La Cotte
IF you stand on the headland overlooking Ouaisné today you will enjoy a fine view of sands stretching towards St Brelade’s Church to the west, a profusion of rocks and the open sea.
A quarter of a million years ago the prospect would have been very different. You would still have been at the top of a cliff originally sculpted by the sea, but away to the west there would have been a plain of grasses and the occasional stunted tree.
The climate, too, would have been very different. The sea level was lower because vast quantities of water were trapped in the polar icecaps and the massive ice sheets which covered much of northern Europe.
Jersey, circa 250,000 BC, was not only linked to mainland Europe but also an integral part of a vast cold prairie frequented by herds of woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros.
That our remote relations were also present is known from the layers of ancient remains excavated from La Cotte, the chasm which bites into the cliff towering over the eastern end of the beach at Ouaisné.
As far as archaeologists can ascertain, the first prehistoric men and women who used La Cotte belonged to a race of hunter-gatherers known as archaic Homo sapiens, though there is also evidence that about 100,000 BC it was also used by Neanderthals, that heavy-browed side branch of humanity which died out some 40,000 years ago.
Naturally enough, Stone Age man used stone tools – some of which have been found in La Cotte’s strata.
Ash deposits prove that he could also make fires to combat the glacial cold, and it seems, he could hunt and kill such formidable creatures as the rhino.
La Cotte’s first humans were also trend-setters: the area was used sporadically for hunting and at least temporary settlement over many millennia.
Much of what we believe to be true of Jersey’s Old Stone Age populations is, however, built on conjecture.
The rhino skulls found at La Cotte plus more than 140,000 other artefacts, including Neanderthal teeth and part of a human skull, paint a picture of generations of people who were sophisticated enough to earn a living in an environment much harsher than today’s.
Stone tools, plus tool marks on bones unearthed from the site, suggest that animals were butchered for food – and no doubt for their skins as well.
It has also been suggested that the site, with its open headland leading to an abrupt drop, was the ideal place to panic herds of animals and then to drive them to their death.
This is certainly more plausible than the idea of a small group of men trying to subdue something on the scale of a mammoth with stone-tipped spears and brute force.
Though excavation at La Cotte began in 1910, much may remain to be discovered.
A series of digs in the 1960s – including one which involved Charles, the Prince of Wales, then a student – yielded many invaluable artefacts, but more are likely to be hidden beneath the many massive fallen rocks littering the area.
Another site, La Cotte à la Chevre near Grosnez, was also used by Stone Age man, but it is less spectacular and imposing than the one at Ouaisné.
Nevertheless, the two places mean that Jersey is particularly rich in remains from an era which can be regarded as the long nursery phase of civilisation in North-western Europe.
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