A butchered bone from Norfolk: evidence for very early human presence in Britain

Before the Anglian glaciation some 450,000 years ago, much of England was drained by large rivers that deposited sediments known as the Cromer Forest-bed Formation now exposed along the coast of East Anglia. The Forest-bed has yielded a great variety of fossils but until now no definite evidence of human activity. The recent discovery of cut marks on a bison bone collected from it in the nineteenth century demonstrates conclu­ sively that humans were present in this part of East Anglia over half a million years ago.

Before the Anglian glaciation some 450,000 years ago, much of England was drained by large rivers that deposited sedimentsknown as the Cromer Forest-bed Formation -now exposed along the coast of East Anglia. The Forest-bed has yielded a great variety of fo ssils but until now no definite evidence of human activity. The recent discovery of cut marks on a bison bone collected fr om it in the nineteenth century demonstrates conclu sively that humans were present in this part of East Anglia over half a million years ago. R esearch on the bison bone from Norfolk is part of an inter disciplinary programme -the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) project1 -that is investigating glacial and pre-glacial depos its along the East Anglian coast, focusing particularly on the stratigraphy, palaeoen vironments and age of the Cromer Forest bed Formation and associated deposits. Today the Forest-bed (so named because tree stumps are preserved in the sedi ments) is exposed discontinuously on the foreshore and in cliffs for over 80 km from Sheringham in north Norfolk, south to Kes singland near Lowestoft in Suffolk.2 Exca vating and recording these deposits is often challenging and sometimes danger ous work, as they outcrop at the foot of pre cipitous and unstable cliffs (Fig. 1). What makes the Forest-bed very interesting archaeologically is that it was deposited at a time when humans first moved out of Africa and dispersed into Asia and Europe. Throughout this period the fl ood plains of the rivers that deposited the Forest-bed sediments would have provided an attrac tive environment for hunter-gatherers, with a wide range of animals and plants to exploit.
As early as the 1860s, the eminent Vic torian geologist Sir Charles Lyell predicted that human artefacts would one day be found in the Forest-bed,3 but after nearly 200 years of intensive searching, including the discovery of so-called eoliths, which are now thought to have been flaked by nat ural processes! no convincing artefacts have been found in its sediments. Why this should be so has become increasingly per plexing, because Lower Palaeolithic sites, such as Boxgrove in Sussex,5 show that humans were present in other parts of southern England at this time. Spurred on by abundant finds of stone tools and bones at Boxgrove, archaeologists and geologists are again actively examining the Forest bed for evidence of human presence.
One of the many objectives of the AHOB project is to document and research exist ing museum collections of finds from the Forest-bed, including animal bones, and to 14 undertake small-scale fi eld investigations with the aim of establishing their age, geo logical context and environmental setting. One unexpected result of this work has been the discovery of sites where bones show that large animal carcasses were butchered with stone tools, but at which no such tools have been recovered.6 The most remarkable outcome so far is the discovery, in a nineteenth-century collection of ani mal bones from the Forest-bed, of a butch ered bone with cut marks on it. This is the first unequivocal evidence for human presence contemporary with the Forest bed. It is an exciting discovery, but it is even more intriguing that such evidence has been so difficult to fi nd. Possible rea sons for the lack of evidence of humans in the Forest-bed sediments are discussed later in this article.

The cut-marked bison bone
The cut-marked bison bone is part of a large collection of specimens of Forest-bed ver tebrates sold to the Natural History Museum in 1897 by A. C. Savin. He was a local fossil collector who amassed the sin gle largest collection of Forest-bed verte brate fossils. When I recently examined this collection, I identified multiple cut marks on a complete foot bone from one of the hind limbs of a bison/ and thus pro vided the first unambiguous evidence of human activity from the Forest-bed so far described. Savin's catalogue indicates that the specimen was collected from Forest bed sediments at Happisburgh on the Nor folk coast (Fig. 2). Its surface morphology is exquisitely preserved,8 and shows classic signs of butchering, consisting of two dis tinct sets of parallel incisions on the lateral ( Fig. 3) and medial faces. The incisions on the medial face are deeply incised, are V-shape in cross section and are sharply angled, showing that the marks were inflicted by a stone tool such as a sharp flake used with slicing strokes. Foot bones are commonly discarded at primary butch ery sites and the anatomical placement of the cuts suggests dismemberment rather than defleshing or skinning.
When studying old collections, one first has to establish the provenance of the fi nds. Savin's catalogue indicates that the cut-marked bone was collected from a fore shore exposure of the Forest-bed north of Cart Gap at Happisburgh. Unfortunately, he did not record a detailed description of the geological context of the fi nd, and because the cliff at Happisburgh has eroded greatly since the late nineteenth century, it is now impossible to locate the spot where he found the bone. However, contemporary geological accounts show that the cliff right along the Happisburgh coast consisted of glacial deposits resting on top of fossil-rich Forest-bed sediments. More recently, Richard West (a palaeo botanist at the University of Cambridge) , studied the geological succession at Hap pisburgh.9 He demonstrated that below the glacial sediments there is a deep sequence of mainly estuarine and marine deposits (resting on chalk bedrock), which he cor related with the early part of the Forest-bed c. 1.8-1 .6 million years ago (Fig. 4). Sub-sequently, mammalian specimens from Happisburgh (many found loose on the beach) were studied by Adrian Lister of the UCL Department of Biology.10 He found that they consisted of a mixture of Late Figure 3 Detail of the left hind fo ot bone (navicular-cuboid) of a bison fr om the Forest bed at Happisburgh , collected by A. C. Savin and now in the Na tural History Museum, London (accession number M6583). It shows parallel cut marks on the lateral fa ce just below the articular surface, the position and orientation of wh ich suggest th at the fo ot was disarticulated fr om the hind limb. Before the specimen was photographed, it was dusted with ammonium chloride to overcome the effe cts of both the dark colour of the bone, caused by humic staining while itlay in the sediment, and of shine, caused by later use of a consolidant to conserve it. Ch anges in Earth 's magnetic field (mag netic reversals) provide a means of corre lating the marine oxygen-isotope curve with terrestrial deposits; grey areas in the column in dicate norm al polarity (when the Earth 's magnetic polarity was north fa cing, as today) and unshaded areas show periods of reversed polarity.
Pliocene to Early Pleistocene and early Middle Pleistocene species and thus dem onstrated that there were younger Forest bed sediments at Happisburgh than those sampled by West. A comparison of meas urements of the Happisburgh bison bone with the same type of bone from other bovid specimens fr om Late Pliocene and Pleistocene sites in Europe confirms that it is most likely to belong to the more recent group of fossils and hence to come from what is termed the Cromerian Complex, sometime between approximately 800,000 and 500,000 years ago. These more recent bones from Happisburgh probably derive from a channel incised into the earlier deposits, and this is the probable context of Savin's cut-marked bone.
Pre-glacial geography and the earliest occupation of Britain Until recently, it was thought that the ear liest occupation of Britain had followed the most extensive (Anglian) glaciation that affected the British Isles some 485,000 years ago, but excavations at Boxgrove in the mid-1980s firmly established the pres ence of humans in Britain approximately 500,000 years ago, before the Anglian glaciation.11 Boxgrove has gained interna tional renown because of the discovery there of hominid fossils and spectacular assemblages of flint artefacts and butch ered animal bones/2 but there are several other less well known British Lower Pal aeolithic sites that have also been shown to pre-date the Anglian glaciation.13 Immediately prior to the Anglian glaci ation, the palaeogeography of Britain dif fered greatly from that of the present day (Fig. 5). Britain was then a northwestern peninsula of Europe, and across what is now the English Channel a chalk ridge formed a land bridge that connected south eastern England to the mainland. The land bridge was the point of entry into Britain for migrating animals, including humans. To its south and west, raised-beach depos its along the foot of the South Downs in Sussex and estuarine deposits south ofthe Solent on the Isle ofWight record the posi tion of the pre-glacial coast, which formed a large embayment fe d by the proto Somme and -Seine and the former Solent river. To the east and north of the land bridge a vast marine embayment formed the southern part of the North Sea basin, which was mostly infilled by deltaic sed iments deposited by rivers flowing across the north European plain (the proto-Rhine and -Meuse), and east across Britain (the proto-Thames and the former Bytham river) (Fig. 5).
Palaeolithic stone tools have been found in abundance in the terraces of the proto Thames, Solent and Bytham rivers and their tributaries. This reflects occupation along their banks and suggests that their flood plains presented easy routes of access for humans migrating into Britain. Some of the most important pre-glacial archaeolog ical sites have been found in fl oodplain deposits of the Bytham river. Victorian antiquarians discovered several of them (e.g. High Lodge and Warren Hill), but oth ers have come to light within the past few years as a result of the extraction of gravel for construction. These sites were origi nally believed to be relatively recent (per haps no older than 200,000 years), but detailed geological mapping in the late 1 980s by geomorphologist Jim Rose and colleagues showed that the sites in the west Midlands and East Anglia were asso ciated with quartz and quartzite-rich river deposits beneath Anglian till (rocky debris left by the ice sheet), which could be traced to the East Anglian coast. This geological detective work demonstrated conclusively that the sites were pre-glacial in age.14

Raw-material availabilit y and mapping humans on the l andscape
The distribution of British pre-glacial sites demonstrates that the availability of raw material strongly controls the visibility of past human activity in the palaeo-land scape. During the period of the Forest-bed, the sites with the most artefacts are those associated with the most abundant and high-quality flint, exposed for example in chalk seacliffs , as at Boxgrove, or where rivers have eroded or cut through chalk bedrock, as at Warren Hill. These examples reflect a broader pattern, whereby, when the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic sites are plotted on a map of the distribution of 16 the chalk, it can be seen that the sites with the largest assemblages of artefacts are invariably located near chalk escarpments or cliffs or in river deposits immediately down stream of them, as in the middle Thames Valley, where high-quality flint for tool manufacture could be procured easily. Conversely, in parts of southeast England where flint of good quality is rare, such as the Weald, much of the Thames basin and the coastal hinterland of East Anglia, arte fa cts are scarce. This suggests that, in areas where there was a ready supply of this raw material, evidence for human activity is abundant, because tools were made and discarded there. In contrast, in areas where flint was scarce, people conserved the stone tools that they had transported, and discarded them only rarely. What implications does this have for our reconstruction of how humans exploited the landscapes of the Forest-bed river sys tems? It seems likely that the availability of raw materials may explain why it has taken so long to fi nd evidence of human occupa tion in these deposits. In the lower reaches and estuaries of the Forest-bed rivers, sedi ments are generally of fi ne grain. Gravel deposits are scarce in these stretches of the rivers, and most of the flints in the deposits have been reworked from beach gravels by water action, or transported down stream from the chalk region of central East Anglia. These river gravels constitute a scarce secondary source of flint, but the flint nodules are generally small, of poor quality and often frost-shattered or bat tered and rolled by water. The cut-marked bone from Happisburgh, together with the apparent absence of any discarded stone tools in the Forest-bed sediments, suggests that people brought flint implements with them to butcher large mammal carcasses, and that these tools were carefully curated and seldom discarded.

Conclusion
After nearly two centuries of investigation of the Forest-bed, the cut marks on the bone from Happisburgh, and its stratigraphical position, constitute the first conclusive evidence that humans were present in this part of East Anglia before the first major glaciation of lowland England. This find fi lls a significant gap in the geographical distribution of pre-glacial archaeological sites in Britain and reinforces the view that humans at this time were living, under varied climatic regimes, in a wide range of environments that extended from the coastal fringe along river valleys and into upland areas. Many of the sites have yielded prolific quantities of stone tools. We may therefore ask why has it been so difficult to find evidence for human occu pation along the lower reaches and estuar ies of the former Forest-bed rivers? There may be several reasons for this, but the main one is likely to be the paucity of flint of good quality as a raw material, and a consequent lack of knapping debris fr om stone-tool manufacture, which has fre quently provided evidence elsewhere of Palaeolithic occupation.
The East Anglian coast is now a key area in the search for evidence of the earliest human occupation of Britain. Extensive stretches of it are currently undergoing accelerated erosion by the sea, which is exposing geological sections that were pre viously hidden by sea defences and sand dunes. These exposures offer a unique window into the Pliocene-Pleistocene history of northwest Europe and they have the potential to contribute significantly to our knowledge of the timing and nature of the first human colonization of northern Eurasia.15