The Ancients - The First Britons

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

67 million people currently inhabit the United Kingdom - but what do we know about the original, first Britons? It's no secret when looking back into pre-history that it was a time of mass migration for animals and people alike, but who were our early inhabitants, and what can we learn about them?In this episode of The Ancients, Professor Chris Stringer returns to the podcast to shine a light on this mysterious part of prehistory. Looking back across millions of years, Chris helps us delve into our distant ancestors' pasts, and illuminates what they were really like. Looking at the latest archaeological and scientific research, what can we know about the first traces of hominin activity on the British Isles?You can go and see some of the archaeology we talk about today in the Natural History Museum's Human Evolution Gallery.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, well, in the past on The Ancientsents we've covered huge topics like the first Australians, the first Americans, we've explored the origins of Homo sapiens, we've looked at Neanderthals. It's fair to say that on the ancients we do like delving deep into human prehistory once in a while and we're doing that again today. In this episode we're going to be covering almost a million years of prehistory. We're going to be tracking, we're going to be covering almost a million years of prehistory.

We're going to be tracking, we're going to be looking at the latest archaeological and scientific research of humans in what is now the island of Britain and tracing what we know so far about these first Britons who came to this part of the world hundreds of thousands of years ago. Sit down and relax, because this is an absolutely enthralling chat. We have got back on the podcast for this major topic, the First Britons, the one, the only, Professor Chris Stringer. He works currently at the Natural History Museum. The name may well ring a bell because he was on the Ancients podcast earlier this year to talk all about the origins of Homo sapiens. And in this podcast episode, I went down to his house and we had a lovely chat for 40 minutes or so

all about the first Britons. We cover hundreds of thousands of years of history and Chris explains all about what the most recent research is revealing about humans in this area of the world. It also links in nicely with a lovely exhibition that they currently have on at the Natural History Museum which also tells the story of the First Britons as we also highlight in this episode today. But that's enough from me. Without further ado, to talk

all about the First Britons, hundreds of thousands of years of history, here's Chris. Chris, it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast today. It's a pleasure to be with you again. Now, last time, the origins of Homo sapiens, incredibly popular topic. And this one, similarly so, the story of the first Britons. This is an incredibly long several, well not millennia, but several hundreds of thousands of years, isn't it? It's a story of climates, and it's also a story of different human species coming to these shores too. That's right, yes. And the story in the last 20 years or so, you know, we really extended the timescale. So 20 years ago, I would have said to you that probably humans got here maybe 500,000 years ago,

and it was probably the species Homo heidelbergensis. Now we've nearly doubled that timescale to close, certainly to about 900,000 years. And that was probably a more primitive and earlier human species. And we're not even sure which one yet because we don't have the bones yet. So that's very exciting. So it feels like we're gonna be learning more and more in the years ahead too.

So what sorts of evidence do we therefore have for this early human activity in the area of Britain? Yes, so for the earliest evidence we go to East Anglia to Norfolk and on the coast of Norfolk, of course a place of great coastal erosion. So cliffs there are being washed into the sea, but sediments are being exposed all the time. And these contain evidence of plants and animals and, if we're lucky, human activity. Some of it's 500,000 years old, but we've even established at Hayesborough that there's activity around 900,000. And so these cliffs, some of them were deposited by an ice age, a massive ice age, about 450,000 years ago. So this ice sheet, which reached right down through East Anglia, it pushed sediments in front of it like a giant bulldozer, and then it deposited them where it stopped. So in East Anglia, there

are these huge cliffs of debris from that ice advance 450,000 years ago. So you know that anything underneath there has got to be more than 450,000 years old. So you know that anything underneath there has got to be more than 450,000 years old. So there are various occupations which go back beyond that date. But at Hayesborough, the site we call Hayesborough 3, we found sediments of a river that was going out towards the North Sea at that time. And alongside that river, humans were living. So we have their stone tools, we have elements of butchery, of cut marks on bones, and we're even lucky enough to find some footprints of the people that were there about 900,000 years ago. Sadly, those footprints appeared briefly in 2013. They were in the intertidal zone, so the sea was going over them twice a day. By the time we reached them, they

already were eroding, and we weren't able to save the floor because the sea was destroying it. But we were able to record them and establish that, indeed, there were a group of humans alongside that river 900,000 years ago. It's fascinating, that footprint discovery, which we'll delve more into in a second. But just to kind of more set the scene, because we also mentioned how this is a story of climates as well in the story of the first Britons. So 900,000 years ago, almost a million years ago, what did Britain look like at this time? Should we be thinking of an island or something very different? Yeah, so at that time Britain was joined to the rest of Europe and there was a land bridge across the southeast of England so there's a huge ridge of chalk joining us across to France. So where the White Cliffs of Dover are now, that was actually land joining us to France and Belgium. So animals, humans, plants migrated across, of course, into Britain.

And we know that the climate varied greatly. So at times it was extremely cold. At times it was as warm or even warmer than today. And this is something we see over the last one million years, because there's been this cycle of ice ages. So the big picture of these changes is that about every hundred thousand years, there's a major switch of climate from warm, like the present day, to extremely cold. And we know those big changes are controlled by the position of the Earth in space. So the Earth is not in a constant position in relation to the Sun as it goes around the Sun. So we know that the larger planets that lie outside us, Jupiter and Saturn in particular,

when they're lined up, they sort of distort the orbits of the smaller planets that are closer to the Sun. So our orbit at times goes from nearly circular, which means you have even, relatively even temperatures through the year, to being much more elliptical. And that means that sometimes of the year, you'll be much further away from the sun than other times. So that runs on about a hundred thousand year cycle. And that's really the dominant cycle in the last 700,000 years. About every hundred thousand years, you have a major ice age and a major warm stage. And then against that, there are also these other cycles, shorter ones. So the Earth's axis is not totally vertical. It tilts slightly. And that tilt varies on a cycle of about every 40,000 years. So you get greater or lesser seasonality. And then

there's a 20,000 or so year cycle because the Earth's axis actually wobbles as well. It's like a spinning top and that varies about every 20,000 years. So these three cycles running together, sometimes they push the Earth to extreme cold, sometimes they push it to very warm, and then often it's in between. So you get these really quite complex fluctuations and that's dominated the climate of the world and of Britain because we're affected greatly by the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean. So when the Atlantic Ocean is relatively warm next to Britain, as it is now, we've got the Gulf Stream coming up to keep us warm from more tropical, subtropical regions. So we have mild winters, even though we're at the same latitude as Labrador. We don't have frozen seas. We don't

have snow on the ground for months. We have mild winters. But that wasn't always so. Sometimes that Gulf Stream switches off, and then the Atlantic is much colder, and the British Isles are much colder. So that's what we see. And when we look at Haysborough 900,000 years ago, or thereabouts, we can't place it precisely, there are two warm stages, relatively warm stages, either side of 900,000 years. And we think the Haysborough human occupation lies in one of those. But it wasn't as warm as today. The interesting thing is that the climate was more like southern Scandinavia. We have coniferous forests and we have animals which indicate cooler conditions, small mammals, for example. So the interesting thing is people were there even then,

900,000 years ago or thereabouts, these people were coping with winters that were colder than the present day. And we don't know how they were doing that. Were they wearing clothing? Did they have the use of fire? Were they physiologically adapted? Maybe they had more layers of fat and their body shape was different. So they were coping with really quite challenging conditions. And they were living on the edge of the inhabited world. Britain really was at the edge of this world habitation at the time, which range we know from Africa across Europe and Asia, across to Southeast Asia. So this area was one of the most challenging and coldest areas that we have humans in from 900,000 years ago. Which makes it all the more interesting to really delve into now. I mean, okay then,

Which makes it all the more interesting to really delve into now. I mean, OK then, Chris, let's keep on these footprints. The earliest current evidence we have for humans in the area of Britain. Do we have any idea from these footprints, if we don't have the bones, what type of human they were? Yeah, we can't unfortunately be sure. The footprints are fairly close in size to our own. It looks like a mixed group of people, adults and children, apparently walking alongside this river estuary,

which incredibly was the River Thames at that time. Now, that's another amazing thing is that this big ice sheet that I mentioned about 450,000 years ago, up to that time, the River Thames was flying much further north across East Anglia towards the North Sea. And this ice sheet the North Sea. And this ice sheet pushed it south. And so at the Haysborough time, 900,000 years ago, this was the River Thames flowing across East Anglia. And these people were living alongside it. So we don't know the species. We can say that it was about our size in body size. And we have to

go to other areas to look at the fossil record and the options are that over in the far east we have this species homo erectus around in places like china so it might have been homo erectus but closer to home there's a species in spain known at about 850 000 years ago from the site of atapuerca and that species has been called homo antisessor, pioneer man. So we've got fossils just from one locality at Hatapuerca, and it's a slightly more evolved, derived species compared with Homo erectus, but making still basic stone tools. And so we have similar sorts of tools at Hayesborough. So our guess is it's probably Homo antisessor, but until we find the bones, we won't know. Interesting. So what sorts of tools, tools therefore were found alongside these footprints very simple so these are tools of flint lovely

black flint very good raw material and they were just making simple stone tools and making sharp cutting surfaces that they were using to butcher animals and they were no doubt collecting plant resources as well so these were hunted together theyers living off the land. There are plenty of mammals around at the time and some interesting ones. You've got giant beaver, much bigger than the present species, so-called giant beaver. A weird sort of elk with really huge ornate antlers. You've got primitive hyenas. You've got mammoths, which at that time were not the woolly mammoths that we know much later on. These were distant ancestors of those mammoths 900,000 years ago. So a whole variety of wild animals. It would have been a dangerous place. You've got lions, you've got hyenas, you've got bears, you've got primitive

wolves and so on around. So not a very safe place to be for humans. It's so, so interesting and so many questions still abound. I mean, from looking at other sites, let's say Atapuerca or elsewhere, do we therefore know anything else? Do we have any potential other snippets as to what life was like for these first humans in the area of Britain? Well, not a great deal, of course, because for Britain, certainly the evidence is sparse. But yes, when we go to Atapuerca, we can see evidence of the technology and it's relatively simple. Just recently, there's been the suggestion of the evidence of fire and cooking from about 800,000 years ago in a site in Israel, Geshe Benet Yaakov, where they were apparently baking fish about 800,000 years ago. So it's

possible there was fire at the Haysborough sites. But of course, we don't know where these people were living. What we've got is the locations where they were alongside the river. And the river has formed the mud sediments that preserve the stone tools and preserve the footprints. We don't know where they were actually living. If we had their home bases preserved, then we, of course, would be in a better position to look at how they were living. Did they possibly have fire? What were their adaptations? Did they build shelters to shelter in windbreaks? You would guess so. But of course, if they were making those of wood and skin, all evidence, of course, has disappeared in the intervening years. Well, do you think, therefore, in the future that we will find more evidence from a site like Hayesborough because of the soil, the preservation, the nature of the

soil, and so on and so forth? Do you think it's likely that we will find out more about these very, very early, perhaps first humans in Britain from that area of Britain? Yes, yes, I think it's likely. And even now, the incredible thing is that footprints are still being uncovered at Hayesborough. So there are a team of local people who go and walk the beaches and map the sediments because the cliffs are receding at a very fast rate. And so these deposits are being exposed and buried all the time. So stone tools are turning up, footprints turn up now and again. And yes, we will get lucky again. There will be some more substantial exposures. And yes,

who knows, there may be evidence. And of course, I'm hoping there'll be some fossil remains to tell us what these people look like. I mean, Chris, I love the story of the footprints, whether it's in Britain or America, White Sands, or in Tibet with the hand and the footprints there, the highlands of Tibet. It's a fascinating type of evidence, rare type of evidence that survives, isn't it? But it must be extraordinary to find that type of evidence for specialists like yourself. Yes, yes. And in fact, the team who found the footprints, because they weren't even looking for them. So we had a team of people up there who were taking cores into the sediment to help date it and look at the environmental changes. And they noticed these depressions right in the intertidal area. And some of them

had worked on footprints in other places like South Wales. And they contacted my colleague Nick Ashton at the British Museum and said, well, we think we've found some footprints of Haysborough. And he just, well, I laughed at it. When we heard it, we'd say, you idiots, they can't be. But when we saw them, they really were remarkable. And some of them clearly were footprints. There's no doubt. As I say, it was an assemblage of footprints of a number of different individuals, not just one. And children potentially too.

And young individuals there too. Well, we've got to move on though in the story. So from Haysborough, roughly 900,000 years ago, how much further forward do we go in time, Chris, until we see the next evidence of humans in the area of Britain, deep in prehistory? Well, staying in East Anglia, we have another evidence of human occupation just from stone tools at Pakefield, which is in Suffolk. So just again on the coast, you've got cliffs there, and we were able to uncover stone tools there. Again, there are animal bones with cut marks and so on. So this is an occupation in a warmer period, a climate more like the Mediterranean. So compared with Haysborough III, with those earliest occupations where there are cooler winters,

this one was by contrast much warmer, a much more Mediterranean environment, probably with maybe hot, dry summers and warmer, wetter winters. So that occupation, brief glimpse of it at 700,000 years. And then we move on to brief signals of occupation at about 600,000 years, such as at Faldwich, where there are hand axe tools. And these are, we can come on to discuss their importance. And then really significant evidence when we get to about 500,000 years at Boxgrove in West Sussex, where we've not only got these lovely hand axe tools, hundreds of them excavated there, but also the first physical evidence of humans in the form of a couple of incisor teeth and a shinbone.

Well, go on then, Chris. Let's keep the story going. The first actual evidence for the humans themselves. Talk to me about these couple of teeth and this shin bone and what they've potentially revealed. Yeah, so these were found in excavations in the 1990s led by Mark Roberts and colleagues. And they've uncovered fantastic evidence of human excavation. And here you really do have direct evidence of the behaviour.

You've got places where people knelt down and made hand axe tools. And you've got the scatter of flint flakes, which they people knelt down and made hand axe tools, and you've got the scatter of flint flakes, which they left behind when they made the hand axe. And then they're taking these hand axes, so they're getting flint out of the chalk cliffs there, they're napping the blocks of flint down to make hand axes, they're then using them to butcher animals. So we've got butchered horses, deer, even rhinoceroses. And that's an incredible thing that, you know, you've got rhinos there with butchery marks on them. And these are very dangerous animals. So how were these humans nearly 500,000 years ago securing the meat of rhinos?

We've got an example on exhibition at the museum now in our human evolution exhibition of a rhinoceros skull that's clearly been broken open to get the brain out. So this is the kind of evidence we've got from Boxgrove. And yes, we've got these two incisor teeth. They're lower incisors. They belong to a single individual. And they're not huge. They're not very primitive. And then we've got a shin bone, very robustly built from a slightly higher level in the stratigraphy at the site. Both of these date from around 480,000 years ago, just again in the downturn of a warm stage then. So probably slightly cooler than the present day again, not as cold probably as Haysborough 3, but certainly cooling down. And we've got humans there, quite substantial evidence of an occupation there in a coastal area. The sea was a little bit further

north at that time, and it was cutting into chalk cliffs at Boxgrove. The sea level fell, and you've then got a coastal area with marshes and wetlands. And the humans were in there exploiting plants and animals from that time. How interesting. Does Britain still feel to be this distant edge of the occupied human world at this time? Yes, yes. So this was, again, Britain was still at this time joined to the rest of Europe. So these humans could come and go across that land bridge. And yes, it looks like they were doing pretty well there at the time. But it didn't last because this severe ice age was coming, probably the most severe one we know about for the last 1 million years. And that probably cleaned everyone out of Britain. So those Boxgrove people

just disappeared. They either died out if they tried to stay, or they managed to escape across that land bridge and survive further south. We've hinted at a great ice age. We will come to that. But I want to keep a bit more on Boxgrove, because it's such a great story, isn't it? Nearby modern-day Chichester, the city of my birth, incredible place. But the story of Boxgrove, you mentioned that the time, some 500,000 years ago, it's a slightly cooler climate than the time of Haysborough, 400,000 years before that. So in regards to fire and warmth, do we have any evidence from Boxgrove that they were controlling fire at this time, that they had that resource available to keep warm in that climate? Yeah, unfortunately, we don't have the evidence,

because again, we don't have the sites where they were living. So if we had their home bases, if they had fire, that's where you'd most likely find it. So unfortunately, we lack that. We do have evidence at about 400,000 years, which we'll come onto a bit later for some evidence of definite use of fire in Britain. But at this time, no evidence of it. They could have had it. But of course, there could have been a stage when people were able to capture natural fires. So maybe a wildfire breaks out and they're able to capture the fire and keep it alive. But perhaps early on, they didn't have the ability to make fire at will. But it's quite possible that by 400,000 years, they did have that ability. Unfortunately for Boxgrove, at 480,000 or so, we don't have that evidence. Now, Boxgrove, you mentioned that we

don't have the settlements of these people, these humans, 500,000 years ago. But does Boxgrove seem to be this important centre, almost a manufacturing centre? Is this a Paleolithic axe factory in one sense? Well, yes, it was a Paleolithic axe factory. And it's very profuse, as I say. I think about 400 of these beautifully made hand axes. And we know they're very effective puttery tools. So they're kind of often called the Swiss Army penknife of the Paleolithic. So they've got a cutting edge. They've got a blunt end for hammering. They've got a point for some of them for boring into things.

So they would have been very useful tools. But it seems that they were able to knock one up in 10 or 15 minutes. So they made them on the spot, they used them, and then they discarded them. So many of the hand axes of boxrovers are still beautifully fresh. They've hardly got a mark on them. But we know from the animal bones that they were certainly using them to butcher and break up thick animal bones to get the marrow out. As I say, extracting the brains from some of these skulls of rhinos, for example, and getting plenty of meat off the carcasses of things like horse

and deer. But again, they were doing this in a very dangerous landscape. This is a landscape where you've got lions, hyenas, wolves, bears, you know, birds of prey would have been trying to come down as well. So these humans would have been competing on that landscape for these resources. And for those rhinos, we don't know how they killed them, if they killed them. Did they happen upon a dead rhino? But if they did, we know from the butchery marks that they were able to secure primary access to that carcass. So the cut marks are there first, and then afterwards, you may see the gnawing marks of a hyena or a wolf. So the humans have primary access.

And that probably means that while some people were butchering those animals, other people were keeping the competition away, the hyenas and things, and keeping a watch out for the competition. So yeah, it's a remarkable story of human capabilities 480,000 years ago. How they're working as a community, as a society, where everyone has their job, whether it's the hunting or the butchering or the crafting or whatever, potentially fending away other predators. Did you say that birds of prey, are they potentially targeting humans

while we're talking about the carcasses? No, I think obviously they're going to be going down for the carcasses too. Yes, yes. And there would have been vultures and eagles and things like that could have been around, and they will be after that carcass as well. So yeah, as you've implied there, yes, this implies larger groups and cooperation. And you might have groups of probably 20 or 30 people around these carcasses. So it's a cooperative for even a family activity. The

kids would have been there too if it was a relatively safe location. And so that also brings us on to the question of communication. And I think that, as many others have said, that the complexity of life and the complexity of behavior at Box Row suggests that these people probably did have some kind of primitive language, at least. I'm sure they were talking to each other. It might have been a simple form of language, but I think given the complexity of their lives, it had probably evolved by then. Hi there.

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Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. The origins of language and this around homo erectus and all that is a fascinating one, which we'll have to talk about in another podcast episode. That's another incredible rabbit hole to go down. But keeping on Boxgrove a bit longer, because you mentioned how we have the bones of the humans themselves, a couple of small bones about them. What have these bones therefore revealed, suggested?

I know it's a complicated story now about what type of human these people were. Well, when the bones were found in the 1990s, we had a much simpler view of human evolution and there was less fossil evidence around to compare them with. So we allocated those bones to Homo heidelbergensis, and that's a species which is known from Europe from around the same time period. So there's a jawbone from Germany, from near Heidelberg, Homo heidelbergensis, and that jawbone then was thought to be about 500,000 years old. So of course we thought, well great, we've got Boxgrove around 500,000 years, what we've got here are probably more bones of this species, Homo heidabagensis. And if we now fast forward another 30 years, we've got a lot more finds in Europe showing a lot more diversity.

And we've got these wonderful finds from the Sima de los Huesos at Atapueca, the pit of the bones. And it's called that because there's just an enormous sample of fossils down there. Over 6,000 human fossils have been found deep in this cave system. And they seem to represent primitive Neanderthals. So you've got skeletons of probably 29 individuals down there. And so you've got lots of incisor teeth. You've got lots of leg bones. So we can use that sample, which dates from about 430,000 years ago,

to compare with the ones from Boxgrove. And so we recently did a study where we made those comparisons. So we compared the Boxgrove incisors with 22 incisors from the Cima and they were very similar. We couldn't really tell them apart. So certainly the Boxgrove incisors could belong in that Cima population at Atapueca, which in fact is early Neanderthal in terms of its morphology and in terms of even its DNA, because there are little bits of DNA from the Sema people that show they're on the Neanderthal lineage. But the leg bone, by comparison, it's extremely robust, very strongly built. Some of the ones from Atapuerca, but the shape of the bone was different.

And in a way, it looks a bit more primitive than the ones from the Sema. So they show changes which already are tending in a Neanderthal direction, if you like. Neanderthals have got some particular features in their leg bones and they're there in the SEMA people. We don't find them in Boxgrove. So this suggests a more complicated scenario because I mentioned that the Boxgrove fossils were not found in the same level.

They weren't found together. So they don't represent a single individual. But if they represent a single population, then that population in its combination of features was different from SEMA. However, the other possibility, which we can't exclude, is that even at Boxgrove, we've got two separate samples. We've got some incisor teeth, which are like the SEMA ones and kind of might be early Neanderthals, but the leg bone is different. And who knows, perhaps that does, after all, represent Homo heidelbergensis. But the trouble is you're comparing a shin bone from Britain with a jaw bone from Germany. And of course, what we need desperately is more material from this period of time, about 500,000 to 600,000

years ago in Europe. So this is a great example of the sorts of evidence you have available. But as you say, there is a limited amount of it at the minute. But it's fascinating to think that potentially, I know it's only one of the theories, potentially a site like Boxgrove could have been important for two different human groups at different times who are living in this area of the world. That's right. Yes. We don't know how much time separates them. It could be a few hundred years, it could be a few thousand years, but we don't necessarily know they're the same people. Our first guess is it was the same people, in which case we can say they are different and a bit more primitive than the SEMA people. And they're maybe 50,000 years earlier. And we have this cold stage in between, of course, as I've

mentioned, that the Boxgrove people, of course, vanish. And when Britain's repopulated, it is repopulated by a different group of people. Well, let's go on to that now. So what happens next? We talked about Boxgrove. We've hinted at it very much there. So what's this great catastrophe? And then the revival that occurs in ancient Britain at that time. Yes.

So this huge ice sheet covers most of Britain. And we think everyone died, you know, died out at that time. I mean, there may have been occasions when people crept across in the warm summers. But overall, as far as we know, for a long period of time, there were no people in Britain. And they were surviving in Europe. And then when people come back, we find evidence of two different stone tool industries in Britain. So there's the handaxe makers. And they're making similar sorts of tools to the ones that the Boxer people were making. But in the beginnings of the warm stage that starts around 420, 430,000 years ago, at the beginning of that stage, there were these industries called Claptonian. And these are flake tools. We don't find any hand axes.

We just find flake tools. And so the intriguing question is, is this the hand axe makers who, for some reason, aren't making hand axes? They're just making these flake tools at the sites we found them? Or is this actually a different group of people? And the first group of people into Britain after that cold stage are actually, if you like, the Clectonian people, and we don't have their bones. But when we come to the hand axe makers, and a site like Swanscombe, which is in Kent, just not far from Dartford, at Swanscombe, you've got huge gravel deposits of the River Thames. At Swanscombe, you've got huge gravel deposits of the River Thames there. And in those deposits, you've got tens of thousands of these hand axes have been found and many bones of animals and luckily enough, three bits of a human.

So at Swanscombe, at the site, you've got first of all, Clactonian occupation at the beginning of that warm stage. And then maybe 20,000 years years later you've got the hand axe makers and the back of a skull the Swanscombe skull so-called it's probably a female individual and what's interesting is it's quite derived in its features it does not look like Homo heidabergensis or Homo erectus the back of the skull is quite rounded got a modern sized brain in there and it looks really like the people from the SEMA it's got a little-sized brain in there, and it looks really like the people from the SEMA. It's got a little depression in the back called a supra-iniac fossa, and we find that in Neanderthals, and it's there in the SEMA people as well. So our guess is that the Swanscombe woman was an early Neanderthal like the SEMA people, who are just a little bit older than her in Spain. So the early Neanderthals

are now in Britain making hand axe tools at around 400,000 years. And I mentioned already the evidence of fire. And if we go back to East Anglia, in Suffolk, there are sites such as Beaches Pit, where you have evidence of what seem to be hearths from this period of time, about 400,000 years ago. Now you mentioned Clacton, you might know where I'm going to be going with this, but do we therefore have evidence of weaponry for this group of humans, these early Neanderthals too? Well, yes, this would be the Clactonian. So it's earlier than the definite Neanderthal like Swanscombe people and the hand axe makers. So for the Clactonian, yes, we've got a wooden spear incredibly preserved in deposits which were kept moist for 400,000 years at Clacton. And these deposits expose the end of a wooden spear,

and we've got that on show in the exhibition at the museum. It's made of yew wood. It's nicely pointed. It was dead straight when it was found, and unfortunately in the intervening 100 years or so, it's got bent as it's dried out. If we were brave enough, we'd make it damp, and maybe it would go straight again,

but we're not going to do that. So it's a beautiful piece of what we think now is weaponry. And we know from sites 100,000 years younger in Germany that there are beautiful wooden spears from this time period. So these people were very capable craftsmen, and it shows us what we're missing of the evidence, because this wood technology, which was probably very important, pretty well all evidence of it has vanished, apart from these few traces. And for people you mentioned so hunting warfare post this great ice age are they hunting different sorts of creatures do we think from the animal bones that we have surviving compared to what people were hunting before at the time of box growth

well i think people are going to take whatever they can from the landscape in terms of food and so at swanscombe it's a really nice warm period even slightly warmer than the present day Well, I think people are going to take whatever they can from the landscape in terms of food. And so at Swanscombe, it's a really nice warm period, even slightly warmer than the present day. So you've got a really rich fauna. You've got deer and you've got elephants and you've got rhinos. So plenty to eat. You've got small game, of course. And so the people at Swanscombe were butchering deer there. There were even possibly signs of footprints, which unfortunately, again, disappeared, but they were seen in the muds at Swanscombe briefly. And so these people, yes, they were hunting deer alongside the banks of the River Thames about 400,000 years ago. And perhaps they too had wooden spears alongside their hand axe making abilities.

Is there therefore anything else from this time before we move even further on from the limited evidence that we have first of the Clactonian people I love that you call them Clactonian people and then these proto or potential Neanderthals from the surviving evidence is there anything else that we can really suggest about who these people were or how they lived at that time? Not a great deal, except as we say, the appearance of fire, controlled use of fire seems to be there from several sites. So that is a big advance because once you've got fire, okay, you've got protection from wild animals, you've got extra light in the evenings and that fire becomes a social focus. People sit around that fire and maybe tell stories and plan what they're going to do the next day. So this would have been a catalyst for social change, for developing language probably as well. So yes, the evidence of fire at 400,000 is a big step forward. And of course, there's cooking as well. So we know that

at times they were cooking foods and that will obviously soften foods, make them more digestible. It will kill pathogens. But interestingly, we know later on the Neanderthals have the use of fire, but often they still let raw meat. So there are different preferences. Well, there you go. And last thing on this, Chris, Britain at this time, it's still not an island. It's still connected to the rest of Europe. That's right. Yes. The picture seems to be that the connection is still there, but it's more tenuous. So what we can do is we can compare the animal bones in Britain, the species we find in Britain, with the ones in Europe. And what we can do is we can compare the animal bones in Britain, the species we find

in Britain, with the ones in Europe. And what we find is that from this period, 400,000 year onwards, we start to find some selectivity. There are some species that we don't find in Britain that are present in Europe. So it's possible that we get a filter beginning to operate. The land bridge is narrower. At times, it must be very tenuous. And certainly, by the time we're at 125,000 years ago, that land bridge had been severed, and Britain was an island. And that could have been even an intermittent picture, that this land bridge that existed was slowly being eroded and cut through. We're getting the beginning of the formation of the English Channel. And it probably happened in several stages, but Britain is beginning to be more isolated. We're talking about stages and talking

about this eroding, therefore, of this land bridge as we move the story on. And as we've already kind of talked about in this podcast, the story of the first Britons, it's not a continual line. It's people then disappearing, then people coming, then them dying after disappearing again. We've now got to the time of these Neanderthals, but as the land bridge is eroding, so 200,000 to 100,000 years ago, there's another great disappearance again, is there? Yes, that's right. So in fact, this is the story right through the British pattern, that we can probably map 10 different occupations of Britain through that 900,000 year period, at least 10. And nine of them were at least disappeared. In a sense, they were unsuccessful. Those people vanished and Britain

had to be repopulated. So we're in the 10th of these, and that's a minimum number. We may well be able to map more of them. And so it is a story of comings and goings and probably at least four human species represented. So we've got Homo sapiens at the end of the story. we've got the Neanderthals for several hundred thousand years, we've probably got Homo hydrobigensis represented, and then whoever is at Hayesborough, you know, Homo intercessor or some other species. So at least four human species. So it's an incredibly complex story, much more complex than I would have told you 20 years ago. Really complex indeed. And what's so interesting about the particular disappearances that say post the period we've just been talking about because from what we were talking about just before we started our podcast episode it seems quite unusual that people disappear at this time.

Yeah so we get to this warm stage about 125,000 years ago when it really is warm and this interglacial period has high sea levels and we see a distinctive fauna in Britain compared with Europe. So we've got a selected group of animals. There are some that are here and some that are not here. So, for example, we don't find at this period any horses in Britain so far. But we do find a rich fauna of large mammals. We've got elephants. We've got rhinos.

We've even got hippopotamus. And the incredible thing, these hippos were swimming around the British coasts. And we even find them up in caves in Yorkshire. So their remains are up in Yorkshire. So they're swimming up the rivers. They're swimming in the River Thames. There's an argument about whether hippos really swim, but they're floating in the River Thames anyway. And the incredible thing is that excavations in Trafalgar Square for building foundations found remains of lions and hyenas and, yes, hippos.

So hippos were swimming around the Thames, where Trafalgar Square is today. That's such a great fact. But the incredible thing is there's not a single stone tool associated with this hippopotamus fauna. So this is a well-known fauna from a number of sites, got it in caves and open sites. There's not a single stone tool. There's not a single bit of cut marks on any of the bones from this warm period.

So we suspect that humans weren't here at that warmest stage. Whether the land bridge was just cut so rapidly that only some animals got across and humans weren't part of it, just as horses didn't come across, humans didn't make it across either. So the Neanderthals, we know they were in Western Europe. We've got their remains from sites in Western France. So at that time, they were around. But we don't find them in Britain at this time And we've even searched back in the museum collections in case we missed evidence

We excavated one new site from this time period very carefully not a trace of human activity So it is a great mystery and it takes a while it seems for humans to come back So when do we think that humans do return, that they come back? Well, they're certainly back by about 60,000 years ago, because we've got this wonderful site in Norfolk called Linford, where there are a number of small hand axes, the type that we find with Neanderthals elsewhere in Europe and Britain, and they're in amongst mammoth bones. So we've got remains of maybe 10 mammoths at this site, with lymph from 60,000 years ago, a really cold open environment. Humans are there, the Neanderthals are there. And we don't know if they were butchering these mammoths, how they were doing it. So did they actually kill the

mammoths or did they happen upon some mammoths that maybe had died in the winter and were defrosting out of a glacial lake? And they probably wouldn't have turned their nose up at defrosting mammoth meat so they could have been exploiting already dead carcasses we don't know but again little evidence at this time of how these Neanderthals were surviving in such an environment we guess they had cold survival clothing we guess they had fire but we don't have the evidence of their living sites at Linford but certainly these lovely little stone hand axes are amongst these mammoth bones. So people are back 60,000 years ago.

They may well have been back earlier, but we can't date any of those earlier occupations very precisely. They were around on the island of Jersey, which at that time was linked into France at these times of low sea level. And I should have said that, obviously, with these ice caps coming and going, they locked up large amounts of water when they were growing. And when they melted, they released large amounts of water. So at times the sea level was even higher than the present day. So 125,000 years ago, some estimates put the sea level at five meters higher. And at times the sea level sank 125 meters globally. So Britain was then firmly joined to the rest of Europe

because the sea level fell completely. And you had Australia and New Guinea joined together. You had, of course, North America and Asia joined together by land bridges. So great changes in geography as well. And so that also affected humans' ability. So after that very high sea level 125,000 years ago, we get a strong reconnection and the emergence of this area called Doggerland where the North Sea is today you've got a huge area that was habitable by animals and by humans. The enigmatic mysterious Doggerland which in itself is worthy of another podcast now 60,000 years that's normally the date put on when humans reach Australia as well so I guess that makes sense if it's connected to Papua New Guinea at that time. But Chris, therefore, so we've got these

Neanderthals here. We've got these stone tools at this time. When do we therefore see our next type of human reaching? When is the dawn of Homo sapiens in Britain? Yeah, so we think it was around 40,000 years ago. So we've evidence from Europe that Homo sapiens had arrived at least 45,000 years ago. In fact, there's a site in southern France dated at 54,000 years. So the evidence in Britain, though, is that the Neanderthals were here until probably at least 45,000 years ago. Then we've got a kind of shady period when there are industries that are known as transitional or initial upper Paleolithic industries. And we don't have firm evidence of who was making them. Was it the last Neanderthals or was it the first Homo sapiens? But certainly we have the Aurignacian industries, and these date

to around 40,000 years ago. And that seems to mark the arrival properly of Homo sapiens. We can't map whether Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were coexisting in Britain, but they certainly were coexisting for a few thousand years in Europe. But on Jersey, we've got a very interesting sample of teeth. They were thought to be Neanderthal. We restudied them recently, and we find that they show actual mixed features, some Neanderthal features and some features we find in Homo sapiens. So that's an intriguing sample, less than 48,000 years old. It might even be a sample with mixed Neanderthal Homo sapiens. So that's an intriguing sample, less than 48,000 years old.

It might even be a sample with mixed Neanderthal Homo sapiens heritage. Jersey is a fascinating place, isn't it, for the story? I guess maybe the story of the First Britons, but just in this whole deep prehistory story, isn't it? Because you've got so much incredible archaeology surviving from that particular island about these things tens, hundreds of thousands of years ago. That's right. Yes, Jersey has extensive occupation from this cold stage around 150 to 200 thousand years ago. There are huge piles of mammoth and woolly rhino bones in a site like Côte d'Etsambrelade. And this shows that humans were there long-term in really quite a cold stage.

And that's of course when it was joined on to mainland France. And then about just less than 50,000 years ago, we've got humans represented by these teeth. They could be Neanderthal, but they might actually be a more interesting sample of mixed heritage Neanderthal Homo sapiens. Well, there you go. Slight tangent on Jersey there.

But just before we completely wrap up, we now have the arrival of Homo sapiens. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Is there an evolution in the types of tools that we're using? Can we see a clear

change in the types of tools that Homo sapiens had? Yes, so with Homo sapiens we see a much greater variety of stone tool technology, much greater use of materials like bone and antler and ivory. Now these materials were around, of course, these early humans, but they didn't make much use of them until we get to Homo sapiens. So Neanderthals did make some use of them, but it moves up to another level with the Homo sapiens occupations with the Aurignacian and then the succeeding stone tool industries, which we call the Gravettian and the Seleutrian and the Magdalenian. We see major changes through here. We get the appearance of representational art. Of course, in Europe, we've got cave paintings. We actually have engravings

on the wall at Creswell Crags from around 14,000 years ago of Ice Age animals and even humans represented there. And at a site like Goff's Cave in Cheddar in Somerset, we've got this evidence of what seems to be cannibalism. Well, it is cannibalism, pretty definitely. You've got human bones that have been cut and butchered, similarly to animal bones. And these were left in the cave about 15,000 years ago. So we had the peak of the last ice age about 20,000 years ago, Britain again, empty of people. And then when

people come back, they're making this industry called the Magdalenian. And we've just published DNA evidence of these people, that they are linked with the Magdalenian people in Europe. And even then, in this period between about 15,000 and 13,000 years ago, we probably even have a replacement within Homo sapiens. The Magdalenian people are replaced by another group of people with distinctive DNA. Interesting. And do we know, therefore, what these... I know there are various different groups of Homo sapiens, therefore. Do we know what they looked like at all?

Well, we've got skeletons, of course, from Europe. From Goff's Cave, we've got these broken up bones from these people that were cannibalised. And they're very like us. They're more robustly built. Their teeth are a bit bigger. They're more strongly built. Their body proportions are a bit different. They're a bit heavier build.

I mean, they're living in quite demanding conditions still. And what's interesting, I didn't mention it, they may well have had domestic dogs by this time. So we get to 15,000 years ago, and there's some evidence that even dogs may have been domesticated at this time, even including in Britain. And then we get one last blip of cold called the Younger Dryas. Again, that made clean people out in Britain about 13,000 years ago. And then from about 11,700 years ago ago we're into our present warm stage. Homo sapiens comes back. We've got cheddar man, that famous skeleton from cheddar cave, dated around 10,000 years ago. We've got his whole genome as well. And people then are in Britain to stay. Not necessarily exactly the same people because even then we know from DNA there were a series of replacements of

these populations as waves of people were coming across. But after about 6,000 or 7,000 years ago, they're coming across water to get to Britain. Because Britain, after 10,000 years, we get the progressive rise of sea level and Britain becomes an island again. Well, Chris, this has been a fascinating crash course in the story of the first Britons. And the intermittent story, these various waves of humans, different humans coming into Britain. It's a fascinating episode, big episode in pre-history. It also sounds like very exciting for the future with new scientific advancements and more excavations, more archaeological discoveries. It seems like we've got so much more to learn, but that these discoveries, they will come. Absolutely. And there are sites under excavation now, which I'm sure are going to

provide a lot more exciting evidence. And of course, as a paleontologist, as someone who studies the bones and teeth, I'm very hopeful. It's about time we found some more fossil humans in Britain, and I'm sure they're going to come. Yes, well, keep us posted indeed. And last but not least, you work at the Natural History Museum and you've hinted at it during the podcast. You've got an exhibition as well which details, tells this great story of the first Britons. That's right, yes. So in there you'll find the evidence of these early occupations, the Hazelfoot footprints are discussed in there, there's a replica of one of the footprints, you've got Boxgrove represented, Swanscombe, we've got the Neanderthals. We've got original Neanderthal fossils in there and discussions of the DNA, including of Cheddar Man.

And alongside the exhibition, Chris, you've also released a big, exciting book on this topic, which is called? Well, in fact, there are a couple of books. So for the big picture of human evolution, there's Our Human Story, which I wrote with my colleague Louise Humphrey. And then we've got a book specifically on the British story, Britain, One Million Years of the Human Story, that I co-authored with my colleague Rob Dennis. And yeah, they cover a lot of what we covered today in more detail. In more detail, absolutely. Absolutely fascinating. Well, Chris, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today. Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it.

Well, there you go. There was Professor chris stringer back on the ancients podcast giving you an overview of what archaeologists what anthropologists what the latest information they have available is about the first britains about the first people coming to this area of the world i hope you enjoyed the episode. It was a pleasure to get Chris back on the podcast and for such a massive topic. Now, last thing from me, Christmas is just around the corner. So on one level, I just also want to say

thank you so much for all of your support this year. It's been an absolute joy to do this podcast and long may it continue. It's definitely one of, if not the highlight of my job at History Hit. And it's definitely one of if not the highlight of my job at history hit and it's wonderful to have seen the wonderful reaction to the ancients over the past 12 months and have worked with a brilliant team to keep working with a brilliant team such as our senior producer elena guthrie our assistant producer really the the glue who keeps it all together

annie colo and of course our brilliant editors such as aiden lonigan anisha deva and tom dinas all of whom put in so much work week in week out to make sure that we are able to keep feeding the ancients beast all i do is the easy stuff i just chat they are the ones who do all the hard work so my heartfelt thanks to all of them i wish you all a very merry christmas and a happy new year and you know if you're in that festive christmas mood then maybe one that you can do now before you log off the big fat smile on your face is you could leave us a lovely rating on apple podcasts on spotify wherever you get your podcast from as we venture towards 2023 and a whole new season of the ancients i've been tristan

hughes and that's enough rambling on from me and i'll see you in 2023