The conversation had reached a pause. Nick said I could look at the objects if I would like to. He told me not to touch the broken elk bone mattock, which was fragile, but I could handle everything else. He pottered off, the video camera keeping an eye on me.
I began with one of the worked flints from Happisburgh. It was small and black and surprisingly sharp along its cutting edge. I thought of Bob Mutch who saw a little group of human beings sitting down by the edge of a river, napping pebbles into the shape they needed for their purposes and then, once they had done their butchering, moving on and leaving their tools scattered on the mud, alongside the core of stone from which they had taken them, and seven hundred thousand years passed by before another human being picked them up and held them in his hand.
Then to the artefacts from the Mesolithic site of Star Carr. I took out a small plastic bag of the sort that is used by banks when they are weighing loose coins. The bag contained a lozenge-shaped stone about the size of a pumpkin seed. It had a hole drilled into it and so it was a bead that must have hung with other beads on a cord around a neck perhaps. I was nervous to take it out for fear of dropping it, so I simply stared and that was that. I lifted a bone barbed point used for fishing out of its polystyrene bed. I felt the sharpness of its backward-slanting teeth and admired the elegance and fluidity of its line which made it appear like something made by nature, not by man. For a moment I could see the making of it; cutting the barbs, fixing the wooden shaft and then it was hurtling into action and entering the body of a fish that thrashed in the water.
Other things to look at. I made notes. Took photographs. Nick returned and it was time for me to go. He picked up the drawers and I followed him back to the stacks. Before leaving I made a rather awkward request, asking if he could show me the object in the collection that was to him the most interesting, or beautiful. I wasn’t quite sure what I meant by this request, but he didn’t seem to mind and he thought for a moment and then fetched a Neanderthal hand axe. The flint from which it was made was divided into three bands of colour: a softly curdled yellow, mottled grey, then the yellow again with a perfect black disc no bigger than my fingernail in the top corner, like a moon in full eclipse. The stone was the shape of a simple leaf. It fitted into the palm of my hand and there was an energy to it, as if it was waiting for my fingers to close around it and set it to work. It was four hundred thousand years old.
Nick explained that he was startled by the absolute beauty of it and because of that beauty it tells a story about an individual who chose this particular stone, someone who was proud to put something of himself into a functional object. Both sides had been given what is called an S-twist, which has no apparent purpose apart from the fact that it looks good.
The big technological leap for the Neanderthals came around 250,000 years ago, when they started to make wooden hafts. The stone head for a spear or an axe is relatively easy to produce, but to connect it with a different element is a huge challenge. The work involves bending, moistening, creating the mastic for glues, carving the meeting place at one end in order to reach what Nick called the magical turning point which comes from joining one thing with another.
13
1972 and I was sharing a cottage in North Wales with my old school friend Caroline. The cottage had no electricity and the back wall was built into the hill which meant that when it rained, the water seeped through and ran out across the kitchen floor. One cold spring evening we were huddled close to the fire in the sitting room when a slow wave containing a matchbox, a shopping bag, a dishcloth, onion skins and clumps of dust and rubbish drifted in towards us.
I needed to earn some money and I got a job from the husband of a woman whom I hardly knew. He was a writer who had been commissioned to write a book about how to perform conjuring tricks. He had written nothing but he had already spent the advance. He said if I produced a text on his behalf he would give me the second instalment and he mentioned what sounded like a huge sum so I accepted the deal without hesitation. I was sent a heap of books about conjuring tricks and how to do them and I began to put the thing together without pausing to wonder if this project was a good idea. Over the next three months I completed the first draft of a conjurer’s guide to magic with much reference to the term sleight of hand which I liked the sound of.
I posted the manuscript to the publisher who was based in New York and when I had heard nothing from them I went down to the red phone box in the nearby village, clutching a heap of coins. I chose to go in the late afternoon because I knew that would be the morning over there.
After a bit of a delay I got through to someone who said my book made no sense, it could not possibly be used, a lot of time had been wasted and there was certainly going to be no payment. I was startled and upset, but in a curious way I didn’t mind because I had enjoyed the process of learning things about which I knew nothing.
I was reminded of this story when I woke early in the morning with the dawn not yet arrived and me worrying about these journeys in search of Doggerland, trying to learn prehistory hand to mouth as I go along. I told myself that the answer lies in the pleasure of the doing, the pleasure of diving into one’s own uncertainty and finding a way back to the shore and with that I was quietened into a restless sleep.
14
The Mammoth Steppes is the name given to the land in the North Sea Basin that once joined England with the spreading bulk of Europe. It was an icy desert in the winter, but in the summer the area burst into life, the layer of permafrost holding a shallow covering of water which became fertile marshes where grasses and reeds grew and swirls of moss spread out in great lakes of luminous green as bright as neon lights. On slightly higher ground the low shrubs and bushes produced their new foliage and their flowers. Mammoth once congregated here in great numbers before they moved further north. They were replaced by horses and herds of big-hoofed, heavy-coated reindeer that followed the seasons.
This could be a landscape in early autumn sixty thousand years ago, in which case bands of Neanderthals are hunting the reindeer on their annual migration south; it could also be seventeen thousand years ago as Doggerland emerges from under the cloak of ice that has covered it for so long, and now the reindeer hunters belong to the culture known as Magdalenian. To make a final jump in space as well as time: it could also be the Arctic Circle in the 1920s and the people dressed in skins and carrying stone-tipped spears and arrows are the Netsilik Eskimo, hunting the caribou as described in the book that Tim lent me and in a series of documentary films made by the same author. Just by watching these people as they hunt and eat, make clothes from skins and tools from bone and stone, you get an idea of all those who came before them and how they managed to survive and how they understood their connection with the natural world in which they found themselves.
c. 15,000 BP
In the summer the caribou are scattered over vast areas. Two hunters are on the ridge of a hill. They have sighted a small herd moving down through a valley. They run to the end of the valley. They find a place where they can hide and as the animals pass they shoot one or two flint arrows at them.
If the caribou are in an open landscape where there is nowhere to hide, the same two hunters hunch their bodies forward, pull their fur-lined hoods over their heads, hold their bows and sticks upright as if they were antlers and with a drifting, bobbing movement they seem to be grazing, just like all the others. They edge closer and closer to the herd and sometimes an individual caribou approaches out of curiosity or a sense of companionship. When the hunters are in range, they stand up straight and there is just enough time to shoot one or two arrows.
Autumn and the vast herds are beginning their annual migration south. There are hundreds of thousands of them, mostly females and their young: the bulls will follow later. The animals are fat from the summer pastures; their hair is short and thick. A group of hunters gets ready. They build a line of stone cairns on top of
a ridge leading to a lake where the caribou will pass. When the caribou see the cairns they are frightened because they look like a line of standing figures waiting for the moment to attack. Some of the hunters are hiding behind the cairns and they make loud wolf cries, so the animals panic and race towards the lake. Other hunters are lying in wait by the water, hidden behind a barrier of stones they have erected.
The hunters assemble on the lake in their kayaks, close to the crossing place the caribou are bound to use. Women and children are crouching silently along the shore, holding bits of skin. The thundering herd approaches and begins to enter the lake, swimming in the ice-cold water. The men in the kayaks throw their spears. The caribou try to return to the shore but now the women and children are howling and screaming like wolves, waving the bits of skin that look like wolf tails. The caribou return to the lake to escape from the wolves and the men go on throwing their spears. When the hunt is over, each hunter collects the animals he has killed, tying them together by their antlers with a thong, before pulling them ashore. A single hunter can kill up to ten caribou on a day like this. The men use their knives to remove the thick skin from the caribou in one perfect piece. They take great care with the back sinew which can be made into cord for binding and holding and thread for sewing. The women start to work on the skins, spreading them out on the ground to dry, hair side facing down, the edges anchored with little stones. They cut the sinews into narrow strips that are stretched between boulders. The men are butchering the meat. They give the children the eyes to eat. Everyone is very hungry; they gorge themselves on lumps of raw meat as they work. They talk and laugh a lot from the excitement of what has just happened and from the presence of so much food. A chattering of voices and little cries. The bigger bones are smashed in order to reach the rich marrow, and the sticky green contents of the stomach are scooped out and eaten as a delicacy. The women cut the excess of meat into flat strips that they hang to dry on long lines in front of fires made from heather. The remains of the carcasses are hidden under heavy stones where they cannot be reached by scavengers.
While their parents are busy, the children pick arctic berries and check the snares to see if they have caught any gulls. A child can play for hours with a snared gull attached to a thread of sinew.
When they are ready to leave their autumn encampment, the people roll up the raw dried skins. A family of four needs at least thirty caribou for clothing and for sleeping under. The skins of polar bears and musk ox are too heavy to wear, but are good as mattresses. Bear skins attract lice and so a piece is always kept as a louse trap.
If fine soft inner garments are to be made, then at night in the igloo both the men and the women wrap their naked bodies into the flesh side of the raw skins, before covering themselves with their usual sleeping skins. The direct warmth of the body softens the skins, making them easier to clean with a scraper.
Once it has been scraped, the women soften the hide further by chewing it and moistening it with their saliva. They stretch it on frames and put it outside in the cold so it can freeze for a day or two. The subcutaneous tissue is removed with a sharp scraper and if it needs to be thinned still further, the men do the work of more vigorous scraping. Children’s garments come from very young caribou. The short-haired skin from the caribou legs is good for boots and mittens. The white hair on the skin from the stomach area is used for the decorative details on women’s clothes, as hair decoration and for ritual items used by the shamans.
For outer garments and sleeping bags the method of preparation is less complicated; there is no night warming and the skins are simply scraped, making them snow-proof and easier to dry out when they are wet.
The people also make trousers from fox and wolf; they make containers for wick moss from dried duck skins and containers for holding a man’s small working tools from the skin of char. Ringed seal is used for summer coats and trousers and for covering kayaks; bearded seal is used for the waterproof boots that are needed during the wet season of the summer months. These summer boots must have all the hair scraped from them: a woman spreads the cold wet skin over her bare thigh as she removes the hair with a sharp moon-shaped knife. The skin is softened by chewing before it is sewn. Seal skin is also used for tent sheets, sled runners, oil and water containers, packs and snow shovels, dog shoes and dog whips, harness lines and harpoon lines, ropes and fish-drying racks. Needles are made from the wing bones of birds and from the strong bones of polar bears that cannot be split and have to be thinned and sharpened with an adze and various knives.
The tools and weapons the Neanderthals made were less complex but they had fire and they made shelters and must have had some sort of needle to stitch their garments and footwear. I have been reading about how the people who first arrived in Doggerland used to lower reindeer carcasses into fast-flowing rivers, fixing them to boulders with thongs, and in that way the meat was kept fresh and safe from scavengers.*
* Based on The Netsilik Eskimo by Asen Balikci, 1970; At the Caribou Crossing Place, RAI film directed by Quentin Brown, with Asen Balikci, 1967.
15
In 1975 I was living in Amsterdam where I met my first husband. We settled in England and had children and were together for more than twenty years and I was again zigzagging back and forth between two countries. In Holland we would often go to a wooden house perched like a nesting bird among the sand dunes on an island that looked out across the North Sea towards Suffolk. The coastline there was in many ways very similar to the coastline here, giving the sense that they were part of a single land mass and the separation was accidental and would not last for long.
When the marriage got into difficulties, I would sometimes sit on the beach and if the moon was full, it cast a broad path across the water as far as the horizon, making it look easy to walk to the other side. During the day when the sea was calm and with the peculiar soupy greyness that comes from the silt of so many rivers flowing into it, the great stretch of water in front of me could appear as solid as the earth’s surface, and then I felt all I needed to do was to find the courage to run.
I never picked up anything of interest on the dunes; only white shells that were good for turning into mobiles for babies and the exoskeletons of tiny sea urchins that broke too easily between your fingers. But further along the coast where the Rhine enters the sea at Rotterdam, I might have found old bones as heavy as stone, or even a stone turned into a tool, a horn turned into a weapon. I was told quite recently that there are more remains of mammoth on the bed of the North Sea than anywhere else in the world, apart from Siberia. They are there alongside the other lost creatures from the land or from the ocean; all of them adapting or departing, or dying out as the climate shifted from cold to hot to cold again.
I was telling my Amsterdam friend Sandra about Doggerland and how it had changed and changed again over the millennia. I got to know Sandra in 1975 when we shared a house and used to write rather odd and mostly unpublished articles together: an interview with the reptile keeper at the Amsterdam zoo; a series of conversations with the men and women who stood guard in museums. Sandra said I should meet a fisherman called Klaas Post. She had interviewed him for a documentary film about Urk, which had been an island until the land around it was reclaimed in the twentieth century. She had noticed heaps of big old bones in a yard outside his storeroom, black and very smelly, and when she asked what they were, he said they were mostly mammoth, but the conversation went no further.
Sandra told me about the people of Urk. As islanders, they had been a very remote and very religious community, members of the Dutch Reformed Church which demanded an absolute belief in the authority of the Bible. Fishing was their way of life and in the late nineteenth century they adopted the new boom-trawling method. Long weighted nets were dragged across the sea floor, gathering every living thing that lay there: plaice and sole and other bottom feeders, starfish, crabs and lobsters, all hauled into the air in a muddled he
ap of desperation. But what also came up in the nets was the bulky presence of the skeletal remains of huge beasts: curling ivory tusks as long as a fishing boat; stone-heavy skulls no one could identify; leg bones as big as a man. The fishermen hated the bones, partly because they caused bruising to the fish, but also because they didn’t belong anywhere on the list of God’s Creation. Some said the creatures had been drowned four thousand years ago when Noah’s Flood was rising, in which case the fact they did not survive meant they were not wanted in the world because they were the work of the Devil. Others simply found them too strange and too threatening even to contemplate. They broke the bones in pieces if they could and threw them back where they had come from.
Klaas’s family were religious, but not as strict in their beliefs as many of their neighbours; his grandfather used to dry his nets on the antlers of a giant deer much bigger than any deer you could imagine and this was proof of his free-thinking nature. When he was sixteen Klaas was on a fishing trip with his father and his uncle and they hauled up a mammoth tusk in the nets. He found it beautiful and wanted to keep it but his uncle threw the tusk overboard.
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