Mesolithic Cowley

This week, we take a break from our romp through French history, to investigate the distant past of La Résidence's home town of Oxford....

It was cold in Cowley 10,000 years ago. Very cold. The sunny, carefree Paleolithic era, when they'd discovered fire and sat around together making stone tools, seemed like a distant memory. Now Cowley (and coincidentally, most of the Northern hemisphere) was covered by several metres of ice. Luckily for Cowley Man (and Woman) better times lay ahead and before they knew it, the Mesolithic Era had started.

The first thing they noticed was that they had flint tools and canoes. Living near the Thames, the canoes were a real bonus. And they took to flint-knapping like a hunter-gatherer to water. Later on, they discovered to their delight that they also had the bow and arrow and could finally throw away their old-fashioned atlatls (SO last ice-age.) (The atlatl is a hand-held spear-throwing device, and examples can still be seen in use in Cowley today, usually for throwing tennis balls for dogs.) To his (and her) discredit, however, Homo Cowleiensis was not nearly as tidy as his (or her) modern counterpart. Unwanted and broken flint tools were simply left lying around outside Tescos, where they remained until archaeologists tidied up the mess in the 1920s.

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