Tamed Page 11
Gordon brought the footprints to the attention of archaeologists, who were able to determine when they’d been formed, using various techniques including radiocarbon dating of organic fragments in the silt. They dated to between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago – an interesting period in our prehistory, spanning that crucial transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in Britain.
The footprints – once exposed by a high tide – would be quickly washed away, remaining only a few weeks at most. Having realised their antiquity and their importance, Gordon decided that he should try to preserve this rare and precious data – and he embarked on a huge personal project: to record the footprints. He drew and photographed them. When he came across particularly well-preserved prints, he would make plaster casts of them. His garage began to fill up with boxes and boxes of footprint casts. When I met Gordon on Formby Beach, back in 2005, he’d recorded over 184 trails of human footprints – both male and female, adult and child. He showed me some of the photographs and plaster casts he’d made. Some contained astonishing detail of toes and the pressure of the footfall. How were such finely moulded footprints created – and preserved for all those years?
The environment around Liverpool Bay, at the time when the footprints were made, would have been very different to today. There were no waves crashing on to the beach at high tide. The sea level was lower and a long sandbar existed, beyond the coast. Behind the sandbar, there was a tidal lagoon and a gently shelving, muddy beach – which would have been largely inundated at high tide, but with gently rising water, rather than high-energy, crashing waves. Pollen analysis conjures up a large area of saltmarsh behind the mudflats with sedges, grasses and reeds, fringing into fen woodland, with pine, alder, hazel and birch. There’s no reason to suppose that our ancient ancestors wouldn’t have enjoyed a trip to the seaside, just as much as we do, but it would also have been a rich environment for those Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to exploit. The archaeology of the area at this time shows a concentration of activity along the coast and river valleys, which drops off inland. This is a familiar picture. Many traces of Mesolithic people are found around the coast, and beside lakes and rivers – it seems that these liminal environments had more to offer hunter-gatherers than the increasingly dense forest of the interior of Britain. At Formby, that thick forest would have started about a mile and a half inland from the coast, with its saltmarsh, mudflats and tidal lagoon.
Looking at Gordon’s plaster casts, I could see how squelchy the mud must have been, to preserve those details of heel, arches and toes. The adult footprints have the splayed toes characteristic of unshod people. But in order for a footprint to have any chance of surviving, the mud can’t have stayed wet and impressionable – it must have baked hard, on a hot day. Then, when the tide came in again, the gently rising waters would have brought a fine layer of sand and silt, to settle over the footprint. Again and again, until it was buried deep under silty layers, sealed and preserved. In the intervening millennia, the dunes moved back and covered the layers of silt containing the footprints. Now the dunes are retreating even further, exposing those deep silts to the raw energy of the Irish Sea – and the layers are being stripped away until the footprints are revealed.
Footprints are rare in the archaeological record, and provide a unique insight into human behaviour. With the help of experts in anatomy and locomotion, Gordon mapped out the ancient visitors to the beach: women walking slowly along the shoreline – perhaps gathering razor clams and shrimps; men running – perhaps hunting; children running around in circles, mudlarking – just like children playing at the seashore today.
But as well as the human footprints, there were animal prints. These recorded the rich bird life of those mudflats – with the prints of birds such as oystercatchers and cranes specifically identifiable. And then there were mammals: boar, wolves (or large dogs), red and roe deer, horses – and the unmistakable cloven hoofprints of aurochsen: wild cattle.
As I walked along Formby Beach with Gordon, on that cold and windy day of filming, more than ten years ago now, we kept our eyes on the ground – looking for freshly uncovered prints. It wasn’t long before we found traces of aurochs hooves. They were hard to miss – they were huge. They were also deep – you could almost feel the great weight of the aurochs pressing its feet down into the wet mud. We both crouched down to look at the print more closely. I’m used to seeing the hoofprints of cattle – the bullocks in the field at home congregate around their water troughs, which become surrounded by a sea of fluid mud when the weather is damp. Sometimes there are days when the weather conditions are perfect for preserving the prints for a short while – a shower to slicken the mud, then hot sun to bake it hard, with all those hoofprints in it. But this aurochs print was easily twice the size of those bullocks’ hoofprints.
As well as being so large, the oldest of the cattle prints at Formby are firmly Mesolithic. So these are not domesticated cattle being driven down to the coast to graze, just as cattle were driven down on to the fens in Norfolk in the Middle Ages. These hoofprints are too early to be those of domesticates – they were clearly, definitely, made by the wild predecessors of our modern cattle.
It was bleak that day on the beach. But beautiful too. We continued to film as the shadows lengthened and the dunes were momentarily bathed in golden light, just before the sun sank into the sea. We finished up, packed the kit into the back of the green van, and I thanked Gordon, before driving off across the dunes.
And Gordon Roberts – he continued collecting his records of the footprints on Formby Beach – making sure those ephemeral traces were catalogued and preserved. He died in August 2016, leaving that legacy behind – a wonderful archive for researchers of the future to delve into. I feel very privileged to have met him, to have walked with him and looked for footprints, on that long stretch of silty sand and ancient mud, by the perpetually shifting dunes.
Hunting the aurochs
The appearance of human footprints alongside hoofprints of deer and aurochsen on Formby Beach has led some researchers to conjecture that people were hunting these animals in the reedbeds and mudflats along the coast. Herds of deer and aurochsen – out in the open – would surely have attracted Mesolithic hunters. It seems like an entirely reasonable suggestion, but, unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell if the human and animal prints were made at near enough the same time, on a specific day. After all, I can walk into the field at home and leave my footprints in the mud, hours after the bullocks have moved off.
What’s really surprising, though, is where the prints were found. It’s not unusual to find modern red deer on the coast, but the aurochs has long been thought of as a forest animal. And yet the wild cattle at Formby weren’t just browsing along the edges of the fen woodland – they were clearly venturing right out into the open reedbeds of this coastal, wetland environment. Not the shy creatures of the forest that we once believed them to be, then.
There may be no direct traces of Mesolithic hunters stalking aurochs at Formby, but there’s plenty of evidence at other sites elsewhere in Britain and north-west Europe. Most of this evidence comes in the form of butchered aurochs bones, from numerous Mesolithic sites – including Star Carr in Yorkshire. Earlier, Palaeolithic sites record the same taste for wild beef. And at just a few, rare sites, there’s evidence of the hunt and the kill itself.
In May 2004, an amateur archaeologist in the Netherlands came across a curious scatter of pieces of bone and two fragments of a flint blade, all sitting on the surface of the ground, close to the River Tjonger and the Balkweg road in Friesland. The artefacts had apparently been brought to the surface by the recent digging of a ditch, and the bones had been lying exposed for some time – they’d been bleached white by the sun.
This stretch of the River Tjonger has been domesticated – its wild, winding course has been constrained into a canal. But the artefacts came from a sandy sediment which had once formed the bank of an inside-bend of the river, deep in antiquity. The d
igging of the ditch had completely destroyed the original site of the bones and flint – they were, in archaeological parlance, out of context – yet they could still provide some useful information.
The bones were from the spine, ribs and feet of an aurochs. They seemed small for aurochsen, but the radiocarbon dates came in at around 7,500 years ago – the late Mesolithic, too early for domestic cattle. The first domestic cattle arrived in the Netherlands at least a millennium later. And the spines of the vertebrae, sticking up from the vertebral bodies like fins, were long like those of aurochsen – much longer than those of domestic cattle. The bones of the feet were also more aurochs-like – long and slender. The final interpretation was that the bones had belonged to a small, female aurochs.
So – a dead, ancient cow. Still nothing much to write home about – except that eight of the bones bore cut marks: evidence of butchery. There were also traces of burning on some of the vertebrae.
Humans had clearly interacted with this carcass. The two fragments of flint found with the bones fitted together to form a single blade – in all likelihood, one of the tools used to skin and butcher the dead aurochs. Like some of the bones, the flint blade was burned. The Mesolithic hunters had lit a fire, perhaps even cooking and eating some of the meat right there, before carrying off the rest of the carcass, including the head.
Balkweg is just one of a handful of sites which record human interaction with what must have been a whole aurochs carcass – a single animal that is presumed to have been brought down in a hunt. There are a couple of other sites in the Netherlands, two in Germany, and one in Denmark, that seem to show the same thing: the finale of a successful hunt. Plenty of individual aurochs bones and fragments of bones also turn up in places where people were living – meat taken home for dinner. But even at these sites, only a very small percentage of the total number of animal bones are ever from aurochsen. Numbers can be misleading. The aurochsen were such huge animals, the meat to be had off one aurochs thigh would have massively outweighed that on the equivalent part of a beaver, badger, boar, or even a deer. And whereas hunters may have brought a whole boar back to the camp for the family to eat, they’re unlikely to have attempted to carry an entire aurochs home. The carcass would have been jointed in situ, dividing up the limbs into manageable portions to transport back, along with the skin of the animal. The hunting sites show that the feet – with slim pickings – were often left behind.
The Balkweg aurochs seems surprisingly small – estimated to stand just 134 centimetres tall at the withers, or shoulders. So she seems, potentially, to have been a less formidable target for those Mesolithic hunters, and she also raises the possibility that many, later aurochs have been misidentified as domesticated cattle, or as hybrids with aurochs – perhaps an easy mistake to make if osteologists look at size alone.
Nevertheless, we know – from the date – that the 7,500-year-old Balkweg cow must have been an aurochs – a member of this ancient species, Bos primigenius, whose huge herds ranged right across Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts, and from India and Africa in the south to the Arctic tundra in the north. Hunted by humans and other predators, the aurochs would eventually go extinct. But there were still aurochsen alive in Roman times. In the sixth book of his epic Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar described these uri – wild beasts inhabiting the Hercynian Forest of southern Germany:
These are a little smaller than an elephant in size, and of the appearance, colour and shape of a bull. They possess great strength and great speed; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have caught sight of. The Germans trap these beasts in pits and kill them. The young men harden themselves with this labour, practising this type of hunting, and those who have slain the most, producing their horns in evidence, are highly praised. But even when very young, these beasts cannot be habituated to humans or tamed.
It’s a fantastic portrait – of the wild Germans of the great Forest, as well as the formidable uri themselves – these untameable, horned monsters.
And yet, of course, we know that some of these magnificent animals were tamed. Although we talk about the species having gone extinct, some lineages survived. The descendants of the aurochs that would make it through to the present day were the ones who became allies of humans. Even as the Balkweg aurochs met her fate on the banks of the ancient Tjonger, on the north-west edge of Europe, some of her cousins in the east had already become domesticated. And not just for their meat and their hides – the same resources that made the aurochs such a prize for the Mesolithic hunters – but for their milk. The relationship between humans and cattle was changing.
Antelope milk and the great unbrushed
We’re all so used to the idea of drinking milk now that it’s difficult to stand back and try to imagine what it was like coming up with the idea in the first place. But if you can manage to shed your familiarity with milk and dairy products, then the idea of drinking another mammal’s milk starts to seem very odd indeed.
Possessing mammary glands, which produce milk, is a defining characteristic of mammals. Milk is produced by females in order to feed their offspring. It’s a brilliant survival strategy – it means that the mother doesn’t have to abandon her infants in order to find food for them. She can stay with her brood and feed them directly from her own body. When they grow older, more capable and independent, they will be able to leave her side and find their own food in the environment.
I think very few people would be comfortable with the idea of pouring human milk on to their breakfast cereal or into their tea – but it’s perfectly acceptable to imbibe the milk of another mammal. And we’ve been doing it for millennia. But who came up with this idea of squeezing milk out of another mammal’s mammary glands in order to drink it?
I suspect that the hunting and gathering forebears of the first farmers had already tasted milk. Nobody has yet found any evidence for humans ingesting milk before the Neolithic, but that may be because no one’s looked, and because it would have been a rare event. Having spent time with several different, modern hunter-gatherer communities, I’ve had a chance to witness just how comprehensively they can approach devouring a carcass. After a successful hunt, it’s not just meat that’s on the menu – offal, brains and stomach contents are all tasty and nutritious. In Siberia, I watched reindeer hunters cutting into the belly of a reindeer they’d just killed, cutting out pieces of the still-warm liver and eating those, raw, while dipping a cup into the cavity to bring out the blood to drink.
Anthropologist George Silberbauer, who spent more than a decade living amongst Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, described in great detail how these hunter-gatherers would utilise the carcass of a hunted antelope – including the udders: ‘The udders of lactating larger antelope are regarded as delicacies when baked over an open fire. If there is milk in the udder, it is squeezed out and drunk before flaying commences.’
A traditional story from the Central Plains of North America suggests that antelope udders and milk were considered to be a prized delicacy amongst hunter-gatherers there too. After hunting and killing a doe antelope, two Kiowa chiefs were said to have argued over who should have the ‘milk bags’. One of the chiefs claimed both udders, and the other chief was so shamed by this affair that he upped sticks and took all his relatives with him, heading off to new territory in the north. The faction apparently became known by a name which translates as ‘Antelope Milk Drags Heart on the Ground Move Off People’. The selfishness of the remaining chief seems too trivial to provoke such a split in a tribe; the story really seems to be about loss of power and prestige – symbolised by that refusal to share the prized udders of the antelope.
With these historical and near-contemporary examples of hunter-gatherers drinking milk from hunted animals, it seems reasonable to suggest that ancient hunter-gatherers would have done the same. They would surely have utilised such carcasses in a similarly thorough way, making the most of this precious resource. It seems foolish to sugges
t that no one would have tasted milk before animals were domesticated. Milk would not have formed an important part of a hunter-gatherer diet, but neither is it likely to have been completely absent. New advances in archaeological sciences provide us with opportunities to explore the diets of our ancestors, and when it comes to milk, there could be clues lurking in our ancestors’ teeth.
Calcium is essential for healthy teeth and bones, and milk is an excellent source of this element. Like many elements, calcium exists naturally in a few slightly different forms, or isotopes. The ratios of these isotopes can be measured from samples of human and animal tissues, including bones and teeth. Ratios of carbon and nitrogen isotopes have proved to be useful indicators of diet – carbon isotopes can indicate broadly which types of plants an organism ate during its lifetime, while nitrogen isotopes reflect whether the diet was more plant-based or meat-based, and whether it contained marine sources of food. And so, for a while, archaeological scientists held out hope that calcium isotope ratios might provide clues about milk and dairy products in ancient diets. They tested archaeological animal bone and human bone, and found a difference in calcium isotope ratios between humans and other animals. But, rather disappointingly, they found no change within humans, over time. Mesolithic and Neolithic humans – living without and with domesticated cattle, respectively – had the same ratios of calcium isotopes in their bones – so unfortunately it seems that this analysis isn’t going to provide us with any answers here.
Teeth do provide us with another option, though. On the whole, our ancient ancestors had much better teeth than we do today. With less sugar in their diets, they didn’t suffer so badly with dental caries. You see the occasional cavity in archaeological teeth, but it’s nowhere near the epidemic proportions seen in contemporary, Western society. On the other hand, our ancestors were notoriously bad at brushing their teeth. This lack of attention to dental hygiene leads to a build-up of plaque, which, over time, mineralises and becomes very hard. Accretions of hard calculus are often seen on archaeological teeth, and it doesn’t stop there. Calculus leads to an irritation of the gums, and also affects the underlying bone – which starts to shrink back, until, eventually, the tooth falls out. By that point, of course, the tooth is highly likely to be lost to archaeological science. It’s the teeth which end up in the grave, still in situ in old jaws, and plastered with calculus, that are now offering up some exciting clues about ancient diets.