Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans. Francis Pryor

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СКАЧАТЬ shelter at Lagar Velho, in Portugal.¹⁹ The bones were from a boy who had been buried about twenty-four thousand years ago. In theory this was at least five to six thousand years after the last Neanderthal had settled in the Iberian peninsula. He had been buried with some ceremony: he wore a shell pendant or amulet around his neck, and the edges of the grave were marked out by stones and bones. Also in the grave were articulated bones of red deer and rabbit – presumably placed there as offerings. The grave contained a layer of red ochre, from dye which coloured either the boy’s clothes or his shroud. Red ochre burials are known from other sites of this period across Europe and into Russia, and I shall have more to say about one of them, from south Wales, shortly.

      The real interest in the Lagar Velho boy lies in the anatomical form of his bones, which are clearly those of Homo sapiens, but also reveal a number of distinctively, and very strongly marked, Neanderthal features. Anatomically, there can be no doubt whatsoever: his ancestors had interbred with Neanderthals, and not just once, but regularly and over a long time. It would be impossible to account for so many Neanderthal features any other way. What are the wider implications of this discovery? Did the two groups of humans routinely interbreed everywhere? We don’t know, but probably not. Spain and Portugal may be a special case, as there does seem to have been a persistent ecological border zone (known as the Ebro Frontier) between the two groups along the northern edge of the Iberian peninsula.

      It would seem that modern humans took their time to penetrate south of the Ebro Frontier, possibly because they were better adapted to the cooler conditions of the north. But whatever the root causes might have been, Neanderthals persisted for some time in Spain and Portugal, and it would appear that even though the end result for one group was extinction, for extended periods relations were more friendly than genocidal. The impression we get is what one might expect of human interactions at any time. In some areas the genocide was swift, efficient and ruthless; in others the two groups continued to live side by side for several millennia, and the ‘genocide’ may not have been deliberate, but more the sad consequence of an inevitable process. As groups of Neanderthals became more widely separated, mates would be harder to find, and the population would decline further. It was a process that in the end took some ten thousand years to complete.²⁰

      The evidence provided by a particular form of DNA, known as mitochondrial DNA (see Chapter 5), which is passed on via the female line, suggests strongly that Homo sapiens is not a direct descendant of Homo neanderthalensis.²¹ So how on earth does the Lagar Velho boy fit in with this? The leading authority, Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at Oxford University, has suggested that the Lagar Velho boy may be the human equivalent of a mule – a cross between two closely related, but different, species: horse and donkey. The mule is tough, strong and hardy, but sterile, because its parents do not share the same number of chromosomes (horses have sixty-four, donkeys sixty-two). We don’t know yet, because the Lagar Velho boy’s DNA has not been examined, but Bryan Sykes reckons that if he was indeed a cross between a modern human and a Neanderthal, then he might well have been sterile, like the mule. This, of course, would help explain why Neanderthal genes appear to be absent from our own genetic make-up.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ