6. Paul
Paul Storm is a researcher of prehistoric human remains at University of Groningen. On the Resurfacing Doggerland project, Paul is examining morphological variation and changes in jaws and teeth of Doggerland populations, compared to surrounding areas in Northwest Europe.
Paul and I met at Hans Peeters’ office on the morning of Friday 7th July 2023 - a busy morning for the faculty. When I arrived, Hans, Paul, and radiocarbon chronologist Merita were excitedly helping a local trawlerman unbox a lieftimes collection of dredged mammal bones, brought over that morning in bubble-wrap and rucksacks, for dating in the lab: always a big moment.
Paul
I’m looking at human material from the North Sea, and from Doggerland, and of course I have to deal with what we find. Some bones you find more than others, and what we find a lot of, relatively, is the mandible and the teeth, and large bones, like the femur and the tibia. You might have seen here these examples of female tibia? As a researcher you always start with definitions. And you take measurements. And I’m interested in the size of these people. Because we have a limited number of bones, we don’t have a full skeleton, but my interest is in the stature of people, and the bone density. These measurements we take give me an indication of bone density because for example if this part of my body [torso] rests on here [hips] … or the relationship between the tibia and the foot or the toes - it starts to give me an indication of how heavy that person was. And the length of the tibia of course gives me an indication of height. So I’m quite single-minded!
The other thing is that I’m interested in jaws and teeth. What we find in Doggerland comes especially from the Mesolithic period, and I’m interested in teeth because they appear to have large molars and big jaws compared to more modern smaller jaws. This is because – and there is a theory – around how the Neolithic revolution is very, very important – because you must imagine that people here before this had no farming, and for millions of years we lived as hunter-gatherers. It was much more of a revolution than I think we sometimes realise.
Matt
I can see that and maybe because of schooling we have this vague idea of stone age man as having been around for a small number of years and then it’s ‘us’ – forever – but it’s the complete opposite isn’t it and we have this very narrow understanding – maybe some quite concerning preconceptions actually. As children I think maybe we imagine the stone age as representing a very tiny amount of time – we lived in caves and then suddenly became ‘modern’ for example, whereas we are actually the smallest point at the end of this lineage that existed for the most part in those behaviours and circumstances.
P
I mean I sometimes think about how – like today, we sit here in this office and we have a conversation behind this computer – as a hunter-gatherer you can’t do this, how could you devote the time?! But after the Neolithic revolution you have states, you know? Railways. Empires. And we sit here… this is the outcome of the Neolithic revolution. To me this is very, very important when we think about this issue. Therefore I’m very interested in what was happening before this in Doggerland. Humans – in a transition – and especially because what we find are the teeth and mandibles, and this tells us about food. And in that time, you eat less variety – there is less variation, less carbohydrates.
In my research I need to know something about what happens before the Mesolithic, so I can see whether there is a continuum as hunter-gatherers through from the Upper Paleolithic, and specifically I deal with these four periods just because at the last glacial maximum, people saw in that something is happening with our bodies. At the last glacial maximum it was very cold obviously here in northwest Europe. So what was the effect? Well, you could look at it like this: we have climate, and we have culture…
M
It's interesting to think about how we separately work into the climate thing and the cultural thing, but then where the two overlap that’s where new knowledge seems to emerge – to not see them as interrelated I guess might be a mistake?
P
Yes exactly, because I think, in my mind, what you sometimes read about human evolution is that it’s first biological, and then it becomes cultural – but, that poses a question, because as a result of this we create a world that without knowing, consciously or unconsciously we are adapting to our own cultural world. You can’t separate these.
To give you an impression, here is for instance a mandible from a Neanderthal – I did work on some of these remains years ago, this is from a very well-known Neanderthal skull in a collection in Paris – and we are looking at all kinds of details.
M
And what are those kinds of details – there seems to be an asymmetry there, what’s going on there?
P
Well this point here is for example where a dentist might give you a pain-blocking injection – there is a nerve across here – and in this case we are looking at the inside, and there is a type of bridging here that is typical for Neanderthals. And this mandible here is from Homo sapiens – it’s a very well-known mandible found in Europe and it’s around 40,000 years old, and we find just this one detail that points to something you would find much earlier in a Neanderthal. And then they started to do the DNA research and the percentage of Neanderthal DNA was higher in this person! Today we have around 2 percent Neanderthal DNA. And the material I’ve seen from Doggerland has characteristics that are also – well, reminds you of Neanderthal.
M
So there was perhaps a population in the Doggerland timeframe that had this higher percentage of Neanderthal DNA?
P
As far as I know, we still don’t know. But there are characteristics that are distinctly similar. This is for instance another mandible from the North Sea, from Doggerland, and it’s dated to around 9,000 years old, so not that old.
M
Yes it’s recent! I’ve had these discussions about Holderness and the patch of boulder clay that’s essentially only been around about that long, just glacial till, rapidly rapidly eroding, and when I’m talking to people now about this project and about time, I kind of say well, you know, 9,000 years ago we were connected to mainland Europe, and it might have been very difficult but you would have been able walk from where we are to Amsterdam… I mean you would have encountered plenty of barriers, huge rivers, animals… and then you can see how that might feel like a long time ago but somehow it’s tangible, and I think people feel and can imagine that very clearly on some level.
P
I sometimes think well, okay, Christ was around 2,000 years ago, the Romans were around 2,000 years ago – okay, so we’re looking back five times that! This mandible we’re looking at from that period, well it’s interesting because it has this particular gap here – and I don’t think you have it! I haven’t certainly, and normally now we experience problems because of this. It is a retromolar gap, and again something you expect to see in a Neanderthal. Now it’s fascinating because these molars are large, but now we often do not have enough space in our mouths and we have problems, and maybe this has something to do with the hunting, gathering way of life, and the effects of agriculture, because we see with these bones that our jaws become short and we run into trouble. And then that’s why this gap is narrowed or disappears. But this guy here had so much space that you would say well I wouldn’t expect this in a human. So if they have smaller molars like we do, you could expect for them to have that space but they don’t, they have very large molars. So this is one of the things that triggered me and I presented this to Professor Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London, and he was really interested in this. He even asked – “is your data good?!” – like, is this mandible really Mesolithic?!
Here is another example where we had to remove one pre-molar for DNA testing, and that’s always a discussion – for me, painful, because you lose morphology, but you hope to gain that you understand the DNA, and this is another thing – you are going to talk I think this afternoon with Lisette, and Lisette works with isotopes. And I also work with Eveline Altner – we are three! Eveline is looking at the DNA, I’m looking at the morphology, and Lisette is isotopes, and she will explain much better than I but roughly this tells you something about the movement of people, and about what they ate. So you can imagine it’s interesting in the ways our research fits together and builds a picture – I for example alone can’t see how someone is moving through the landscape.
I can now go to Excel and show you some data on body mass. I work with other many researchers in Europe – and here this is from someone in America, and they give me all kinds of data, because what I have in what I’m doing is a very small part of the picture. So I look at the human remains from Doggerland, I measure them myself, I look at Neolithic material from the Netherlands, but what I want is to compare the four periods I am focusing in on across different areas, so I start with Britain, which we can call point one, then I go to Scandinavia, central Europe, and then northwestern Europe – the Netherlands, Belgium, France. And so of course I can’t collect all this data myself, but two people in particular are very kind in sending me a lot of data from Europe. All kinds of measurements from a lot of individuals and projects.
above: from the book ‘Doggerland: Lost World Under the North Sea’, Sidestone Press, 2022
M
Something that I was really kind of – in talking to you and talking to Hans, Annelou, talking with everyone on the project – something I really admire and didn’t realise the extent of was the collaborative exchange of knowledge that you share between you. For example I met some of the private collectors on the beach – at the Zandmotor, on Tuesday night – we went fossil hunting, and it was just this kind of really special experience for me – they were talking about how much they appreciate the ways in which Luc has involved them in the project, and I think that’s really interesting to think about – for me, the Resurfacing Doggerland project is very similar to many visual arts projects – so similar that the most powerful of these typically embrace and really centre the power of communication, and sharing.
P
Yes absolutely and I always say that people are the basis of the work in their generosity – if people are finding for example fossils but not sharing the material, then we learn nothing!
M
When did you first become interested in morphology specifically?
P
It kind of started for me around 2009, but as a hobby. Someone brought me one small part of a mandible with one molar in it, and then the idea was that maybe it was from a Neanderthal – it was from the North Sea – and I thought well, there really aren’t very many from the North Sea – they were rare I think, and I think the chances are that this was human, but prehistoric. Before this worked on Indonesia, and there I was interested in the transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, and also was interested in the origin of Australian Aboriginals because the idea is that they went through Indonesia to Australia. And I was also interested in micro-evolution, wondering also about the origin of Indonesians because they have a very specific face and very rounded skulls and if you look at the other side of Papua New Guinea, Australia, they are not so different, and there is a very deep sea between these regions – you can see parallels. So when I saw that small piece from the North Sea I thought, well okay, I was asked to study it, and it was a way into studying micro-evolution in Europe, and here there is much more – Indonesia has an underdeveloped archaeology scene in comparison with Europe, where we have a lot of activity, so over there I had fewer individuals to collaborate with, and less material also.
M
And here you’re mapping out this context of – okay, we know a little bit about Doggerland in this portion of the North Sea basin but what is the deeper context of the things we are discovering about people?
P
Totally – and I am interested in time. In each of these four regions, what is happening there – what is happening with the body? What is happening with dentition in the agricultural revolution.
M
How do ideas change – maybe today we’re thinking about agricultural practices in slightly different ways to the ways the Neolithic might have been thinking about the benefits of these new cultural innovations, but more-so than they would have been thought about a hundred years ago.
P
Well as we tell students you know the truth of today is not the truth of tomorrow. In an idealistic way, in science you are always prepared to say ‘I was wrong’. Science is a frustrating profession – you’re always looking for the truth, but you will never find it. You try to go as close as possible.
M
Yes I mean I asked Annelou about truth and her response was sort of that well, we don’t really know what the word means.
P
Here’s a philosophical question – can you express truth in numbers? Even then you have to be critical – to be critical of what you are doing also.
Here [on this graph] you see that in Britain there are not many examples of mandibles from the Neolithic – there are some females from Britain, but I make these kinds of pictures that plot the data so we have these points that represent body mass, and these that represent stature, and every point is an individual, with an ID. And I separate males from females – sometimes individuals change or they are not well dated – this is a worry of mine because it is so important when we are trying to establish trends through time. In this case we are basing these on the tibia, but you could also use the femur. In Scandinavia, you have Neolithic but we think these individuals here we have here as examples were hunter-gatherers – so also this is something you have to be aware of – you can be in the Neolithic as a period but if you don’t live as a farmer, there are also hunter-gatherers. These examples in blue are my Mesolithic cases – but you can see that in terms of the body mass, you can’t say that well the hunter-gatherers were so much bigger – the differences aren’t spectacular. Let’s go to Western Europe… these are kind of interesting because here you can see another problem might be that you don’t have very many individuals to compare. And also it’s quite normal to have outliers – I mean, if you go out on the street today you are likely to see some people that are either actually very tall, or very short. And there is an idea among researchers – the idea that in the early Upper Paleolithic, or before the last glacial maximum, people were big. But so far as the Mesolithic – Neolithic transition, in terms of body mass I don’t see a lot of difference.
Lower jaw of ‘La Ferrassie 1’, Homo neanderthalensis. Musée de l’lHomme, Paris
M
To me it's so interesting - could you even imagine being around as a hunter-gatherer when farming is just beginning to take place and take hold – being caught in that transition, I feel like it’s impossible to imagine.
P
Well yes I mean the question is if people themselves were aware of the fact because you can imagine that hunter-gatherers might be doing certain things in their environment a little bit differently like planting seeds and slowly other behaviours start to emerge – I always think about these relationships and changes as happening completely in symbiosis – and between humans and other species. The dog is a very beautiful example because maybe, as far as we know at this moment, it was the first domesticated animal, and that is kind of striking because you expect maybe it would have been herbivores, but a dog is a domesticated wolf. We know this also because of DNA. So in fact we are also living with the domesticated wolf, 14,000 years ago – in the Upper Paleolithic, before the Mesolithic, and domestication of the dog comes from that period. So it’s also an idea that it started as a symbiosis, because wolves, maybe themselves, started to live in the neighbourhood of humans… if you consider hunter-gathers living with dogs this must have been a very strong combination. Because we have a brain, we have eyes with depth, but dogs are so… well, they have things we don’t have – smell, they have speed, those ears, but also they defend you. They warn you if there is danger ahead, so it’s such a great partnership – it’s a very strong bond. Maybe there is even some co-evolution.
I showed you the data on body mass and stature - I have one more year now to collect, and after then I start analysing – these graphs here I have just started to plot because I am curious. Now here in this one we have five individuals represented from Doggerland, in comparison to other individuals from the Neolithic, and between some characteristics it is almost like looking at two species. So maybe, maybe – I don’t know, we have to be very careful, maybe in two years it is going to tell me something very different, but maybe this is indeed a Neolithic revolution that didn’t do anything with our body mass, but it did have a serious impact on our mandibles and maybe on our teeth. So the transition away from another way of life. Eating something else was indeed something that altered our biology – it’s a cultural change, but our molars are becoming smaller because our faces are becoming more flat, and the molars do not have enough space – we encounter new diseases, it creates a lot of trouble – then comes the biological selection for smaller molars, and also to sometimes the third molar – a biological answer to a cultural transition.
M
Evolutionarily that’s really fast too?!
P
Well I don’t know if it is true but it is the idea, which is why I need as much data as possible. Maybe soon I will be able to tell you something different. In a couple of years if we meet again perhaps I will be telling you that the trend wasn’t as strong as I thought! But who knows. And this is partly though why this means I’m interested in the whole body because if I’m looking at tigers for instance, I look at Sumatran tigers and Siberian tigers, we know they are a different kind of sub-species, but everything in Siberian tigers compared to Sumatran – I expect to see bigger humerus, bigger canines, the whole tiger becomes bigger, or it becomes smaller – you see that in other animals, but in this case you see with humans it is not so, except for this one area of the body.
M
Something I was talking to Luc Amkreutz a little bit about was how there is this undercurrent subject of nationality that often comes to the surface around reconstructions like those of Krijn and Cheddar Man, this kind of thing about recency and nation states and contentious stories that arise in terms of skin colour, and eye colour and visual appearance, and as we know a lot of people find that very hard to accept. It becomes a political thing again about time and belonging, and there are so many different directions and angles to this project and this is something on my mind as well. But I’m reminded about that now here actually talking about potentially these weird sort of rapid changes which are so powerful and can completely disrupt our ideas of how things are and how things where – people imagine things are fixed by default but I’d disagree. And the jawbone is another thing where you’ve described feeling like you would think… this surely can’t be right?!
P
This is what we call micro-evolution. Small changes within species. So evolution is happening every day and we have to remind ourselves of this, that it’s not a thing of the past – you can’t stop evolution because genetically it is what we have or receive and what we give to the next generation.
Bust reconstruction of Cheddar Man by Kennis and Kennis, beside original skull excavated in 1903 from Cheddar Gorge, Somerset
M
We have ideas about the fixed-ness of things as well right? And in terms of the relationship between climate and culture I wonder whether by invoking words such as crisis this has both intended and unintended consequences for the way this disrupts those ideas. Nothing stops, everything’s constantly changing.
P
Yes I think you’re right. Sometimes too I think people are now so afraid of the climate, and that if I look at it from an historic point of view, I’m not even very sure if… of course we have to be careful – especially with the environment, for example the ways in which we use plastic, but the climate… we have to be careful because it has been so much hotter and so much colder than we have ever experienced. Not all scientists agree on this always – I mean, as if there is one science. Biodiversity is incredibly important. I don’t know as much about Britain but I think over here it’s definitely a political thing as well.
M
Perhaps politics is also pretty transient in terms of the timescales we’re trying to understand here.