Holding his victim’s head in his left hand, the powerfully built man took hold of his stone knife and began to slice into the skin at the top of the skull. With each cut, flesh peeled from the bone, fresh blood dripped to the cave floor and the anticipation of the hungry crowd grew ever more intense…No, this isn’t a scene from a horror movie, it’s a reconstruction of an event that took place some 14,000 years ago in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset. Evidence found there, including a skull fragment with cut marks on it and bones apparently broken for their marrow, suggests that early British Homo sapiens were, at least on occasion, fond of the meat of their own.But while there’s something darkly fascinating about the thought that our primitive ancestors may have indulged in cannibalism, it’s a mere subplot in an extraordinary new prehistory of Britain that has emerged in recent years thanks to the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) project.Born in 1999, the project gathered together 30 archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists and sent them on a quest to find Britain’s earliest inhabitants. Led by Professor Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum, the project represents the first time that such a collaborative investigation has been attempted.The results have been astonishing,as revealed in Stringer’s book, Homo britannicus: The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain. One find in particular captured the headlines – a collection of 700,000-year-old flint tools discovered at Pakefield in Suffolk. To the untrained eye, the flakes would be barely discernable from any other piece of flint, but the researchers are convinced that humans crafted them. “They have all the hallmarks of human workmanship,” Stringer explains. “When humans strike flint, they are very focused – they hit the flint in a particular way and leave marks that show they were doing this.” The tools may have been simple, but their significance was immense, adding some 200,000 years to the known occupation of Britain. Before Pakefield,it was thought that conditions in Britain 700,000 years ago – in particular the shorter growing seasons and severe winter conditions – would have been too harsh for such primitive people. But, as Stringer says, “Pakefield broke the mould. It’s also the earliest good evidence of people in Northern Europe.”So how could such primitive people have survived here? Well, the Britain that emerged as the AHOB specialists sifted the evidence wasn’t quite the place they expected to find. The human occupation of Pakefield took place during a period known as an interglacial – the relatively warm patch between two ice ages. But evidence from everything from fossilised beetles to isotope ratios in sediments suggested the climate was warmer than anything seen before. “The suggestion was of really hot summers and mild,wet winters – a Mediterranean climate,” Stringer says. “That’s unlike any of the later interglacials – they have a climate roughly similar to that of the present day.”This warm climate supported flora and fauna more akin to that of Africa than the East Anglian coast. Hippos swam in swampy rivers; elephants grazed on open grassland. Researchers have dubbed the region the Costa Del Cromer, and while it may be going too far to imagine primitive Europeans holidaying on the balmy Suffolk coastline, it does seem that humans were crossing what is now the English Channel at various times during our prehistory.“During this period, there was a permanent land bridge between Britain and Europe,” Stringer explains. “At the time of Pakefield, the winters were mild, so people probably stayed here all year round. Later on, however, the climate became more seasonal, and people may have left Britain during the winters by crossing the land bridge.”Because no human fossils were found at Pakefield, this land bridge holds the key to establishing just who these primitive Britons were. Rather than the island nation we know today, for most of the past million years, Britain was effectively a remote peninsula of Europe. Hence, to find the earliest Britons, we need to look to our continental neighbours. “At sites in Italy and Spain, we have fossils of people from this time that have been assigned to a species known as Homo antecessor – Pioneer Man,” Stringer explains. So what do we know about these people? “Well, the remains we have of this group are fragmentary,” says Stringer, “but we do know that the brain size was smaller than the present day but bigger than earlier species such as H. erectus. The face was large and the teeth were larger than we find later on. If we could have seen these people, we would have had no doubt they were human beings – they walked on two legs, they would have looked basically human.”

Comings and goings
They may have looked human, but can we consider H. antecessor our ancestors? Well, not in a literal sense. As far as we know, they were the first British humans (although Stringer and his team are currently searching for evidence of older settlements), but if you are looking for an unbroken chain of habitation, the roots of the modern British people can only be traced back about 11,500 years – far later than those of our European neighbours or the native peoples of the Americas, Australia and Japan.“We knew that there were gaps, that the human inhabitation of Britain was episodic before the project began,” says Stringer, “but we wanted to test the evidence. We now think that between 500,000 and 12,000 years ago, Britain was only inhabited by humans for around 20 per cent of the time.”Climate change seems to have been behind this episodic inhabitation. At Pakefield, H. antecessor’s stay probably lasted no more than 20,000 years before the returning ice drove them from our land for good. They were replaced by a species known as H. heidelbergensis – about 500,000 years ago they appeared to be flourishing at Boxgrove in Sussex, butchering horse, deer and rhino with beautifully carved hand axes. Fifty thousand years later, they too had gone, driven away or to localised extinction by the onset of Britain’s worst ice age. This fate was shared by the early ancestors of the Neanderthals at Swanscombe, North Kent, about 380,000 years ago, and again by those who followed.Yet no matter how harsh conditions were, humans always found their way back. Sometimes it’s difficult to understand why they bothered – even during the interglacial periods, the holiday-resort conditions of Pakefield were very much the exception.This was certainly the case for the Neanderthals who settled at Lynford in Norfolk some 60,000 years ago. There, along with mammoth bones and more than 40 beautifully carved flint hand axes, the AHOB team uncovered a very different environment. Beetles again helped retell the story – more than 160 species were uncovered, including some now found only in Siberia. This was clearly a very cold climate: the researchers believe that temperatures rarely exceeded 13°C and would have dropped as low as –10°C in winter.Long caricatured as knuckle-grazing brutes, the Neanderthals have always had something of an image problem. Yet they were the dominant or only species of human in Europe for several hundred thousand years. Clearly resourceful and adaptable, they were able to survive in a range of different climates and on a variety of diets.Like us, they buried their dead, a trait not seen in earlier humans. “To us, care of the dead is a very human characteristic,” says Stringer, “so the fact the Neanderthals were doing it indicates their ‘humanity’.” The Neanderthals may have shared many traits with us, but researchers now believe that far from the ‘missing link’ they’ve often been portrayed as, they were actually the end of a completely separate evolutionary line. Since the 1970s, Stringer has devoted much of his time to studying these people and their relationship with us. “The Neanderthals were too different to be our ancestors,” he begins. “During the ’70s, when I first looked at this, the general classification was that they were a specialised form of H. sapiens. I’m now convinced that they were a separate species.”

Branch meeting
Around 35,000 years ago, as H. sapiens emerged from its African birthplace and spread around the globe, into Europe and then Britain, these two branches of the human evolutionary line may well have met. However, evidence of such encounters, in Britain or elsewhere, remains sketchy. “We can’t place our dating evidence so precisely – we can’t say that they were in exactly the same place at the same time,” says Stringer. “But they undoubtedly overlapped in Europe for thousands of years, so they must have encountered each other. What would they have thought when they saw each other – would they have seen each other as friends, as enemies, as food? At this stage we just don’t know, and the interactions might have been different in different places, so there could have been warfare between groups, there could have been peaceful co-existence, even trading.” Some believe that the relationship between the species may have been even closer. Features normally associated with Neanderthals were recently found in H. sapiens skeletons discovered in a cave in Romania, leading to claims the two may have interbred. Stringer believes that this was a possibility, arguing that although Neanderthals and humans were distinct enough to be considered a separate species, they were probably closely related enough to allow interbreeding.So, were H. sapiens to blame for the extinction of the Neanderthals? It seems likely that it was more than coincidence that our arrival coincides with their decline, but the work of the AHOB team suggests that climate change could also have played a role. It has found that between 45,000 and 12,000 years ago, the European climate was highly unstable, with rapid and extreme shifts in and out of ice age conditions. These shifts could even have occurred within the lifespan of a single generation, and would have put the Neanderthals under immense pressure. Yet they had proved themselves adaptable many times before, and Stringer argues that as the ice age approached and food became more scarce, the presence of competing groups of H. sapiens – with their more advanced tools, social structures and hunting techniques – was enough to push the Neanderthals over the edge.For the first British H. sapiens, known as the Cro-Magnons, this unstable climate would also prove impossible to endure. Around 25,000 years ago, as an ice cap formed over most of the country, all traces of them disappear. As the ice advanced, people would have been forced to retreat to the milder climes of Southern Europe or die trying to hold on to their homeland. As the climate warmed, they returned and flourished, but even after more than 10,000 years of continuous settlement, they succumbed to the climate once more.“Near the end of the last ice age – around 13,000 years ago – the Cro-Magnons vanished from Britain,” says Stringer. “South of the ice sheet, it would have been a polar desert, there would have been very little food. It’s extraordinary to think that climate change has driven our own species from Britain twice before.” Only on their return, around 11,500 years ago, did the Cro-Magnons establish themselves to the extent that we can now trace an unbroken chain of human habitation of Britain. It’s these people who represent the earliest true ancestors of the modern British people.

Artistic streak
So what were the Cro-Magnons like? Well, anatomically they were essentially like us, but slightly larger bodied and larger brained. Their technology and society were far more advanced than anything seen before them. Beautifully carved harpoons made of red deer antler and jewellery made of stone and amber dating from around 11,500 years ago have been found at Starr Carr in Scarborough. Even more remarkable was the discovery there of 21 masks made from deer skulls, originally thought to have been worn during hunts but now believed to be part of some kind of ritual.At sites all over Eurasia, from Portugal to the Urals, the arrival of H. sapiens has been linked with an explosion in cave art. Until recently, however, early British H. sapiens was thought to have missed this early artistic flowering, their struggles with the environment held to have diminished their desire for self-expression. But in collaborative research involving a member of the AHOB team, 90 possible engravings, including depictions of horse, bison, bear, birds and women, were found on the walls of Church Hole cave in Creswell Crags, Derbyshire. Other caves in the same region have also revealed art on their walls. These finds not only raise early British H. sapiens to the same artistic level as their peers elsewhere, but as the style of the images is similar to that of finds elsewhere in Europe from this time, it suggests that groups may have been linked via a land bridge where the North Sea is now located.While these early British H. sapiens were relatively advanced, this was still a primitive world, as illustrated by the apparent evidence of cannibalism at Gough’s Cave. The skull fragment, found in 1987, clearly shows cut marks made as a stone knife was used to scalp it. As more human fossils emerged, the picture looked darker still. “I think the evidence of cannibalism here is very strong,” says Stringer. “It looks as if the butchery is for meat. They are cutting out the tongues, smashing the long bones open to get the marrow out – that makes it look as if this was done for nutritional purposes. Of course, these people may simply have been starving and someone died and they did this – in my view ‘crisis cannibalism’ such as this must have happened from time to time. But it isn’t only the Cheddar site, there are others with similar evidence, so I think it was a more widespread activity, probably groups killing and eating each other.”As exciting as many of the AHOB researchers’ finds have been, one particular piece of the puzzle still eludes them. “It’s still my dream to find an early human fossil in Britain,” says Stringer. “But in Europe as a whole, human fossils are rare. There weren’t that many people around, and that isn’t surprising. Humans were carnivorous by this time, so they are at the top of the food chain. There are always fewer carnivores than herbivores, and look at the competition, there were lots of very successful predators around – lions, sabre-toothed cats, several species of hyenas, wolves…” he pauses, laughing at the gravity of the situation facing our distant ancestors. “Humans, especially in the earlier stages, weren’t yet that successful – they were thin on the ground – in many ways you just have to admire them for surviving at all.”