Let us travel back to a day vast ages ago, to a spot at the foot
of the South Downs, five miles east of present-day Chichester,
West Sussex. Before us is an unfolding tableau rich beyond a naturalist's
wildest fantasy.
A chorus of strangely familiar bird song - it includes robin and starling - issues from a thick forest of oak and hazel that cloaks the high ground right up to the edge of a cliff. Below it is a flat, sandy plain stretching away to a distant sea. The mists of time draw back and fuzzy forms step into focus. There are animals lost to our world, like the giant deer, small wolf and Deninger's bear, together with stalwards of today's countryside, rabbit, hedgehog and badger. To complete a menagerie of African extravagance, we catch the distant glimpse of lions and elephants.
Britain, a peninsula of Europe, basks in a pleasant, temperate climate between Ice Ages. This is a habitat in perfect balance. But already there is a superior force at work. On the plain below the cliff is a man. He is tall and powerfully built, although it impossible to see if he is clothed.
He carries in his hand a small, round flint cutter with a mean edge and he hurries with a purpose to join other men who gather excitedly around something large and newly dead. Hyenas lurk on the fringes and large scavenging birds hang in the warm air. The man gives a signal and the group begin to expertly and systematically skin and cut up a large rhino.
We stay at this exact spot but speed forward 480,000 years to an autumn day in 1993. Roger Pedersen is assiduously scraping away at a silt deposit at the bottom of a gravel quarry close to the village of Boxgrove. In the previous eight years the English Heritage-funded excavations have already yielded more species of fossilised animal remains from the period of our opening scene than any single site in Europe, well over 100 types of birds, reptiles, mammals and fish.
But Pedersen, a regular volunteer at the project, has unearthed the top of something quite exceptional, a large bone. He removes an entire rectangle of silt containing the find and takes it to the site office. There are no immediate cries of triumph. Archaeologists scrutinise and check the find for many weeks, (Sussex, by coincidence, is the county of archaeology's greatest humiliation, the Piltdown skull forgery), before they announce that it is a ten and a half inch (294mm) long remnant of tibia or shin bone, the oldest human remain ever unearthed in Britain, and possibly in Europe.
The large bone size suggests that its owner was almost certainly a man, perhaps over 6ft, and weighing more than twelve and a half stone (80 kg). Was our rhino hunter hunted himself? There are no other remains at that precise level to show how he might have died, but he certainly provided a meal after death. The tibia, from the left leg, had been gnawed at both ends by a creature, probably a wolf, and dropped where it was found.
As in the best detective stories, one unexplained death was shortly followed by another, or, more accurately, pre-dated by a thousand years or so. On August 27th 1995 archaeology student Laura Bassel, digging at a lower level, unearthed a human tooth. A second tooth was found shortly afterwards. They both belonged to the same person - perhaps we should call her Boxgrove Woman, in the spirit of equal opportunity.
Four years ago the world's oldest body, the 5000 year old Ice Man, was discovered in the Italian Alps, with his personal possessions largely intact. His posthumous testimony has been immense. By comparison, teasing out the secrets of Boxgrove society from just three human objects requires the most subtle forensic analysis. Yet the finds have already yielded some remarkable details. The shape of the two teeth, lower incisors, tells archaeologists that their owner was missing an upper front tooth on one side. The pattern of wear, probably from gripping tools or implements, suggests the person was right handed. A study of the tartar deposits on the teeth may give clues to diet and diseases. The Boxgrove people belongs to the species Homo heidelbergensis, a distinct type which inhabited Europe more than a million years after the first tool-using man developed in Africa, and 400,000 years before classic Neanderthal Man. This period of history is bursting with unanswered questions, such as why it took man so long to reach Europe from their evolutionary cradle in Africa? "At the moment there are no answers that make any sense," says Mark Roberts of University College, London, director of the Boxgrove project. He confidently expects next year's excavations around the teeth to yield a jaw bone. Such a find could add enormously to our understanding of human evolution. The discoveries at Boxgrove and other European sites are already causing archaeologists to revise their estimation of primitive man' capabilities - apart from tools he left no creative mark on the world until the wave of cave art a mere 30,000 years ago. Far from being totally primitive thugs, Roberts sees no reason why Boxgrove people should not have used speech for hunting in open environments and organised food sharing. "Their brains were large enough. There are no anatomical reasons why they could not speak.
"We are reaching archaeology that tells us about what people were doing half a million years ago, and the way they organised themselves. And that is so rare in this period. These people are of the same genus as us. They are, in my opinion, on the way to becoming fully human."
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