removal of the flesh symbolises the soul’s journey to the next world, and the clean bones are often ignored, piled together in ossuaries or, as happened in later prehistoric times, in purpose-built communal tombs. In the case of Gough’s Cave, the careful dismemberment of the cadavers suggests that the detached limbs were placed in a special area reserved for bodies or souls that were still in a transitional state, either in the cave or perhaps on a platform outside, in the open. Again, we don’t know precisely what was going on, but the general picture – of a two-stage funerary process – seems fairly clear.

      What is also abundantly clear is that prolonged and elaborate funeral rites didn’t suddenly appear six thousand years later with the arrival of the Neolithic period around 5000 BC. This is when we have the introduction of farming and houses and a more settled style of life; it is also when we find the first large communal tombs, barrows and other evidence for people coming together to mark or celebrate rites of passage. But the social processes, and in particular the human need to mark a person’s passing in this special way, have roots which go down very deep. As we will see in the next two chapters, there’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that the hard-and-fast barrier that archaeologists have traditionally erected between the distant world of hunter-gathering and our world of farming and settled life simply isn’t there.

      The Red ‘Lady’ of Paviland provided evidence for contacts over enormous distances. Of course, those contacts need not have been direct. I’m not suggesting that the people who used the Paviland caves commuted to the plains of Russia; what I am suggesting is that they may well have met people who knew people who did – just as I have met people who knew someone who was a friend of another person who died in the World Trade Center disaster of 11 September 2001. Both are examples of contacts within societies where people move around a great deal.

      Gough’s Cave also provided evidence for long-distance contact, although this time the distances were not quite so massive; but the evidence was also much stronger, and not based on something as hard to pin down as the style of art used to decorate those three bone spatulae.

      So far in this book I have concentrated more on people than on the flint tools they left behind them. This is not because I dislike flint – on the contrary, writing reports on flint artefacts has been my bread and butter for many years. However, to a non-specialist the technological differences between the various types and styles of flint can be hard to remember. Indeed, it took me a long time to master them with any degree of assurance, and when I eventually did so, I found I knew very little extra about the people behind the technology – and that, surely, is what our story is about. But now I have no alternative, because the extraordinary rapidity with which styles of flint-working start to change in the Upper Palaeolithic and subsequent Mesolithic periods surely reflects the hotting up of social evolution that was predicted in the last chapter. It must also reflect increasing opportunities for contacts between different groups, and perhaps too a gradually increasing population. Certainly a warming climate after the cold Loch Lomond sub-phase would have helped, but that was only part of the picture. It was human beings, not the climate or some other external stimulus, who were the main engines of change.

      The most important innovation of Upper Palaeolithic flint-working technology was the widespread adoption of tools fashioned from blades that had been struck off a larger block of flint, known as a core. In Chapter 1 I described the person or persons who invented this process as a ‘genius’, and I stand by that: it takes a very special way of thinking to turn technology back to front in this way. I can see nothing very clever in inventing the wheel, which seems to me a perfectly logical progression from the log rollers that had always been used to move large timbers and rocks. But to work out how to prepare a specially shaped core that would allow the removal of long, thin, razor-sharp blades – now that took real intelligence.

      The style of flint-working found in the warmer times before the cooler Loch Lomond sub-phase is known as Creswellian, after cave finds at Creswell Crags on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire borders. (Incidentally, one of the pleasures of being a specialist in the Palaeolithic must surely be the location of the sites: the Gower Peninsula, Cheddar Gorge, Creswell Crags – all of them gorgeous places that stir the soul.) But the high-quality, fine-textured flint needed for the carefully prepared cores used in making blade-based tools came from further east, where the landscape is softer and far less dramatic. A good example of this is the flint used for Creswellian flake tools found at Gough’s Cave and at contemporary caves in south-west Wales and southern Devon. This occurs naturally in the Vale of Pewsey (Wiltshire), about a hundred miles (160 kilometres) north-east of the Devon findspots.

      One of the striking aspects of some Creswellian sites is that in the debris on the cave floors, the early stages of making a flint tool are apparently missing. We saw at Boxgrove how a hand-axe-maker sat on the ground and first removed the outer, cortical or softer parts of the flint nodule. The flakes removed during this initial, roughing out or preparatory, work are known as primary flakes, and they’re easily spotted, as they’re usually very much paler than the other flakes, due to the cortex of soft, weathered flint on their upper surface. But primary flakes are rare, or just don’t occur, on many Creswellian sites. The evidence suggests that first the cores and then the blades were made at the source of the flint, before being carried to the place where they were to be used. Only then were they further modified to be turned into points, piercers, burins (a specialised bone- or antler-scoring tool), knives or scrapers. In conceptual or cognitive terms what we are seeing here is forethought, light years away from the world of the heavy, all-purpose hand-axe.

      These smaller tools were clearly intended to carry out specific tasks, and were used by people with much skill and dexterity. It’s apparent from the scratches found on meat bones that the animal carcasses butchered at Gough’s Cave were taken apart expertly and with great economy of effort. Animals such as wild horse and red deer not only gave quantities of meat and bone marrow, but also tongue, brain and doubtless offal too. Their hides were removed to provide warm coats, boots and tent coverings – all essential given the cold climate of the time. Their bones were used to make sewing needles, personal adornments (beads and pendants) and parts of spearheads. Sinew was used for thread, and the animal glue used to fix small flint blades into slots in bone spearheads was boiled up from hooves. Nothing was wasted.

      The movement of goods apart from flint, over even longer distances, can also be demonstrated. Among the many other items found there, Gough’s Cave produced pieces of Baltic amber and non-local seashells which may well have come from beaches of the North Sea coast. But in this instance, are we looking at groups meeting other groups who have visited these far-off places, or at a single group (or groups) that was highly mobile and well adapted to travelling very long distances? Taken together, the evidence tends, somewhat unexpectedly, to suggest the latter. Indeed, Roger Jacobi has suggested that certain finds from caves as far apart as Kent’s Cavern (in south Devon) and Robin Hood’s Cave in Creswell Crags (Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire) are so extraordinarily alike that they could have belonged to,

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