Guardian Ltd.
Digging the dirt
Early humans may have hunted the mammoth, one of the largest animals that lived thousands of years ago, writes Mike Pitts
Thursday October 3, 2002
The Guardian
In a store in Wandsworth, south London, are 10 tonnes of 750,000-year-old Norfolk. "If you could go back 750,000 years," says palaeontologist Tony Stuart, "you'd look at the plants and animals and think you were in a familiar place. Then odd things would happen. Perhaps you'd see a macaque monkey. An elephant would wander past."
Stuart, now at University College London, was on the team that excavated a giant mammoth 10 years ago at West Runton, Norfolk. The peaty earth around the bones is still awaiting study in the Natural History Museum store, but the mammoth is the best preserved specimen of Mammuthus trogontherii in the world, a huge beast that is twice as heavy as a modern African elephant. The Norfolk animal had been scavenged: 20 hyena turds still glistened beside the chewed bones.
Archaeologists now believe humans were present in southern England not long after. Could they have hunted elephants? The question has arisen with the completion of another Norfolk dig, at Lynford, near Thetford. Here, Stuart has identified the remains of at least nine woolly mammoths, or Mammuthus primigenius, a more manageable size of roughly an African elephant. Although there are no human fossils, there are 44 pristine flint handaxes.
Lynford dates to a mere 60,000 years ago, so the tool makers would have been Neanderthals. Mark White, an archaeologist at Durham University, is convinced they were using the flints to butcher the mammoths.
The flints show that the Neanderthals were bringing to the site ready-made blanks, which they then turned into sharp knives. White thinks this means they knew there would be mammoths there.
There are two flint blanks they did not use. "One is like a thick slice of salami. The angles are all wrong: you could never make a handaxe with it. The other has a flaw in the flint," he says. "These were very skilled creatures."
Danielle Schreve, palaeontologist at Royal Holloway College, London, however, is not ready to say whether the handaxes were used to butcher the mammoths.
It could be difficult to prove either way. No cuts on the bones have been found, but experiments with modern elephants show that butchery does not always mark bones. The Lynford remains have been heavily smashed up. Stuart says this may have been done partly by hyenas. But he thinks the Neanderthals were there, too, extracting the bone marrow.
"They were working hard to get everything out of them," he says. "This would be more consistent with scavenging than hunting."
Both digs are exciting because of the wealth of information about the ancient environments. At Lynford, 150 species of insect have been identified. These indicate the presence of standing water, marsh, bare sand and grass. Dung and carcass beetles add to the picture of giant rotting mammals being scavenged by hyenas and Neanderthals.
The climate was warmer at the more ancient West Runton. Fruits, seeds and pollen indicate temperate forest, quite different from the cold open spaces at Lynford. A list of creatures found from the remains includes pike and perch, newts, frogs, beavers and an extinct otter, hamsters, bison, a small extinct rhino, wolves and an extinct giant elk.
The animal that most catches the imagination, however, is the mammoth. "We are left with the two modern ones," says Stuart, "but there were loads of different kinds of elephant."
The woolly mammoth is the best known, famous for its warm coat of long hair. No skin or hair survives at Lynford, but a few hairy mammoths have been found frozen in Siberia. Cave paintings in France and Spain confirm that European mammoths were woolly. And small-eared. Thought to be part of the African elephant's cooling system, large ears could have been death to mammoths rooting for grass under snow drifts.
It is the woolly mammoth that will walk across our television screens tonight, digitally reconstructed for the first film in a series about American wildlife 13,000 years ago - when many archaeologists believe the first humans reached America. "Just a few hundred generations ago," says series producer Miles Barton, "people met these almost mythical animals."
Which is what, in a manner of speaking, a group of archaeologists did this summer in Norfolk.
· Wild New World: Land of the Mammoth, tonight on BBC2 at 9pm.
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