© 2018 Halbert Katzen, JD
By Halbert Katzen J.D.[1]
¶ Summary
The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project (“AHOB project”) was launched in 2001 to revitalize the study of ancient archaeological sites in Britain. By 2005 AHOB researchers were able to establish that primitive man occupied Britain 700,000 years ago. This discovery came as quite a surprise the archaeological community. Prior to this recent development, the evidence for early human habitation only went back 500,000 years.
The Urantia Book, published in 1955, states that human habitation of Britain began approximately 900,000 years ago. Noting that there used to be a land bridge between Britain and France, it also remarks that, even though most of the evidence of human occupation is now submerged in the English Channel, there are still several sites near the coast bearing evidence of this early occupation. This is where recent discoveries have been made that push back the date of human habitation by 200,000 years. Additional work by the AHOB project is increasingly lending support to this aspect of The Urantia Book’s account of early human history. It is anticipated that this report will need to be updated numerous times in the next several years as the AHOB team continues to make new discoveries.
¶ Overview
The Urantia Book, published in 1955, makes several statements about the early occupation of Britain. Recently, the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project (“AHOB project”) has made a number of surprising discoveries which support the statements made in The Urantia Book.
Most importantly, the AHOB project findings have pushed the earliest human occupation of Britain back considerably. Until this decade, scientific consensus dated human life in Britain to about 500,000 years ago. However, the AHOB project has discovered two different sites with human artifacts that date to 700,000 years ago. At the first site, off the Norfolk coast near Happisburgh, two hand axes have been found sticking out of the seabed in the remains of an ancient forest. Both hand axes, as well as the forest, were dated to between 500,000 and 700,000 years ago.
The second site, at Pakefield in East Anglia, yielded over thirty worked flint flakes and one flint coresuggesting frequent human visitors to the site. Since the flints were found in sediments that contained microscopic animal bones scientists were able to use a technique called the “vole clock” to date the flints to about 700,000 years ago. The findings from both sites were announced in 2005 in peer- reviewed articles in Nature. The article makes the importance of these discoveries clear: “Until now, the earliest uncontested artifacts from northern Europe were much younger, suggesting that humans were unable to colonize northern latitudes until about 500 kyr ago.”
However, these recent findings confirm statements made over fifty years earlier in The Urantia Book. The following passages are not sequential; see the full report or citations:
950,000 years ago the descendants of Andon and Fonta [the first two human beings] had migrated far to the east and to the west. To the west they passed over Europe to France and England . . . [2]
During most of the ice age England was connected by land with France. . . At the time of the Andonic migrations there was a continuous land path from England in the west on through Europe . . . [3]
900,000 years ago the arts of Andon and Fonta . . . were vanishing from the face of the earth; culture, religion, and even flintworking were at their lowest ebb.
These were the times when large numbers of inferior mongrel groups were arriving in England from southern France. These tribes were so largely mixed with the forest apelike creatures that they were scarcely human. They had no religion but were crude flintworkers and possessed sufficient intelligence to kindle fire.
They were followed in Europe by a somewhat superior and prolific people, whose descendants soon spread over the entire continent from the ice in the north to the Alps and Mediterranean in the south. These tribes are the so-called Heidelberg race.
During this long period of cultural decadence the Foxhall peoples of England . . . continued to hold on to some of the traditions of Andon and certain remnants of the culture of Onagar.
The Foxhall peoples were farthest west and succeeded in retaining much of the Andonic culture; they also preserved their knowledge of flintworking, which they transmitted to their descendants, the ancient ancestors of the Eskimos.
Though the remains of the Foxhall peoples were the last to be discovered in England, these Andonites were really the first human beings to live in those regions. At that time the land bridge still connected France with England; and since most of the early settlements of the Andon descendants were located along the rivers and seashores of that early day, they are now under the waters of the English Channel and the North Sea, but some three or four are still above water on the English coast. [4]
700,000 years ago the fourth glacier, the greatest of all in Europe, was in recession; men and animals were returning north. The climate was cool and moist, and primitive man again thrived in Europe and western Asia. Gradually the forests spread north over land which had been so recently covered by the glacier. [5]
The Urantia Book states that the “Foxhall peoples” were the first human occupants of Britain. Interestingly, the name “Foxhall peoples” seems to have come from an obscure 1905 article by Nina Frances Layard detailing her excavation work at the Paleolithic site at Foxhall Road, Ipswich. Layard made a number of remarkable discoveries including early hand axes and remains of extinct mammals, but her work was not widely recognized until 2005, when two AHOB researchers published Miss Layard excavates: the Palaeolithic site at Foxhall Road, Ipswich, 1903-1905. The Urantia Book therefore seems prescient in acknowledging this as an important piece of scholarly work.
The Urantia Book’s description of the “Foxhall peoples” is consistent with the findings of the AHOB project, stating that 1) the “Foxhall peoples” had knowledge of flint working, 2) their settlements were located near rivers and seashores on a land bridge connecting France to Britain, 3) only three or four settlements remain above water, and 4) they lived in this region as far back as 900,000 years ago.
In conclusion, the discoveries made by the AHOB project over the last ten years bring scientific consensus in line with statements made in The Urantia Book, which was published over fifty years ago. Scholars have now pushed back the date for the earliest human occupation of Britain to 700,000 years ago, which is consistent with The Urantia Book’s statements and bring them 200,000 years closer to its claim that humans were actually first there about 900,000 years ago.
¶ Complete report
This report focuses on several statements made in The Urantia Book about the early occupation of Britain. These statements are part of a general recounting the history of primitive man. Launched in 2001, the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project (“AHOB project”) is a ten-year study that brings “[s]pecialists, several Institutes and Universities . . . together to investigate when people first arrived in Britain, and what factors led to their survival or local extinction.”[6] By 2005 this project was already producing results that surprised the scholarly community and are also noteworthy for their support of what The Urantia Book published in 1955 regarding the early occupation of Britain.
The general model for preparing UBtheNEWS reports is to quote sparingly from The Urantia Book, staying narrowly focused on the specific statements that are being corroborated by advances and science and scholarship since its publication. This report departs somewhat from that approach. Because this topic is regularly being advanced with new discoveries and scientific methodologies that provide insights into ancient human history and because The Urantia Book provides a selection of specific statements and general commentary relevant to the new discoveries that are being made in this field, this report will provide several pages of material from The Urantia Book in order to give readers an appreciation for of both the details and general account that it provides regarding this extensive period of human history that covers hundreds of thousands of years. Given the ongoing nature and progressive development of the AHOB project, there is a reasonable expectation that this report will soon need to be updated with additional evidence of The Urantia Book’s accuracy regarding the ancient occupation of Britain by some of the earliest human beings. The broader selection of material offered in this report will also serves as a foreshadowing of the types of discoveries that are being anticipated.
Readers who are particularly interested in this subject are encouraged to read all of Chapter 64 in The Urantia Book (about ten pages). Also, the last several sections of Chapter 62 and Chapter 63 recount the story of the first human beings and provide additional insights about the origins of human life. According to The Urantia Book, humanity began nearly 1,000,000 years ago and was marked by the evolution of a species possessing sufficient mental capacity and intellectual sophistication to engage in spiritual thinking and make spiritual choices, to recognize wisdom and strive for ideals. Naturally, such a definition of being human does not lend itself well to scientific investigation. Additionally, as this report demonstrates, archaeologists continue to be surprised by new discoveries; early human history is hardly a settled field of science. So, not surprisingly, there are still many areas of this subject where scholarly opinions and theories are not aligned with The Urantia Book. Nonetheless, this report, along with the Adam and Eve Report, Vikings Report and the Early Migration to the Americas Report, are part of an emerging pattern of increased support for The Urantia Book’s statements regarding human history.
Some of the challenges associated with reconciling anthropological discoveries with The Urantia Book are attributable to its assertion that varying degrees of mating occurred in the early periods of human history between humans and their immediate prehuman predecessors. Aside from not being a “politically correct” topic of discussion, this also makes it extremely difficult for anthropologists to interpret their findings. Even the use of flint and other rudimentary tools is said to have developed among our prehuman ancestors, making it all the more difficult for scholars to correlate the use of tools with the emergence of human beings.
In order to appreciate The Urantia Book’s recounting of early human history, certain terminology and a bit of background information needs to be explained; this information is found in Chapters 62 and 63. Humanity is said to have started with the birth of twins, a male and a female, named Andon and Fonta, respectively. These twins are described as “radically” different from their parents; they evolved “suddenly.” According to The Urantia Book, the Eskimos are the closest living representation of this first “race” of humanity, referred to as the Andonic race. Additionally, The Urantia Book offers a unique perspective regarding distinctions associated with skin color. These are said to have emerged “suddenly,” approximately 500,000 years ago, as a variety of “mutations” with dominant genetic characteristics, superior to the Andonic race, and all coming from one mother.
The following selections from The Urantia Book provide the relevant statements and basic context for this report:
During most of the ice age England was connected by land with France, while later on Africa was joined to Europe by the Sicilian land bridge. At the time of the Andonic migrations there was a continuous land path from England in the west on through Europe and Asia to Java in the east; but Australia was again isolated, which further accentuated the development of its own peculiar fauna.
950,000 years ago the descendants of Andon and Fonta had migrated far to the east and to the west. To the west they passed over Europe to France and England. . . .
The Foxhall Peoples
900,000 years ago the arts of Andon and Fonta and the culture of Onagar [humanity’s first great spiritual teacher/leader] were vanishing from the face of the earth; culture, religion, and even flintworking were at their lowest ebb.
These were the times when large numbers of inferior mongrel groups were arriving in England from southern France. These tribes were so largely mixed with the forest apelike creatures that they were scarcely human. They had no religion but were crude flintworkers and possessed sufficient intelligence to kindle fire.
They were followed in Europe by a somewhat superior and prolific people, whose descendants soon spread over the entire continent from the ice in the north to the Alps and Mediterranean in the south. These tribes are the so-called Heidelberg race.
During this long period of cultural decadence the Foxhall peoples of England and the Badonan tribes northwest of India continued to hold on to some of the traditions of Andon and certain remnants of the culture of Onagar.
The Foxhall peoples were farthest west and succeeded in retaining much of the Andonic culture; they also preserved their knowledge of flintworking, which they transmitted to their descendants, the ancient ancestors of the Eskimos.
Though the remains of the Foxhall peoples were the last to be discovered in England, these Andonites were really the first human beings to live in those regions. At that time the land bridge still connected France with England; and since most of the early settlements of the Andon descendants were located along the rivers and seashores of that early day, they are now under the waters of the English Channel and the North Sea, but some three or four are still above water on the English coast.”[7]
. . .The purer Andonites live in the extreme northern regions of Europe and in Iceland, Greenland, and northeastern North America.
During the periods of farthest glacial advance the westernmost of the Andon tribes came very near being driven into the sea. They lived for years on a narrow southern strip of the present island of England. . . . [8]
The use of the term “Foxhall peoples” is an apparent reference to the archaeological work of Nina Frances Layard. The 2005 publication of Miss Layard excavates: the Palaeolithic site at Foxhall Road, Ipswich, 1903-1905 was written by researchers involved with the AHOB project. In their resurrection of the importance of this archaeological site “White and Plunkett describe how aspiring archaeologist Nina Frances Layard discovered Lower Palaeolithic hand axes and the remains of extinct mammals in a working quarry close to her home in southeastern England; arranged permission, financing, and workers to conduct an excavation; and published her findings. The site is little known today, they say, not because of any failing in the excavation work, but because the lack of supporting professional and official support in the early 20th century allowed the artifacts to be scattered and the site to be developed later.” [9] [10]
Curiously, The Urantia Book chose to name a population of early man after this early, underappreciated archaeological work, which, over one hundred years later, is gaining respect for its contribution to this subject area.
Continuing with selected passages from The Urantia Book’s account of early human history:
Besides the Foxhall peoples in the west, another struggling center of culture persisted in the east. This group was located in the foothills of the northwestern Indian highlands among the tribes of Badonan, a great-great-grandson of Andon. These people were the only descendants of Andon who never practised human sacrifice.
To the east of the Badonan peoples, in the Siwalik Hills of northern India, may be found fossils that approach nearer to transition types between man and the various prehuman groups than any others on earth.
850,000 years ago the superior Badonan tribes began a warfare of extermination directed against their inferior and animalistic neighbors. In less than one thousand years most of the borderland animal groups of these regions had been either destroyed or driven back to the southern forests. This campaign for the extermination of inferiors brought about a slight improvement in the hill tribes of that age. And the mixed descendants of this improved Badonite stock appeared on the stage of action as an apparently new people — the Neanderthal race. [11]
The Neanderthal Races
The Neanderthalers were excellent fighters, and they traveled extensively. They gradually spread from the highland centers in northwest India to France on the west, China on the east, and even down into northern Africa. They dominated the world for almost half a million years until the times of the migration of the evolutionary races of color.
800,000 years ago game was abundant; many species of deer, as well as elephants and hippopotamuses, roamed over Europe. Cattle were plentiful; horses and wolves were everywhere. The Neanderthalers were great hunters were great hunters, and the tribes in France were the first to adopt the practice of giving the most successful hunters the choice of women for wives.
The reindeer was highly useful to these Neanderthal peoples, serving as food, clothing, and for tools, since they made various uses of the horns and bones. They had little culture, but they greatly improved the work in flint until it almost reached the levels of the days of Andon. Large flints attached to wooden handles came back into use and served as axes and picks.
750,000 years ago the fourth ice sheet was well on its way south.10 With their improved implements the Neanderthalers made holes in the ice covering the northern rivers and thus were able to spear the fish which came up to these vents. Ever these tribes retreated before the advancing ice, which at this time made its most extensive invasion of Europe.
In these times the Siberian glacier was making its southernmost march, compelling early man to move southward, back toward the lands of his origin. But the human species had so differentiated that the danger of further mingling with its nonprogressive simian relatives was greatly lessened.
700,000 years ago the fourth glacier, the greatest of all in Europe, was in recession; men and animals were returning north. The climate was cool and moist, and primitive man again thrived in Europe and western Asia. Gradually the forests spread north over land which had been so recently covered by the glacier.
Mammalian life had been little changed by the great glacier. These animals persisted in that narrow belt of land lying between the ice and the Alps and, upon the retreat of the glacier, again rapidly spread out over all Europe. There arrived from Africa, over the Sicilian land bridge, straight-tusked elephants, broad- nosed rhinoceroses, hyenas, and African lions, and these new animals virtually exterminated the saber-toothed tigers and the hippopotamuses.
650,000 years ago witnessed the continuation of the mild climate. By the middle of the interglacial period it had become so warm that the Alps were almost denuded of ice and snow.
600,000 years ago the ice had reached its then northernmost point of retreat and, after a pause of a few thousand years, started south again on its fifth excursion. But there was little modification of climate for fifty thousand years. Man and the animals of Europe were little changed. The slight aridity of the former period lessened, and the alpine glaciers descended far down the river valleys.
550,000 years ago the advancing glacier again pushed man and the animals south. But this time man had plenty of room in the wide belt of land stretching northeast into Asia and lying between the ice sheet and the then greatly expanded Black Sea extension of the Mediterranean.
These times of the fourth and fifth glaciers witnessed the further spread of the crude culture of the Neanderthal races. But there was so little progress that it truly appeared as though the attempt to produce a new and modified type of intelligent life on Urantia was about to fail. For almost a quarter of a million years these primitive peoples drifted on, hunting and fighting, by spells improving in certain directions, but, on the whole, steadily retrogressing as compared with their superior Andonic ancestors.[12]
Now that the relevant quotes from The Urantia Book and necessary context have been provided, we can turn our attention to the recent discoveries that lend support to its assertions. The following news story put out by Channel 4 in England summarizes the development and significance of recent discovers:
The earliest humans
In 2001, ex-policeman and amateur archaeologist Mike Chambers made a discovery that would help push back the earliest known date for human activity in Britain by several hundred thousand years. For sticking out of the seabed off the Norfolk coast at Happisburgh, he found a hand axe – one of the earliest artifacts made by humans ever discovered in northern Europe.
Located in the remains of an ancient forest, revealed only at low tide, the axe – like the forest – was dated to between 500,000 and 700,000 years ago. It was one of several key discoveries made very recently that have stunned archaeologists and other scientists studying the ancient human occupation of Britain, and transformed our understanding of the earliest human activity here in the space of less than a decade.
Mike Chambers’ find coincided with the establishment of a large-scale research project, the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB), bringing together archaeologists and scientists from a range of different disciplines and organizations to investigate this neglected period of prehistory. As one of the scientists involved in the project remarked, in relation to mapping the lost land bridge between Britain and Europe, so crucial to our understanding of early human activity here, “We know more about the surface of Mars than we do this.”
Spectacular findings
AHOB’s work resulted in spectacular findings. As well as the Happisburgh site, where they found a second hand axe in 2004, a team of experts assembled by AHOB also investigated another site in East Anglia at Pakefield. This, too, had first been highlighted by amateurs, who had discovered what appeared to be a tiny fragment of worked flint in situ in the same beds as a large collection of animal bones.
Over the course of the next few years, AHOB’s excavations turned up more than 30 such flint flakes and one flint core from four different contexts at Pakefield. This suggested that humans were regular visitors to a landscape that experts had previously believed to have been devoid of human activity.
The Pakefield flints were found in sediments that contained large quantities of microscopic mammal bones. It was these that enabled scientists to date the flints. In particular, AHOB used what is often referred to by scientists as the ‘vole clock’,[13] which featured in a previous Time Team program at Elveden in the 2000 series. Simon Parfitt identified a species of Mimomys vole among the Pakefield sediments. This is known to have died out in European Russia before MIS16[14], an extremely severe cold period, and together with other mammal deposits enabled AHOB to date the flint finds to around 700,000 years ago.
Headline news
Since the oldest previous known evidence for a human presence in Britain dated from less than 500,000 years ago, this was a dramatic discovery – and it made headline news when it was first reported, in an article in Nature, at the end of 2005. Many of those reports referred to the people who made these tiny tools as the ‘earliest Britons’, although actually there is no direct line of descent between them and the people who inhabit these islands today.
In fact, as Chris Stringer explains in Britain’s drowned world, there have been eight separate waves of colonization of what is now Britain, seven of which have failed. These have coincided with the warmer periods between Ice Ages, with humans moving into Britain as the ice sheets retreated and being forced out again as they expanded. The latest (and, so far, uninterrupted) wave of occupation dates only from when temperatures began to rise again with the ending of the most recent Ice Age, starting about 13,000 years ago.”[15]
Its aim is to draw up a chronological sequence for the arrival and spread of humans in Britain. It has made some spectacular finds, including evidence that dated the arrival of early humans in Britain to 700,000 years ago, 200,000 years earlier than had been thought. It also found that massive changes in climate drove human inhabitants out of Britain many times over.[16]
The Urantia Book covers hundreds of thousands of years of human history in several pages. With a combination of “broad-brush strokes” and specific details, it presents a chronology regarding the human struggle for existence during its most primitive state and in the midst of significant climatic challenges, the progression and recession of glaciers. This aspect of human history in relationship to glacial activity is in general alignment with scholarship and has been since before publication of The Urantia Book. However, falling outside of this general alignment is the issue of exactly when certain areas of the world were first populated.
Discoveries in this millennium have pushed this date further back and into closer alignment with The Urantia Book. As well, these discoveries are being made in precisely the area of England that is specified by The Urantia Book. The location, evidence, and continuity of the peoples involved are well encapsulated in these statements:
The Foxhall peoples were farthest west and succeeded in retaining much of the Andonic culture; they also preserved their knowledge of flintworking, which they transmitted to their descendants, the ancient ancestors of the Eskimos.
Though the remains of the Foxhall peoples were the last to be discovered in England, these Andonites were really the first human beings to live in those regions. At that time the land bridge still connected France with England; and since most of the early settlements of the Andon descendants were located along the rivers and seashores of that early day, they are now under the waters of the English Channel and the North Sea, but some three or four are still above water on the English coast.[17]
Regarding the Eskimos, The Urantia Book also states, “A little more than eighty thousand years ago, shortly after the red man entered northwestern North America, the freezing over of the north seas and the advance of local ice fields on Greenland drove these Eskimo descendants of the Urantia aborigines to seek a better land, a new home; and they were successful, safely crossing the narrow straits which then separated Greenland from the northeastern land masses of North America.”[18] One can reasonably extrapolate from the previous sentence, when it is taken in conjunction with statements about how the Foxhall peoples passed on “their knowledge of flintworking” “to their descendants, the ancient ancestors of the Eskimos,” and the statement about how “the purer Andonites live in the extreme northern regions of Europe,”[19] that The Urantia Book is indicating an unbroken line of descent from these “farthest west” “Foxhall peoples” to the Eskimos and these people inhabited, whenever possible, the area now known as England.
Interestingly enough, there are today “three or four” sites of primary archaeological interest “still above water on the English coast” where evidence of these ancient peoples is being found. And the most recent evidence from these sites has pushed the date of human habitation in this area back an additional 200,000 years.
The peer reviewed 2005 announcement in Nature makes clear that The Urantia Book’s 1955 assertions were in no way a part of the generally accepted scholarly view of this subject.
The colonization of Eurasia by early humans is a key event after their spread out of Africa, but the nature, timing and ecological context of the earliest human occupation of northwest Europe is uncertain and has been the subject of intense debate. . . .Until now, the earliest uncontested artifacts from northern Europe were much younger, suggesting that humans were unable to colonize northern latitudes until about 500 kyr ago. Here we report flint artifacts from the Cromer Forest-bed Formation at Pakefield (52° N), Suffolk, UK, from an interglacial sequence yielding a diverse range of plant and animal fossils. Event and lithostratigraphy, palaeomagnetism, amino acid geochronology and biostratigraphy indicate that the artifacts date to the early part of the Brunhes Chron[20] (about 700 kyr ago) and thus represent the earliest unequivocal evidence for human presence north of the Alps.[21]
There is abundant literature regarding these new discoveries by AHOB and others. For the sake of brevity and to avoid redundancies, these will not be included in this report. As well, because it is anticipated that this report will need to be updated numerous times in the years to come, an exhaustive review of the relevant material is not timely. However, numerous links to this material can be easily accessed in the External Links section of this topic. Some of these links pertain to issues related to the land bridge that used to connect England and France.
The selections from The Urantia Book provided in this report provide a basis for beginning to appreciate the comprehensive, yet condensed and detailed, recounting of early human history. The facts of early human existence are a matter of history; but our knowledge of what occurred is still very limited. New archaeological discoveries, as well as advances in the field of genetics and other sciences, increasingly reveal a clearer picture. Along with the Adam and Eve Report, Vikings Report and the Early Migration to the Americas Report, this report further develops The Urantia Book’s emerging pattern of making assertions about human history in advance of their verification.
¶ Links
¶ External links
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Britain’s drowned world, Channel 4, April 2007. Great 2007 summary article with dates and places of discovery, vole clock, axe handles, advancing and retreating ice.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090619033218/http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/T/timeteam/2007_dogger_ancient.html [Original link broken]
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Scott M. Forsythe, The Foxhall Peoples: An Encounter between Archaeology and The Urantia Book, Scientific Symposium, 1988
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P. G. H. Boswell y J. Reid Moir, The Pleistocene Deposits and Their Contained Palaeolithic Flint Implements at Foxhall Road, Ipswich, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, January - June 1923.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2843759 [Link requires subscription]
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Mark Kinver, Tools unlock secrets of early man, BBC News, December 2005. Good general article.
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Miles Crawford Burkitt, Prehistory: A Study of Early Cultures in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin, Books for Libraries Press, 1925.
http://bit.ly/2JARjfd [Link for Google Books search]. See page 51.
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K. Kris Hirst, Homo Erectus (or H. heidelbergensis) Colonization in Europe, mayo 2019 [última actualización]. Article references other ancient site around the world. Homo erectus v. Heidleberg.
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Guy Gugliotta, Tools Found in Britain Show Much Earlier Human Existence, Washington Post, December 2005.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/14/AR2005121402249.html
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Bio-archaeologists Pinpoint Oldest Northern European Human Activity, University of York, December 2005. Corroboration of 700,000 date.
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Mike Pitts, On this beach, 700,000 years ago …, The Guardian, January 2006. Good magazine article.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/jan/06/g2.archaeology
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William K. Stevens, In the Ebb and Flow Of Ancient Glaciers, Clues to Next Ice Age, The New York Times, January 1990. NY Times article covering glacial cycles.
https://nyti.ms/2y8Fc3G [Link requires subscription]
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Steve Graham, Milutin Milankovitch (1879-1958), NASA Earth Observatory, March 2000. The man who invented the theory of glacial periods in relation to the earth’s orbit and rotation.
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Professor Mark White, BA, PhD. Dr Mark White, BA, PhD Prof from Durham University Mark’s second big interest is the history of archaeology and he has a deep respect for many of the antiquarians and amateur archaeologist of the past, especially the more eccentric ones. He has published articles re-assessing the work and contribution of several Victorian pioneers, such as Sir John Evans and Worthington Smith, as well as a monograph.
¶ Links off the AHOB site
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Paul Rincon, Delving deep into Britain’s past, BBC News, October 2006. Image in file for time periods and sites.
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Jonathan Leake, First Neanderthal tracked to Torquay, The Sunday Times, October 2006. Its aim is to draw up a chronological sequence for the arrival and spread of humans in Britain. It has made some spectacular finds, including evidence that dated the arrival of early humans in Britain to 700,000 years ago, 200,000 years earlier than had been thought. It also found that massive changes in climate drove human inhabitants out of Britain many times over.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/first-neanderthal-tracked-to-torquay-th0zg0rl2ch [Link requires subscription]
http://www.archaeology.ws/2006-10-3.htm [Link with the new]
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Simon A. Parfitt, René W. Barendregt, Marzia Breda, Ian Candy, et al., The earliest record of human activity in Northern Europe, Nature, January 2006. ¡Pakefield study!
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Anglia Man, Bradshaw Foundation. Nice summary write up.
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/british_isles_prehistory_archive/mammoths_britain/index.php
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Miss Layard Excavates: The Palaeolithic Site At Foxhall Road, Ipswich, 1903-1905, by Mark White and Steven Plunkett Published: October 31, 2004 Between 1903 and 1905 Miss Nina Frances Layard conducted exemplary excavations of an outstanding Palaeolithic site on plateau gravels above Ipswich. Here, Palaeolithic humans gathered around the edges of an erstwhile lake and/or river, leaving behind stone tools and manufacturing waste. Many remarkable pictures emerge from this book: of the excavator, an Edwardian lady of great determination and skill; of the site itself, which might well have been on a par with Boxgrove had it been discovered today; of the piecing together of Miss Layard’s lost archive by Steven Plunkett; of the meeting of two enthusiasts and their decision to write this book; and the remarkable archaeological evidence. The authors have assembled a jigsaw of magnificent proportions: their detective work has enabled them to return a neglected but truly significant site to its rightful place in the canon of British Palaeolithic archaeology. (Western Academic and Specialist Press 2004) 0953541886 Hb £ 48.00.
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Jim Rose, Humans in Great Britain before the first lowland glaciation — c. 700,000 years ago, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London.
https://www.yorksgeolsoc.org.uk/archive/2006 Circulars/530.pdf
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Revista British Archaeology, issue November / December 2005: “The meticulous Miss Layard Nina Layard, cousin of famed Nineveh and Nimrud excavator Sir Austen Henry Layard, was the first woman to address the British Association. A new study of her unpublished records of a 1903–4 dig at Foxhall Road, Ipswich has revealed an exceptionally well-preserved early human site where hunters paused briefly beside an ancient river 400,000 years ago”.
https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?thold=-1&mode=flat&order=0&sid=2146412330
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AHOB II, Ancient Britain and Its European Context, Natural History Museum (NHM) Press Office.
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Seabed Prehistory: Gauging the Effects of Marine Aggregate Dredging, Volumen VII, Happisburgh y Pakefield Exposures, Wessex Archaeology, February 2008. Study supporting offshore correlations. From page i “The principle objective of the Happisburgh and Pakefield Exposures project was to trace sediments of known archaeological potential onshore into the offshore marine environment. The fine-grained sediments onshore are unique and have changed our understanding of the earliest occupation of Britain. Finds within these sediments have demonstrated that human occupation of north-west Europe started earlier than hitherto thought, c. 700,000 years ago. The survival of these deposits at the base of the cliffs at Happisburgh and Pakefield is unexpected considering their character and nature, and the series of geomorphological processes that have affected them. As these deposits reside at the base fo the cliffline and on the foreshore there is a possibility for their survival offshore. If traced, this would allow the geophysical signatures of fine-grained deposits to be assessed and improve methodologies to effectively survey these deposits in the future».
https://es.scribd.com/document/2989835/Vol-VII-HappisburghPakefield
¶ Site 1: Boxgrove, Chichester, West Sussex, UK
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http://bit.ly/2JASnQf, link to Google Maps.
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Boxgrove Man. Mentions some of the animals found at the site, not a great site to reference though, metaphysically related.
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Boxgrove dispatches, Current news from the Middle Pleistocene Research Project at Boxgrove, UK. Blog about Boxgrove findings.
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Wil Roebroeks , Life on the Costa del Cromer, Nature, December 2005. Has significant article.
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Simon A. Parfitt, René W. Barendregt, Marzia Breda, Ian Candy, Matthew J. Collins, et al., The earliest record of human activity in northern Europe, Nature, December 2005. “The colonization of Eurasia by early humans is a key event after their spread out of Africa, but the nature, timing and ecological context of the earliest human occupation of northwest Europe is uncertain and has been the subject of intense debate1. The southern Caucasus was occupied about 1.8 million years (Myr) ago2, whereas human remains from Atapuerca-TD6, Spain (more than 780 kyr ago)3 and Ceprano, Italy (about 800 kyr ago)4 show that early Homo had dispersed to the Mediterranean hinterland before the Brunhes–Matuyama magnetic polarity reversal (780 kyr ago). Until now, the earliest uncontested artefacts from northern Europe were much younger, suggesting that humans were unable to colonize northern latitudes until about 500 kyr ago5, 6. Here we report flint artefacts from the Cromer Forest-bed Formation at Pakefield (52° N), Suffolk, UK, from an interglacial sequence yielding a diverse range of plant and animal fossils. Event and lithostratigraphy, palaeomagnetism, amino acid geochronology and biostratigraphy indicate that the artefacts date to the early part of the Brunhes Chron (about 700 kyr ago) and thus represent the earliest unequivocal evidence for human presence north of the Alps”.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/abs/nature04227.html
¶ Site 2: Pakefield, Lowestoft, Suffolk, UK
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http://bit.ly/2y8JFTV, link to Google Maps.
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John Wymer’s first scientific publication, announcing his remarkable discovery of a third piece of the Swanscombe skull in a Kent quarry (still, at 400,000 years old, the only pre-Neanderthal skull from Britain), was in Nature. His last was in the same journal, 50 years later, illustrated with his fine drawings of the 700,000-year-old flint tools from Pakefield, Suffolk (Jan/Feb, page 22). Between his engagement with these iconic finds, he directed important excavations in England and in South Africa (notably at Klasies River Mouth, which, in deep deposits rich with fauna and artefacts, produced the then oldest evidence for Homo sapiens, c110,000 years ago).
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Steve Boreham, East Anglian Prehistory – Some Recent Research: A Conference in Memory of John Wymer, CAMQUA, Newspaper Cambridge Quaternary, April 2007. “A worked flint flake was ‘discovered’ at Pakefield in 2000 by John Wymer. In fact, Richard Preece dislodged the chip of flint with his foot, and it was handed to John for inspection. The discovery of knapped flint prompted the 2003 AHOB excavation of the CFBF at Pakefield. The ‘Unio bed’ provided abundant early Palaeolithic (c.700ky BP) worked flint material, together with a host of palaeoenvironmental information from molluscs, beetles, vertebrates (including bones with cut marks), plant macrofossils and pollen. Several hundred plant and animal taxa have been recorded, and the faunal and floral assemblage is one of the richest known from the CFBF. The palaeoenvironment indicated at Pakefield is that of a broad meandering river with large marshes, and open grassland grazed by large mammals, with broadleaved woodland on the higher ground of the interfluves. The site was also close to the estuary with some maritime influences, and the climate was of Mediterranean style, similar to that of southern France today”.
¶ Site 3: Foxhall Road, Ipswich, Suffolk, UK
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Mark White y Steven Plunkett, Miss Layard excavates: the Palaeolithic site at Foxhall Road, Ipswich, 1903-1905, Western Academic & Specialist Press, 2005. Book on Nina Layard’s wonderful site at Foxhall Road, Ipswich, excavated between 1903-1905. Using newly discovered archives Mark gave this long neglected site new relevance to the debates of the 21st century. “Between 1903 and 1905 Miss Nina Frances Layard conducted exemplary excavations of an outstanding Palaeolithic site on plateau gravels above Ipswich. Here, Palaeolithic humans gathered around the edges of an erstwhile lake and/or river, leaving behind stone tools and manufacturing waste. Many remarkable pictures emerge from this book: of the excavator, an Edwardian lady of great determination and skill; of the site itself, which might well have been on a par with Boxgrove had it been discovered today; of the piecing together of Miss Layard’s lost archive by Steven Plunkett; of the meeting of two enthusiasts and their decision to write this book - and last but by no means least - of the remarkable archaeological evidence. The authors have assembled a jigsaw of magnificent proportions: their detective work has enabled them to return a neglected but truly significant site to its rightful place in the canon of British Palaeolithic archaeology”.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061006165154/http://www.waspress.co.uk/publications/layard.html [Original link broken]
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Wikipedia about Nina Frances Layard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Frances_Layard
¶ References
With special thanks to Chris Halvorson, Ph.D., Fred Harris, J.D., and Donna Whelan ↩︎
Proyecto AHOB, https://www.ahobproject.org/ and https://www.ahobproject.org/AHOBI/index_2.html ↩︎
UB 64:7.16-17. These last two sentences are taken from a section related to the time period from approximately 500,000 to 80,000 years ago. ↩︎
M.J. White, y S.J. Plunkett, Miss Layard excavates: a Palaeolithic site at Foxhall Road, Ipswich, 1903-1905. Bristol: WASP, 2004. ↩︎
From Wikipedia.com: “The Lower Paleolithic (or Lower Palaeolithic) is the earliest subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. It spans the time from around 2.5 million years ago when the first evidence of craft and use of stone tools by hominids appears in the current archaeological record, until around 100,000 years ago when important evolutionary and technological changes (behavioral modernity) ushered in the Middle Paleolithic.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Paleolithic ↩︎
The Arvicolinae is a subfamily of rodents that includes voles, lemmings, and muskrats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvicolinae ↩︎
From Wikipedia.com: “Marine isotopic stages (MIS) are alternating warm and cool periods in the Earth’s paleoclimate, deduced from oxygen isotope data reflecting temperature curves derived from data from deep sea core samples.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_isotope_stage ↩︎
Britain’s drowned world, Channel 4, April 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20090619033218/http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/T/timeteam/2007_dogger_ancient.html [Original link broken] ↩︎
Jonathan Leake, First Neanderthal tracked to Torquay, The Sunday Times, October 2006, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/first-neanderthal-tracked-to-torquay-th0zg0rl2ch [Link requires subscription] http://www.archaeology.ws/2006-10-3.htm [Link with the new] ↩︎
The chron is a unit of time, the shortest used in geochronology to refer to geological periods. The duration of each cron is variable. The extension of a chron is frequently linked to reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field that record the beginning and end of the period in the rock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetostratigraphy#Chron ↩︎
Simon A. Parfitt, René W. Barendregt, Marzia Breda, Ian Candy, Matthew J. Collins, et al., The earliest record of human activity in northern Europe, Nature, December 2005. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/abs/nature04227.html ↩︎