Boxgrove
A shin bone and butchered horses on an English coastal plain, half a million years old.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 20 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 20 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
The Boxgrove site in West Sussex preserves a Middle Pleistocene land surface almost undisturbed: knapping scatters where individual handaxes were made, and animal bones bearing cut marks that precede carnivore tooth marks — evidence that humans reached the carcasses first, and were therefore hunting rather than scavenging. A robust human tibia and two teeth were recovered, among the oldest human remains from Britain. A horse scapula carries a semicircular puncture consistent with a spear wound.