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I would like to dedicate these pages to my PhD supervisor, Eric Higgs. After studying at the London School of Economics, he bought a hill farm in Shropshire at the outset of the Second World War, and spent the following decade rearing sheep and cattle, with the objective, he once told me, of breeding miniature versions of the former. By 1953, he had had enough of farming and went to Cambridge to ask Professor Grahame Clark if he could enrol for a Diploma in Archaeology. Clark suggested that he should apply to the Institute of Archaeology in London University, but Higgs was adamant. He informed Clark that ‘I want to study at the best university’. Grahame could hardly disagree on that score. After his studies, a junior post became vacant and Eric was appointed an Assistant Director of Research. His great interest was economic prehistory, for which his time as a farmer primed him perfectly, and in 1959 I first encountered him, in his lab, known as ‘the Bone Room’. It was a small den, with animal bones hanging on the walls, dominated by a massive aurochs skull. Eric had piercing blue eyes, and a disarming way of giving one the impression that you were important, and here was your chance to join a movement to change the course of prehistory. He said to me that he could tell more about a prehistoric society from a single animal bone, than from a suitcase of handaxes.
Eric Higgs in a typically thoughtful mood. Image: courtesy Paul Bahn
I was fascinated by his confidential asides that it was us against them, and spent many hours learning how to tell a sheep bone from a deer, or a horse bone from that of a cow. In the summer of 1962, I went straight from my graduation ceremony to jump into the back of his Land Rover for the week’s drive to Greece and a fabulous summer hunting down the Neanderthals in the Balkans, as described in CWA 90. The day we returned to Cambridge, I became his first doctoral student. I asked him for his advice for a topic, and he replied with two words: ‘Try Norway’. But I went to Switzerland, and spent months in the Zurich Zoological Museum, identifying and analysing thousands of animal bones from the Swiss Lake Villages. One of the first tasks, confronted with boxes of bone fragments, was to sort out those that were sufficiently complete to make it possible to say what animal they came from. Fragments where this was impossible, like rib bones, were set aside as being of little use. Then I did the same thing in Denmark before returning to base to write up my findings into a dissertation. All this time, Eric continued his fieldwork in Greece, and then moved to the Near East with substantial funding from the Royal Society. It was Eric who urged me to write and ask for a lectureship at the University of Otago, and so I took what I had learned from him to New Zealand, and set up a cloned ‘bone room’ there, before doing the same when my interests took me to Southeast Asia. On one of my return visits to Cambridge, I naturally called on Eric, and he showed me his latest device, a flotation machine to extract botanic remains from archaeological sites, which has transformed our understanding of prehistoric exploitation of plants. I was the first person to use this technique in Southeast Asia. On a later visit in 1976, I found that Eric’s health had deteriorated rapidly, and I sat beside his bed reminiscing about those golden days roaming Greece, just a few weeks before he died.
Sorting species
The virtually universal recognition among archaeologists today that faunal and floral remains are important owes much to his pioneer thinking, but I am sure that Eric would be amazed by recent developments. Prominent among these, was a remarkable discovery made as part of investigations into the Siberian cave site of Denisova. As it happens, this involved my son Tom and his wife Katerina. Located in a tributary of the Ob River, Denisova has a long Palaeolithic sequence that involved the eastern limit of occupation by Neanderthals, the arrival of Anatomically Modern Humans, and the discovery by DNA analyses of a new species of human known as Denisovan. A problem with this cave is that it was also occupied from time to time by hyaenas, and they crunched up bones, leaving thousands of fragments and very few that can be assigned a species. However, bone fragments need no longer be set aside, for we now have ZooMS, or ‘Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry’, a method developed at the University of York by Matthew Collins and Mike Buckley that can identify the species of these vital fragments. Tom and Katerina returned bags of fragments from Denisova to their lab in Oxford, and set graduate student Samantha Brown to seek any that might be human. And on the 1,300th bone – eureka! – they found one: a tiny fragment just 24.7mm long that was at once despatched to Nobel Laureate Svante Pääbo’s lab in Leipzig for DNA analysis.
As Tom described in his book The World Before Us, the result stunned. It came from a young teenage girl born about 90,000 years ago, who was the daughter of a Denisovan father and Neanderthal mother. A world first, this first-generation hybrid was christened Denny, and she was featured on the front cover of Nature when the publication appeared.
These breakthroughs have taken me back to the weeks and months I spent in Zurich identifying the Swiss Lake Village faunas, and I ask myself: were my results riddled with errors because of all those fragments that were seen as of no use? A possible answer now comes from a recent paper published by Eugène Morin and colleagues. They have analysed the bones from three European Palaeolithic sites, two in France and one in Montenegro, using two approaches. The first is the traditional method that I followed, simply using the shape of the bone to identify the animal it came from. They then applied ZooMS to a subset of hitherto unidentifiable fragments. Saint-Césaire is a cave site in western France, north of Bordeaux. It was occupied by Neanderthals, and then by Aurignacian modern humans. A feature of the excavations was the great quantity of bones, often, as in the middle Aurignacian, comprising dense middens. In the original report on these faunal remains, it was noted that it was at times difficult to distinguish between bovine and horse, red or giant deer remains, so they were simply ascribed to ‘ungulates’. This contrasts with Eugène Morin’s conviction that ‘modelling the subsistence strategies of prehistoric groups depends on the accuracy of the faunal identifications’.
So, how do the two approaches compare at this site? It is clear that the inhabitants centred their hunting on herds of reindeer, since this species accounts for 55% of the bone sample calculated from traditional methods. However, this number fell to 43% based on ZooMs. At 20%, the proportion ascribed to horses is about the same. However, the morphology over- estimated bovines and the mammoth, and failed to identify any red deer. Hyaenas and bears were also only found on the basis of ZooMS.
Crvena Stijena is a rock shelter occupying a magnificent location in Montenegro, and contains 31 layers covering a period of about 130,000 years. With a much milder climate than at Saint-Césaire, the reindeer was replaced by red deer during what were probably seasonal periods of occupation. As at Denisova, bones were often gnawed and damaged by hyaenas. Both approaches resulted in similar percentages for the red deer, with proportions of about 70-80% depending on the particular context analysed. ZooMS identified more ibex or tahr. Moving back east, Jinsitai Cave is located in northern China. Here, ZooMS has been applied to bone fragments dated from 37,000 to 20,000 years ago, and found for the first time that the early modern humans there were hunting wild camels as they penetrated past Denisova and into Northeast Asia. It does rather seem that my research in Switzerland would have benefited from this remarkable new technique.
Five years ago, my friend Paul Bahn told me that he had tracked down Eric Higgs’ tombstone in the churchyard of Clee St Margaret, a tiny village in Shropshire. Lying on a tilt and surrounded by ivy, it bears the simple inscription: ‘Eric Sidney Higgs 1908-1976. Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath. Tennyson’. Eric certainly tilled his field, and his pioneering harvest will always be remembered by his many students.
Charles Higham is a Professor at Otago University in New Zealand, and an authority on Cambodia's Angkor civilisation and Ban Non Wat in Thailand.
