EARLY BRITAIN

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 112, 7 November 1935, Page 25

EARLY BRITAIN

LIFE IN THE STONE AGE

THE FIRST INHABITANTS

NORTHWARD MOVE

Who were the earliest inhabitants of Britain? From North Africa southwards to Cape Colony, eastwards to India, and northwards through Spain and France to Britain we can trace the implements of early hunters, flint blocks with edges and points made sharp by knocking off flakes that often seem to have been little valued, writes Professor H. J. Fleure in the "Manchester Guardian." Unfortunately we have only the Swanscombe skull fragment to tell what manner of men made the hand-axes, but many are so beautifully made that they muct be the work of a being with aesthetic appreciation and power; they cannot have been made by sub-humans.

Contemporary with the men who made hand-axes from flint and chert in the regions named were others, quite possibly sub-human after the fashion of the Neanderthal race, so called, who used flint chips of the roughest kind. No doubt both human and sub-human people made use of wood, and the bone implement found at Piltdown is an indication of very early use of that material. The early users of rough flint flakes appear to have been scattered over the Eurasian land mass north and north-east of the

area in which chipped flint blocks or cores were at any rate an important' part of man's equipment. STILL DEBATED. It is natural and inevitable that the earliest core implements should remain in dispute. Benjamin Harrison found pieces of chipped flintMn the plateau gravels on the North Downs. From their situation they are thought to be of immense antiquity, humanly speaking, for these gravels were apparently laid down at a time when the chalk was still continuous from the North to the South Downs and the surface was still under shallow water, at least at times. How far thesa "eoliths" are of human workmanship and how far they are naturally chipped pebbles we cannot tell. Research, in which Mr. J. Reid Moir has been a bold pioneer against strong criticism, has pushed back the dawn of human (or subhuman tool-using) life in East Anglia, and critics have been won over to some extent. Professor Breuil has laid special stress on flint-flake implements from Clacton, Essex, which are considered to be broadly contemporary with the flint-core or hand-axe implements so widely found in the gravels of our river terraces—that is, in old river banks now left at higher levels because the valleys have since been cut deeper. It is indeed likely that on the borders of the two greater areas that we may call Eurasian and Eur-afro-indian there were many contacts and exchanges of ideas leading to great "advances that distinguish the later part of the Old Stone Age, with its artists and its manifold specialisations, from earlier times. the ice march. Those earlier times witnessed, ad- i vances and retreats of ice sheets over large areas, the. ice centres being the Scandinavian, Scottish, Welsh, Alpine and other highland areas. In the mild,

sometimes warm, periods when the ice | had retreated man spread northward and reached Britain; in the rigorous phases he probably retreated and may i have' had to leave even the south of the country, though the ice'sheets, did not. cover that region. In the earlier tii. es just discussed the types of implements were few and fairly standardised; tradition was obviously strong;" arid individuality, albeit evident in workmanship, found little scope in anything that has been left for pur study., ■, In the later part of the Old. Stone Age matters are very different. Flakes are shaped for use as borers, gravers, kniver, scrapers of several kinds, and not seldom different parts of a flint were chipped to serve different purposes. Moreover, men must soon have .acquired the idea of hafting their implements in wood/ and thereby got greatly increased power. Different regions show diverse developments of. fashion. Men lived often in cave-shelters, as at Cresswell Crags, in the Mendips, and at Paviland. in South Wales. They were spreading northwards, following the last, major retreat of the ice, hunting the : great beasts which roamed' over the cool grasslands of Europe and v Britain. They prized bone and reindeer horn and made carvings on these surfaces as well as on the roc!?, and on the latter' they. painted in colour, using chiefly ochre and carbon. The evidence of progress is clear, but it did not lead on, in Western Europe, to later civilisation. THE FORESTS. An. important change supervened. The ice sheets were diminishing, so the cold,' heavy air which had overlain them no longer kept out the ocean winds: the v/sterly winds and cyclones blew into Western Europe, bringing rain that helped forests to grow in place of grasslands.. And, while it was still cold, the forests were of pine.

and therefore very, unfriendly to men' • and to most,beasts.. Man in WesternEurope retreated from the - forest! either to collect limpets^ and winkle*, cockles and mussels by;the seashore, I or' to make what He could of exposed 1 uplands and other 6ites that for'various reasons-remained'more or leu forest" free: The; abundance of wood led men to use the art of halting more x taan ever, and one fihSs the flints be- ' coming smaller, so 3iat they are often called "pigmy - implements." Many - finds of them have been described by March, Woodheadi Petch, and other*' from the Pennine Moors, typically from sites one thousand or more feet above sea. But neither these findi nor those from the middens of the shore can be .exactly dated,'because. thU " mode of life continued for perhaps some thousands 'of years. In North Africa and South-west Asia late in the Old Stone Age the migration of the ocean winds and cyclones -northwards left a great area dry in winter as. well as in summer" and forced out the hunters. But in those regions they found the Nile and the' Euphrates and other perennial riven with their regular floods, and on the flooded ground grew grasses that could be tended and improved into cereals, while the date palm coud be turned to profit. Cultivation vwas begun, • dairying and herding followed, new arts such as stonergrinding arid metallurgy were developed. Civilisation ■ had begun; its arts spread piecemeal, some, like stone-grinding, more quickly, others, such as metallurgy, more slowly. Eventually these' arts, reached Britain, .that of grinding and polishing stone perhaps a century or two ahead of that of metallurgy, so " we" had a short "neolithic" phase introductory to the age' of copper and bronze. ' These events constitute the beginnings of our Western civilisation at some date tliat was not very far removed from 2SOO B.C.