Sublime

The sheer abundance of struck (i.e. worked) Mesolithic flints found at Blick Mead is remarkable and suggests that this was not a briefly occupied, one-off settlement. By 2018, the excavation had revealed a total of 30,608 Mesolithic flints.8 People returned repeatedly to Blick Mead for some four millennia and they must have been aware that groups o

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Human hunters survived through the peak of the Ice Age in southern Europe – where we find not only their stone, bone and antler tools, but even more extraordinary examples of artistic creativity, from evocative ivory carvings to the mesmerising cave paintings in sites such as Lascaux. The warming of Britain after the Ice Age happened fairly rapidly

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During interglacials, when the ice had melted away, the sea level rose, cutting off Britain. It was during the transitions – in and out of glaciations – when this landscape was both accessible and attractive to large herbivores and the humans that hunted them. Two hundred and thirty thousand years ago, then, the landscape of Britain was reachable –

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I can remember being very moved by the fact that the more recent footprints in the muds of the Severn were made by men, women and children and when I visited the site I could imagine Mesolithic families out for a stroll along the foreshore. But what we now realize were the earliest footprints in Europe, at Happisburgh, were probably left by a famil

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The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time sc... See more