Scenes from Prehistoric Life

by Pryor, Francis;

  Buckland was Dean of Westminster Abbey, a Doctor of Divinity, a leading theologian and Fellow of an Oxford college. He was also an eminent geologist and Fellow of the Royal Society. During a diverse and very unusual career, he revealed one of the first dinosaurs (which he named Megalosaurus) and announced his discovery when he became President of the Geological Society in 1824, the year after he found the Red ‘Lady’. At this point in his life, Buckland was a firm believer in the Biblical Flood, which ended the first process of creation (including Adam and Eve’s Busy Week, as I always think of it), and initiated the geological record. In other words, the geological story of Britain began with the Flood. Everything else had to come later; there was nothing before the Flood.

  The bones in Paviland Cave had been stained red by being sprinkled with ochrea immediately after burial. The body lay in a shallow grave and was accompanied by objects carved from ivory, including two bracelets, two dozen wand-like objects (maybe the rough cuts for beads) and a number of perforated sea shells, which could have fringed a leather cloak or been used in a necklace or earrings. The grave was at the same level as the bones of extinct mammals, such as mammoth, which Buckland believed could not have existed at the same time as humans. So he guessed that the red bones were those of a prostitute who had been buried very, very much later in historical times.

  Buckland seems to have been rather eccentric. My student imagination was caught when I read in a book by my then professor, Glyn Daniel: ‘Buckland was a very strange character and anecdotes about him abound – how he ate the heart of a French king in Sutton Courtenay Church, kept an orang-utang in his rooms at Christ Church [College, Oxford], and prepared for Ruskin’s breakfast “an exquisite toast of mice”.’b This made me smile because the room at Trinity College, Cambridge, where I first read that was directly below the small tower where Lord Byron kept his tame bear. Byron did so because dogs were not allowed in our college. I don’t know what Buckland’s excuse was.

  Like all great thinkers, Buckland’s ideas changed throughout his life.2 He was firmly pro-Flood in 1823, but by the early 1830s his views had changed and he advocated a rather complex sequence of divinely inspired creative events that gave rise to the various animal species. He was later to become friends with Darwin on the latter’s return to Britain, in October 1836, following his five-year voyage aboard the Beagle.3 Meeting with Darwin, and other people of a like mind, caused Buckland to change his views further, and although he never became an evolutionist or indeed an atheist, as Darwin most probably did, he certainly set aside his belief in the Flood and recognized that much of Britain’s most recent geology came about through the action of glaciers. But what are current views about the young man buried in the Goat’s Hole Cave at Paviland? To answer that question, we must return to the rocky shores of the Gower Peninsula.

  The land that borders the southern parts of Cardigan Bay, and especially the two promontories to the west (around Tenby) and east (the Gower Peninsula), is known to be home to about thirty sites of the Upper Palaeolithic, including many caves.4 These lay immediately south of the ice sheets of the Devensian glaciation. I say ‘sheets’ because Ice Age glaciers were not permanent: they came and went, advancing and retreating as the climate changed. These changes can be monitored by taking cores of sediment and rock from lake- and seabed deposits and examining the successive changes in plant pollen they reveal. As anyone with hay fever knows, pollen is present in the air we breathe and some of it eventually falls to the ground, where it can be preserved if conditions – such as wet muds or growing peat – are right. The plants producing pollen reflect the climate of the time: arctic conditions favour miniature tundra species, pines prefer it slightly warmer and oak and ash favour even milder weather. Pollen found with evidence for human occupation shows, not unsurprisingly, that people chose to settle in new areas during warmer interludes, between glaciations.

  Any interpretation of the bones in Paviland Cave must first establish their date. Buckland’s idea that ‘she’ was buried shortly before the Roman conquest was challenged in 1913 when it was argued that the grave had to be contemporary with the material around it on the cave floor. Radiocarbon dates processed after the Second World War suggested that the bones dated to around 18,000 years ago, but archaeologists soon realized that the natural conditions in the cave meant that the bones had been contaminated by more recent carbon. This led to a reassessment, which indicated the bones were much older: 26,000 years old. The latest filtration techniques now suggest a more realistic date of about 30,000 years. These older dates are important because they show that the burial took place during a warmer spell immediately before the final glaciation of the Ice Age.5

  Cartoons like The Flintstones were very funny and in many ways they were accurate, because they portrayed Fred, Wilma and their daughter, Pebbles, as humans who were no different from us. When I first witnessed their antics on television in the late 1960s I laughed a lot, but I also scoffed a lot: having just read archaeology at university. I was aware that their seemingly suburban social life would have been impossible. I ask you: cavemen with next-door neighbours like Barney Rubble? We all knew, or thought we knew, that our prehistoric forebears inhabited solitary, isolated caves in order to cope with the bitter cold and fend off marauding mammoths, wolves and bears.

  The distribution of caves and other sites containing evidence for human occupation in the late Ice Age strongly suggests that people did not live in isolation. And nor did they just inhabit caves. There is also good evidence to suggest that the caves were occupied by bears and other animals when the humans moved away. The young man from Paviland had been placed in the ground with a fair amount of ceremony: apart from being sprinkled with red ochre and buried with fine ornaments, his head was missing and had possibly been deliberately removed. Big stones had been placed at the head and foot of the grave, which was accompanied by the bones of large mammals. The red ochre may have symbolized blood. It has also been shown that the red staining was thinner above than below the waist and almost absent from the toe bones. This suggests that the body probably wore a two-piece outfit, with shoes.6 The grave had also been carefully aligned parallel with the walls of the cave – where there may well have been ceremonial paintings. These rites can be matched right across western Europe and they clearly demonstrate that ritual and religion played a major role in people’s lives. But I have always been intrigued by something else about the place – which might foreshadow what was to happen very much later in prehistory.

  The Goat’s Hole Cave lies high above the beach and can only be safely reached when the tide is out. But in the Upper Palaeolithic this landscape was very different. Sea levels were much lower and a large dry and fertile plain would have extended from what is now the beach out into the Bristol Channel. So the steep edge of the Gower Peninsula would have been a sharply rising escarpment that must have dominated the flat landscape to the south. In later prehistoric times, such prominent features were often chosen as sites for burial mounds, hillforts and other monuments. This was probably because ridges of hills, steep valley sides and escarpments would have seemed very special to people who lived out most of their lives in the fertile plains below. Following the introduction of farming in the Neolithic period, around 4000 BC, these regions were soon occupied by farms, fields and villages. But in earlier times they would have been the lands where most of the wild game roamed and where rivers were slow and deep enough to fish. Farmers, hunters and their families going about their daily business must always have been aware of those hills looking down at them.

  Today, we treat such features in the landscape as things of beauty: they are attractive views, ranging from gently rolling to steeply impressive. In wintertime they can seem threatening or dangerous, but they rarely enter our spiritual or emotional thoughts, except perhaps through poetry. But things would have been very different in prehistory. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that people often considered certain landscape features, such as steep hill
s, springs, cliffs, waterfalls or rivers, as rather magical.7 In broad terms, these remote places were seen as being on the edge of the inhabitable world. Archaeologists use the word ‘liminal’ to describe them.c Beyond the liminal zone lay the realms of the ancestors and the forces of nature that controlled not just the weather, but the passing of the seasons and the rising and setting of the sun. Liminal features in the landscape were often chosen for burials and ceremonial sites. There would have been many complex reasons for this, but essentially it was driven by the belief that they were gaining a measure of control. It was also a way of introducing supernatural forces into the operation and control of human societies. Only important people, from elite clans or families, would have been accorded the honour of burial in such a place as the Goat’s Hole Cave. For all we know, the Red ‘Lady’ may well have been a Palaeolithic prince.

  *

  I have long been fascinated by the idea of ‘views’. The notion of landscape as a source of aesthetic satisfaction is actually quite recent. People almost certainly revered or admired certain features in the landscape, such as the Goat’s Hole Cave high in the cliff at Paviland on the Gower Peninsula. But they would probably not have regarded it as a ‘view’, nor one that was particularly beautiful. All of that was to come much later, probably in the late sixteenth century with the arrival in Britain of landscape artists from the Netherlands. The term ‘landscape’, which derives from the contemporary Dutch term ‘landscap’, meaning a painter’s view, first appears in English in the early seventeenth century.8 So how did prehistoric people regard their surroundings, if not as landscapes? And the answer to that is very complex. Indeed, I’m not at all sure we will ever be able to answer it completely.

  Recent research is starting to provide us with some interesting and unexpected insights into the way ancient communities thought about and regarded the landscape. What I still find surprising is that the relevant sites and finds are very early. Many date to the Mesolithic, the era of post-Ice Age hunter-gatherers. It used to be thought that there was very little continuity between the resident British population of hunter-gatherers and the farmers who came over to Britain at the start of the Neolithic period, around 4000 BC. But we can now appreciate that the situation was far more complex and subtle. One good place to think about the Mesolithic is Ireland, an island that was uninhabited before the arrival of the earliest post-glacial hunter-gatherers, just after 8000 BC.9

  We might find it simpler to think about people’s attitudes to their surroundings if we compare what was happening in a single category of site, through time. As we’re thinking about the very beginnings of post-Ice Age prehistory, I thought it would be best if we continued looking at caves because preservation of the most ancient deposits can often be very good. I must also confess I had an ulterior motive, since all the cave sites in Ireland have recently been completely reassessed by the leading prehistorian Marion Dowd.10 Her findings have been unexpected – and highly intriguing.

  It will always be difficult to make meaningful estimates of Mesolithic population levels because the archaeological evidence tends to be quite slight: post-holes for houses are quite shallow and people generally avoided digging large pits, wells or ditches. Later transformations of the landscape have either hidden or destroyed many early sites. In Ireland it was the growth of huge areas of peat across the midlands and in Britain it was the massive intensification of gravel-quarrying and agriculture. Bearing in mind that these are bound to prove underestimates, about 900 find-spots of Irish Mesolithic material are known. These would suggest a Mesolithic Irish population of some 3,000 people – which is roughly the same as a modern small country town.11 Some thirteen cave sites are known to have contained Mesolithic finds. These are spread across the country, from County Antrim in the north to County Cork in the south. As in Britain, Mesolithic burials or finds of human bones are very unusual in Ireland, where just seven are known – and of these, two, roughly a quarter, are in caves. As we know so little about burial practices in the Mesolithic, these two caves are very important. The evidence also suggests that both places were visited repeatedly in Mesolithic times.

  Finds from Killuragh Cave in County Limerick suggest that it was occupied, used or visited for a very long time, roughly from 7000 to 1000 BC.12 At first glance, this cave, which has two low entrances on very rough ground overlooking the Mulkear River, doesn’t look particularly special, or impressive. It’s situated in a limestone area, where numerous caves have been formed by the action of acid rainwater on the alkaline bedrock of streams, both on the surface and underground. Many of the caves around it haven’t yet been investigated. So it isn’t even unique. Yet it was repeatedly visited by prehistoric people for some seven millennia. There must have been a reason for this.

  Archaeologists and prehistorians no longer seek single or one-off answers to explain how or why a particular site came into existence – especially if it then continued to be used or respected. The notion that Stonehenge was simply an astronomical observatory is now seen as ludicrous. But when it was first put forward in the late 1960s it resulted in a bestselling book, which led to many spin-off TV documentaries.d As archaeological ideas go, it was very profitable. As we will discover shortly,e we now take a far broader view, which takes in the complex landscape around the Stones, their journey from Wales to Salisbury Plain and many other factors. The new story is rather like the evolution of the monument itself; it is far from simple and reflects some of the varied and very human motives that led to its construction and frequent subsequent modification. Viewed in this light, Stonehenge has far more in common with a great medieval cathedral than a mere astronomical calculator.

  As is the case with most Irish caves, the initial finds from Killuragh Cave were revealed by farmers, landowners and cavers, but rather unusually they led to two seasons of proper archaeological excavations, in 1993 and 1996. These produced no fewer than 250 human bones, but all of these were loose, individual finds; none were articulated, either as limbs or as complete skeletons. A small sample of these bones was radiocarbon dated. Three of them turned out to be Early Mesolithic (around 6900 BC) and could possibly have come from the same man. The three Late Mesolithic (around 5500 BC) bones were from two adults and one juvenile, but all were of uncertain gender. Four bones were dated to the earlier Neolithic period (around 3600–3500 BC) and these probably came from two individuals. The flat ledge leading into the main entranceway was the scene of a dog burial, beneath a pile of pebbles. One of the dog bones produced a radiocarbon date that closely matches the human ones. Most of the human bones from the Neolithic and Mesolithic period were found close by the main cave entrance and were probably originally deposited on the small ledge just outside (where the dog was buried). We’ll consider the nature of that ‘deposition’ in a moment. But now I want to move forward into the Bronze Age.

  It seems that the way Killuragh Cave was used changed subtly at the very start of the Bronze Age (around 2400 BC). Human bones and other finds of this period were discovered beyond the tight entranceway tunnel, in a small end chamber. They included two Early Bronze Age human bones, which were radiocarbon dated to around 2000 BC; a dog and a pig jawbone were dated to the centuries just before and just after the start of the second millennium BC. A horse breastbone was found deliberately buried in the ground at the far end of the cave; this was slightly more recent, around 1200 BC. Finally, the interior of the cave also revealed nine sherds of Early Bronze Age pottery, belonging to three different urns, dating to around 2000–1500 BC. All these finds had been taken deep into the body of the cave.13

  The second cave known to have produced Mesolithic human remains is very enigmatic: we know it exists, because we have finds from it and detailed notes from the caver who investigated it. We also know its name, Sramore Cave, in County Leitrim, and its approximate location, on the north side of Sramore Mountain.14 The trouble is we can’t actually relocate it, although we know for a fact that it’s there – somewhere. And that, of course, sa
ys something about the nature of the cave: like Killuragh Cave, it’s a bit shy and retiring. It certainly isn’t high profile, prominent or in-your-face. This probably tells us quite a lot about the way these caves were viewed and may help explain how they were used.

  According to the caver’s notes, Sramore Cave is situated high on the mountainside, with panoramic views of the surrounding country, but it has a very restricted entrance (just 1.3 m x 1 m/4 ft x 3 ft), which leads into a narrow passage (0.9 m/3 ft high x 0.6 m/2 ft wide). Some 15 metres (50 ft) along the passage, near the cave’s centre, cavers discovered three human bones from a man: a thigh bone, an upper arm bone and a lower jawbone. Given that the bones represent very different parts of the body, it seems likely that they originally came from a complete skeleton. Conditions in the cave were very cramped indeed. So it could very plausibly be argued that the human bones were carried into the cave as loose bones, maybe wrapped in bags. We just don’t know for certain, because a proper archaeological excavation was impossible. The bones gave radiocarbon dates that showed the man had died shortly before 4000 BC. The earliest current dates for Neolithic farmers in Ireland are about 3850 BC, which is very slightly later than the Sramore Cave body. Having said that, such dates mustn’t be taken too literally and I tend to share Marion Dowd’s view that the man in the cave might well have witnessed the beginnings of farming.15 It’s a tantalizing thought.

  The earliest bones from Killuragh Cave seem to have been deposited on the small platform just outside the entranceway. This rite continued into Neolithic times and probably has something to do with the process of excarnation in which flesh is removed, or is allowed to be removed (usually by carrion crows), from the bones, eventually leaving a clean skeleton. In many tribal societies the removal of the flesh is believed to represent the ascent of the soul into the Next World. In some communities the process of excarnation is seen as being sufficient of itself: the soul has moved to another realm, so the bones themselves cease to be important. This belief may have been current in Iron Age Britain, where loose human bones occur quite commonly on settlements, in pits and dumps filled with household debris and other rubbish. Having said that, many Iron Age communities also cremated their dead and there is abundant evidence for quite elaborate burial rites, especially in the higher echelons of society. Simple explanations rarely work when it comes to the disposal of the dead.