Well not your tools specifically Martin but the ones your ancestors lost.
On this beach, 700,000 years ago …
One wintry day, two keen fossil collectors found a flint beneath these cliffs. It didn’t look like much, but it turned out to be evidence for the earliest humans in Britain. Mike Pitts on the amateur archaeologists who rewrote history
Friday January 6, 2006
The Guardian
Given the choice, the bottom of a cliff with the tide coming in fast is not a place you’d work. For Paul Durbidge and Bob Mutch, however, the foreshore at Pakefield, south of Lowestoft, Suffolk, is precisely where they want to be. Especially in winter, and even more so when the storms are up. Because it’s then that the fossils are exposed.
Durbidge and Mutch have been collecting on this beach for years; they have assembled a huge and academically valuable collection of animal bones. In 2000, though, they heard that along the coast in Norfolk, someone had found a flint handaxe that was 500,000 years old. It would have been made by a distant ancestor of Neanderthals, and as far as Britain was concerned, was as old as early humans got. This gave Durbidge and Mutch an idea. They knew their animal fossils from Pakefield were older than that. What if we have flints here too, they thought? “We had a gut feeling about Pakefield,” says Durbidge.
Late in 2001, they hit the jackpot: during an excavation, they found a small flint flake. To the uninitiated, it’s just a chip of stone, the sort of thing you might prise out of your sandal. But the two friends saw it for what it was: a diamond amid dross. That little chip of flint had been shaped by the hand of one of the very first Europeans.
Late last month, the journal Nature announced the discovery of 700,000-year-old stone tools in Suffolk - pushing back the date of arrival of early humans in northern Europe by 200,000 years. Buried in the list of 19 authors were the names of Mutch and Durbidge.
Full story here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1680443,00.html
MarkB