Philobiblon

I've lived in three flats in London that have led me into regular, if short, contact with large numbers of neighbours whom I've barely got to know. Consequently, I've got very good at talk about the weather (although I remain extremely bad at predicting it.) The British talk about the weather, a lot, perhaps because theirs is so changeable, but also because they are such a polite race – politics, religion, etc are all distinctly "out".

And it seems from Jan Golinski's work that it was ever thus. In British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment, he finds, however, that from the Enlightenment onwards, about the end of the 17th century, there was a significant change in the way in which people talked about the weather — or at least how educated people talked about it. Extreme events came to be regarded less as acts of god and more as natural phenomena to be explained (although as Golinski notes in the conclusion, even today, as in some discussion about Hurricane Katrina, some haven't managed to reach the stage of basic enlightenment).

As you might expect, the change was founded on science, or at least attempted science, which can be traced back to the efforts of the Royal Society in the 1660s. Robert Hooke published his "Method for Making a History of the Weather" in 1667, laying out the format that a daily journal should take. A few recorders, who more or less followed these methods – meticulously in the case of William Derham – were published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions. In the 1780s British efforts, which had been sporadic, were sharpened by efficient "competition" from France and Germany.

The efforts took a more popular form in The Gentleman's Magazine, which from 1751 began monthly accounts from the London physician John Fothergill, while later Thomas Barker in Rutland and the famous naturalist Gilbert White (whose The Natural History of Selbourne has just been republished) also contributed.

The notion of climate had, Golinski records, once meant simply a zone of latitude and later extended to mean the conditions of a place, including its atmosphere. Classical writers, including Caesar and Tacitus, had begun a familiar refrain about the British damp, but during the Enlightenment period, the trope gradually shifted: the weather was part of what made Britain great.- moderate and only gently variable in temperature and precipitation – indeed "civilised".

Studying the weather in the 18th century meant doing so politely – having a cultural marker that set you off from the common mass – John Pointer dismissed claims that storms represented armies fighting in the air as "barbarous" or "vulgar". Another commentator complained that "in the last Century it as …a prevailing Opinion among the Vulgar that the Winds were in some measure, under the direction of the internal spirits". Appropriate records and scientific investigation and explanation could, these men (and they were nearly all men – Margaret Mackenzie of Delvine, Perthshire, who kept a meticulous temperature record at her home from 1780 to 1802 being a rare exception about whom Golinski unfortunately tells us no more) banish such misunderstandings.

Although, of course, the science was far from up to the job. The great summer haze of 1783 cause, we now know, by a dust and gas plume from a volcanic fissure in Iceland, was beyond 18th-century science's powers of explanation, although Benjamin Franklin did get it right, but it seems no one believed him. One newspaper called it a "universal Perturbation in Nature".

While this is clearly a solidly grounded academic work, Golinski provides plenty of colour to leaven his account, which is interesting enough in its own terms (and he's blessed short on academic jargon). So he tells us about Thomas Barker (1722-1809), squire of Lyndon Hall in the county of Rutland, who took his dedication to weather recording, as to other scientific experiments. "Twice a day, month after month, year after year, Barker read his thermometer and barometer, at times that he measure to the minute…" There were however occasional interruptions, as on his marriage in 1751 to the sister of Gilbert White. His recording here was less meticulous, however: he wrote in his diary "at Selbourne, etc". (What Anne White thought or perhaps wrote about the marriage unfortunately doesn't seem to have survived.)
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Reading Chris Stringer’s Homo britannicus is a bit like going down to the pub beer garden on a sunny Sunday afternoon and listening to an acquaintance who’s fast becoming a friend setting out their life’s work and passion – he wants you to grasp the excitement of the work, and understand what’s going on, but he’s also scrupulous in making clear in this fast-moving field what’s now known fact, what’s generally believed but could be overturned in a moment, and the theories he holds that run against the general view of the field.

What’s more, he wants you to understand why this is important, beyond the pure science, beyond the romance of history – for his study of the spread of 700,000 years of human occupation of Britain has a powerful lesson about just how difficult an environment this proved for multiple species Homo, and just how often the environment wiped them out, or forced them to flee. (No current Britain no claim to really be a “native” – at most their ancestors have spent 11,500 years on these isles; between 500,000 and 12,000 years ago there was only human occupation for about 20% of the time, with none at all between 180,000 and 70,000 years ago.)

Stringer is one of the leading lights in the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project, which after centuries of amateur enthusiasm and chance discoveries has sought to bring planning and careful science to a field that’s often been left to chance, amateur enthusiasm, and occasionally blighted, as with the Piltdown Man, by forgery, and more frequently by over-claim and media distortion.

He begins with a brisk skip through this often less than illustrious history – starting with the pioneering Michele Mercati, director of the Vatican Botanic Gardens who in 1590 first recognised flint tools for what they are, rather than “thunderbolts” or “elfshots”, as they were known. He was ignored, a later pioneer, Isaac de la Peytere, concluded these were the works of “pre-Adamite man”, and had his books publicly burnt in Paris for his trouble. Gradually, however, light emerged through the religious fog, with by about 1820 the idea that there had been successive creations, each destroyed by a flood, gaining ground. This is no dry list, for Stringer keeps his tale entertaining, painting a picture of the eccentric but for his time remarkably scientific Reverend William Buckland, who proceeded on his investigatory travels by horse, always dressed in academic gown and top hat. Beginning the modern science of taphonomy, he imported hyena from Africa to study its feeding habits, with the intention of then dissecting it, but he became so fond of “Billy” he kept the animal for 25 years as a pet, which had the disconcerting habit, for dinner guests, of chomping whole guinea pugs under the sofa.

But the story properly begins 700,000 years ago – at a site in what is now East Anglia, where a species using only shaped stones for tools lived on a peninsula linked to western Europe. The site is Pakefield, and, Stringer explains, through a technique called amino-acid dating, human occupation here has been dated back this far – the oldest firmly dated site north of the Alps. The tools are very simple – but, he explains, they were made from water-worn pebbles, a material not suited to large flaked tools like handaxes. The flora and fauna of the time suggests a remarkably mild environment, and it is clear that Stringer inclines towards supporting the view that this “Costa del Cromer” was only a brief episode of migration under unusually favourable conditions, not real adaptation to anything like normal northern conditions.

There’s then a gap to 500,000 years ago, when Homo heidelbergensis, a species that made very finely shaped handaxes, lived (and thought to be an ancestor of both Neanderthals and us) – best known through the much-reported Boxgrove site. It deserves its fame, for rare conditions of preservation mean that not only mere artefacts are preserved, but moments in real time – when a person crouched down to knap a flint tool, then walked off with it, leaving the debris spread around the worksite and their footprints visible. There are also butchery sites – the bones and the tools left there when the work was done.

But the evidence also shows more – for on the bones of the big game being butchered here, rhinos, deer and horses, the human tool marks on the bones always precede the teeth marks of hyena or wolves – indicating that these people were either capable of hunting game for themselves, or at least at fighting off the fiercest of scavengers until they’d got what they wanted from a carcass. Stringer explains that when this discovery was made in the 1990s it was a revelation – for while secondary scavenging and using tools for marrow extraction may have been enough to allow the first human expansion out of Africa about 2 million years ago, primary access, with intestines and offal, meant a much better quality and variety of food.

Very late in the work at Boxgrove, on one last throw of the dice, the investigators found one of the Boxgrove men – or at least his tibia and a couple of teeth. From this they were able to draw conclusions about the sort of individual this diet could produce – 1.8 metres ( 5 foot 11) tall, weighing about 90kg (200lb), and perhaps 40 years old when he died. What’s more, they know he was righthanded – from the marks on his teeth made when he used then as a “third hand” while slicing items with stone tools. (Reading this book, one often longs for a time machine – but with this level of science you almost have one.)
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