Blood of the Isles Read Free Page B

archaic species of humans, not directly ancestral to our own species,
Homo sapiens
. A shin bone from Boxgrove Quarry near Chichester on the Sussex coast, a tooth from Pontnewydd Cave in north Wales, both over a quarter of a million years old and both the remains, as far as can be told, of much sturdier, large-boned humans, more like Neanderthals than our own species. The recent discovery of flint tools that have been exposed in a crumbling cliff near Lowestoft on the Suffolk coast is evidence, albeit indirect, of a human presence on the Isles more than half a million years ago. Fascinating though these finds are, theyare merely glimpses into the world of long-extinct humans who came and went but left no lasting impression on the Isles, small bands of roving hunters whose luck finally ran out. These were not our ancestors.
    The earliest evidence of our own species,
Homo sapiens
, in the Isles comes from Paviland Cave just above the rocky shoreline of the Gower Peninsula to the west of Swansea in South Wales. In 1823 the Oxford palaeontologist William Buckland excavated the partial skeleton of a man. Misled by the presence of ivory ornaments near the body, Buckland assumed that he had found the remains of a woman and, because the bones were stained with red ochre as part of an unknown burial ritual, she soon became known as ‘the Red Lady of Paviland’. However, a more thorough analysis of the bones, particularly the pelvis, showed that the Red Lady was actually a man, though he still retains the title. When Buckland found these bones they were so well preserved that he thought they could not be all that old. His theory was that they were the remains of a woman who had been living in the cave while working at a nearby Roman camp. But he was wrong again. We now know from carbon-dating that the Red Lady was much older than the time of the Roman occupation. ‘She’ died 26,000 years ago and ‘her’ pendant was not made of elephant ivory but had been carved from the tusk of a mammoth. We know, from the deliberate burial, that the Red Lady was survived by her relatives, but no trace of them remains. After the time of the Red Lady, there is a long empty gap in the fossil record of the Isles. There is nothing until the time of the ‘older’ of the Cheddar Men,just over 12,000 years ago. Why the break? There is one very simple answer – the Ice Age.
    About 24,000 years ago the temperatures in the northern latitudes around the globe, including the Isles, began to drop as the planet entered once again into the downward phase of a glacial cycle. These regular cycles of bitter cold and comparative mildness have been going on for at least 2 million years. They are caused by the slight shifts in the way the earth rotates and moves in its orbit around the sun. The shape of the orbit changes from circular to elliptical and then back to circular about once every 96,000 years. The angle of the earth’s axis changes, shifting the positions of the Arctic Circle and the Tropic of Cancer up and down by 3 degrees of latitude, and several hundred miles, once every 42,000 years. Another cycle, every 20,000 years, alters the seasons when the earth is at different parts of its orbit. As the earth runs through this cycle, the signs of the zodiac slowly move round and we enter new astrological ‘ages’, the latest being Aquarius. The combination of all three cycles one on top of the other means the earth’s climate never stands still for long. The effect is to change the amount of sunlight which hits the higher latitudes in both hemispheres, slowly increasing and decreasing as the overlapping cycles gradually shift the planet’s position with respect to the sun. We are now in a warm phase of the long-term glacial cycle, but it will not last for ever and at some as yet unpredictable time in the future we will slide inexorably into another Ice Age. How soon the next cold phase will begin and to what extent its chilling effects will be tempered