A History of Ancient Britain (12 page)

Over generations of selection in favour of pale skin in colder, darker parts of the world, other characteristics would change too: resulting in the straightening of hair, thinning of lips,
narrowing of noses and loss of pigmentation in hair and eyes. By this process human populations were able quite rapidly to change colour and general physical appearance, so that by 40–50,000
years ago there were pale-skinned people – Cro-Magnons – living in northern Europe and Asia. Natural selection had seen to it that they were able to make sufficient Vitamin D in their
skins every day with just a few minutes’ exposure to daylight, compared to the hour and more required by black people living at the Equator. Paler eyes – blue and green – were
also better than brown eyes at making the best of low-light conditions.

Long before the last Ice Age, then, our species had adapted to the world’s various climates and environments by evolving a range of skin colours: the complete set of peoples was abroad on
the planet by at least 40,000 years ago, if not earlier. But while the consequences of those changes were profound, they were spread across so many generations and so many miles that none of us
Homo sapiens sapiens
could have noticed they were happening.

Much more recently, however, and in Britain, the people experienced an event that changed everything in mere moments and that has, perhaps, never been forgotten.

Natural disasters have been part of the human experience since the beginning. Ice Ages began quickly enough to be seen as disastrous, possibly over the course of just a few years, and have
gripped the planet on countless occasions; the very ground beneath our feet has been shaken apart by earthquakes; volcanic eruptions have laid waste to all in their paths. But there is one
particular natural phenomenon that seems to be so profoundly affecting that it has written itself into our consciousness as a species, and that is the deluge: The Flood.

As recently as 11 March 2011, the north-eastern part of Japan was hit by
an earthquake followed by a catastrophic tsunami that killed thousands. On 26 December 2004 the
so-called Boxing Day Tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people. An undersea earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra, in Indonesia, unleashed waves up to 100 feet high that swept entire towns and
villages into oblivion from the coastlines of 14 countries around the edges of the Indian Ocean.

Between 26 and 27 August 1883 a volcanic explosion that conjured similarly gigantic waves and killed at least 40,000 people blew apart the Indonesian island of Krakatoa, east of Java. Apart from
anything else it is said to have been the loudest noise in modern history, heard 3,000 miles away.

There are many causes of flood of course, many reasons why land is sometimes inundated by and submerged beneath water. But while it is not just tsunamis (tsunami is a Japanese word meaning
‘harbour wave’), there is something about the sudden, towering wall of water that rears up out of the sea with little or no warning that is especially terrifying – and so
instantly world-changing as to be unforgettable.

So-called ‘disaster archaeologists’ believe the Minoan civilisation, which dominated the Mediterranean world until three and a half thousand years ago, was stopped in its tracks by a
volcanic explosion 10 times greater than that which destroyed Krakatoa. Dated to between 1480 and 1450
BC
, the blast tore apart the island of Santorini, 70 miles north of
Minoan Crete and its capital Knossos, before monstrous waves ripped across the Aegean like nothing less than the wrath of God.

Within a couple of generations of the coming of that deluge, the Minoans were gone from history. Here was a civilisation that had once placed the shadow of its hand across most of the eastern
Mediterranean, its greatness centred on the vast and fabled palace of Knossos, with paved streets and running water; whose king of kings, Minos, would haunt the myths of ancient Greece for
centuries to come in the company of the labyrinth-dwelling beast he called the minotaur . . . all of it swatted away like a cloud of flies. Plato may even have woven his legend of the lost city of
Atlantis around the wreck of all that Crete and Knossos had once been.

Going back further in time, there have been other floods – and some of a different sort entirely. By the end of the last Ice Age in North America 15,000 years ago a great finger of ice
blocked the Clark Fork River in Idaho and Montana, creating what was effectively an inland sea. Known to geologists as Glacial Lake Missoula, it was 200 miles wide and contained an estimated 500
cubic miles of water. From time to time – perhaps as
many as 40 times between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago – the ice dam broke apart, sending all that ice and
water surging towards the Pacific Ocean. Every time the torrent was set free it tore across the land below it with a force calculated as 10 times the combined flow of all the rivers in the world.
Each time it happened the deluge might have been hundreds of feet deep and moving at up to 65 miles an hour, releasing all 500 cubic miles of water in as little as two catastrophic days –
days that literally shook that part of the world. The devastation of those times survives today in the monumental channels and scoured landscapes of the so-called Scablands of Montana.

And all the while those events unfolded there were people on the land to witness them. How would such happenings have been remembered? For how long were the tales passed down through the
generations before the truth of it all was finally lost? Was there a simmering fear in the minds of our hunting ancestors that a day might come when all the land disappeared beneath the waves,
leaving no place at all for man and beasts to stand?

By around 6100
BC
Britain had been inhabited by people living a Mesolithic lifestyle for thousands of years, since time out of mind. It is impossible to know or to
calculate the population then but perhaps a few thousand is a reasonable estimate. During those millennia the nomadic hunters, gatherers and fishers would have roamed freely throughout the interior
and all around the coastlines.

Since the beginning of the Mesolithic period, right after the end of the ‘Big Freeze’ of the Younger Dryas, Britain had been firmly attached to mainland Europe. The tens of thousands
had penetrated the interior not of an island, but of a remote peninsula. (Ireland had become an island much earlier. There is no evidence that Palaeolithic hunters ever reached there, before
Mesolithic people made their own crossings in boats, around 8000 BC.)

Sea levels rose and the land, freed from the massive weight of the ice, rose too. There has been a long, slow dance ever since – sometimes the land has risen faster, sometimes the water
– but as the Mesolithic period progressed the connection to Europe was steadily reduced to a narrow and marshy bridge of land. What is now the southern part of the North Sea and the English
Channel had for thousands of years been a rich territory for hunters and gatherers. It had been perilously low-lying – dry land only while the sea level was as much as 120 feet lower than
today and always at the mercy of a changing world. All the while the ice melted and the sea
level rose it was steadily being inundated, whittled away little by little. But
archaeologists believe the end came not with a whimper, but with an awful roar.

On a truly remarkable day around 6100
BC
, the sun rose over the eastern seaboard of the British peninsula for the very last time. All along the length of it, communities
and families went about their normal round of daily activities. Perhaps it was a fishing season and people set and tended nets and traps in shallow bays and across rivers. Or maybe there were
shellfish to be collected – mussels, periwinkles, cockles and the like. Some folk would have been out in their boats, coracles or dugout canoes making their way from point to point along a
coastline made familiar by millennia. Children would have played in the shallows, as children do.

All of it was about to change for ever. Hundreds of miles beyond the horizon, around 70 miles off the coast of Norway, a shelf of seabed over 200 miles long and amounting to thousands of cubic
miles of rock and sediment suddenly slipped free from its ancient mooring and shuddered deeper into the North Sea. It had been part of what modern Norwegians call the ‘Storegga’ –
the Great Edge – and when it slid downslope underwater it left behind a massive void above. Into that sudden space sloshed an incalculable volume of seawater – a movement followed
almost at once by an equal and opposite surge in every direction, towards Norway and Britain both. The North Sea was behaving much like a bath full of water disturbed by someone suddenly slipping
beneath the surface. A great wave was on the move along its length.

Back across the sea, mere moments later, people down at water level on the coast of Britain would have noticed the strangest thing: the tide suddenly, and very rapidly, going out so that what
had been sea was now seabed. All the time the wave approached land it had pulled water towards itself from the shallows ahead. Seabirds, fearing the worst, would have risen in alarm, screeching a
warning that was too little and much too late. Maybe some of the most alert of the men, women and children would have dropped their gear then and turned towards higher ground. But for most there
was likely nothing to do but stand still, aware all at once of a wind blowing in from offshore. And then there was a roaring noise as well, soft at first but building in volume and intensity.

For anyone close enough to the water to notice any of this, it was too late even before it began. Standing still and open-mouthed or running full tilt away from the roar, it would have made no
difference. A 30-foot-high wall
of water, hundreds of miles long, bore down upon the coastline of Britain at many tens if not hundreds of miles per hour. People and animals
in its path would have been obliterated, smashed to smithereens. All that had been there before, all but the bedrock, was washed clean away. The force of the tsunami – believed to be the most
powerful natural disaster to have hit that part of the world in the last 8,000 years or more – was such that ground as much as 50 miles inland was briefly, catastrophically submerged beneath
many feet of water. Whale bones and sand found on the Carse of Stirling, smack in the middle of Scotland, have been attributed to the same event.

As quickly as it had appeared the wave withdrew, pulling in its wake the dead, the uprooted trees, everything it had torn away from the land. At a stroke a whole swathe of Mesolithic Britain
– the people and all the evidence of their way of life – disappeared for ever.

It took a geologist studying post-glacial sea level changes in Scotland and northern Europe to bring the 8,000-year-old event back into the light. In 1988, Professor David Smith, of the
University of Oxford, was studying a bank of sediments in the Montrose Basin, a tidal estuary on Scotland’s north-east coast, when he spotted a thick layer of fine sand. Simply put, it should
not have been there. It was of such a volume, and at such a height above sea level, that there could only be one explanation. This was material from the seabed, slapped up onto dry land by a giant
wave and left behind when it withdrew. ‘As it came on, it would have made a noise like an express train,’ said Smith. ‘There was no way anyone caught down there could possibly
have survived. The speed is just so great . . . anybody standing out on the mudflats at that time would have been dismembered by the power of the wave.’

Apart from the tragedy of it all, the loss of life and homes, Britain’s destiny had been shaped. The connection to Europe was severed. The last vestiges of Doggerland were lost beneath the
waves, another Atlantis. (Millennia later Dutch fishermen in their trawlers, boats they called dogges or doggers, would find the strangest, unexpected things in their nets from time to time. In
among the fish and the crabs would be blackened mammoth ivory, lions’ teeth, sometimes a lump of peat. Every once in a while they would find beautifully worked tools of bone and antler
– evidence of man. They already knew the seabed was close to the surface there – the fishing ground was called Dogger Bank because submerged sandbanks just 30 or 40 feet beneath their
hulls attracted the fish they sought. Now they realised it had once been dry land roamed by great beasts, and the
people who hunted them. Later, archaeologists would imagine
a vast territory they called Doggerland, stretching between southern Britain and Europe.)

But now and for ever Britain was an island. Shakespeare’s ‘scepter’d isle . . . This other Eden . . . This fortress build by Nature for herself . . . this little world, This
precious stone set in the silver sea’ was cut out from the main in one hellish moment that likely wiped out a fair percentage of the population there and all around the North Sea at that
time.

For people living in Britain it was also the end of infancy, the end of their helpless forgetting. From now on they remembered things about themselves. They already knew there had been other
people – like them and yet not like them, who had been on the land when their forefathers came – but they were long gone. Now they would remember how the waters had once risen up and
taken away their land and their people. The Flood became a fixed point for our species. All across the Old World it is the same – it is floods that haunt the earliest folk memories and that
are remembered as the cleansing cataclysms that ushered in everything that exists today. Atlantis has vanished more than once and we fear it will disappear again.

And so nothing has written itself into our psyche as indelibly as the threat of losing everything to the deluge. It is there in the early chapters of The Bible, the creation story for
Christians, Jews and Muslims alike. Earlier still it featured in the Epic of Gilgamesh, an even older collection of legends, from the lost land of Sumer in Mesopotamia. Before it was called the
Epic of Gilgamesh the poems it contains were known collectively by an older name – Sha naqba imuru – He Who Saw the Deep. Norman Maclean got it right in his novella,
A River Runs
Through It
: ‘The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words,
and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.’