More about the Lower Pleistocene Human Site at Easton Bavents

MORE ABOUT THE LOWER PLEISTOCENE HUMAN SITE AT EASTON BAVENTS H . D . (HOLLINGS

Two years have gone by since I wrote about the man-made bone tools from the Lower Pleistocene Antian beds at Easton Bavents (1) and little has been found since then as there were hardly any high tides to open up new sections. Nevertheless Mr. Ian Cruickshanks found one or two bone spatulas and a good bit of walrus tusk and between us \ve got the usual run of stumps of deer antlers, broken elephant bones (Archidiskodon meridionalis), fish bones and suchlike odds and ends.

Stone Flakes Apart from some shaped flints, the origin of which is controversial, seven flakes have been found since 1969. One is not an artefact, one is doubtful, but the other five are certainly man-made.

These were mentioned in my former paper as having been approved of by the late Dr. L. S. B. Leakey, who said that they were "most emphatically made by man". Two of these flakes are described below: FIG. 1A. An outer (?) flake, yellowish-brown glossy patina.

Its outer surface is fairly heavily scratched and there are a few small light Scratches on the inner surface. The natural flaking on the edges has the same patina, but there are also a few small negative flakes without patination which suggests that they are of later date. It was found by Mr. T. H. Gardner in the Upper Stone Layer, north cliff, in which so many good finds have been made. Its State of preservation seems to show that it had gone through at least one Glacial period (Thurnian?) and was then weathered out of its old bed and slightly damaged before ending up in the Upper Stone Layer.

FIG. IB. An outer flake of rather impure flint, patinated as above. The point-of-percussion is much battered. The upper and lower edges have some slight natural flaking and there are patches of hardened red sand that show that it may have been derived from some earlier deposit. It is unscratched.

These specimens call to mind the flakes in Ipswich Museum that were found by Mr. H. E. P. Spencer some thirty years ago at Bawdsey, and although they were picked up from the beach, they came from the Red Crag (Ludhamian) sands above it (2).

These Easton Bavents and Bawdsey flakes show the possibility that man was here at roughly the same time as Bed I man at Olduvai in East Africa, a site that is dated at about 1,750,000 years ago. I say "man" since there seems to be no good reason

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FIG. 1 a and b : Stone Flakes f r o m Easton Bavents.

c: M o d e r n

Platax.

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for shutting out the tool-making and upright-standing Australopithecines from that genus. But there may be more to it than that, for it seems that the Easton Bavents and Bawdsey folk were skilled makers of flakes whereas their presumed contempories in Africa were making their characteristic tools out of pebbles\ thus the Africans had a CORE culture and the East Anglians a F L A K E culture.

This core versus flake way of making tools has been long known to students of the European Middle Pleistocene Stone Age who have assumed that the core tradition arose in Africa and the flake tradition in Asia. Should this assumption be true, our Crag flake makers may have been of Asiatic origin and the forerunners, by more than a million years, of the classical European palaeolithic flake cultures.

The above theory may not be altogether too wild since Professor G. H. R. von Koenigswald (3) has suggested that the ancestral Australopithecines arose in India and that one line went to Africa and another to Java and China. If this was so, then it could be that stone-tool making arose independently in Africa and China and that it was in the latter area that the flake tradition held sway and was diffused into Europe in Crag times.

S o m e Observations PLATAX. Among the many fossils to be found in the Upper Stone Layer and the Shell Beds some of the commonest are those of the extinct species of fish Platax woodwardi. T h e genus goes back to the Cretaceous period and some species are still living in the tropical waters of the Indian and western Pacific oceans.

It is known as the Sea Bat (not to be confused with the bottomloving West Indian "Bat Fish" of another genus) and when I was reading up the subject it was feit that it might be of interest to make a copy of an Illustration (by W. P. C. Tenison) of the living Platax orbicularis—FIG. l c (4). Some species grow to a length of twenty inches and are strikingly marked.

As British fossils they are said to be not common in the Coralline and Red Crags but many of their bones are found in the Norwich Crag at Easton Bavents. The importance of this fish to us is that although the genus is a tropical one it must have been common here a million or more years ago and moreover it could only have reached our waters by way of the Mediterranean, a sea that has a most chequered history owing to the earth movements of the 'Continental Drift' and the pressure of the African land-mass against Europe which sometimes blocked and sometimes opened the Straits of Gibraltar and the Isthmus of Suez. There is a good account of these earth movements in a recent National Geographie Magazine (5). It would be most helpful to know the age of our

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Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 17, Part 2 Platax bones and how and why so many are found in such a relatively late deposit as the Antian at Easton Bavents.

BRYOZOA. Fourflintswere found that have the remains of 'Sea Mats' (Flustra) upon them. One, a typical Cragflint,with a recent looking colony, was found on the beach but the rest were from the Crag. Miss Patricia L. Cook, of the Department of Zoology, British Museum (Natural History) has most kindly looked at them and says that the one from the beach is the living species Canopeum reticulum (Linn), and that the others "a certainly fossil but I am afraid I cannot give an age to them.

They may also be Canopeum reticulum, but are very worn. reticulum is common in esturine—to marine waters round the southern and eastern coasts of Britain".

So the hope of getting even a rough date for the fossil forms has been dashed.

DATING THE BEDS. Another problem is true age of these deposits. Palaeomagnetic investigations, fossil pollen counts, heavy mineral sampling, zoological surveys and so on have thrown much light on the subject, but what is now needed is a way that will give a time scale in years as the Potassium-Argon method has done for East Africa by way of its volcanic ashes.

Corals and shells, it is said, can be dated by Helium 4. analysis but I do not know if it would work for our shells here.

FUTURE PROSPECTS. Unless some spectacularfindis made, the outlook for work on the Crag is not bright, for it would seem that Science for the sake of Science is no longer as esteemed as it was in the days of the Victorian 'amateurs' who pioneered so manyfieldson the strength of their own private incomes. Nowadays the problem is complicated by the need to have the help of modern methods of scientific research in addition to the actual finding of the specimens, and for this, specialists in many branches of learning are needed tofitthefindsinto their backgrounds, the time scale and the stream of life and evolution.

This scientific co-operation might also have come about with the Red Crag excavations around Ipswich in the early part of this Century, but J. Reid Moir's and Sir Ray Lankester'sfindswere on the whole inconclusive, too early by a generation and above all before the time was ripe. But now, with the known date of the Australopithecines going back into millions of years, the time is ripe for a wholly new look that would allow prehistorians, geologists and other specialists, unfettered by the prejudices of the past, to bring their skills to bear upon our Crags and upon those of the Netherlands and Belgium and indeed upon all the European deposits of Lower Pleistocene age and Villafranchian fauna, for, as the prehistorian Professor Hallam L. Movius, Jr.

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has written (6), "A healthy science is one in which there is continuous re-evaluation of the problem in the light of present evidence and application of this re-evaluation to practice and terminology".

Platax—A correction Since the above was written, I have had the pleasure of a talk with Mr. P. Cambridge about the problems of the Crag at Easton Bavents and he told me that, in his opinion, the fossil fish bones, so long held to be those of Platax, do not belong to that genus and that they represent more than one species.

Some are probably the bones of fish of the Cod family and others compare with the well-known modern Jack fish (Caranx) of the American eastern seaboard. Some of the 'Cod' type are found as derived fossils associated with shells of Plio-Pleistocene age in the Holocene (post Glacial) beds of the river Scheide in Holland and Belgium.

References 1.

Collings, H. D . (1974). Man worked bones from the Norwich Crag at Easton Bavents. Suffolk Natural History 16, 309-315.

2.

Spencer, H. E. P. (1970). of Suffolk. Part 5. Suffolk

3.

Koenigswald, G . H. R . von (1973). Australopithecus, Meganthropus and Ramapithecus. Journal of Human Evolution 2, 487-491.

A Contribution to the Geological History Natural History 15, 286.

4.

Norman, J . R. (1931).

5.

Matthews, Samuel W .

Geographie 143, 1-37.

A History of Fishes.

6.

Movius, J r . , Hallam L . (1953). Old World Prehistory: Palaeolithic.

Kroeber, ed.: Anthropology Today (Chicago) p. 189.

(1973).

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Fig. 83b.

Changing

Earth.

H. D. Collings, B.A., 23 Station Road, Southwold,

National

Suffolk.