A groundbreaking display at London's Natural History Museum reveals the humans that occupied Britain for the past million years – and tells their stories
February is proving to be an astonishing month for Britain's ancient humans. First came news of the discovery of the oldest hominin footprints in Europe, by a team including researchers from London's Natural History Museum. Now the NHM has brought together for the first time artefacts drawn from the entire history of early humans in Britain.
Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story is the synthesis of a 13-year project to explore human origins. Among the key artefacts on show is the so-called Swanscombe Man. It is a 400,000-year-old Neanderthal skull from Swanscombe in Kent, which is in fact the skull of a young woman. Also featured is a 500,000-year-old tibia, once part of an early human dubbed Boxgrove Man, as well as the world's oldest spear, at 400,000 years old, from Clacton-on-Sea in Essex.
The exhibition builds on the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain research project, headed by Chris Stringer, the NHM's expert on early humans. That project pushed back the known date of the earliest humans in Britain from around 500,000 years ago to 950,000 years ago.
The big picture
"This is the big picture," says Stringer. He says that Britain has an unusually complete record of early human occupation, in terms of the evidence of human fossils, artefacts, fauna and flora. And it has been dated and reconstructed in great detail.
The decision by the NHM to feed important finds into the exhibition right up to its launch date has made the show unusually topical. For example, there is full coverage of the recent discovery of the world's oldest human footprints outside Africa, in Happisburgh (pronounced haze-bruh) in Norfolk.
The trail of elongated prints on the flat, muddy Norfolk coast were dated to around 800,000 years ago using pollen analysis and other techniques. The researchers also measured the length and width of the prints in a bid to estimate the height of the people who made them. Stringer, who jointly led the Pathways to Ancient Britain project (which encompasses Happisburgh), with Nick Ashton of London's British Museum, reckons the footprints were made by a male and several smaller people, perhaps a female and some children.
Full of character
The exhibit starts with a mini hall of ancestors, where four busts of early humans are arranged from oldest to most recent: Homo antecessor (to whom the Happisburgh footprints are most likely to belong), Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. And while none of them would win a beauty contests, their painstakingly reconstructed faces are full of character.
The journey through time is artfully arranged by themes, with visitors guided through the kinds of humans who occupied Britain, the artefacts of their lifestyle and culture, the animals they hunted or fought, and the climates they faced. There is even a narrow blue chasm of a room at the 450,000-year mark, representing the Anglian ice age. Here visitors can reflect, while the howl of icy winds whips round them.
But the weather would have been somewhat better in the first and most "ancient" of the rooms, where a video tale of the newly found footprints is screened. Other artefacts on display, such as 950,000-year-old pine cones from Happisburgh, show that these humans probably lived in a temperate climate like that of southern Scandinavia today.
Thoroughly bloody
The next room fast-forwards to 500,000 years ago, revealing how H. heidelbergensis would have hunted rhinos and brown bears in the much warmer climate before the Anglian ice age. On display is Britain's oldest human fossil, a sturdy tibia from the left leg of the ancient man discovered in Boxgrove, West Sussex. Alongside, a thoroughly bloody video show is running. This features an "experimental" archaeologist, shown making the kind of axe tools wielded at the time, and using them to cut up carcasses.
There is another first in the room showing the early Neanderthal occupation, around 400,000 years ago. Here is the Swanscombe skull, which consists of three pieces of a female Neanderthal skull, unearthed in a gravel pit in Swanscombe between 1935 and 1955.
Stringer notes that the first use of fire by humans was around this time: "The Neanderthals were hunter-gatherers, and they were adaptable because we find them early in the warmer stage, and then later on in the cold stage."
Remarkable absence
But there is a remarkable absence of any kind of humans when Britain entered a warmer, more hospitable climate 180,000 to 60,000 years ago. By that stage, the weather had warmed up sufficiently for hippos to bask in the tepid Thames river, and lions, rhinos and straight-tusked elephants to roam over what is now London's Trafalgar Square.
The team wanted to make sure this was right, says Stringer: "We went back to the collections to see if we had missed any cut marks on animals, or stone tools [from that period], but we didn't find any." So, had the cold climate killed off the local humans or had they departed for warmer climes?
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