Ancient Sussex #9: Imogen Lycett Green meets Boxgrove Man (well it is the surreal issue)

ROSA: Good morning, Boxgrove Man, I hope I didn’t wake you up.

Boxgrove Man: It’s ok, I’m happy to hear your voice. Buried in chalk for 450,000 years, it’s been, shall we say, quiet.

ROSA: 450,000 years… freak me out! Do you know where you were buried?

BM: Where I lived, I guess, on a chalk cliff.

ROSA: To be exact it was a ridge in West Sussex running east to west – 20 metres high, 20 miles wide – parallel with the coast, eight miles north of Bognor Regis.

BM: We had a great vantage point. When you’re trying to survive in the Stone Age, vantage points are everything. And you could see far and wide, across the marshlands to the sea, abundant game spread out before you.

ROSA: Game?

BM: Well, a man’s gotta eat. There were rhinoceros and lion, bear and wolves and horses, foxes, aurochs, deer, bats. You name it. Talking of names, why am I called Boxgrove Man?

ROSA: We found your tibia buried near a village called Boxgrove, during an archaeological dig conducted by University College London in the 1990s. To be more accurate, you’re an example of Homo heidelbergensis, a human species so called by a German archaeologist who discovered one of your contemporaries in 1907 in Heidelberg. We’re excited, you see, because until we found you, we didn’t know there were any hominids in the British Isles that long ago.

BM: Hominids?

ROSA: You’re a great ape, just like me! But you come from the Middle Pleistocene (781,000 to 126,000 years ago). Homo heidelbergensis is descended from the African Homo erectus, emerging during the first early expansions of hominids out of Africa beginning roughly two million years ago. Homo heidelbergensis is the last common ancestor of modern humans (Homo sapiens, that’s us) and Neanderthals. Two teeth from another Homo heidelbergensis individual were found at Boxgrove two years after you. Also, with you, we found over 250 flint tools.

BM: Tools?

ROSA: Thin oval shaped sharpened flints? Brutal! The archaeologists say thinning may have been produced by striking the hand axe near-perpendicularly with a soft hammer, possible with the invention of prepared platforms for tool making. You used them for butchering animals, no? That’s what we surmised from examining the bones of the roe deer, horse and rhinoceros found near yours in the quarry.

BM: I made some of those tools! Hard work, but it made all the difference. We ate well.

ROSA: Apart from hunt and eat, what did you do?

BM: Procreate, groom each other, avoid predators, make shelters, bring up our young. What do you do all day?

ROSA *thinks long and hard*: Pretty much the same, only with better equipment, and while wearing clothes.

BM: What are clothes?

ROSA: Things we wear to hide ourselves from each other.

BM: But if you want to procreate you need to be naked, so why hide from each other?

ROSA: Not everyone wants to procreate all the time.

BM: Well, I get that, we had seasons. No point bringing young into the world at the beginning of winter. We timed our births with spring.

ROSA: You sound pretty efficient, it’s sad that you died out.

BM: We died OUT???!!! Now you tell me.

ROSA: Homo heidelbergensis became extinct due to ‘sharp, unfavourable changes in the global climate’. The things is, you hadn’t worked out how to make fire, which would have kept you warm during the chilly stretches. You hadn’t invented spears either, which would have enabled you to kill game more efficiently. Don’t worry, the Neanderthals died out too.

BM *ruminates*: So if only we had discovered ‘fire’.

ROSA: Don’t beat yourself up. The early Homo erectus Africans only discovered ignition technology by scavenging from bushfires naturally occurring on the savannah. It wasn’t warm enough or dry enough here for you to jump on that bandwagon. But you were advanced in other ways. You were knappers (tool makers) who used not only stone but also bone and antler to make hammers. We can track your cognitive development by looking at the tools you made. We can also see from your bone density that you were strong. You lived a bruising lifestyle, but you were resourceful, and, importantly, you engaged in organised strategic activity. From studying the Kalahari bushmen, we see it is likely that you worked in groups to exhaust your prey.

BM: That we did. We ran them up river valleys, or off the cliffs if we could.

ROSA: There you go, intelligently using the topology of the land.

BM: It’s all very well telling me how we worked as a group, but what about me, the individual.

ROSA: Using radiometric dating and by comparing you with other Homo heidelbergensis remains from Zambia, Germany, Spain and France and Namibia, for example, we know that you were 5’9” tall and about 40 years old and you weighed 89kg or 14 stone. You were big! Females were around 5’2”. Your contemporaries died variously, from accidents, being eaten by wolves or bears, old age and diseases we are still vulnerable to, like orbital cellulitis causing sepsis.

BM: Could we speak?

ROSA: At that, I can only guess, since we only found your tibia. Some of your contemporaries have a modern humanlike hyoid bone (which supports the tongue), and middle ear bones capable of finely distinguishing frequencies within the range of normal human speech. Nonetheless, these traits do not absolutely prove the existence of language.

BM: This is a lot to take in. I’m going to need another 450,000 years of sleep to process it all.

ROSA: Well, I hope we meet again.

BM: Where will you find me? Is it possible to visit the Boxgrove Quarry any more?

ROSA: Sadly not. The original excavation site is on private land, but we Homo sapiens can read a map and drive our car along the A285 between Halnaker and Duncton which follows the old Roman road known as Stane Street. Look south and we see the view that you saw. If we half shut our eyes the topography is the same, only instead of marshland and wild rhinoceros, there is farmland and domesticated horses. You the individual, however, can be found in the Natural History Museum. I’ll come and visit you there. And I look forward to another discussion!

BM: By which time you might know the answers to some of your questions.

ROSA: Doubtful, but I like your optimism. Sweet dreams, Boxgrove Man.