The caves in these cliffs at Ouaisné have yielded remains that can be dated back a quarter of a million years Picture: PETER MOURANT (00700285)

THE high granite cliff near La Cotte at Ouaisné is one of the more imposing features of our coastline, but it becomes even more impressive if you pause to consider its history.

Put simply, the cave at La Cotte is the oldest known site of human habitation in Jersey, having yielded remains that can be dated to a quarter of a million years ago.

Not only that, the archaeological evidence revealed in a succession of excavations shows that the period over which the cave was in at least sporadic use makes the recorded history of the Island look like a mere drop in the ocean of time.

We are, albeit with various degrees of precision, aware of what Islanders have been up to for the past one and a half thousand years, but La Cotte was the home – or perhaps just the workshop – of ancestral cousins, of whom we know very little, over an incredible 80 millennia.

Systematic archaeological excavations began in the cave 100 years ago and significant finds were soon recorded.

Joseph Sinel and his excavation team in 1914

Teeth which were classified as belonging to Neanderthal man were found by Robert R Marett and his team during work that began in 1910 and 1914.

It is now thought that the Neanderthals – named after the German valley where their skeletal remains were first found – were not direct ancestors of modern man, Homo sapiens, but a branch of the human evolutionary tree which became extinct many thousands of years ago.

But anthropologists and archaeologists believe that Neanderthals were creatures of high intelligence who most certainly possessed what we would regard as a ‘culture’.

They fashioned stone tools, appear to have understood the use of fire and lived in small groups whose members must have co-operated with each other.
There is some evidence – though not from Jersey – that they even buried their dead.

Just how effective these people were when it came to hunting the ‘megafauna’ of their age, woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoths, became apparent during later work at La Cotte, when skulls of these great beasts were found tucked under a ledge.

Hand axes and scraping tools that have been found, plus marks on bones, suggest that carcasses were butchered on-site.This perhaps helps to solve one of the puzzles about La Cotte.

As a sea cave formed when the sea level was considerably higher than today and long, long before hominids of any sort appeared on the scene, it would not have been the most obvious place to find comfortable shelter.

Jersey Museum’s new exhibiton for 1950 featured finds from La Cotte

It is, however, conveniently close to a natural feature of the landscape which, it has been hypothesised, could have been used as a highly effective aid to hunting large and no doubt dangerous creatures.

It is suggested that far from trying to corner and spear a mammoth or a rhino, the ancient denizens of this Island – then high ground on a vast plain stretching out into what is now the English Channel – concentrated on driving their prey over the cliff to certain death.

This is certainly plausible, but when Marett carried out his excavation he elicited the help of another scientist whose own work demonstrated all too clearly how difficult it can be to interpret even tangible evidence.

The scientist was Arthur Smith Woodward, of the British Museum, who at the time of the first La Cotte dig was engaged in work on the Piltdown skull, one of the most notorious fakes in the history of anthropology.

Far from being the remnant of an ancient hominid, it had been concocted from a human cranium, an orang-utan jaw and fossil chimpanzee teeth.

There is, however, no hint that any of the remains from the Ouaisné site are part of any sort of hoax.

Prince Charles, then a student at Cambridge, at La Cotte in 1968

In the 1960s and 70s teams from Cambridge University undertook further excavations in the cave, discovering not only the massive skulls but other teeth and bones from animals of the Pleistocene era.

To date, the site has yielded 140,000 artefacts. Under the direction of C M B Burney, one of the young excavators who made a contribution at La Cotte – and attracted plenty of media attention – was Prince Charles, then a university student.

The site’s first excavator, Marett, published a study, The Site, Fauna and Industry of La Cotte de St Brelade, in 1916, but reference to the cave is generally made whenever the prehistoric occupation of Europe is considered.

The name La Cotte is mentioned in the same breath as Swanscombe and Boxgrove, two UK sites where the remains of even older representatives of humankind were discovered.

Interestingly, the old Jersey name for the cave was Lé Creux ès Fées, literally The Fairy Hollow.

It would stretch belief to suggest that people had some sort of folk memory of the cave formerly being the haunt of some sort of non-human creatures, but you have to admit that the old name is intriguing.