Inside the mind of an ancient axeman

A javelin thrower, a dead deer and a pile of flint chippings bring us closer to our Stone Age ancestors


Sherlock Holmes appreciated the importance of stabbing dead animals with spears in the name of science. "If you could have looked into (the butcher's) back shop," the fictional detective once told Watson over breakfast while brandishing a ferocious weapon, "you would have seen a dead animal swung from a hook in a ceiling, and a gentleman in his shirt sleeves furiously stabbing at it with this weapon. I was that energetic person, and I have satisfied myself that by no exertion of my strength can I transfix the pig with a single blow. Perhaps you would care to try?"

One hundred years on and scientists are still trying. In one of the more unusual examples of experimental archaeology, researchers piecing together the finds from Boxgrove, in West Sussex, Britain's most important Stone Age site, recruited a university athlete to hurl a wooden spear at a dead deer.

The method was unorthodox. But the results may have helped to settle a long-standing row over whether our ancestors living 500,000 years ago were spear-throwing hunters or simply scavengers. More importantly, they allowed scientists to get closer to understanding the mind of Boxgrove Man, Britain's earliest known inhabitant.

It was 10 years ago when Mark Roberts unearthed a long shinbone from a former gravel quarry close to Chichester. The remains, and two teeth found between 1993 and 1996, were half a million years old. He and his colleagues concluded that they probably belonged to Homo heidelbergensis, the tall, muscular ancestor of modern man and the Neanderthals.

The find electrified the science world and captured the public's imagination. But the full picture of the long, slow excavation and analysis from the quarry is only now coming to light.

Today the Boxgrove quarry offers little to the casual visitor: a few piles of earth, a big hole and acre upon acre of gravel. Half a million years ago, when Britain had a more continental climate and was still connected to Europe, Boxgrove had a raised beach at the foot of 70m-high chalk cliffs.

The landscape was changing fast. But for a few hundred years, a spring fed fresh water from the base of the cliff. And for something between five and 50 years, the water collected into a watering hole.

This pond was a magnet to wildlife, for rhinos, horse, red deer and giant deer and bison came to drink. And with the herbivores came the predators – lion, panther, hyenas and humans.

Over the past decade, thousands of bones have been excavated from the former beach. Many of the animal bones had cut marks, evidence that they had been skilfully butchered with flint tools. A staggering 450 hand axes were found, along with some of the earliest antler tools used for finishing flint artefacts. There were even scrapings of flint that had fallen to the ground to reveal the silhouette of the toolmakers.

"The preservation is like Pompeii," says Dr Matt Pope, an archaeologist at University College London archaeologist who works at the site. "It was very wet and inundated with silt at high tide. So we get snapshots of events preserved in time."

The remains of Boxgrove Man are, along with fragments of skull in Swanscombe, Kent, and teeth from Pontnewydd, North Wales, the only direct evidence of pre-anatomically modern people in Britain.

The leg bone came from a stocky, adult at least five feet nine inches tall. Both ends of the bone had been chewed – possibly by a wolf, lion or a hyena. Prof Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum, London, said that the tibia matched bones from Homo heidelbergensis in Africa from the same period. "This is physical evidence of some of the first Britons and indeed some of the earliest Europeans," he said. "This, or something like it, is the common ancestor of us and the Neanderthals."

Analysis of the bone cells, or osteones, in the leg revealed Boxgrove Man to be between 42 and 52 at a time when life expectancy could not have been much more than 40. The teeth belonged to a second Homo heidelbergensis. They were diseased – and badly cut with flints, suggesting that stone tools were used close to the mouth. The picture that emerges is one of a tall, muscular hunter with the body of a sprinter not a marathon runner. He was designed for bursts of energy, more suited to ambush, entrapment and escape than the long slog across open ground.

So much for their bodies. But what of their minds? As recently as 10 years ago, many scientists argued that these early humans were very different from modern man – they lived in the moment and may have simply been scavengers, unable to hunt. Boxgrove has changed that view. First, the repeated use of the water hole by humans raises the intriguing possibility that these wandering hunters and gatherers may have had roots in the landscape.

According to Mark Roberts, the University College London archaeologist who heads the research team, how long the watering hole was operational is crucial. If it was around for 50 years or more, an average of nine hand axes were dropped or left there each year. That could mean just one visit a year, possibly by different groups of nomads. But if the pond was more short-lived, then it was used frequently, possibly by people camped close by.

"My gut feeling is that this is a place that was known in the landscape," said Roberts. "They didn't bring the animals there. These were killed here. They already equate the water hole with these animals and that's also where they butchered them."

The remains of rhino, horse, bison and deer at Boxgrove and elsewhere reveal that Boxgrove Man was a skilled butcher. He had to be. A watering hole, visited by predators, was a dangerous place. He needed to strip the meat, smash the bones and remove the marrow as quickly and efficiently as possible, while defending the catch from other hungry predators and scavengers.

Experiments by the Boxgrove team have shown that a large deer can be stripped of meat, and the marrow removed from the bones, with flint tools in two to three hours.

A good butcher is not necessarily a hunter. But Boxgrove has provided evidence that humans were bringing down their own animals as well as cutting them up. The crucial find was the earliest indirect evidence of spear use. A horse carcass, stripped of meat within a day, was found near the main site with an injury to its shoulder blade. With help from a javelin thrower from University College Chichester, the Boxgrove team showed that similar damage could be inflicted on a deer carcass using a thrown wooden spear. Sir Bernard Knight, a Home Office pathologist, confirmed that the damage was compatible with a spinning spear. The conclusion is supported by the discovery of a wooden spear from Germany about 400,000 years old.

The evidence of hunting and butchering suggests Boxgrove Man was working in teams. Prof Stringer said: "It's difficult to judge the numbers, but if you imagine a rhino carcass in an open landscape where you've got lions, hyenas, wolves and vultures, it would need a reasonable-sized group.

"You are not talking about two or three. These were dangerous animals, and if you were armed only with wooden spears you wou