BRAVING ICE AGE CLIMATES, EARLY HUMANS colonised our remote corner of the European mainland time and again. Glacial periods were succeeded by interglacials, with far-reaching consequences for the ability of early people to visit these islands, far less to stay permanently. Here is a strangely different but dimly recognisable Britain. It is shown through the eyes of a distinguished archaeologist who treats the reader to a contemporary view of the very latest findings in the quest to unravel the interactions between the changing environments and their ancient human occupants, their lifestyles and migrations, in these islands. Here we see the latest dating techniques and the latest discoveries from archaeological sites around Britain, from the southwest peninsula to the Scottish islands. We take in about a million years of prehistory, and are treated to an intimate view of the lives of humans before the advent of the farming revolution we call the Neolithic.
The very fact that we can devote an entire New Naturalist volume to the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic also tells us something about the prodigious expansion in our knowledge of these ancient peoples, and their environments. Using an interdisciplinary approach Nick Ashton reveals some of the fruits of his work with his colleagues from the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project. This is a collaborative effort involving archaeologists, palaeontologists, and earth scientists at a number of different British institutes, including the Natural History Museum and the British Museum. In pulling this story together this volume enables us to learn much about the humans but also a great deal about the plants and animals into whose midst they came as scavengers and top carnivores in these early ecological niches.
Here, to use an apt simile, is the cutting edge of research drawn from a wide field of specialists. But in setting out the most recent findings, Nick Ashton also offers a longer and contextual perspective: he unveils the long history of the many individuals who have been instrumental in developing the skills and interpretations upon which our current knowledge lies. He also shows how, over several centuries, the broad outlines of prehistoric chronology have been painstakingly built up by amateurs and enthusiasts as well as by the educated and leisured. And this is, above all, a personal account which tells of the excitement of discovery, the difficulties of fieldwork in often appalling, even perilous, conditions, and the pleasures of teamwork. Through his eyes we see the hippopotamus, elephant and rhinoceros grazing the banks of the early Thames, roaming through what is now Trafalgar Square, but devoid of humans; and amazingly we see the footprints, discovered in 2013, left by groups of people, including children, as they walked perhaps as much as 900,000 years ago by the proto-Thames along what is now the Norfolk coast at Happisburgh, or much later as a group walked through the muds of the Severn Estuary.
This is by no means the first New Naturalist volume to approach the study of early humans and their environments. Volume 18 of the New Naturalist series, published in 1951, was H. J. Fleure’s A Natural History of Man in Britain which was reprinted in 1959 with corrections, including the removal of a reference to the hoax Piltdown Man. The fact that this early volume included just 13 pages on the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods, and that in 1953 The Weald (volume 26) was published with just six pages covering the pre-Neolithic period, compared to the totality of the present volume, tells us much about the explosion of research over the past 60 years. So here is a detailed, rigorous and engrossing account of the environmental nature of the earliest human occupation of Britain, interspersed with telling illustrations, some of which are the author’s own photographs taken in the field.