Neanderthals of La Manche: new research in the Channel

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Matthew Pope, UCL & Natural History Museum - March 2018 Recent Lecture

Matthew has been part of a research team from University College London, the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Universities of Manchester, Wales, York and Southampton, Wessex Archaeology and French institutions, which has been active in the English Channel for 9 years, focussed on Jersey, the British South Coast and Northern France. They have been trying to unify the archaeology, especially the Middle Palaeolithic, of these regions. There are challenges and conceptual problems in developing the prehistory of the region. France has a different history of archaeological investigation, collection, artefact recording, development of commercial archaeology, etc: not only the language has kept the study of these areas separate. The chalk cliffs on the opposite coast in France are rather different from those on our South Coast, but the landscape of Northern France matches that of Southern England: the Bois de Boulogne is part of their Weald. So in prehistory were the same people present on both sides? Before the English Channel existed, Britain was just a peninsular. But there are differences between the two sides.

They have conducted 8 years of prehistoric research in Jersey. Matthew had realised that at the site of La Cotte de St Brelade, where there had already been 140 years of investigation, there was huge potential for Neanderthal studies. He could see an Ice Age landscape there, and they have focussed a lot of their attention there. The Jersey authorities are going to make the site safe from the sea in an engineering project: excavations will continue alongside.
La Cotte de St Brelade is a Neanderthal Supersite: a fissure in the cliffs made during high sea levels - the sea has cut a ravine into the granite headland, which has filled up with sediments. The site has yielded the largest collection of Neanderthal artefacts in NW Europe, from 220,000 years of sediments and of time, including fossils of two individuals plus a quarter of a million artefacts over 1cm in size, more than the rest of Europe by a huge factor - only 10,000 so far in the whole of the rest of Britain. This is where Neanderthals drove animals off the cliff then butchered them? The team has trouble with this, but can come up with no alternative explanation - carcases were being brought in to the site.

There is a lot of bone, a lot of burning. When the islands were habitable, there was long term occupation. When did people first start living in caves? It is usually seen as the primal human condition. Where were hominins sleeping, putting their children, the elderly, the sick etc? We don’t know - the record doesn’t exist. Stone tools are associated with carcases, but you don’t sleep where you eat – it is too dangerous to bed down around your kill for the night. From 600,000 years ago (also in Africa and Southern Asia) evidence first appears of humans – Heidelbergensis, Erectus, Neanderthalensis - living in caves, with innovative behaviours: cave occupation is associated with composite tools, birch bark tar, use of wood, fibres, different butchery, and fire. Bones show tiny cut marks from cutting off bits of meat, sharing meals, feeding together, sharing knowledge, performing in front of each other. La Cotte de St Brelade shows the threshold of new behaviour. There are advantages in working on an island: it is a fixed shape – you can understand the landscape. Other finds have been discovered around the coast, such as extensive Iron Age deposits. They continue under the sea, but are evident on the beaches. Sediment deposits are made up of loess which has been whipped off the exposed seabed and has rained down across Northern Europe and the Channel Islands. In the middle of the island there are 5 metres of loess, going back perhaps ¼ of a million years, possibly more - so, there is preservation - there may be incredible discoveries still to be made. On the coast, sections through the deposits are exposed.

But the archaeologists may have been concentrating their activities too much on the edges of the island. Another site, Les Varines, 14,000 years old, looks towards France: 3 metres down, a Magdalenian camp: modern humans, hunter-gatherers; they are thin on the ground in Britain. There were 7 or 8 pieces of green schist with cut marks on them: abstract art? The team will have to look under the loess.

This whole region is full of myths about lost landscapes such as Avalon. The Cornish name of St Michael’s Mount means “great rock in the forest”. At low sea levels a Bronze Age forest – stumps, logs etc. - is exposed around it; perhaps this triggered the idea of a lost landscape. Around the Channel Islands are numbers of small reefs, extensive areas of granite exposed at low tide. So, they are “consumed by the sea”. Jersey has a large tidal range: the sea retreats 4½ km, exposing ridges of granite, between them loess with Neanderthal tools. This can be explored with a guide on foot. Between Siberia and Alaska, Beringia was not a land bridge – this was where people lived, which applies also to Jersey. Doggerland is another lost landscape. Old accounts - in Pepys’ diary, Clement Reid’s 1913 mapping of Doggerland, Graham Clarke trying to make a synthesis, show people were trying to understand old geography, and since then, there has been Bryony Coles’ well-known 1998 paper and Vince Gaffney’s recent work. Was the Mesolithic centred in the North Sea? Deep sediments lie on Doggerland and under the English Channel. The seabed under the Channel is being mapped; it is incised by river valleys, and there is a type of tableland called Scabland, similar to that found in the USA and on Mars, with cliffs metres high - raised islands which could have affected the movement of game - there is probably Neanderthal archaeology there. There is an ancient cliff line off Normandy with Neanderthal tools and bones of mega fauna; mammoth bones turn up in Northern France. So, the team are working out the paleogeography of La Manche and realising the sort of land the Neanderthals preferred. They are looking at the style of artefacts, comparing them with Northern France: differences infer different behaviour. But this latest information must be responsibly presented. People nowadays are more and more identifying with ancient populations – haplogroups etc. But to claim descent from these ancient people is “bonkers”. The only Acheulian handaxe discovered in Greece was on the island of Lesvos, which during low sea levels was part of Turkey. So we must be aware of paleogeography.

Yvonne Masson