that if one dressed an early hominid, such as Homo rudolfensis (named after a site near Lake Rudolf in Kenya), in a suit and tie, and gave him a shave and a haircut he would, as the old saying goes, probably frighten the children, but not necessarily the horses, should he then decide to take a stroll along Oxford Street. His gait and facial appearance would certainly attract strange looks from those too ill-bred to conceal them; but such frightened sidelong glances aside, he might just be able to complete his shopping unmolested. His appearance in modern clothes would not be as undignified and inappropriate, for example, as that of those poor chimpanzees who until very recently were used to advertise teabags; he was no Frankenstein’s monster. He died out less than two million years ago, and his place was immediately taken by other hominids, including the remarkable Homo erectus, a late form of whose bones were found at a site in Italy dating to a mere 700,000 years ago.4 If Homo erectus took a stroll along Oxford Street, his appearance would attract far less attention than Homo rudolfensis, even if his size and stature would cause most men to step respectfully aside.
When I was a student, the descent of man (people were less twitchy then about using ‘man’ to mean ‘mankind’) was seen as essentially a smooth course, with one branch leading naturally to another. More recently it has become clear that the development actually happened in a more disjointed fashion, with many more false starts and wrong turnings along the way. We now realise that our roots don’t mimic those of a dock or a dandelion, with a single strong central taproot, but are more like those of grasses and shrubs, with many separate strands of greater or lesser length.
The dating of these early bones and the rocks in which they are found depends on various scientific techniques, but not on radiocarbon – more about which later – which is ineffective on samples over about forty thousand years old. Palaeolithic archaeology relies more on the dating of geological deposits, or the contexts in which finds are made, than in dating the finds themselves, as is frequently the case in later prehistory. This often means that dates are established by a number of different, unrelated routes, and that in turn leads to a degree of independence and robustness. So it is possible to say, for example, that early hominids had begun to move out of Africa and into parts of Asia about 1.8 million years ago. When did they move into Europe? That is a very vexed question, involving many hotly disputed sites, dates and theories. But it is probably safe to suggest that man appeared in Mediterranean Europe somewhere around 800,000 years ago, but did not reach northern Europe and the place that was later to become the British Isles until just over half a million years ago.
The most probable reason why there was so long a delay is relatively simple, and has to do with the European climate, which was far less hospitable than that of Africa. It has been suggested that wild animals may have acted as another disincentive, but I find that less plausible: why should European animals have been so very much more fierce than those of Africa? We should also bear in mind that conditions in Europe are less favourable to the survival of archaeological sites than are those in Africa. There is more flowing water around – rivers ceaselessly wear away at their banks; there is a disproportionately larger coastline; and of course there are vastly more people, whose towns, roads and farmlands must have buried or destroyed many Palaeolithic sites. And these very early sites aren’t easy to spot. Unlike the settlements of later prehistory, there’s no pottery, and stone tools are both remarkably rare and easily overlooked, having frequently been stained earthy colours because of their great age. All this suggests that it’s not entirely impossible that the million-year ‘gap’ between the original move out of Africa and the subsequent colonisation of Europe may be more apparent than real.
As the term Old Stone Age implies, stone was the main material from which tools were made. Having said that, there is evidence for wooden spears, and bone was certainly used and fashioned. But for present purposes I want to concentrate on stone, and particularly on flint. Most of the flint found in northern Europe formed in the geological Upper Cretaceous Period (one hundred to sixty-four million years ago), usually at the same time as the chalk. When it formed, the chalk was a deep, lime-rich mud on the seabed. In it are countless fossils, including the bones of marine dinosaurs, but more often one finds straight and spiral shells of squid-like creatures, which must have been extraordinarily abundant. Flint is found in the chalk both as nodules, which are often rounded and knobbly (to my mind they closely resemble Henry Moore sculptures), and as a near-continuous tabular deposit which was mined in later prehistory at places such as Grimes Graves in Norfolk (see Chapter 6). It is also frequently found in much later Ice Age gravels, which are composed of stones that have been worn down from much earlier rocks, including the chalk. It’s probably fair to say that most prehistoric flint tools in Britain were made from flint pebbles found in gravel deposits at or close to the surface.
The stone tools used by the earliest people in Africa were fashioned from flakes and pebbles, and were probably used as choppers to break bones and to sever tendons to remove the meat. They are simple but effective, with a series of sharp cutting edges which were formed by removing flakes of flint from one side of a rounded pebble, using a hard stone as a hammer. The part of the pebble that was to be gripped when it was in use was left smooth and unworked. They may have been simple tools, but they weren’t that simple: if I were to ask an educated modern person with no experience of such things to make one, I strongly suspect that he or she would fail. For a start, the stone-toolmaker must know how to select the right sort of stone for both the tool and the hammer. If the stone for the tool isn’t flint, it should be as fine-grained as possible. The hammer should be hard, but not brittle; plainly, it should be resilient too. It’s also important to check that the stone to be used for the tool isn’t run through with hidden planes of weakness, perhaps caused by heat, compression or severe Ice Age frost, as these will cause it to disintegrate when struck even a light blow.
Now we come to the process of removing flakes. Again, this is far from straightforward. Put yourself in the toolmaker’s position: in one hand is a rounded, fist-sized pebble, and in the other is a hammerstone of similar size. Both are rounded, with no obvious points, bumps or protuberances. So how do you knock a flake off? A hard hit at the centre will either achieve nothing, or will simply break the stone in half. A softer blow around the edge will just glance off, rather like a bullet striking the rounded edges of a Sherman tank. I know that first blow is far from straightforward, because I’ve delivered it many times myself. I’ve spent hours and hours trying to perfect and then replicate its force and angle. It’s not easy to detach those all-important initial flakes cleanly. After that, it gets a little less difficult, because the removal of the first flakes leaves behind ridges, which make better targets and result in larger flakes that are simpler to remove.
Flint-working – or knapping, to use the correct term – is an art, a craft.5 Even the crudest of pebble chopping-tools require considerable skill to make. Tools of this, the earliest tradition of flint-working, are remarkably similar from one site to another, which would suggest that the people who made them told each other about good sources of potential raw material, and passed on technological improvements as they happened. Alternatively, perhaps they communicated by example. Either way, the communication took place, which is all that really matters, because these tools were not only extraordinarily effective, they were important.
To my mind there is a vast divide between our earliest hominid ancestors and the closest of our African great ape cousins, the chimp and the bonobo.6 It is true that apes can learn to use and even fashion tools; it is also true, as I have noted, that we arose from a common genetic stock. But the widespread adoption of something as complex as a stone-using technology could only have been accomplished by creatures who were both physically adaptive and who possessed mental capabilities that bear comparison with our own. Make no mistake, the earliest tool-using hominids were almost fully human: cross-bred ape-men they were not.
Pebble choppers were the main component of the earliest tool-using groups, but around 1.6 million years ago a new style of tool began to appear in Africa. Very soon it would be the tool
