Swanscombe Heritage Park

Swanscombe Heritage Park is a national nature reserve and a Site of Special Scientific Interest near the village of Swanscombe in north-west Kent, England, at the Thames east of London. The park lies in a former gravel quarry, Barnfield Pit, and is very close to the Baker's Hole site to Swanscombe's east.

The area was already famous for the finds of numerous Palaeolithic-era handaxes—mostly Acheulean and Clactonian artifacts, some as much as 400,000 years old—when in 1935/1936 work at Barnfield Pit uncovered two fossilised skull fragments. These fragments came to be known as the remains of Swanscombe Man, a name they retained despite a re-identification that established that they had belonged to a young woman. These remained the oldest human fossils discovered anywhere in the UK, until the 1994 and 1995 discoveries of 500,000-year-old human leg bones and teeth at Boxgrove.

The Swanscombe skull has been identified as Homo heidelbergensis. It dates to the Hoxnian Interglacial 400,000 years ago, and since this follows the extreme Anglian ice age which drove humans out of the British Isles, the Swanscombe people must represent a re-colonisation.

Swanscombe

Coordinates: 51°26′57″N 0°17′57″E / 51.4491°N 0.2993°E / 51.4491; 0.2993

Swanscombe is a small town in the Dartford Borough of Kent. It borders the Gravesham Borough. It is located north-west of Gravesend.

History

Prehistory

Bone fragments and tools, representing the earliest humans known to have lived in England, have been found from 1935 onwards at the Barnfield Pit about 2 km (1 mile) outside the village. This site is now the Swanscombe Heritage Park. Swanscombe Man (now thought to be female) was a late Homo erectus or an early Archaic Homo sapiens. The c. 400,000-year-old skull fragments are kept at the Natural History Museum in London with a replica on display at the Dartford Museum. Lower levels of the Barnfield Pit yielded evidence of an even earlier, more primitive human, dubbed Clactonian Man.

Nearby digs on land for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link revealed a c. 400,000-year-old site with human tools and the remains of a Straight-tusked Elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), and evidence of water vole, pine vole, newts, frogs etc., indicating a site with standing water. (See below for discovery details).