Chris Stringer
HOMO BRITANNICUS
The incredible story of human life in Britain
319pp. Allen Lane. £25.
0 713 99795 8
Patrick Wise Jackson
THE CHRONOLOGERS’ QUEST
The search for the age of the Earth
310pp. Cambridge University Press. £19.99 (US $30).
0 521 81332 8
Edwin Danson
WEIGHING THE WORLD
The quest to measure the Earth
302pp. Oxford University Press. £17.99 (US $29.95).
0 195 18169 7
Hard as several recent authors have tried, it is not easy to tell an
“incredible story” about the Earth’s physical dimensions – mass, length or
time. What is incredible, in the preferred but rather odd sense of that
word, is what is hard to square with accepted belief, and few of us have any
opinion at all as to the age of the world, or the mass and dimensions of the
Earth. When it comes to the subject of life, however, the added dimension in
Chris Stringer’s new book, Homo Britannicus, most of us can conjure up an
image of our ancestors, whether it is based on Bryan Sykes’s The Seven
Daughters of Eve, starring mitochondrial DNA, or One Million Years BC,
starring Raquel Welch. Stringer has chosen to focus on “the incredible story
of human life in Britain”; and British life means British weather.
We know how seriously our politicians take that taxing problem, the fickle
nature of the world’s climate and its implications for our future. If
Henrietta Marshall were to be writing Our Island Story today, pressured to
remind us that climate shaped the history of the human race in the past, she
would doubtless be turning her clock back to a time long before the Romans
taught us how to say “homo britannicus”, to a time before mention of the
British Isles was banned in Ireland, indeed to a time when Britain was
joined by land to the Continent. Stringer opens his book with a graphic
description fully worthy of that schoolroom classic of a century ago. He
pictures a family in a parched landscape, eating with their fingers the
still warm brain of a newly killed baby hippo. Lions and wolves are near at
hand, and elephants can be heard crashing through the forest. Such was life
in rural Pakefield (Suffolk) some 700,000 years ago, and no earlier evidence
is presently known from any other place in northern Europe. As for the
eating habits of homo brit., there would be much worse to come.
Stringer’s is a beautifully illustrated book that makes accessible the work of
his research group of thirty archaeologists, palaeontologists and
geologists, whose aim is “to reconstruct the most detailed calendar of human
presence and absence in Britain yet achieved, using the latest techniques of
scientific investigation”. Stringer works at two distinct levels. He puts
across the findings of his group with clarity and authority, and he is a
showman. Working as he does in the Natural History Museum, it comes as
second nature to him to take a full-sized replica of a woolly mammoth with
him on lecture tours. They have been seen together at literature festivals
in Cheltenham, Woodstock and Ilkley, and more recently in Trafalgar Square –
which is to exotic animals what Berkeley Square is to nightingales, judging
also by the number of tell-tale bones that have been found in the vicinity.
(Appropriately enough, the tusk of a hippo was found during digging for the
foundations of Uganda House.) It is the message, however, not the medium,
that really counts, and here Stringer, by aiming at as complete a history as
possible, puts us well and truly in our place. Human absence is as important
to his story as human presence. Climate change has meant that while there
were tropical periods in which hippos swam in the Thames, there were other
periods when the advancing ice left a terrain fit only for such hardy
mammals as reindeer, mammoths and woolly rhinos. The underlying message is
that our occupancy of these islands cannot be guaranteed for ever.
Stringer’s earliest British inhabitants, those from East Anglia, belonged to a
primitive species using very primitive stone tools. Advancing 200,000 years,
we are introduced to hunter-gatherers from Sussex, strongly built people of
the species Homo heidelbergensis, using more advanced stone tools and living
in a climate much like ours today. These people having been forced to
emigrate or perish by the rapid advent of Britain’s worst ice age about
450,000 years ago, people from other branches of the human tree returned,
but only after an interval of another 50,000 years. Ancestors of the later
Neanderthals, these newcomers were of diverse racial groups,
hunter-gatherers still, enjoying a mild climate. Thanks to massive
excavations connected with the manufacture of Portland cement at Swanscombe
(Kent), more than 100,000 of their stone tools have been found. Yet again an
ice age forced an exodus, and history repeated itself. Reckoning very
approximately, in thousands of years before the present, they left at 380,
returned at 320 and 240, and were forced out again at 200. There was another
ice age at 140. Even after the warming that followed it had run its course,
human beings seem to have kept their distance for a puzzlingly long period,
a period when life went on in neighbouring France and Belgium.
On, next, to evidence from a rich Neanderthal site in Norfolk of renewed
habitation in that part of Britain a mere 60,000 years ago. To speak again
in thousands of years before the present: the Neanderthals perhaps managed
to cling on until 30 – often keeping warm, it seems, by burning bones for
fuel – but then they disappeared for ever. As a peak of climatic severity
gradually approached, the tall and modern-looking Cro-Magnons began to move
in, the people known best today for their cave art in France. Homo sapiens
they may have been, but at 25 the British weather defeated them, and not
until 15 did they return. Their cave art at Creswell Crags in Derbyshire and
their suspected “nutritional cannibalism” in Somerset’s Cheddar Gorge are
memorials to their time here, which lasted until a final purge by ice at 13.
Only from the time of their last return, about 11,500 years ago, has life in
Britain been reasonably continuous, with a climate kind enough to support,
in the course of time, farming and urbanization.
So much for the bare bones of the story. Anthropologists are not afraid to
stretch their canvas back to such remote periods, although few calling
themselves archaeologists do so, and even fewer who think of themselves as
historians, with the consequence that our gestalt view of the past is highly
blinkered. Broaden your canvas to picture ice north of the Thames a mile
thick, and all the fine detail of later world history suddenly seems less
important. Stringer gathers the views of climatologists as to what is in
store for us. Though they cannot agree on whether there will be a
“super-interglacial”, warmer than anything for the past 50 million years, or
a freezing over of the North Atlantic and the continents flanking it, this
is small comfort, since they do appear to agree that change, when it comes,
may be rapid, sweeping away communities in less than a human lifespan.
Politicians should read the relevant chapter of Homo Britannicus carefully,
for it will cut more ice than all that windmill nonsense.
The plan of Stringer’s book has a pleasing symmetry, beginning as it does with
an often told but fascinating sketch of the history of scholarly attitudes
to life on Earth in the earliest of times, and ending with a series of
potted autobiographies by a selected number of colleagues from his research
group. Conveying in this way the excitement of the chase for evidence, then
and now, Stringer shows how the hurdles in the obstacle race have changed.
In 1797, John Frere could delicately suggest that the context of flint
implements he had found deep underground with strange animal bones at Hoxne
(Suffolk) may tempt us to refer them to a remote period, “even beyond that
of the present world”. The intellectual difficulty he faced, one with which
so many wrestled throughout the nineteenth century, and in some quarters
have to face even today, was that of reconciling new discoveries with the
account in Genesis. Frere did not know it, but the tools he had uncovered
were a hundred times as old as most conventional readings of the Bible would
have then allowed. Darwin saw the implications of his theory of evolution
for human origins in the 1830s, twenty years before his Origin of Species.
He kept his thoughts to himself, he said, for want of evidence, and there
were many others who found themselves in the same difficulty, for different
reasons.
Before Darwin, increasing numbers of discoveries of the bones of extinct
animals had been made, more by chance than design. While the strain they put
on the religious academic was great, the response was not stuffily
conservative. The Oxford geologist and palaeontologist the Revd William
Buckland, for example, a member of a now sadly extinct Oxford species, had
strong antediluvial prejudices, but he was determined to form an honest
opinion on what were seemingly tropical bones which he had excavated in a
cave at Kirkdale, in Yorkshire, in the 1820s. He imported a hyena, “Billy”,
from Africa, intending to dissect it for its stomach contents and skeleton,
after it had done its work. The deed was too much. Billy continued to live a
comfortable Oxford life for the next twenty-five years, known to guests as
the family pet that chewed guinea pigs while they dined on other fare.
Scientifically, however, he earned his keep. He was living proof that a
hyena splintered his ox bones in the way fossil bones from Kirkdale had been
splintered.
Buckland is one of many scholars from the heroic age of this subject passing
under Stringer’s review – others include Georges Cuvier, Louis Agassiz and
Charles Lyell – before it is the turn of shadier characters, Neanderthal
Man, Java Man, Heidelberg Man and the rest. Stringer’s account of the
Neanderthal discoveries is especially interesting, since research into them
remained moribund until less than ten years ago, when it suddenly sprang
back to life with a series of DNA tests, showing that Neanderthals had a
population history as long and complex as our own, but an ancestry quite
distinct from ours. Our own shared ancestry is shown by DNA analysis to
begin in Africa, as the fossil evidence had suggested earlier. The later
Cro-Magnons are now seen not to have interbred with the Neanderthals, an
older branch of the human tree that has left no modern trace, according to
most present-day opinion. The Neanderthals have a few aficionados, even so,
determined to claim social virtues for them, and to put an end to their
association with mindless thugs at one extreme and harmless cretins at the
other. It is now widely agreed that, for the past 30,000 years, ours has
been the only living branch of the human tree; but that in the million years
prior to this, there were perhaps half-a-dozen human species around in the
world at any one time.
It seems that at a very remote time we were scavengers – like Billy the hyena
under the Buckland dining table – before we were hunters. Somewhere in our
history, we became distinguished from Billy and all other animals. What is
it that makes us human? It is commonly said – and occasionally denied – that
we are alone in being able to live in the imagination, and able to create
virtual worlds in the mind, helped by language. One can only admire the
courage of those who, like some members of Stringer’s research group,
speculate about primitive language and the sound of the voice, starting from
a study of entirely empty cavities of brain and inner ear. The often highly
speculative character of Stringer’s narrative enhances the excitement of
this kind of chase just as much as his account of the caving, crawling and
rock climbing in which he and his team have to indulge.
Chronology is at the heart of this human story, and those who are aware only
of physical methods of dating, such as those based on radioactive decay, may
be surprised by a few of the alternatives. The vole clock, ticking away over
millennia, depends on a calibration of the evolutionary changes in that
species. Owls play their part, by stacking voles’ bones in convenient piles.
Like an army of conscripts, the science has to take what it can get, as when
temperatures are measured by the species of beetle in fossil deposits, and
as when help in deciding on the evolutionary sequence of hand-axes is
obtained by butchering dead elephants in zoos. This is a science in which
the pendulum of theory often swings erratically, simply because the evidence
is gleaned indirectly with the help of other theories that are unreliable.
This in turn no doubt helps to explain why palaeontology has had more than
its fair share of dishonest practitioners. Stringer’s stories of fakes are
an intrinsic part of his narrative, and readers should not miss his
plausible account of the notorious Piltdown affair, with its part orang-utan
skull and its “cricket bat” bone, its miasma of international rivalry and
avenged academic slights. Stringer’s book, by contrast, is the story of an
academic collaboration of the very best kind.
Chronology extending beyond human affairs to the age of the Earth itself, even
that of the universe, is Patrick Wyse Jackson’s concern in The Chronologers’
Quest, but since Jackson takes a historical approach, human concerns are
unavoidable. They are manifest in biblical chronology, for example, and the
discovery that James “4004 bc” Ussher was on Jackson’s own family tree
apparently helped to inspire him to write his book. Ussher, who makes a
brief appearance in Stringer’s book too, is here treated at considerable
length, and it seems that those from these islands who write on such matters
will forever continue to cite the seventeenth-century Archbishop of Armagh’s
writings on the date of Creation as though they were unique. There were in
fact scores of earlier and later alternative chronologies, some by far
greater scholars. Petavius, arguably the greatest of all, is not even
mentioned by Jackson, but more disturbing is his failure to explain what lay
behind the Christian chronologists’ enterprise. One ambition was to
harmonize as far as possible the chronicles of different nations – Persians,
Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks and the rest – with Holy Writ.
Another important task of the Christian chronologer was to refute all who
considered the world eternal. Jackson actually refers to “Aristotelian
infinity” in a title to one chapter, and yet curiously nowhere mentions
Aristotle’s views. For a brief biography of Hesiod, whom he places a
century-and-a-half too early, he relies without realizing it on the
imaginative Byzantine poet John Tzetzes, who lived eighteen centuries after
Hesiod. In Jackson’s headlong race to cover the beliefs supposedly held
between Ancient Egypt and medieval Iceland, a dozen pages suffice, of which
only a dozen lines cover Indian traditions – important for later cyclical
chronology. Ussher, by contrast, gets eighteen pages. There is more
equilibrium as Jackson races into history’s home straight, where he has
better modern histories on which to draw. On stratigraphy,
uniformitarianism, sedimentation and oceanic salination, he has useful
things to say, though he always has a weakness for discursive irrelevance. A
greater weakness is his failure to do justice to the strong astronomical
component in his material, although some of the works cited in his lengthy
and valuable bibliographical guide – the best part of the book – will
compensate anyone who uses it.
Edwin Danson is the third of our three authors mentioning Ussher: in Weighing
the World, he misrepresents the man’s date for Creation by a day, at which
few will complain. The matter is hardly relevant to his main theme, which is
the shape and mass (not weight) of the Earth, and the series of measurements
by which those things were determined, thus “transforming our understanding
of the world”. As though afraid that such mundane matters will not catch the
imagination of the general reader, Danson opens with a frightful historical
preface owing more to A Tale of Two Cities than to history. “It was an age
of reason; it was an age of enlightenment”; and it was half a dozen other
things before the story can begin – and when it does, it is with chapters
that take us from the ancient world to the seventeenth century by way of a
series of errors and misjudgements. The wonder is that the greater part of
the book should turn out so well.
Danson has an excellent feel for the practicalities of surveying. When
introducing us to those geodetic surveys that provided an important part of
the evidence for the Earth’s shape – rugby ball or squashed orange? – he
also has the makings of a good story. There are famous names: Newton, the
Cassinis and Maupertuis, for example, though not Voltaire; and for the
American market, Mason and Dixon. There are scientific disputes, the
vagaries of travel and exploration in such far-off places as India and Peru,
disease, wars, and yet cooperation between European scientists that could
often bypass military conflict. Towards the end of the book, the relatively
well-known story of Henry Cavendish’s determination of the Earth’s density
in 1798 is recounted. At the heart, however, there is a less familiar story,
illustrating that class of experiments by which the density (and hence mass)
of the Earth is derived from the deflection of a plumb line by the
gravitational attraction of a neighbouring mountain.
The cold, wet, wild and unwelcoming Scottish mountain of Schiehallion is the
most famous actor in this classic textbook drama, directed by the Royal
Society’s ironically named Committee on Attraction. As in all such cases,
the experiment itself was much more complex and tedious than the usual brief
textbook account would lead us to expect. The Revd Nevil Maskelyne,
Astronomer Royal, is usually given the credit, so it is good to learn more
about minor characters such as William Roy, Charles Mason and the irascible
Reuben Burrow, and to be able to follow the activities of Benjamin Franklin,
a member of the Committee on Attraction, at this critical point in his
career. In 1773, Franklin had published his Rules by which a Great Empire
May be Reduced to a Small One. The Privy Council’s behaviour towards him
finally alienated him and – like so many of the species homo britannicus
before him – the climate of the time forced him to leave these shores. In
the end, the Royal Society’s Copley Medal went to Maskelyne, of course, as
leader of the band. And their findings? The Earth’s mean density is at least
twice that at its surface. Is that all? Was all the effort worth it? Those
concerned thought so, for they had jubilantly disproved “the hypothesis of
some naturalists” who thought the Earth to be a great hollow shell. Then,
almost as a tailpiece, came the massive calculations of Charles Hutton, son
of a Newcastle colliery worker, presented in May 1778. He decided on a
figure of 4.5 for the mean specific gravity of the Earth, and rightly
conjectured that the interior of our planet is likely to comprise metals
more than twice as dense. Britons have had their heads on postage stamps for
less. Maskelyne could never quite face up to the fact that he had been
outshone.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
John North's recent books include The Ambassador's Secret, 2001, a study of
Holbein's painting in the National Gallery, and God's Clockmaker: Richard
