Pakefield beach

Amateur Archaeologist

On this beach, 700,000 years ago ...

One wintry day, two keen fossil collectors found a flint beneath these
cliffs. It didn't look like much, but it turned out to be evidence for the
earliest humans in Britain. Mike Pitts on the amateur archaeologists who
rewrote history

Friday January 6, 2006
The Guardian

Given the choice, the bottom of a cliff with the tide coming in fast is not
a place you'd work. For Paul Durbidge and Bob Mutch, however, the foreshore
at Pakefield, south of Lowestoft, Suffolk, is precisely where they want to
be. Especially in winter, and even more so when the storms are up. Because
it's then that the fossils are exposed.
Durbidge and Mutch have been collecting on this beach for years; they have
assembled a huge and academically valuable collection of animal bones. In
2000, though, they heard that along the coast in Norfolk, someone had found
a flint handaxe that was 500,000 years old. It would have been made by a
distant ancestor of Neanderthals, and as far as Britain was concerned, was
as old as early humans got. This gave Durbidge and Mutch an idea. They knew
their animal fossils from Pakefield were older than that. What if we have
flints here too, they thought? "We had a gut feeling about Pakefield," says
Durbidge.
Late in 2001, they hit the jackpot: during an excavation, they found a small
flint flake. To the uninitiated, it's just a chip of stone, the sort of
thing you might prise out of your sandal. But the two friends saw it for
what it was: a diamond amid dross. That little chip of flint had been shaped
by the hand of one of the very first Europeans.
Late last month, the journal Nature announced the discovery of
700,000-year-old stone tools in Suffolk - pushing back the date of arrival
of early humans in northern Europe by 200,000 years. Buried in the list of
19 authors were the names of Mutch and Durbidge.
While their address was given as Lowestoft Museum, they are not on the
staff: in a great British tradition of "amateur" scientists and explorers,
Mutch and Durbidge are unpaid and answerable to no one. Without them, the
flints might never have been found. In our regulated, budget-driven world,
it turns out that it's still possible for the independent visionary to
rewrite history.
There is a dark layer of clay that can be seen intermittently along the
coastal cliffs of Norfolk and Suffolk, and it's known as the Cromer
Forest-bed Formation. It got its name from ancient tree stumps, and for over
200 years has been popular with collectors for its copious fossils -
mammoth, sabretooth cat, bison and other exotic creatures. Pakefield was
famous for fossils a century ago, but until recently the shore was covered
with debris and little more could be found.
The coast south of Lowestoft is Bob Mutch's patch. He began collecting
fossils, he says, as a youngster in the Southwold area. He knew the history
of Pakefield and kept an eye on it. Then in 1994, there was a big storm.
"Then the proverbial hit the fan," he says in his soft accent. "There was
tons of material everywhere."
During a big winter storm, the beach can disappear for a period - suddenly
the ground drops by several metres. On those rare occasions when everything
goes right, ancient gravel-filled river channels are exposed, packed with
animal bones. Mutch describes running about, picking up fossils in a frenzy
while the tide rolls around and cliffs slump into the waves.
In 2000, a group of scientists found a worked flint at Pakefield - but it
was not in situ; it was loose, rather than embedded in the clay, and
therefore couldn't be dated. Mutch and Durbidge, already buoyed up by news
of the Norfolk handaxe, knew they'd need to do better.
So, starting in late 2001, Durbidge and Mutch excavated small sections at
the bottom of the cliff. They were thorough. "We have to map it all, take
the photographs, systematically scrape the surface, sieve, wash and sort,"
says Mutch. He's not as fit as he was, and an assistant, Adrian Charlton,
does the spadework. "He stands up to his knees in cold water," says Mutch.
"Works his backside off. He loves sieving."
Then came the flint. "It was pure luck," says Durbidge. "We'd done three
small sections, and we found our first flint flake."
"I knew what it was," says Mutch. "It was crisp ... stood out a mile."
They sent it to the Natural History Museum, and got an excited letter back:
"You appear to have hit the jackpot."
In 2003, a small team that included members of the Ancient Human Occupation
of Britain (Ahob), a project involving scientists from institutions across
the UK, came to Pakefield to excavate. They were helped - and watched
closely - by Mutch and co, keen to have their discoveries vindicated.
Ahob found three more flints, perfectly sealed in the clay alongside animal
fossils.
Simon Parfitt, small-mammals expert at the Natural History Museum and
University College London, had also been looking for signs of early humans
on the East Anglian coast. In 1998, he'd found the very first, ironically on
a bison bone that had been in the museum's collection since 1897. The bone
had microscopic cuts on it, that could only have been made by a flint
butchery knife: unfortunately, it was not sealed in the clay layer.
His quest, like that of Durbidge and Mutch, had brought him and Ahob to
Pakefield. Not only was he hoping for flints, but also the supportive
evidence that large mammals had been defleshed with stone tools. He wanted
the bones of a butchered mammoth.
Parfitt and colleagues sieved everything they dug up, some of it in the lab
in London, and over the next few months sorted the thousands of tiny
fragments under a microscope. "There was a huge quantity of small mammals,"
he says, including such exotics as "a very rare extinct aquatic shrew",
bats, squirrels, hamsters and, most significantly, the vole species known to
have died out some 700,000 years ago. No butchered beasts yet, but they were
now confident of the great age, the association with flint tools and the
nature of the landscape and fauna at that remote date.
For these flints - they total 32 now - prove humans to have been there, but
it's the animal bones, plant remains, beetles and sediment studies that
allow us to picture what it was like. What would it be like, then? Tony
Stuart, a leading specialist in ice-age mammals at the University of Durham
and UCL, says that at first you would think you were in modern Britain as it
might be if it was still wilderness, with broadleaved woodland opening on to
marsh around a meandering river rich with pike, tench and rudd - though you
might feel a little warm.
However, he says, "in a short while, familiarity would have given way to
astonishment." As a lion roared and hyenas whooped, a mammoth would crash
through the undergrowth on its way to the river, upsetting the hippos
sunning themselves on the bank. The roster of creatures would make a theme
park drawl with envy: an extinct giant beaver, wild boar, three different
extinct giant deer, a giant moose, an extinct bison, two species of horse,
an extinct rhino, the enormous straight-tusked
elephant (larger than any elephant alive today) and the mammoth itself, an
ancestor of the (smaller) woolly mammoth of the later ice ages.
There were humans out there, but so few as to be almost unnoticed. The
animals' chief concerns were the more vicious carnivores: lion, spotted
hyena (Durbidge and Mutch have found not just bones, but droppings too),
wolf, bear and the spectacular sabretooth cat. In fact, humans were so
rare, it's normal in such work to find a huge range of animals but no fossil
hominins.
And what were these early humans like? Well, they predate Neanderthals by
hundreds of thousands of years, but still would have been much more like us
than our closest living relatives today, the chimpanzees. At Boxgrove in
West Sussex a few fossils have been found of Homo heidelbergensis, dating
from 500,000 years ago. Pakefield hominins may be their ancestors, and
ultimately the Neanderthals' too - it's thought that, some 15,000 years ago,
the lineage died out.
Durbidge and Mutch have mixed feelings about publicity, little surprise
given the history of occasional mistrust, not just between professional and
amateur archaeologists, but professional and professional too. Media
coverage of the 700,000-year-old humans last month inevitably focused on the
sponsoring institutions - 15 alone listed in Nature - rather than the
Suffolk men. Although they spoke to me for this article, Mutch and Durbidge
later decided they did not want to be photographed. Their work at the cliff
face is not yet over, and they fear attracting undue attention to it.
"It's the science that's important", says Mutch, "not us."
The fact is, though, that it's men and women like them who have helped to
write our early history and will continue to do so.
The Suffolk flints may not look like much, yet their context launches them
on to the stage of British history. The implications are huge. If evidence
for hominins 700,000 years ago could be missed for 200 years in a part of
the world with probably the highest density of collectors and scientists,
what might we yet find, in older deposits here and elsewhere?

· Mike Pitts is the editor of British Archaeology



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