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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