Norfolk's world-famous beach.

Alright?

I owe you an apology. Whilst I’m sure you survived (and, in all likelihood, didn’t even notice) a lack of an email last week, I promised a newsletter every Sunday and failed to deliver.

On a more positive note, I had a good excuse: I was in Scotland getting engaged. Everything went well, despite the inevitable rain.

Unfortunately, today’s newsletter has nothing to do with the usual engagement-related tropes. I’ve already spaffed Norwich’s best love story in one of last month’s newsletters - a sloppy lack of forward-thinking on my part.

Instead, we’re going back. Way back. Back further than we’ve ever been before, or will ever go again.

Footprints for the ages.

Before 2013, the oldest known human footprints outside of Africa were the theatrically named Ciampate del Diavolo, or the “Devil’s Footprints”.

Found in Campania, Italy, these footprints were found near a volcano and preserved by a pyroclastic flow. Surely, the locals once supposed, only the devil could walk across lava without burning his feet.

Dated to 350,000 years ago, they’re pretty old. Rumour has it they’re even older than the Castle Mall, though this is fiercely debated.

But nowadays, the Devil’s Footprints are the second-oldest known human footprints outside of Africa. In May 2013, on a sleepy beach in Norfolk, Europe’s ancient history was completely rewritten.

Welcome to Happisburgh.

If you start typing “Happisburgh” into Google - as I’ve done several times whilst researching the contents of this newsletter - the first search suggestion isn’t “Happisburgh footsteps”.

Instead, it’s “Happisburgh erosion”. The Norfolk village is victim to one of the fastest rates of coastal erosion in the UK, with 34 homes lost in the last 20 years alone.

But it’s this rapid erosion that has put Happisburgh on the map for a different reason. The sea and weather are frequently uncovering new layers of sediment and, with it, new archaeological opportunities.

In February 1825, an exceptionally high tide swept away sediment that had buried an ancient landscape of fossilised tree stumps, animal bones, and fir cones. Throughout the 1800s, fishermen would report finding bones from long-extinct animals.

More recently, in 2000, a man walking along the beach found a black flint handaxe, dating back to between 600,000 and 800,000 years ago (pictured below).

That was followed by a haul of stone tools discovered in 2010, estimated to be 840,000 years old, making them (to this day) the oldest human artefacts discovered in Britain.

And in 2013, a research team funded by The British Museum found human footsteps after a storm exposed new hollows on the beach.

They were dated to be around 900,000 years old and belonged to a pre-Neanderthal species called Homo antecessor (or “Pioneer man” in Latin).

Not only does this make them the oldest known footsteps outside of Africa, but it also makes them the earliest evidence of human activity in Britain - redefining what we know about our first inhabitants.

The science/geography bit.

Right. Anyone who remembers the Lucky Nipple newsletter will know that my scientific/geographical acumen is limited at best. The fact that I don’t know whether this is a scientific or a geographical issue should speak volumes.

So when I try to decipher sentences like the one below, it’s as though my brain is shrinking in size, not unlike the brains of the ancient folks wandering around Happisburgh beach 900,000 years ago:

“The Early Pleistocene is an unofficial sub-epoch in the international geologic timescale in chronostratigraphy, representing the earliest division of the Pleistocene Epoch within the ongoing Quaternary Period.”

And here I was thinking that Pleistocene was the squidgy stuff you used to make animals in school.

Still, I’ve persevered, because it’s easier to understand the significance of the Happisburgh footsteps when we know a few simple facts:

1) Britain’s geography was different 900,000 years ago. Ancient rivers flowed through modern-day Norfolk (like the Ancestral Thames and the now-defunct River Bytham), Britain was still connected to mainland Europe, and the whole area was bigger, too. Here’s a mind-blowing map:

2) Britain’s weather was, somehow, even more changeable and rubbish than it is now. It had been tropical at one point, but around 900,000 years ago, the climate shifted, and 100,000 years of glaciations followed.

Why does this matter?

The significance of Happisburgh.

Until the post-2010 discoveries at Happisburgh, every piece of ancient human history found in Britain pointed to a theory as old as time itself: that when the weather gets chilly, British people clear off. Presumably to an ancient Benidorm, with ancient buffets and ancient happy hours.

So when 700,000-year-old stone tools were discovered in Suffolk in 2005, it made perfect sense, because archaeologists knew that the climate at the time was Mediterranean.

But finding 900,000-year-old human evidence goes against everything we thought we understood about humans in Britain, because we know the climate was awful back then. Far from being too primitive to adapt to colder, harsher conditions, Happisburgh tells a story of early humans who were willing and able to endure a glacial Britain.

Follow in the footsteps.

Unlike the positively modern Devil’s Footsteps found in Italy, Norfolk’s footsteps didn’t stick around for long.

A storm exposed them and, less than two weeks later, the tide had eroded them away. In that short time, experts worked around the clock (and often in the pouring rain) to record 3D images of them, gathering all the information needed to analyse and date them to within a respectable, if not exact, timeframe.

The analysis reveals that it was probably a group of five people, ranging in height from 2 ft 11 to 5 ft 7. Possibly a family.

Whilst some might consider it a shame that we can’t see them anymore, I think it’s all the more remarkable that the research team were able to extrapolate so much insight in such a short amount of time. A textbook case of seizing the opportunity before it’s washed away forever.

If you’re interested, this short video, published by the Natural History Museum, documents the discovery, research and analysis of the footprints.

Norfolk is many things to many people. But where understanding more about ancient humans is concerned, it might be one of the most significant places on Earth.

See you next week,

Secret Norwich.