MESOLITHIC PERIOD
Our resilient hunter-gatherer ancestors contended with wild animals, tsunamis and the watery separation of Britain from mainland Europe while living lightly off the land,
Mike Pitts delves into deepest prehistory, when our hunter-gatherer forebears lived lightly off the land
When did humans first arrive in Britain? It’s a simple question, but there are several possible answers, depending on what we mean by first. And by Britain. Oh, and by human. Let’s take it backwards.
There has been someone here, without a break, for 11,500 years. For nearly half of that time, until farmers arrived some 6,000 years ago, people lived entirely on their abilities to exploit what we think of as the wild. We call these people Mesolithic. It’s easy to overlook them, sandwiched, as they were, between their mammoth-hunting, cave-painting predecessors in the Ice Ages, and their Neolithic successors, the builders of Stonehenge.
The people of the Mesolithic lived lightly on the land, leaving few monuments and hard-tofind ephemeral houses where we might see them at work. But however they managed it, with refined skills using all the materials available to them, they were very successful for more than 200 generations.
We see our Mesolithic ancestors most clearly at Star Carr in Yorkshire, where a major excavation project was completed this year. On the edge of what was then a lake, huntergatherers built camps on dry land and split great timbers to create walkways across the swamp into open water. Peat preserved these and rare details of their lives: spearheads for hunting red and roe deer, elk, wild boar and cattle (aurochs); sticks for digging up roots; a fishing bow and butchery knives; a wooden paddle, stone beads and little rolls of birch bark for flaming torches.
BACK TO THE ICE AGES
To understand how the landscape of Britain emerged, we have to go back a few million years to the succession of Ice Ages. These periods of intense cold lasted tens of thousands of years at their extreme. Glaciers reached as far south as the Thames and there was little life here at all. Between were long stretches of warm climate, sometimes warmer than today. Plants and animals returned, each time creating different worlds, with some new species and some extinct; larger examples include hippos, elephants, mammoths, lions and rhinos.
Early humans made Britain their off-and-on home nearly a million years ago, whenever the climate allowed. Flint tools – and, astonishingly, footprints, the oldest outside Africa – have been found on the Norfolk coast, left by an unknown species of Homo. Up to 45,000 years ago, the only people in Britain were Neanderthals, until the arrival of modern humans, Homo sapiens. For a few millennia, it’s likely the two of us shared Britain, competing as top predators; genetic evidence is clear that we interbred, and most of us carry Neanderthal genes as a result.
WATERY SEPARATION
Over the millennia, our hunter-gatherers faced not just changing climate and flora and fauna, but also a rising sea. The sea first divided Britain and the continent 450,000 years ago; the connection was remade and broken again as glaciers grew (and sea levels fell) and melted.
When the last Ice Age ended 11,000 years ago, plants, Mesolithic people and animals returned to colonise the former frozen wastes. Grass and scrub appeared and eventually trees: birch, then hazel, then oak, elm and pine, and finally alder, lime and ash. At the time, Britain was joined to mainland Europe and this large area of land where the southern North Sea is now – with a wealth of marsh, rivers and estuaries and the homes of many people – is sometimes referred to as Doggerland. But some 8,000 years ago, it was overwhelmed by mounting waves, as a tsunami hit the east coast from
Kent to Shetland, and soon after, Britain and the continent were separated. In the far north, the ground rose, recently freed of the overpowering weight of ice, exposing new land.
MESOLITHIC CLEARANCES
It would be a mistake to imagine that Mesolithic people never cleared land. Britain never had an unbroken forest in which, to quote an old saw, a squirrel could have run from John O’Groats to Land’s End without touching the ground. From the start, Mesolithic people felled trees and set fires, perhaps to attract game to young growth. Large mammals browsed and trampled; beavers dammed rivers. Along with natural fires and storms, all this would have created a mosaic of vegetation types and open spaces.
But certainly, as the Mesolithic period ended about 6,000 years ago, the landscape took a momentous hit from the newly arrived farmers, which was probably a big factor in our huntergatherers’ demise. One of many new tricks was a tougher and more efficient stone axe to cut down trees. A new era in the British landscape was about to begin...