Reading Chris Stringer's Homo Britannicus is a bit like going down to the pub beer garden on a sunny Sunday afternoon and listening to an acquaintance who's fast becoming a friend setting out their life's work and passion - he wants you to grasp the excitement of the work, and understand what's going on, but he's also scrupulous in making clear in this fast-moving field what's now known fact, what's generally believed but could be overturned in a moment, and the theories he holds that run against the general view of the field.
What's more, Stringer wants you to understand why this is important, beyond the pure science, beyond the romance of history - for his study of the spread of 700,000 years of human occupation of Britain has a powerful lesson about just how difficult an environment this proved for multiple species Homo, and just how often the environment wiped them out, or forced them to flee.
Stringer is one of the leading lights in the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project, which after centuries of amateur enthusiasm and chance discoveries has sought to bring planning and careful science to a field that's often been left to chance, amateur enthusiasm, and occasionally blighted, as with the Piltdown Man, by forgery, and more frequently by over-claim and media distortion.
He begins with a brisk skip through this often less than illustrious history, but the story properly begins 700,000 years ago - at a site in what is now East Anglia, where a species using only shaped stones for tools lived on a peninsula linked to western Europe. The site is Pakefield, and, Stringer explains, through a technique called amino-acid dating, human occupation here has been dated back this far - the oldest firmly dated site north of the Alps. The tools are very simple - but, he explains, they were made from water-worn pebbles, a material not suited to large flaked tools like handaxes. The flora and fauna of the time suggests a remarkably mild environment, and it is clear that Stringer inclines towards supporting the view that this "Costa del Cromer" was only a brief episode of migration under unusually favourable conditions, not real adaptation to anything like normal northern conditions.
There's then a gap to 500,000 years ago, when Homo heidelbergensis, a species that made very finely shaped handaxes, lived (and thought to be an ancestor of both Neaderthals and us) - best known through the much-reported Boxgrove site. It deserves its fame, for rare conditions of preservation mean that not only mere artefacts are preserved, but moments in real time - when a person crouched down to knap a flint tool, then walked off with it, leaving the debris spread around the worksite and their footprints visible. There are also butchery sites - the bones and the tools left there when the work was done.
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