Fairweather Eden: Life Half a Million Years Ago as Revealed by the Excavations at Boxgrove

What a career as a journalist Pitts might have had. The superb "people skills" and vivid descriptive powers expressed in this book make it a very "human." Pitts, however, is an archaeologist, bringing a strong scientific background to an account of a prehistoric dig and what it brought to view. As the evidence mounted of ancient hominids living along the Sussex coast, it became clear that Boxgrove revealed an unprecedented age for European habitation. Boxgrove, as this book makes graphically clear, will become the standard against which older archeology will be judged and future finds compared.It is difficult to distinguish the respective contributions made by each author in this book. Mark Roberts, a young archeologist at the beginning of the excavations who became the Director of the site, is a dedicated digger. He managed logistics, personnel, site management and analysed the results. It is likely that he provided significant portions of the scientific background for the account. The story is simply one of persistence in using evidence to gain support for extending operations when funding seemed threatened. Those extensions continued to reveal an assemblage of fossils, tools, and other signs of human activity. All from half a million years ago.With the authors contributing background material on climate conditions, glaciation and sea levels, soil content and the new science of geomagnetism, we're given a detailed picture of the world surrounding those ancient people. What impact did that environment have on their lives? What does the evidence suggest about how they coped with what nature imposed on them? Did they hunt, or scavenge? Was meat a mainstay or a "side dish" in their diet? This book makes a major leap of interpretation in formulating what sort of people existed those millennia ago. With help from many sources, the authors build a picture of a sophisticated creature. Boxgrove produced a wealth of flint tools and flakes, some the researchers were able to reconstruct into the original stones. The evidence, they assert, suggests a creature with strong intelligence, capable of in-depth analysis in selected topics. The most important consideration was in hunting and creating the tools to make the hunt a success. Knapping flakes from flint is "more than banging a couple of rocks together" - requires the ability to foresee several steps in advance - "like a game of chess." The tools meant ready access to meat - and meat is necessary for increased brain power. Far from a raw savage, Boxgrove's revelations image our ancestor a capable creature. From this interpretation, it's clear older finds must be reassessed. New discoveries will need to draw on the same interdisciplinary teamwork Roberts was able to assemble.Fairweather Eden is a wealth of information, both historic and current. Much background material is provided, interspersing the descriptions of participants in the finds and subsequent analysis. One individual