2 - The Lower, Middle and Early Upper Palaeolithic periods
These periods, which lasted down to the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic period (around 40,000 years Before Present), are the least known periods in British archaeology simply because the evidence for the activity of people in our area of Europe is so sparse at the time.
During this vast period, the climate changed very often so that on occasions glacial (Ice Age) conditions prevailed and at other times rhinoceros and elephant roamed the land. Four Ice Ages have been recognised, the last occurring during the Upper Palaeolithic period, so that three occurred during the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic periods and were separated by periods of warmer conditions known as interglacials. The chronological boundary between the Lower and Upper Palaeolithic periods lies somewhere between 250,000 and 200,000 BP.
The earliest dateable evidence for people in Britain occurs about half a million years ago. At this time and for many thousands of years to come there was no island of Britain. Our land was simply an extension of the great continent of Eurasia which stretched eastwards to the Pacific Ocean. In this vast territory people were scarce and groups of kin could probably go for years without coming into contact with other groups. So the evidence for people in our land is likely to be scarce.
The evidence falls into two categories: fossil bone finds and artifact finds - there are no structured camping sites until the Upper Palaeolithic period. Fossils are bones that have become impregnated with chemicals in the ground and so are made hard and durable. They are particularly important in identifying the species of man in the periods before the Upper Palaeolithic which is the time when Homo sapiens sapiens, our own species, first appears on earth.
Artifact finds are evidence of the presence of people in the past and are used mainly to study the flint and stone technology. Spreads of ash indicate that fire was known although there is no evidence for hearths or for the uses to which fire was put. Finds of animal bones can give us some indication of the animals that were used for food and provided bone, antler and, presumably, skins. Apart from this source of nourishment, we assume that these people collected vegetable foods and perhaps fished. We classify their life-style as that of the hunter-gatherer, a way of life that had existed since the first appearance of man on earth.
High Lodge, Mildenhall, in Suffolk was the find-spot of an assemblage of flint tools which have rather upset some of the pre-conceived notions about the development of stone tools. It used to be thought that tools became finer and smaller with time so that the coarser the tool manufacture the older the artifact. This is disproved at High Lodge where the tools from this early site are made from carefully-struck flakes which have been skilfully made into a range of scrapers and points. The scrapers would have been used for scraping skins and the points for projectiles. They are more sophisticated pieces of work than many tools from a much later time. Lacking from the assemblage are handaxes which were always assumed to have been part of the tool-kits of the Lower Palaeolithic hunters. Handaxes were general purpose tools and are so called because they were simply used in the hand.
On the other hand, at Boxgrove in Sussex which also dates to about the same time, between 478.000 and 424,000BC, 250 handaxes were found amongst the flint artifacts but they were unlike the general run of Lower Palaeolithic handaxes, being finely crafted in an ovate shape and could well have been mistaken for tools of the later Middle Palaeolithic period. At Boxgrove were found part of a fossil shinbone and two teeth which greatly increased the meagre total of human fossils that we have from our part of Europe at this time. The site lay along the banks of an ancient stream used as a watering- hole by animals such as horses, two types of rhino, red deer and bison whose bones bear the cut marks of flint handaxes wielded by the hunters during the butchering process.
Objects from this period are nowadays being more accurately dated with the aid of three rather specialised techniques. Radiocarbon dating cannot be used at these chronological ranges, being useful only back to about 80,000 years ago. Recent developments in thermoluminescence (TL) dating of burnt flint have made it a useful tool. Rocks like flint contain small amounts of natural radiation which cause damage to crystalline substances such as flint by displacing electrons. When flint is heated in a fire the damaged electrons are 'neutralised' by the energy and the radioactive clock is set at zero. To obtain a date, the amount of radiation damage which has been absorbed since zeroing is measured by heating the sample in a laboratory to 500ºC or more to release the energy of the displaced electrons. As the name of the technique suggests, the energy emitted is expressed as a glow curve.
Similar to this technique is electron spin resonance (ESR) dating which measures accumulated natural radiation in crystalline substances such as carbonates and tooth enamel. Microwave radiation causes displaced electrons to give off a signal which is proportional to the amount of radiation damage incurred. The method has been particularly important in dating fossil mammal tooth enamel such as the tooth found at Boxgrove.
Flowstone deposits in caves and travertines deposited at springs out in the open can be dated by the use of uranium-series dating. What is measured is the radioactive decay following the uptake of uranium into the carbonate as it forms. The amounts can be measured and an age derived by using the known decay rates for uranium and thorium isotopes. Since palaeolithic materials are often found in caves or, on occasions, encased in travertine or stalagmitic concretions, this technique has proved extremely useful in Europe and in Asia.
One of the best-known Middle Palaeolithic sites in Britain is that at Swanscombe in Kent where, in a gravel pit, three parts of a skull were found between 1935 and 1955 together with thousands of flint handaxes. The skull perhaps belonged to an early member of the Neanderthal lineage, while the handaxes are of the Acheulian type. The fossils and the flints in this upper loam layer date from c360,000 years ago. In contrast, the lower loam yielded flints that dated from c420,000BP and consisted of a mixture of chopping tools and thick, irregular flakes. These are described as Clactonian after a similar assemblage excavated at Clacton in Essex from an old stream channel which also contained the tip of a wooden spear.
At La Cotte on the Channel island of Jersey, two piles of bone were discovered beneath a rock overhang. The animals represented include mammoth and rhino. They have been interpreted as the result of hunting drives across the granite headland so that small herds were forced over a cliff. Amongst the flint tools, handaxes are rare but very common are tools made from flakes struck from cores using the Levalloisian technique. This involves carefully shaping a nodule of flint so that one side is domed. At one end a striking platform is made by knocking off one end of the nodule to leave a flat surface. A blow on this striking platform knocks off a domed flake. The procedure can then be repeated as long as the nodule is big enough. What is left is shaped rather like a tortoise and so is known as a tortoise core.
A good many of the tools from La Cotte have been recycled or resharpened and this is thought to have been necessary because of an increasing scarcity of flint. The sequence of palaeolithic activity at La Cotte begins about 250,000 years ago and continues through until the last glaciation.
Examples of the use of dating techniques comes from the Pontnewydd cave in North Wales. The stalagmitic flowstone on the walls and some lumps found in the sediments provided material for uranium-series dating which resulted in a determination of about 200,000 years ago. Burnt flint in the archaeological layers in the cave was used for TL dating which also produced dates of around 200,000 BP. Thus the two methods are in correlation. In the absence of the date, the tools would have been considered to have belonged to a much earlier period. They were made out of coarse-grained rocks such as rhyolites and volcanic tuffs and the handaxes, in particular, looked very antique.
One can draw the conclusion that judgments made simply on the basis of the appearance of the tools can be very misleading at this period. It is only with the availability of dates that it has been possible to place these four very significant sites in their proper chronological contexts.
Tools of the earlier Middle Palaeolithic do seem to conform to a pattern of assemblage types that is pretty standard. Handaxes, flakes, Levallois flakes and blades, side-scrapers, points, cores and pebble/chopping tools make up the bulk of the material.
During the later Middle Palaeolithic period, which lasted from 130,000 to 35,000BP, tool designs changed with the introduction of the small Micoquian handaxes and knives and the classic triangular handaxes/knives which are commonly found in England and elsewhere. The term 'Micoquian' comes from a cave in south-western France where these tools were first identified.
Between 40,000 and 30,000BP, new people were coming into Europe. These were the Cro-Magnons, the earliest Homo sapiens sapiens, and our direct ancestors. Like the people of the Middle Palaeolithic period, the Neanderthals, they had larger skulls than we and were heavier. They were taller and had larger brains.
Apparently they came originally from Africa, via the Middle East and eastern and central Europe, bringing with them a new tool technology that we refer to as Aurignacian.
The total amount of archaeological material from the Upper Palaeolithic period is much greater than that from the Middle Palaeolithic with most coming from the second part of the period which is divided into two - the Early Upper Palaeolithic period up to the most severe climatic times of the last Ice Age when the ice-sheet was at its greatest extent and the period, described as the Late Upper Palaeolithic period, from about 13000BP up to the Mesolithic period c8000BC
However, there is a large gap in our knowledge during the coldest period of the last Ice Age during which we have no evidence of human activity in Britain and it may be that the climate was too extreme for occupation. This gap seems to extend from round about 28,000BP to the post- glacial re-occupation of the Late Upper Palaeolithic period.
Increasingly, the Late Upper Palaeolithic period is being being seen as a continuum with the succeeding Mesolithic period and the time of the greatest glaciation as a dividing line between archaeological periods. The Late Upper Palaeolithic period is now sometimes being referred to as the Epi-Palaeolithic (the 'Epi' meaning 'in addition to') and the climatic period after the Ice Age as Neo-thermal. We perhaps can adopt this idea since the gap in our knowledge when man may well have been absent in Britain seems to signal a new beginning even though some of the techniques of flintworking which had been kept alive on the Continent were developments of what had been done during the Early Upper Palaeolithic period.
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