Scotland Yard’s top fingerprint expert,
Detective Chief Superintendent Gerald Lambourne had a request from the British
Museum’s Prehistoric Department to focus his magnifying glass on a mystery.
"Somewhat outside my usual beat," he said.
This was not a
question of Who Did It, but Who Was It. The blunt instruments he pored over were
the antlers of red deer, dated by a radio-carbon examination as being up to
5,000 years old. They were used as mining picks by Neolithic man to hack flints
and chalk, and the fingerprints he was looking for were of our remote ancestors
who had last wielded them.
The antlers were unearthed in July
during the British Museum’s five-year-long excavation at Grime’s Graves, near
Thetford, Norfolk, a 93 -acre site containing more than 600 vertical shafts in
the chalk some 40 feet deep. From artifacts found in many parts of Britain it is
evident that flint was extensively used by Neolithic man as he slowly learned
how to farm land in the period from 3,000 to 1,500 B. C.
Flint
was especially used for axe heads to clear forests for agriculture, and the
quality of the flint on the Norfolk site suggests that the miners there were
kept busy with many orders.
What excited Mr. G. de G. Sieveking,
the museum’s deputy director of the excavations, was the fried mud still
sticking to some of them. "Our deduction is that the miners coated the base of
the antlers with mud so that they could get a better grip," he says. "The
exciting possibility was that fingerprints left in this mud might at last
identify individuals who have left few relics, who could not read or write, but
who may have had much more intelligence than has been supposed in the
past."
Chief Superintendent Lambourne, who four years ago had
"assisted" the British Museum by taking the fingerprints of a 4,000-year-old
Egyptian mummy, spent two hours last week examining about 50 antlers. On some he
found minute marks indicating a human grip in the mud. Then on one he found the
full imprint of the "ridge structure" of a human hand -- that part of the hand
just below the fingers where most pressure would be brought to bear in wielding
a pick.
Chief Superintendent Lambourne has agreed to visit the
Norfolk site during further excavations next summer, when it is hoped that
further hand-marked antlers will come to light. But he is cautious about the
historic significance of his findings.
"Fingerprints and
handprints are unique to each individual but they can tell us nothing about the
age, physical characteristics, even sex of the person who left them," he says.
"Even the fingerprints of a gorilla could be mistaken for those of a man. But if
a number of imprinted antlers are recovered from given shafts on this site I
could at least determine which antlers were handled by the same man, and from
there might be deduced the number of miners employed in a team."
"As an indication of intelligence I might determine which way up the
miners held the antlers and how they wielded them."
To Mr.
Sieveking and his museum colleagues any such findings will be added to their
dossier of what might appear to the layman as trivial and unrelated facts but
from which might emerge one day an impressive new image of our remote
ancestors. |
