M25/A2 road works suggest land route to France more than 110,000 years ago
Climate change may have brought Neanderthals from France – across a dry English Channel to Kent – 40,000 years earlier than previously thought. Theory has it they were attracted by the sight of the “white cliffs” rich in flint, or the migration of mammoth, rhino, horses and deer: precious foods in then sub-arctic conditions.
The whole story is told by a single flint hand tool and a waste flake discovered at the M25/A2 road works in Dartford in 2007. These have been dated by archaeologist Dr Francis Wenban-Smith of Southampton University and his team at Oxford Archaeology, by measuring the amount of radiation absorbed by the samples before they were buried (reports Tuesday’s Independent).
Works in progress
Chris Baker, Manager of Dartford Borough Museum said: “The road works in question have thrown up a number of discoveries all the way from Palaeolithic times, through the stone age, to the Romans, and up to World War II. This one is very exciting. If the flints are indeed 110,000 years old, that places them squarely in the ‘abandonment period when it was believed humans had not yet returned to Britain from the continent.”
“I do hope it may be possible to house the flints here in Dartford. It may be that they go to a national museum for further research, while we hold replicas. This has been the case with the 400,000 year old Swanscombe skull fragments, for example, whose originals are now housed at the Natural History Museum in London. Either way it looks likely to change our understanding and our exhibits about prehistoric England.”
But Dr Mark White of Durham University, who is not connected with the study, cautioned that the dating technique used is still under development. He said he would like to assess the findings in detail before considering whether they posed a challenge to the majority view that humans were absent from Britain at this time.
So who were the Neanderthals?
Named after the valley in Germany where their remains were discovered, Neanderthals were characterised by a short, muscular physique, a barrel chest, large brain and prominent facial features. They would have moved in “hunter gatherer bands” of up to 25 individuals, they made use of fire and relied on spears as their main hunting weapon. It is not known whether they wore clothes or relied on their own body hair for warmth.
Neanderthals split from the Homo Sapiens evolutionary line some 500,000 years ago and disappeared. However, scientists led by Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig last month reported that between 1 and 4% of the DNA in today’s Europeans (and people in the Pacific) comes from Neanderthals. This means that after Homo Sapiens came out of Africa, and before it migrated to Asia, there was some interbreeding between the two types of early humans.
