Britain’s first settlers called Canterbury home
Discovery of tools dating back 620,000 years suggest ‘prolonged occupation’ of site in Kent
SIX hundred thousand years ago, Britain was often an inhospitable place – miles-thick sheets of ice, freezing temperatures and a dearth of game meant early humans were often only fleeting visitors.
Now, a team led by archaeologists at the University of Cambridge has uncovered evidence that Britain’s earliest human residents lived around what is now the city of Canterbury.
Using infrared- radio fluorescence dating, the team have been able to date stone hand axes found at Fordwich in Kent to 540,000 to 620,000 years ago. The tools would have been made by homo heidelbergensis, a species of archaic human known to have controlled fire and built basic shelters.
Evidence of an earlier human presence in Britain was found in Happisburgh, Norfolk in the form of 800,000-year-old fossilised footprints discovered in 2013, however it is not known if these were only fleeting visits.
The findings at Fordwich, however, are the earliest confirmed tools in the UK. “People were here making these tools, or using these tools longer ago than any other comparable site in Britain,” said Prof David Bridgland of Durham University, a co-author of the study.
The abundance of those tools may suggest prolonged occupation and sizeable populations rather than just a few exploratory groups, researchers say. The discovery of so-called scraping tools used to prepare animal hides, indicates that these early inhabitants thrived. Dr Tomos Proffitt from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, who analysed the tools found at Fordwich, said: “Finding these artefacts may therefore suggest that people during this time were preparing animal hides, possibly for clothing or shelters.”
The site at Fordwich was originally discovered in the 1920s, and a collection of hand axes found then is now in the British Museum. However, the site was then all but forgotten about for decades until Dr Alastair Key and his team began their excavations. With this new information, the Cambridge team claim it “can now begin to take its place among the most important of early Acheulean sites in north-west Europe”. Acheulean refers to Stone Age hominin tools.
There remain plenty of mysteries to be unlocked at the site. Much of the evidence for Stone Age humans is from south of the Thames, where glaciation did not reach and the climate was milder.
However, the presence of tools in Fordwich does not mean that these early humans did not roam elsewhere too. Instead, it may simply indicate that the area was so rich in easily available flint that the hunter-gatherers could afford to ditch their tools.
At a much later site in Norfolk, archaeologists found evidence of humans butchering mammoths stuck in a bog and ditching their tools so as to carry more meat, said Prof Bridgland.
“You wouldn’t do that where flint was scarce, because a sharp-edged cutting tool would be really precious to you. But if flint is plentiful, and you know you can make another one in 20 minutes, you’d carry as much meat as you can carry,” he said.
The findings are published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.