Elephant Hunters at Ebbsfleet
Excavation in April in advance of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link revealed an undisturbed Lower Palaeolithic land surface in the Ebbsfleet Valley near Swanscombe.
Francis Wenban-Smith, specialist advisor to Oxford Archaeology on the Palaeolithic, spotted the site’s potential whilst carrying out routine monitoring. Initially, follow up investigations revealed only a few artefacts and no faunal remains; however, as excavation progressed, near what was once the edge of a small lake, part of an extinct form of straight-tusked elephant preserved in the boggy sediment was revealed. Beside the skeleton the archaeologists found a concentration of flint tools, lying undisturbed where they were discarded around 400,000 years ago.
This find has excited archaeologists, in part because this is the most complete elephant skeleton in Britain to date, only four others being known – two in the Lower Thames, one at Upnor, Kent and another at Aveley, Essex. None of these had any associated archaeological evidence, and all were more recent than the Ebbsfleet example.
Most fascinating is the evidence for butchery of the animal shown by the flint tools. These were manufactured on the spot, as refitting debitage (waste flakes and chips) and cores were found. Slight damage on some sharp edges probably reflects their coming into contact with bone whilst cutting meat off the carcass.
Speculation surrounds the question of whether the elephant was deliberately driven into the boggy ground, or whether it became trapped on its own; either way it appears that a band of early hominid hunters came across it alive and then killed it, as they would have needed the meat to be fresh. Sharp and heavy wooden spears were used by the people of this period – an elephant skeleton at Lehringen, Germany, had the remains of a 7 foot yew spear between its ribs.
Other evidence from the site has provided a clear picture of the past environment and climate. Faunal remains and pollen indicate that the elephant met its end by a lake surrounded by woodland, probably with some open areas due to heavy grazing, in a climate similar to, or warmer than, the present day. Dating of the site has been achieved through examination of excavated vole teeth, since a detailed framework of vole species evolution over the last million years has been constructed. Of the two species found at Ebbsfleet, one has been extinct in England for the last 400,000 years, and the other has only been present for the last 500,000 years. This evidence, together with that of the flora and fauna indicative of climate, points to the period of the Hoxnian interglacial, a warm phase for which deposits are also preserved at nearby Swanscombe.
The hunters who exploited the elephant were of the same early species of hominid as the famous ‘Swanscombe Man’, whose skull parts were found over 50 years ago. Their brain size was about 75% of ours, but they were probably not fundamentally different in their intellectual capabilities, and they walked fully upright. They must have at least possessed the necessary strategies to have effected the kill and butchery of an animal which stood up to twice the height of a man and weighed 3 or 4 times as much as a car.
Information taken from www.oxfordarch.co.uk/pages/crt/e_feature.html
Above and below: excavation continues at the Ebbsfleet site - searching for more remains of the Straight-tusked Elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus). Illustrated in the sketch at the left of the page is Palaeoloxodon - reproduced by kind permission of Union Railways.
Illustrations from the site are shown as dark specks beside Francis Wenban-Smith