styles of flint-working start to change in the Upper Palaeolithic and subsequent Mesolithic periods surely reflects the hotting up of social evolution that was predicted in the last chapter. It must also reflect increasing opportunities for contacts between different groups, and perhaps too a gradually increasing population. Certainly a warming climate after the cold Loch Lomond sub-phase would have helped, but that was only part of the picture. It was human beings, not the climate or some other external stimulus, who were the main engines of change.
The most important innovation of Upper Palaeolithic flint-working technology was the widespread adoption of tools fashioned from blades that had been struck off a larger block of flint, known as a core. In Chapter 1 I described the person or persons who invented this process as a ‘genius’, and I stand by that: it takes a very special way of thinking to turn technology back to front in this way. I can see nothing very clever in inventing the wheel, which seems to me a perfectly logical progression from the log rollers that had always been used to move large timbers and rocks. But to work out how to prepare a specially shaped core that would allow the removal of long, thin, razor-sharp blades – now that took real intelligence.
The style of flint-working found in the warmer times before the cooler Loch Lomond sub-phase is known as Creswellian, after cave finds at Creswell Crags on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire borders. (Incidentally, one of the pleasures of being a specialist in the Palaeolithic must surely be the location of the sites: the Gower Peninsula, Cheddar Gorge, Creswell Crags – all of them gorgeous places that stir the soul.) But the high-quality, fine-textured flint needed for the carefully prepared cores used in making blade-based tools came from further east, where the landscape is softer and far less dramatic. A good example of this is the flint used for Creswellian flake tools found at Gough’s Cave and at contemporary caves in south-west Wales and southern Devon. This occurs naturally in the Vale of Pewsey (Wiltshire), about a hundred miles (160 kilometres) north-east of the Devon findspots.
One of the striking aspects of some Creswellian sites is that in the debris on the cave floors, the early stages of making a flint tool are apparently missing. We saw at Boxgrove how a hand-axe-maker sat on the ground and first removed the outer, cortical or softer parts of the flint nodule. The flakes removed during this initial, roughing out or preparatory, work are known as primary flakes, and they’re easily spotted, as they’re usually very much paler than the other flakes, due to the cortex of soft, weathered flint on their upper surface. But primary flakes are rare, or just don’t occur, on many Creswellian sites. The evidence suggests that first the cores and then the blades were made at the source of the flint, before being carried to the place where they were to be used. Only then were they further modified to be turned into points, piercers, burins (a specialised bone- or antler-scoring tool), knives or scrapers. In conceptual or cognitive terms what we are seeing here is forethought, light years away from the world of the heavy, all-purpose hand-axe.
These smaller tools were clearly intended to carry out specific tasks, and were used by people with much skill and dexterity. It’s apparent from the scratches found on meat bones that the animal carcasses butchered at Gough’s Cave were taken apart expertly and with great economy of effort. Animals such as wild horse and red deer not only gave quantities of meat and bone marrow, but also tongue, brain and doubtless offal too. Their hides were removed to provide warm coats, boots and tent coverings – all essential given the cold climate of the time. Their bones were used to make sewing needles, personal adornments (beads and pendants) and parts of spearheads. Sinew was used for thread, and the animal glue used to fix small flint blades into slots in bone spearheads was boiled up from hooves. Nothing was wasted.
The movement of goods apart from flint, over even longer distances, can also be demonstrated. Among the many other items found there, Gough’s Cave produced pieces of Baltic amber and non-local seashells which may well have come from beaches of the North Sea coast. But in this instance, are we looking at groups meeting other groups who have visited these far-off places, or at a single group (or groups) that was highly mobile and well adapted to travelling very long distances? Taken together, the evidence tends, somewhat unexpectedly, to suggest the latter. Indeed, Roger Jacobi has suggested that certain finds from caves as far apart as Kent’s Cavern (in south Devon) and Robin Hood’s Cave in Creswell Crags (Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire) are so extraordinarily alike that they could have belonged to, or been made by, the same group of people.8 Certainly the distance from Creswell Crags to the North Sea coast would be nothing to a group capable of moving between the north midlands and southern Devon.
It’s interesting that Baltic amber was valued in the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, because in later prehistory, most especially in the Early Bronze Age (around 2000 BC), it was widely traded and was made into some extraordinarily beautiful objects, including a large variety of beads and elaborate multi-stranded necklaces.9 It’s tempting to wonder whether some of the routes whereby this later material found its way to Britain and central parts of mainland Europe were not beginning to emerge as early as late glacial times. But why did people choose to move around in this seemingly restless fashion?
In order to answer this question, one must try to imagine the environment of late glacial Britain during the Creswellian (i.e. between 12,600 and twelve thousand years ago). By this period the Arctic tundra conditions that prevailed after the peak of the last glacial maximum (eighteen thousand years ago) had gradually been replaced by birch woodland. But the climate was already starting to get colder – heading towards the Loch Lomond cold sub-phase – after 12,600 years ago. The main wild animals were horse and red deer, but there were also significant populations of mammoth, wild cattle, elk, wolf, fox, Arctic fox and brown bear. Many of these are animals that move around. The wild horse and red deer, which were the main prey animals, moved through the landscape during the passage of the seasons, and the human population who depended on them would have had to be equally mobile if they were to take advantage of the times, such as when the mares foaled, when their prey was most vulnerable to attack.
Archaeologists often seek to demonstrate seasonality when they suspect that a site was only occupied at a certain time of year. There are many ways of doing this, and it’s much easier to demonstrate when a site was occupied than when it wasn’t. Absence is invariably harder to pin down. Bearing that in mind, a close examination of the eruption and growth patterns of horse and red-deer teeth found at Gough’s Cave suggests that the animals were killed in two seasons: in late winter or spring, and in the summer. This would suggest that the group moved away from the cave in the autumn. Perhaps that was when they went to the North Sea coast.
The final cold period, the Loch Lomond sub-phase, lasted from 10,800 to ten thousand years ago, and thereafter we’re in our own postglacial or Flandrian period, which I’ll cover in the next chapter. It was very cold in Loch Lomond times: there was ice over the Highlands of Scotland, winter sea-ice as far south as Spain, and most of Britain and north-central Europe was tundra. Scandinavia north of Denmark was under ice, and the Baltic Sea was a seasonally frozen-over lake. Along with the cold came dryness, and this suited the development of the particular dwarf grasses, mosses and lichens preferred by animals such as wild horse and reindeer. We must imagine that herds of reindeer migrated across the plain that was later to form the North Sea, between Britain and the continental mainland. Like the Lapps of today, people would have followed behind the herds, taking beasts when the time and place was appropriate. It’s an elegant and rather attractive idea, but what is the evidence to support it?
The old road from Peterborough to Northampton is very familiar to me. It twists its way along the Nene valley, swerving randomly from one side to another. Nowadays a soulless dual carriageway bypasses anything of interest, but that old road went through all the villages and hamlets. One of these was the pleasant village of Earls Barton, which nestled in what was still then the remote peace of the Northamptonshire countryside. It was in a low-lying, flat, tranquil and prosperous landscape, quite unlike the more rugged uplands characteristic of places like Creswell Crags and Cheddar Gorge – the natural habitat, as I once believed, of Late Upper Palaeolithic man.
