Where did the first Torbay Folk go?
Around four thousand years ago the inhabitants of Torbay died out - and we don’t know why. Kevin Dixon explores the mystery.
T
his near extinction took place over several hundred years but we know from DNA evidence that they did disappear. These lost locals were the Neolithic communities who were responsible for megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge and Torbay’s oldest building, the Chambered Tomb or Passage Grave at Broadsands. In their place came migrations of people from continental Europe. Dated to 3768-3641 BC, the Broadsands tomb is older than Stonehenge and is representative of the final part of the Stone Age, the Neolithic, which spanned from around 4000BC to 2,500BC. The peoples of the Neolithic Revolution had adopted agriculture and settled down in one place. To make room for new farmland, mass deforestation took place while new types of stone tools began to be produced. The Neolithic also saw the construction of these monuments in the landscape, the earliest being chambered tombs, to later be replaced by stone circles and other landmarks – the greatest of which are at Stonehenge, Avebury and the immense Silbury Hill. These megaliths seem to be linked with the new ways that
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people thought, in their religion, and how they ordered their society. The Broadsands tomb is a stone mound megalithic chamber, which had a single entrance passage. Discovered in 1956 by local archaeologist Guy Belleville, the tomb was excavated by C Ralegh Radford in 1958. Archaeologists found three first inhumations of two adults and one infant alongside Neolithic pottery – an adult male aged at least forty, a young adult male who was over 5ft 6ins tall, and the infant. There may have been more as the remains had later been cleared to the sides of the chamber and trodden into the floor. It was when two human thighbones still embedded in soil were dated that we found that the inhumations took place between 3768 and 3641 BC. It appeared as if several ritual fires had been lit before a new pavement was put in position, possibly a ritual cleansing prior to reusing the chamber. Then there was a later inhumation of a young male below the age of twenty alongside later Neolithic pottery. Oddly, evidence from stable isotope analysis showed that the occupants of the tomb had a diet almost wholly
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