A Fairweather Eden

Mark Roberts · Michael Pitts

mar 2013 · Random House

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The discovery of the remains of 'Boxgrove Man', a 'Missing Link' hominid half a million years old in chalk pits in Sussex made world headlines in May 1994. This was the most sensational archeological find in the UK since Piltdown Man - only this time it was not a hoax. Continuing excavation by site archeologist Mark Roberts has enabled him and his team to build up a picture of this, the first Englishman, and to open up a unique window on life in Britain before the Ice Age. Because these human remains, the artefacts surrounding them and the remains of the local flora and fauna - including elephants and rhinoceroses of an extinct species - are preserved in an unprecedented way, we now discover how our ancestors hunted, ate, manufactured the implements they needed to survive and interacted; these were neither the opportunist scavengers nor the mindless killers that they have previously been supposed to be. Boxgrove, therefore, represents a revolutionary view of the origins of mankind, and changes our understanding of what it means to be human.

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Mark Roberts is a primary school teacher, and he writes plays as well as children's books. He has won the Manchester Evening News Theatre Award for Best New Play, and been shortlisted for the Alfred Bradley Award, a BBC Drama Award. He lives in Liverpool with his wife and daughter. Mike Pitts, the only living archaeologist to have directed excavations at both Stonehenge and Avebury, studied at the Institue of Archaeology (University College London) before moving to Wiltshire for a stint as Curator of the Alexander Keiller Museum. He has written extensively for academic journals, as well as for radio, newspapers and popular magazines and his first book Fairweather Eden was published in 1997 to critical acclaim.