What a thrill to find mammoth bones under Pembroke Castle.By David Horspool
Historians pride themselves on taking the long view. They strive to rise above our daily preoccupations while working on less smug-sounding variations of the conclusion ‘It’s all happened before.’ Sometimes, that long view can get very long indeed. Peering back into prehistory, astonishing remains are still being uncovered. Less than a blink of an eye ago (in prehistoric terms), researchers in Norfolk in 2013 were able to show that fossilised hominid footprints beneath the sands of a Norfolk beach at Happisburgh were up to 950,000 years old. That’s more than half a million years older than the oldest footprints discovered anywhere else in Europe, and the oldest outside Africa. Pictures of the footprints showed outlines that could have been left by anyone wading along the shore today. The find tempts you to identify with an ancestor who was not even of the same species as us, probably Homo antecessor, who...
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