The human bones yielded ever older results to each dating process: the current one stands at around 32,000 BC, making it possibly the oldest ceremonial human burial yet found in Europe.

They believed that material things create persons as much as persons make them, and that they likewise have life phases. Non-human bodies such as pots or houses were readily seen as the outward forms of non-human beings, which transform the social contexts in which they move and change their own meanings as those contexts are transformed.

In 2003 the site became the focus of a major research project based in the universities of Sheffield and Hull and led by Paul Pettitt and Paul Bahn, which immediately achieved spectacular success by revealing the existence of the very first Palaeolithic pictures ever found on the walls of British caves.

Traditional peoples also commonly lack the modern sense of the human self as indivisible, seeing it instead as penetrating and being penetrated by other beings in the world around.

What is absolutely clear is that our own species, Homo sapiens, manifested every sign of possessing the necessary imaginative faculty as soon as it evolved, whether as a result of evolution, as most Western scholars now believe, or as a divine gift, as is still the opinion of some adherents to certain faiths.

indeed, the quantity of paintings that survives there from their hands is probably greater than that found anywhere else in the world from humans living more than 10,000 years ago.

In this panorama, the Goat’s Hole stood out for humans as somewhere special: the Aldhouse-Green project has also confirmed that the quantity of artefacts found in the cave far exceeds that discovered at any other site in Britain or neighbouring parts of Europe from the Early Upper Palaeolithic, the first 20,000 years in which our species is known

The word ‘ritual’ has been the subject of equally extensive and complex debate.

This would suggest that farming had originally been brought from Europe by colonists who arrived in the Thames, and that it had swiftly been adopted by the natives: but none of this is securely proved by the better dating. All told, the problem of how the Neolithic arrived in Britain does not seem to have been solved at the time of writing; and