Page 467 - The Secret Museum

flakes from Box-grove left behind by the maker who had walked off with his new

tool tucked in his hand. Several original blocks of flint have been put back together
from the flakes, leaving a hole where the handaxe would have been. Nick showed me
one: ‘It’s like a time capsule in a way. You can see 20 minutes of someone’s time,
half a million years ago preserved right here.’

There is another handaxe from Hoxne that is less artistic, but very significant in
handaxe history. It was the first handaxe ever to be recognized as such. John Frere
(1740–1807), who lived nearby, found it near a gravel pit in 1797. He wrote to the
Society of Antiquities informing them that he had found ‘weapons of war, fabricated

and used by a people who had not the use of metals … The situation in which these
weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed, even
beyond that of the present world …’ For six decades, no one really believed his
claim that the rock was a tool made by early man. In those days the things we call
handaxes were known as ‘thunderbolts’ because people couldn’t explain them. They
imagined they were created by the ether during a storm. His thinking was far ahead of

its time, much like that of the artistic man from Hoxne who created a handaxe to be
beautiful as well as useful.

Since John Frere’s time, we’ve learnt more about handaxes and the people who
created them. A seismic shift in our understanding of life in Britain occurred thanks
to a man called Mike Chambers, who was out walking his dog on the beach in
Happisburgh, Norfolk (a small seaside village right on the edge of some cliffs, which
are crumbling into the sea). He spotted a handaxe lying in the mud and called the
Norwich Castle Museum. The handaxe was made 700,000 years ago, some 200,000

years earlier than any previously discovered artefact. The British Museum then began
excavating at two sites in Happisburgh, and found the earliest-known human
settlement in northern Europe.

Palaeontologists believe these first settlers were a different species to the
creative, early Neanderthal who made the stunning handaxe in Hoxne. They call this
now-extinct species Homo antecessor, or ‘pioneer man’. They think the species
walked from southern Europe into the dark forests, around 800,000 years ago, never
to return. They made it across the land bridge, to Norfolk which was then at the edge

of the inhabited world. The land was more forested, hillier and colder than it is now
(we know this because beetles found at the site are now found only in chilly
Scandinavia). At the time, the River Thames was flowing through Norfolk, out into
the North Sea, so pioneer man must have lived in its estuaries, hunting and fishing by
the water.

Pioneer man disappeared from Britain because of an Ice Age. These occurred
about every 100,000 years and, each time, Britain was depopulated. As it warmed up
again, new waves of people walked from southern Europe to Britain. There were at

least eight different waves of people that came in and died out before the most recent
wave, which is the one that survives today: us.