Talk:Prehistoric Britain/Archive 1

Archive 1

Is there a more detailed article on the Cheddar Man and Targett case? Seems as though there should be. --Ian Lancaster 11:50, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm going to blitz this article tomorrow as its hopelessly out of date. I feel it ought to be moved to Prehistoric Britain too as it sounds more encyclopaedic. adamsan 22:20, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

"They drove elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses over the tops of cliffs or into bogs to more easily kill them" - What is the evidence for this? And is it conclusive enough to state it as a fact? Kernow 12:22, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

Facts are somewhat thin on the ground. What is known for certain is that a Mastadon (which is no small beastie!) was attacked by hunters armed with flint knives. If the creature had maximum mobility and freedom of movement, it is unclear if such an attack could have succeeded. Wounded by knife cuts, it would have gone berserk. That is about as far as I believe our certainty really goes. I believe the rest to be conjecture on the basis that it is a technique other societies have used when facing powerful opponents. At best, this makes it a hypothesis worth examining.

The Southeasterners who used knives seem to have been wiped out by a rival group that had mastered axe-building and over a relatively short space of time. Not something one would expect from a society skilled in manipulating and terrifying superior opponents.

I would want substantially better evidence than currently exists before I could support the theory of driving such animals into bogs. Particularly as the southeast is heavy on the chalk and chalk areas aren't usually where you find the really thick bogs. The really good peat bogs are all in the gritstone regions, much further north.

(I can, however, say one thing for certain. Elephants were NOT present. Mastadons and Pygmy Mammoths very likely roamed Essex and Sussex. Plenty of other members of that family have been found in Britain. The specific sets of subspecies we know of as elephants (less than half the size of the Mastadons found in Britain) almost certainly did not reside there. Those articles I have seen that claim otherwise are generally very bad journalism. JD

Archive 1