Boxgrove Man Traditional Cache

Park at "The Anglesea Arms"  pub at N 50° 51.937 W 000° 42.587 - You can get to the footpath by following the well worn track south accross the lawn at the rear of the car park.

Boxgrove was made internationally famous in 1993 by the discovery of the stone age human remains. Dated at around 480,000 old "Boxgrove Man" is the oldest human ancestor ever discovered in Britain.

In what the papers at the time referred to as "A Stone Age Pompeii", amazingly well preserved remains of animals, stone tools and early humans were discovered in context allowing a more detailed picture of stone age life to emerge. The site has since been acquired by English Heritage and archeology is ongoing and although no dig is in progress at the moment, one expert estimated that it could take well over a hundred years to exhaust the information available here.

From the parking coordinates proceed East along the footpath toward Boxgrove common. The cache is situated close to "Devil's Ditch" a 6 mile long iron age fortification for the early settlement at Chichester but we are more interested in a time far before a mere 2000 years ago....

Just beyond the cache site at N 50° 52.117 W 000° 41.933  (you will need to walk along the edge of the field, so be careful not to damage the crops) you can stand and overlook a newly landscaped quarry to the North East. There is not a lot to hold your attention in todays view, so let yourself imagine a landscape 480,000 years past.....

Gone is the roar of traffic and the droning of planes, in its place a chorus of strangely familiar bird song - it includes the Robin and the Starling - against the les familiar sounds of the hyenas and the buzz of crickets. A thick forest of Oak and Hazel cloaks the high ground right up to the edge of a tall (200m) chalk cliff around 100m to your North.

You stand on a flat, sandy plain stretching away to a distant sea. The mists of time draw back and fuzzy forms step into focus. There are animals lost to our world, like the giant deer, small wolf and Deninger's bear, together with the regular denizens of today's countryside, rabbits, hedgehogs and badgers. Across the plains to your east you catch a glimpse of the incongruous forms of elephants and can imagine the lions that are surely obscured within long grass.

Britain, still a peninsula of Europe, is basking in the pleasant, temperate climate between Ice Ages. Just to the North East, beside a spring fed pond at the foot of the cliff, a group of tall and powerfully built men gather excitedly around something large and newly dead. Although different in form and build, the men - Homo Heidlebergensis an ancestor of Neanderthal man - are easily recognisable as ancestral humans. The nomadic hunter gatherers have returned to their favorite summer haunt around the watering hole where prey is plentiful and the safety of the cliff top within easy reach.

Heeding a call from the leader, you hurry over to join them and squat to sharpen the flint cutting blade that you carry. Holding the cutter in your hand and striking it with an antelope's thigh bone, the slivers of flint fall to the ground around you as the ancestral vultures circle in the warm air overhead.

There is a brief ruckus as the group chase off the pack of Hyenas that were getting a bit too close to the kill and then you join them as they expertly and systematically skin and cut up a large rhino.

While we can never know exactly what happened here all those years ago, the above story is pieced together from the finds at this and other sites:

• Stone cutting tools crafted from local flint.
• A horse's shoulder blade with evidence of a projectile (spear) injury.
• Other animal bones with cut marks made by flints tools.
• The remains of a hunter that was unlucky or careless, the human thigh bone found shows signs of having been gnawed by a large carnivore - humans were not always at the top of the food chain...
• And perhaps most incredibly the 'shadow' of a person's legs amongst the chippings of a worked flint tool.

Stand here for a moment longer and reflect on the 480 millennia, the 24 thousand generations, the four ice ages that have passed, the wars that have been fought, the civilizations that have risen and fallen to find you standing here on the exact same spot with a GPSr in your hand looking for a box full of tacky placky toys ...........

For more information see the UCL Boxgrove Dig Home Site and