New research pieces together the activities and movements of a group of Homo heidelbergensis, a poorly understood species of archaic humans that lived between 700,000 to 200,000 years ago, as they made tools, including the oldest bone tools documented in Europe, and extensively butchered a large horse at the 480,000-year-old archaeological site near Boxgrove, Sussex, the United Kingdom.
An artistic rendering of the Horse Butchery Site and the Boxgrove people; it shows how the site was situated in front of towering chalk cliffs on the edge of an intertidal lagoon; the cliffs to the north provided all the flint used in tool making at the site and, within a few hours, the tide would have begun to cover the site in fine silt, preserving evidence of the day’s activity. Image credit: Lauren Gibson / Institute of Archaeology, University College London.
The Horse Butchery Site is one of many excavated in quarries near Boxgrove, an internationally significant area that is home to Britain’s oldest human remains.
During the excavations in the 1980-90s, archaeologists recovered more than 2,000 razor sharp flint fragments from eight separate groupings, known as knapping scatters.
These are places where individual early humans knelt to make their tools and left behind a dense concentration of material between their knees.
Embarking on an ambitious jigsaw puzzle to piece together the individual flints, Dr. Matthew Pope from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London and his colleagues discovered that in every case Homo heidelbergensis were making large flint knives called bifaces, often described as the perfect butcher’s tool.
“This was an exceptionally rare opportunity to examine a site pretty much as it had been left behind by an extinct population, after they had gathered to totally process the carcass of a dead horse on the edge of a coastal marshland,” Dr. Pope said.
“Incredibly, we’ve been able to get as close as we can to witnessing the minute-by-minute movement and behaviors of a single apparently tight-knit group of early humans: a community of people, young and old, working together in a co-operative and highly social way.”
“We established early on that there were at least eight individuals at the site making tools, and considered it likely that a small group of adults, a ‘hunting party,’ could have been responsible for the butchery,” he said.
“However, we were astonished to see traces of other activities and movement across the site, which opened the possibility of a much larger group being present.”
The detailed study of the horse bones shows the animal was not just stripped of meat, but each bone was broken down using stone hammers so that the marrow and liquid grease could be sucked out.
The horse appears to have been completely processed, with the fat, marrow, internal organs and even the partially digested stomach contents providing a nutritious meal for the early human group of 30 or 40 individuals envisaged for the site.
However, the horse provided more than just food, and the detailed analysis of the bones found that several bones had been used as tools called retouchers.
A small knapping scatter relating to the reshaping of a biface, preserving the imprint of an early human knee in the shards of waste flint, under excavation in 1989 at the Horse Butchery Site near Boxgrove, Sussex, the United Kingdom. Image credit: Institute of Archaeology, University College London.
“These are some of the earliest non-stone tools found in the archaeological record of human evolution,” said Simon Parfitt, also from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London.
“They would have been essential for manufacturing the finely made flint knives found in the wider Boxgrove landscape.”
“The finding provides evidence that early human cultures understood the properties of different organic materials and how tools could be made to improve the manufacture of other tools,” said Dr. Silvia Bello, a researcher at the Natural History Museum, London.
”Along with the careful butchery of the horse and the complex social interaction hinted at by the stone refitting patterns, it provides further evidence that early human population at Boxgrove were cognitively, social and culturally sophisticated.”
Cooperative activity amongst larger numbers of people suggests these temporary sites could have been highly social spaces for interaction, learning and the sharing of tools and ideas.
The Horse Butchery Site shows this behavior more vividly than any other site so far discovered in the archaeological record.
“This research is a timely reminder of the power of archaeology to illuminate details of remarkably intimate events across a vast gulf of time and at the same time to improve our understanding of how human beings evolved,” said Dr. Barney Sloane, National Specialist Services Director at Historic England.
“The discovery, in a quarry site, demonstrates clearly the value of ensuring that our planning policies take account of archaeology’s potential for scientific advancement.”
The findings are detailed in the book ‘The Horse Butchery Site: A high resolution record of Lower Palaeolithic hominin behaviour at Boxgrove, UK’ published by Spoilheap Publications.
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Matt Pope et al. The Horse Butchery Site: A high resolution record of Lower Palaeolithic hominin behaviour at Boxgrove, UK. SpoilHeap Publications, 2020
