Invasive Aliens. Dan Eatherley
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direction a brisk wind blew. Birds sang and robber flies buzzed. There was the faint drone of distant air traffic. Above us circled a pair of buzzards.
‘What can you see?’ I asked my daughter.
‘Cows,’ she replied, mouth stuffed with cheese-and-onion crisps.
Today’s miscellany of embankments, trenches, mounds and other vestiges of Hembury’s convoluted history confounds those wishing to understand it. The modern visitor is further disorientated by colossal beech trees which have erupted from the earthworks, clinging on with tentacular moss-covered roots. Yet its secrets are yielding to the archaeologist’s trowel.
Hembury’s strategic location and defensive qualities have long been recognised by those keen to defend themselves and command the region. It’s a real Russian doll of a place: ostentatious double-ditched ramparts dug in the Iron Age, some 3,000 years ago, surround the entire three-hectare monument, which is perched at the edge of the Blackdown Hills in East Devon. Easy access to nearby iron ores and smelting works perhaps justified the investment in time and effort to shift the countless tonnes of earth by hand. Members of the Belgae tribe, from northern France and the Low Countries, subsequently laid claim to Hembury, making their own mark in about 50 BCE with additional defensive ditches and ridges across the centre of the fort. Then, in the middle of the first century CE, the Roman military too added Hembury to its network of forts – apparently taking it without a fight.
More fascinating still was Hembury’s much earlier, Neolithic, incarnation, dating to around 6,000 years ago. This period was the focus of a pioneering series of digs in the early 1930s undertaken by the Devon Archaeological Exploration Society. The work was led by Dorothy M Liddell, a formidable and inspirational personality, and one of an emerging breed of female archaeologists. (A 17-year-old illustrator called Mary Nicol was one of Liddell’s protégés at Hembury. Later, as Mary Douglas Leakey, she would make her own name with palaeontological discoveries in Africa.) Through meticulous excavations, Liddell detected signs of earlier inhabitation at Hembury, including a causewayed (or interrupted) enclosure; post-holes denoting a once-grand timber gateway; the remnants of daub huts; shallow cooking pits, a metre and a half in diameter; and traces of a circular wooden building, possibly a guard house. Her team also recovered flint arrowheads and axes, and other stone implements, along with jet and greyish steatite beads and some of the earliest pieces of southern English pottery. Known as ‘Hembury ware’, the latter included simple round-bottomed bowls with lug handles, made using gabbroic clay, an orange-coloured mineral naturally occurring around the Lizard in Cornwall, 200 kilometres to the west. The finds hinted at a connection to an ancient and extensive commercial network stretching across the region and beyond.
But, for me, Liddell’s most important discovery at Hembury were some charred grains of spelt, an ancient form of wheat. Carbon dated at roughly 5,000 years old, these represent some of the earliest archaeological evidence for the cereal anywhere in Britain. Liddell also turned up stone querns for grinding the crop into flour. Evidence of the importance of cereals in the diet of Hembury’s Neolithic occupants was bolstered by the later discovery of 13 impressions of wheat grains embedded within some of the Neolithic ceramics.
How and why did a food plant native to the Middle East – 3,500 kilometres distant – come to be eaten atop a windy promontory in southwest England? The answer lies much further back in time.
Some 23,000 years ago, while Britain and the rest of northern Europe was gripped in an endless winter, people basking in the more benign climate of the eastern Mediterranean were gathering, grinding and cooking the grains of wild wheat, barley, oats and other grasses. It’s possible that the most far-sighted and patient among them may have planted out some of their seeds and waited to harvest a crop. The evidence for such an innovation back then is patchy, but certainly by around 12,500 years ago farming communities had materialised across the region.
The specifics of the transition from restless nomadism to a sedentary way of life based on cereal cultivation are still to be understood, but the shift is remarkably well documented in the Natufians, a people whose settlements are scattered across what is today Israel, Palestine, Jordan, northern Syria and southeastern Turkey. From about 14,500 years ago they started exploiting wild grasses such as emmer wheat and barley to make flatbread, beer and, later, animal feed. The transition from hunter-gatherer to settled farmer was by no means simple and direct. For some reason, the Natufians, having earlier taken up agriculture based on the intensive harvesting of wild grains, decided to resume a more mobile existence around 12,800 years ago. This about-turn has been linked to a colder period known as the Younger Dryas that reduced the natural availability of wild cereals in the Mediterranean region, forcing people to keep moving to fill their bellies.
Eventually, the Natufians and others returned to the cultivation of cereals. By selecting varieties with the greatest yields, or those which thrived in diverse conditions, crops were gradually domesticated. Early agriculturalists benefited from a common mutation in wild wheat and barley that causes the grain-carrying spikelets to be more tightly gripped to the plant after ripening – just when they should be releasing them. In wild conditions, these ‘non-shattering’ mutants are at a competitive disadvantage compared to normal grasses which can spread their seed far and wide, but they lend themselves to being harvested and cultivated by humans. People learned to exploit other plants too, including flax, pea, chickpea, lentil and bitter vetch, intentionally planting, tending and harvesting them.
Scientists wonder whether the timing of this shift to crop domestication, which probably occurred independently in different places across the Fertile Crescent – as well as in parts of eastern Asia where wild varieties of millet and rice were the grains of choice – might not be a coincidence. One suggestion is that as the climate warmed at the end of the last Ice Age, and sea levels rose, so people were forced to higher ground where they would have encountered wild wheat and barley growing naturally. Levels of carbon dioxide were also increasing in the atmosphere – possibly due to its release from warming oceans – boosting worldwide plant production, including grasses such as cereals, and kick-starting what is often called the Neolithic revolution.
With the right kind of seeds, well-prepared soil and a favourable climate, the pioneer farmers soon found themselves amassing more food than they needed. This calorie boost, combined with a reduction in energy spent moving around, is thought to have ramped up human reproductive rates. A population boom led to civilisations across the Fertile Crescent, an 800-kilometre arc of territory encompassing the floodplains of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates. But the discovery of farming may have set off a vicious cycle: the more people bred, the more food was needed and the harder everyone had to work. If they didn’t want to, or couldn’t, they might cheat or steal, requiring strong laws and even stronger rulers to keep the peace. Of course, there was nothing stopping rulers themselves from hoarding food and growing their own power in the process. At the same time, more and more of the landscape was turned over to crops which meant an acceleration in deforestation, erosion and other varieties of environmental degradation.
Unsurprisingly, given its peripheral location and challenging climate, Britain wasn’t an early adopter of agriculture. By the time wheat and barley made their appearance here some 6,000 years ago – and those precious spelt grains were being hoarded in a primitive hut on Hembury hill – the world’s first city of Uruk was already rising from the Mesopotamian floodplain. The farming of livestock also appeared in Britain, and the rest of northern Europe, around this time, again having been pioneered long before in the Middle East.
Goats and sheep are believed to have been domesticated from their wild ancestors – bezoar and mouflon, respectively – across southwest Asia from about 11,000 years ago. These low-maintenance creatures, compatible with a semi-nomadic lifestyle, were probably first kept for their flesh alone, and only later used for milk, wool and other secondary products. The fertilising properties of livestock manure was also noticed and exploited. Despite their benefits, sheep and goats would go on to become among the world’s most destructive invaders, especially on islands where their relentless chomping wipes out rare plants and degrades ecosystems. Indeed, their unfussy diet, their rapid reproductive rate, their tolerance of a breadth of environmental conditions – the very traits which first drew us to them and of course to so many other problematic species – go a long way to explaining