London before London

Caroline Juby, Royal Holloway, University of London (Geography Department) and the Early London History Department in the Museum of London Recent Lecture
Caroline Juby described her very interesting project of studying all the of existing artefacts found in the London area. She set the scene for this by describing how (despite what some might expect) there had in Victorian times actually been a huge number of palaeolithic finds in London. She estimated these as some 21,000 currently scattered around a huge variety of museums and collections. London had a large river, and at that period there was a huge amount of gravel extraction that still took place by hand.

However, there was little current scope for new first hand research. Few of these original Victorian sites had been re-investigated, and current finds are relatively rare. Instead there was great scope for better analysis of the 21,000 existing artefacts, which were often poorly documented and studied.

Caroline herself had found items in museum basements that had 'gone missing'

There was a very clear description as to how the geography of the South of England had changed over the huge periods covered. For example, until 450,000 BP the Thames had flowed much further North and entered the sea around modern Clacton.

Details were then given of what this meant for our area of London. Examples were given of local sites, and Caroline took us through a most unexpected range of details.

To give just a few examples:
in Kew/Richmond at 75,000 years BP, there were Bison, reindeer, wolf, and brown bears that were twice the size of a current bear
in Acton, in the last Interglacial (about 125,000 years BP) the temperature was some 3 degrees higher than today, and there were hippos, hyaenas, rhinoceros and similar creatures. Normally you would also expect hominids during an interglacial, but in this case no evidence had been found.
in Yiewsley, North of Heathrow, there were lots of flints probably made by Neanderthals around 250,000 years BP

Peter Brown