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his keepsakes and his mammoth for what he is: one of us.
    When Buckland unearthed his Red Lady of Paviland in 1823, it was hardly the first discovery of one of modern humankind’s ancestors. Down through the centuries people have found, from time
to time, fragments that have come to be understood as characters from earlier pages of the human story. In total, the number of known fragments of our most ancient ancestors still do not add up to
much – but they have been just numerous enough to let palaeontologists follow them all the way back to the beginning.
    Humankind has always originated in Africa. It is our home. There have been several species of human over the millennia, as though Earth conducted experiments and trials to see what kind works
best. As far as palaeontology can tell, the first actually to leave the warmth of the nursery and head out into the rest of the world was Homo erectus – upright man – who began
spreading north, east and west, into Asia and Europe, just less than two million years ago. In ways not yet fully understood – and certainly lacking consensus among palaeontologists – Homo erectus was subsequently joined on stage by a closely related species called Homo heidelbergensis . Named after a jawbone found near the city of Heidelberg, in south-west Germany,
in 1907, Heidelbergensis seems either to be descended from Erectus or from some earlier, more primitive species that is a common ancestor to both – perhaps Homo habilis ,
handy-man, or Homo ergaster , workman,both of whose faint traces are also found in Africa, Europe and Asia from time to time. The paucity of physical evidence of any
of these species recovered from around the world so far means that certainty is as elusive as the people themselves.
    Further complicating the picture is Neanderthal man. The first remains of this additional relative were found in the Neander Valley, near the town of Düsseldorf in western Germany, in 1856
and finally given the name Homo neanderthalensis in 1863 Some palaeontologists see Neanderthal characteristics on skulls and bones that are as much as 600,000 years old but there is more
general agreement that humans of this species inhabited Europe and Asia from around 350–400,000 years ago. More interesting than when they ‘start’, however, is when they
finish.
    Neanderthals were still roaming the European continent 25,000 years ago. While that species was evolving for hundreds of thousands of years in Europe and Asia, somewhere in Africa there was one
last throw of the human dice. Homo sapiens sapiens – ‘wise man’, modern man – was the result, and had certainly evolved somewhere on the Dark Continent by at least
around 200,000 years ago. Not until as recently as perhaps the last 100,000 years, however, did any of us leave the homeland and make our way into other parts of the world.
    Modern humans are therefore the Johnny-come-latelies of the story but their arrival in Europe by around 40,000 years ago means they encountered a sitting tenant there in the form of the
Neanderthals. For perhaps several millennia, until the last of the Neanderthals died out, for reasons unknown, our modern ancestors shared their world with a venerable old uncle of the human
race.
    From his office in the Natural History Museum in London Professor Chris Stringer directs the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project. Stringer’s name is inextricably linked with the
now broadly accepted ‘Out of Africa’ theory and he understands more about the shadowy comings and goings of humans in Britain than perhaps anyone else.
    If the mammoth-hunter from Paviland is the first and oldest modern man known to have lived in Britain, he was certainly not the first human. In Homo Britannicus – The Incredible
Story of Human Life in Britain – Stringer describes the discovery of the individual who is the earliest known inhabitant.
    Close to the city of Chichester, in West Sussex, is a gravel quarry called