A Fairweather Eden
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The discovery of the remains of 'Boxgrove Man', a 'Missing Link' hominid half a million years old in chalk pits in Sussex made world headlines in May 1994. This was the most sensational archeological find in the UK since Piltdown Man - only this time it was not a hoax. Continuing excavation by site archeologist Mark Roberts has enabled him and his team to build up a picture of this, the first Englishman, and to open up a unique window on life in Britain before the Ice Age. Because these human remains, the artefacts surrounding them and the remains of the local flora and fauna - including elephants and rhinoceroses of an extinct species - are preserved in an unprecedented way, we now discover how our ancestors hunted, ate, manufactured the implements they needed to survive and interacted; these were neither the opportunist scavengers nor the mindless killers that they have previously been supposed to be. Boxgrove, therefore, represents a revolutionary view of the origins of mankind, and changes our understanding of what it means to be human.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Boxgrove, a gravel quarry in Sussex, England, is one of Great Britain's best-known archaeological sites. A wealth of fossils have been unearthed from this location, including fragments of what has been called the oldest European. Roberts, the archaeologist in charge of Boxgrove, and science writer Pitts use these remains, along with bones of long-extinct animals and primitive tools, to answer one of the biggest debates in Stone Age archaeology, "whether these people were actively hunting or whether they were scavenging from carnivores." The authors come down squarely in the camp of those promoting a belief in active hunting, and conclude that these early hominids possessed a great deal more intelligence than they are usually given credit for. In addition to providing modest insight into the capabilities of our ancestors, Pitts and Roberts do a superb job of describing the way archaeology is conducted. Theirs is a fascinating account of how a world-class dig has been forced to operate on a shoestring budget, making remarkably good use of undergraduate students and unpaid volunteers. Many of the experiments they describe, such as having a modern-day butcher cut up a deer with Paleolithic tools, are elegant, informative and intriguing. 16 pages of b&w illustrations.
