Vole Clocks
What Time is it Mr Vole?
In the last of my posts on the background to the British Isles, I thought I’d mention Vole Clocks. Tomorrow my travels really begin.
Until the 1990s it was believed that man did not reach Britain until the warm period which followed the Anglian ice advance around 450,000 years ago. Then fossilised bones which were found at Boxgrove in West Sussex in 1993 gave us the first evidence that early man – in fact, most probably Homo heidelbergensis – was here before the ice sheet rolled over Britain. Alongside the remains were also pear-shaped flint tools, known as Acheulean tools, which Boxgrove man – or Boxgrove somewhat chunky woman, as she might have been – would have used to butcher whatever prey he or she caught. Also at the same site were remains of rhinoceros, bear and voles which may have formed part of the diet of our early ancestor. Voles are very important to the archaeologists and palaeontologists who make these discoveries; they date many finds by using what is known as the “vole clock”.
By discovering what sort of vole was around at the same time as the other fossils you find, it is possible to gain some insight into what dates you’re talking about. If you find traces of the now extinct vole, Mimomys savini, then you must be looking at something which comes from before the Anglian ice age. If you find remnants of the more modern Arvicola terrestris cantiana then you must be dealing with fossils from the warm period which came after this, known, in the United Kingdom, as the Hoxnian interglacial.
In 2013, fossilised footprints were found in Happisburgh in Norfolk which push the human habitation of Britain back much further, to around 900,000 years ago. They are the oldest known hominid footprints outside Africa and were made at a time when a land bridge still connected the eastern counties to the continent. Animals, including early humans, flowed back and forth as the climate changed. We think we’re so important but when those early humans first left Africa, they did so along the tracks made by elephants – tracks their ancestors had created twenty million years earlier.
Happisburgh sat on the western side of a huge bay formed by the land which lay to the south and connected us to the continent. We enjoyed a warm climate then, something like the Mediterranean has today, and Happisburgh sat on the southern banks of the lush estuary of the massive River Bytham in a grassy open valley bordered by pine forests. It must have been a very pleasant place for our early cousins to live 900,000 years ago.
Think about that time scale for a moment 900,000 years, nine hundred thousand years, NINE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS, it’s almost unimaginable, isn’t it? Ninety years, I’m fine with, it’s the thirties, the rise of Hitler. A black and white world of newsreels, steam trains and hats. I can think of nine hundred years ago; the first Norman castles and churches and horses and peasants and mud all somehow, thanks to my upbringing in front of the TV, in glorious technicolor. Nine thousand years ago is a bit more of a struggle but I can imagine Britain as it was then. It was the Mesolithic – or middle stone-age – the time of the hunter-gatherers. The ice sheet has retreated and Britain is a warm and pleasant land, our ancestors look just like us. They live in small communities, they have language and clothes and bury their dead. But beyond that it gets rather more difficult to imagine and nine hundred thousand years ago is incredible, even though it is but a tiny fraction of the history of our world.
It is clear now that there have been several waves of immigration into our islands. Early humans colonising the country in the warmer periods and retreating south during the ice ages that covered most of Britain in ice and snow and made it uninhabitable. No-one lived here at all for huge swathes of time; between 180,000 and 70,000 years ago, for instance, there may well have been nobody here at all, not one person, for over one hundred thousand years. Those who know me will confirm that this is the last point at which it was possible to find a parking space into which I could conceivably parallel park.
Each of the climatic alterations to our home meant massive changes not only for the animals and plants living in the areas affected by glaciation but also the land itself. The Anglian ice advance, for instance, pushed the River Thames south to its current position and the Holocene period is the one which has finally seen the British Isles become islands. Ireland didn’t even become appropriately named until 11,000 years ago and it would still take several thousand years for such places as the Isle of Man, the Scillies, the Orkneys and the Shetlands to become islands.
Not only have the British Isles not always been islands, they have changed their mind over time. Even during the Quaternary Ice Age they have jumped back and forth as sea levels rose and fell. We were islands two and a half million years ago but by 1.8 million years ago we were a peninsula of north-west Europe.
In the last inter-glacial period before our own, the Ipswichian, which began about 130,000 years ago, we were an island again but by 22,000 years ago, as temperatures cooled again, we were not. When the last great glaciation of the Earth was at its peak, the Laurentide ice sheet (around 8 million cubic miles of ice) sat over North America. The Scandinavian ice sheet covered Norway, Denmark, northern Germany and large parts of Russia with ice a mile thick. Most of Britain disappeared under its own sheet of ice with icebergs in the sea off the Scillies at times.
So recent is the last glacial period that the land is still recovering. Scotland – which was the last part of mainland Britain to be crushed under the unimaginable weight of the glaciers - is still bouncing back, rising at a rate of about a millimetre every year. This is why the hills that I climbed easily as a young man now leave me breathless, they actually are higher and it’s not simply because I am old and fat.
Those massive glaciers would have taken a very long time indeed to melt as the centuries passed and the temperature warmed, great rivers of meltwater rushed through the landscape of southern Scotland, northern England and northern Ireland. As the seas slowly rose and the climate changed, Britain was, once again, covered by forests which were now home to bears, wolves, wild boar and red deer. At the height of the last ice age sea levels had dropped by up to 125 metres. Even when humans made their way back here, the seas were at least 50 metres lower than they are today. Our ancestors moved freely over the land that lay where the North Sea now sits. This area was called Doggerland –no sniggering please, we’re better than that. The land would have reduced in area as the waves got higher but we were still linked to the rest of Europe.
It wasn't until 6,100BC that the Storegga Slides – massive landslides on the coast of Norway - triggered one of the greatest tsunamis the world has ever seen and the last of the land bridge which connected us to the continent disappeared. This means that the British Isles and all of the ideas that are held dear about them account for 0.000135% of the history of the Earth so far.
Regardless of how many islands actually constitute the British Isles, this could in no way be considered their usual configuration. And we’re only about halfway through our planet’s journey.
The Sun burns through 600 million tonnes of hydrogen every second but, while that’s a lot, it has enough for about another four or five billion years. After that it will start to burn helium and will expand massively, either consuming the Earth or spitting the dried and charred husk of a planet out into space. Let’s face it, the British Isles and its red pillar boxes and bagpipes and changing of the guard and Eisteddfods and shamrock and honey still for tea is nothing more than a blink of an eye. As Woody Allen said: “Tradition is the illusion of permanence.”
I am sure if Mr Basford had told me all of this in his Geography lessons, I’d have been far more interested but then, of course, I might have turned up for the exam and I’d never have discovered the joy of bunking off.
Thanks for reading Bunking Off with Adrian Bleese so far. Tomorrow I really start writing about my travels.
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There’s a bonus Christmas Day post tomorrow at 10AM Dirty Old Town
