Page 468 - The Secret Museum

Treasures excavated from the 800,000-year-old home of pioneer man are stored in

the room above the handaxes. We entered a room filled with bags full of sediment
waiting to be sieved – the finest sieves are for beetles; the larger ones for bones –
and looked in a tray filled with flints which are more primitive tools than handaxes.
As yet, no handaxe has been found at this site. Perhaps these earliest settlers didn’t
know how to make them.

There are so many unanswered questions about pioneer man. ‘It would be nice to
excavate a hairy human holding a handaxe,’ said Nick, ‘but, so far, all we know is
they probably had smaller brains and smaller bodies. Did they know how to make

fire? What about clothes and shelter? Were they the top predator?’ Nick explained
that it was possible they were not, and they spent their days in competition with
spotted hyenas and other animals that hunt for food. Pioneer man may have survived
by scavenging scraps left behind by other animals higher up the food chain. How
bizarre is that?

Having spent hours looking at handaxes and talking about life on Earth millennia
ago, emerging into twenty-first century Hoxton was quite a shock. These concrete city
streets seemed an unnatural environment for humans to live in, after hundreds of

thousands of years spent living on and off the land. Or maybe I was just unnerved as a
man followed me along the road and asked me whether I was from MI5. Oh well, I
thought, contending with oddballs is better than competing with a hyena for food. I
nipped into a cafe to escape him, and looked around at people plotting ideas and
creating projects over their flat white coffees. It was good to see the artistic spirit of
the dreamer who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago in Hoxne still alive and

well. If he were alive today, he’d probably have been an artist living here in Hoxton.