The context of the Palaeolithic straight-tusked elephant
By Frank Beresford
of Tower Hill. This trench was about | ||
2 ft. 6ins wide and 3-4 ft. deep, | ||
caves partly caving down with grass | ||
growing at places. Whilst taking | ||
observations in my shelter, I saw | ||
where some massive bones had | ||
been cut through, also part of what | ||
appeared to be a large tusk having | ||
been cut through ….… I managed | ||
to disinter one bone and carried it | ||
home to Luton.” Turner subsequently | ||
sent the bone to the Natural History |
Museum where it was identified as a carpal bone of a giant elephant (Fig 2) In response, the museum asked whether there were more bones and could he receive a small deputation to view them (Turner, 1952).
Fossil elephant bones and teeth were frequently found in the Thames Valley and elsewhere in Britain and Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and subsequently but complete skeletons were and are rare. These discoveries provoked decades of debate and disagreement among palaeontologists about the number of fossil elephant species. In
1857, Hugh Falconer, a Scottish geologist, botanist, palaeontologist, and paleoanthropologist (Fig
1), used their enormous teeth and jaws to identify different species and concluded that the straight-tusked elephant (then called Elphus antiquus but now called Palaeoloxodon antiquus) is distinct from the mammoth (Elphus primigenius) (Falconer 1857, 1858; O’Connor 2007, 16).
The straight-tusked elephant was adapted to a temperate climate and parkland or woodland environments and so moved north to Britain during interglacial periods, retiring southward during the glacial periods. It was immense being one of the largest of the pachyderms (huge thick-skinned mammals) of the Pleistocene epoch and much larger than any living elephant.
Its long tusks, its most distinctive trait, while not twisted like those of the mammoths, were not really straight but gently curved (Fig 2, drawn by K. Schauer/C. Beauval).
The Lower Medway region was one area in which such fragmentary fossil elephant remains, including examples of the straight-tusked elephants were found. For example, some were uncovered during the construction of new docks at
Chatham Dockyard around 1860, mostly on land largely reclaimed from the River Medway, including an upper molar identified as from Palaeoloxodon antiquus (Davis 1874, 60). During work to underpin one of the towers of Upnor Castle around 1900, the remains of a considerable elephant were found which, because of its size, William Coles Finch suggested could also be a straight-tusked elephant (Finch 1930, 27.) The tusk, when unearthed, was perfectly preserved and measured nine feet in length.
Workmen digging the large chalk pit at Twydall also reported finding large elephant bones near the northern entrance to the Pit around 1905 (Beresford 2018).
The remains of the skeleton of a straight-tusked elephant were discovered in 1911, during the construction of practice trenches by a party of Royal Engineers’ in the grounds of the Royal School of Military Engineering on Upnor Hard, on the banks of the Medway. In the course of their work, the Engineers came across many large bones, some of which were destroyed including a tusk of large size. Two years later, the remains were rediscovered by Sydney Turner, who described how in August 1913, he was searching for stone tools and implements at Upnor, having obtained permission from the Military Authorities. He wrote “Whilst rambling round that Sunday morning it came on to rain very heavily and I took shelter in a disused trench in the undergrowth
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Fig 1: Hugh Falconer (photo from his 1868 memoirs)
A few Saturdays later, Turner escorted Dr Charles Andrews, Professor MacKenny Hughes and Sir Hercules Read to the site for a careful examination. It became clear that a considerable portion of a huge elephant remained buried in the clay, but wet weather hindered the work which was not resumed until 1915 when a full excavation carefully removed all the remaining parts of the skeleton which were in an extremely fragile condition (Figs 3 & 4). It was identified as a straight-tusked elephant by its molar teeth of which one lower and two upper molars were recovered in excellent condition.
This was important as it was the first instance in which the teeth had been found in apparent association with the skeleton, and so was the final confirmation of Falconer’s 1857 proposals (Pycraft, 1916).
During this work, Turner visited the site several times, at the invitation of Andrews who had Turner’s picture taken sitting by one of the tusks (Fig 5). A near neighbour and acquaintance of Turner in Luton, William Coles Finch, who was the Manager of the Luton Waterworks Company and the author of several books on Kent was also invited by
Andrews to view the excavations and witnessed the removal of the cervical vertebrae (Fig 2) (Finch, 1930, 29).
Andrews wrote a short report and published in Nature in December 1918 (Andrews 1918). This describes the context in which the bones were found as stratified beds consisting of a series of sandy clays and tough clay with numerous flints, much race and ironstone. These were deposited against the side of a slope composed of chalk below and Thanet sands above. A photo of the chalk face was included which indicates that the site was at the far end of an overgrown quarry section.
It took the next 12 years to clean the bones, which had been covered in plaster of Paris, to harden them in a solution of shellac in alcohol and to mount them as a complete skeleton, replacing any missing parts. In 1927, the Upnor Elephant was finally placed on public view in the Natural History Museum. It was mostly complete but mounted without the skull which was too fragile to conserve. The skeleton represents a massive male elephant with an estimated height at the shoulder of about four metres and originally weighing in at around ten tonnes.
The museum published a report in their Natural History Magazine (Bather 1927) followed by a monograph the following year
(Andrews & Cooper 1928). However, Andrews died in 1924, before the completion of the reconstruction and the publication of the monograph.
The monograph repeats the description of the context of the find given in the 1918 report and describes each of the eight stratified layers in the series. The bones occurred at a depth of about 14 feet at the bottom of the basal deposit which was described as Clay with much race, numerous flints (rounded and angular), sand, ironstone passing down to clay with large flints. Unlike the Ebbsfleet elephant (see below), the Upnor elephant skeleton was not associated with any flint artefacts or waste (Bather, 1927, 106). The monograph
(Andrews 1928, 2) describes “sharp gravel with angular and rounded flints (flakes)” in the immediately overlying bed. Eight flint flakes from Upnor, seven with secondary working, were noted by Roe in
Maidstone Museum (Roe 1968, 186) but there is no evidence that they were found in the overlying bed.
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Fig 2: Schematic drawing of a Palaeoloxodon antiquus skeleton showing the anatomical parts mentioned
A better chrono-stratigraphic context for the Upnor Elephant has subsequently been sought. John Carreck, a geologist at Queen Mary’s College, London investigated this question in the 1960s and left some working notes (Fig 6) that indicate his thinking at the front of his copy of the 1928 monograph (Fig 7).
The notes indicate that, on April 18th 1965, he visited Lower Upnor and met a long term resident, Sidney Gurd, on the foreshore who remembered the excavation of the elephant. Gurd said that the elephant was found near Whitewall Cement works, about one-quarter of a mile from Whitewall and on a footpath leading from the river, half a mile from Upper Upnor, on the North East corner of Tower Hill. He said the site was only about 10 feet above the marsh near Couviet Creek. Using Gurd’s information to give the base level of the deposit and allowing 5 feet OD for the height of the marsh, Carreck noted that the summit of the stratified deposit at the site would have been circa 28 feet OD and the top of the basal deposit, which was the horizon of the elephant, being
20 feet OD. Noting that the elephant and some associated mammalian fauna were all woodland or forest species he tentatively suggested a “late Ipswichian” age (now linked to Marine Isotope Stage 5e) for the deposit which is a warm period circa 125,000 years BP but noted that “we only have Gurd’s memory to indicate the base level.” Anthony Stuart (1982, 44) also suggested that the Upnor elephant was probably of an Ipswichian date.
In 2006, the Medway Valley Palaeolithic Project (MVPP) made a further attempt to relocate the site of the Upnor elephant hoping to clarify its date and perhaps reinvestigate the associated sediments. However, since the elephant was initially found, large earth movement and re-landscaping at the site had continued for almost 100 years as part of the training programme of the Royal Engineers. Consequently, although the original site location was identified, it was not possible to relocate the original context.
They noted that the elephant did not seem to have been contained
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Fig 6: John Carreck’s working notes in fluvial sediments, and so could not be directly related to their proposed MVPP Medway terrace framework. So they also considered the find level. They correlated this with Terrace DE or D on the MVPP framework, which would tie in with Marine Isotope Stage 7 circa 240,000 years BP, a warm period within the Wolstonian complex (Wenban-Smith et al. 2007).
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Fig 3: Pelvis, femur and tibia of the Upnor skeleton during the excavations in 1915 Middle
Fig 4: Hessian textile and plaster of Paris was used to support the bones during their extraction. Courtesy of the Rochester Guildhall Museum Bottom
Fig 5: Sydney Turner sitting by one of the tusks during the excavations in 1915, courtesy of
Illustrated London News, 1916
The Upnor elephant cannot be readily dated by reference to other securely stratified finds of straight- tusked elephants as Palaeoloxodon antiquus is present in the British fossil record over a considerable period. It first appears in the early Middle Pleistocene deposits of the Cromer Forest-bed Formation, including a couple of molars from the Pakefield deposits (Marine Isotope Stage 17 or 19 circa 750,000 years BP) that have also provided evidence of early human occupation in Britain (Parfitt et al. 2005). In Kent, Palaeoloxodon antiquus remains occur throughout the sequence of deposits at Barnfield Pit Swanscombe being especially abundant in the lower gravels (Ovey 1964, 91). In 1935, a complete tusk was found in the Middle Gravel (Fig 8), the same level in which the three fragments of the Swanscombe skull were also found separately in 1935, 1936 and 1955. The sequence at Barnfield Pit has been dated to Marine Isotope Stage 11 circa 400,000 years BP, a warm period known as the Hoxnian Interglacial. In 2004 the remains of a straight tusk elephant were found nearby at Ebbsfleet surrounded by a scattering of flint tools and waste flakes which were attributed to the
Clactonian tradition. About 5% of the skeleton was preserved, and it was also dated to Marine Isotope Stage 11 (Wenban-Smith, editor, 2013).
Bones of several straight tusk elephants have been recovered from Marine Isotope Stage 7 deposits at Sandy Lane Pit in the Lower Thames Valley at Averley, Essex (Sutcliffe 1995). Another was found at Deeping St James near Peterborough, in deposits of the last Ipswichian interglacial (MIS 5e, ca. 120,000 years ago).
The species (Fig 9) soon after disappears from the British record, although it hung on in southern Europe until close to the start of the last glacial maximum (around 25,000 years ago) (Lister 2009).
Consequently, it is only possible to say that the skeleton of the Upnor elephant, still one of the most complete skeletons of a straight tusk elephant ever found, represents a huge male that most likely dates to the late Middle Pleistocene (Marine Isotope Stage 7). In lacking a clear chrono-stratigraphic context, the Upnor Elephant site mirrors most of the major Palaeolithic sites in the Lower Medway area. Only Cuxton can currently be linked to such stratification (Wenban-Smith, 2006) while comparative technology has been used to propose dates for Frindsbury (White & Ashton 2003) and Twydall (Beresford 2018).
Acknowledgements:
The author would like to thank Don Blackburn for his help in the research for this paper at Medway Archives and Steve Nye of the Guildhall Museum, Rochester for his help with the illustrations. All illustrations are used as authorised by the copyright holders as far as could be established.
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Fig 7: John Carreck’s copy of the 1928 monograph showing the reconstructed Upnor elephant on the left
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Fig 8: Preparing to move the tusk of a straight-tusked elephant found in Barnfield Pit, Swanscombe, Kent, courtesy of Getty Images
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Fig 9: Life restoration of a straight- tusked elephant such as the Upnor elephant based on fossil skeletal remains of Palaeoloxodon antiquus by D. Foldi