A History of Ancient Britain Read Online Free PDF Page B

– than of criticism for his failure to
see the world through our eyes. Had it not been for his efforts in Goat’s Hole, for example,the so-called Red Lady of Paviland and the animal remains that accompanied
the burial might not have been available for study by the twenty-first-century world. For this service to science at the very least, Buckland is owed an enormous debt of gratitude.
    The Red Lady is kept today as part of the collections of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and is now in the care of Professor Jim Kennedy. There was no skull even when Buckland
was excavating the find, but enough of the skeleton has survived to enable modern scientists to go much further towards understanding that most enigmatic and significant of burials.
    ‘Within a few decades of Buckland’s death, people re-examined the skeleton,’ said Professor Kennedy. ‘They looked at the shape of the pelvis, the shape of the long bones
– and in particular the shape of the articulation surfaces [of the joints]. And on the basis of those features, any anatomy student today would recognise this as the skeleton, not of a young
woman, but of a young man.’
    Not a Red Lady then but a Red Laddie, who had come to die sometime in his early twenties. Much more importantly, as it turns out, further forensic analysis has made it possible to determine just
how long ago that Red Laddie breathed his last.
    Like every other scientist who lived and died before 1949, Buckland had not the advantage of radiocarbon dating. Until that momentous breakthrough, archaeologists generally made assumptions
about the age of excavated items – human bones and every other class of artefact – based on the context in which they were found. Items were ‘older’ than those unearthed
above them in a trench and ‘younger’ than any found beneath. This is and was the principle underpinning so-called ‘relative dating’.
    But in 1949 the American chemist Willard F. Libby noticed something special about one of the building blocks of life on Earth. All living things here are made primarily of the element carbon. A
tiny proportion is formed in the planet’s upper atmosphere when cosmic rays from the sun bombard nitrogen atoms, transforming them into carbon – and not just common-or-garden variety
carbon, but rather radioactive carbon. This magical ingredient, in the form of carbon dioxide, then dissolves in the oceans and enters the food chain via photosynthesis by plants.
    Libby’s genius was to notice that at the moment a living thing dies, the radioactive carbon within it (known as C14) begins to decay and break down, reverting to nitrogen once more.
Crucially for archaeologists set ondetermining the age of objects, C14 always decays at the same rate. Exactly 5,730 years after something dies (or, more particularly in the
case of an archaeological find like the Red Laddie, some one ) only half the original amount of C14 remains within them. After a further 5,730 years there will be only half as much again
– and so on, at exactly the same rate of decay until, after perhaps 60,000 years, the remaining amount of C14 is just too small to measure.
    Libby realised that by counting the proportion of atoms of C14 remaining in an object made of organic material – a piece of wood, antler, skin or bone – it would be possible to
determine exactly how long ago it had died.
    A team of archaeologists at Oxford University, led by Dr Tom Higham, has subjected a tiny sample of bone from the Red Laddie to precisely this process. The painstakingly counted C14 atoms
discovered within revealed he died a little over 33,000 years ago. He was therefore the first modern human being – someone exactly like us – who lived in the land we know as
Britain.
    The Red Laddie’s Britain was a very different place, to say the least. Louis Agassiz rightly saw a world shaped by ice but he never learned the whole truth of it. During the most recent 30
million or so