Today’s photo is of a cafe that once existed on the cliff top at Aldbrough on the Holderness coast, this copied from a Facebook post of some time ago. I would imagine that this would date to 1950s at a point on the coast long lost to coastal erosion. Aldbrough Top was a popular destination for bus day trippers from Hull in the 1930s and ’40s; presumably there were steps cut into the cliff face so the beach could be accessed, these probably having to be re-cut after each stormy spring tide. If this was so, at least they could access the beach, unlike the tenants of the modern caravan site today! For further information on the history of the Aldbrough ‘hutment colony’ see the essay on page 3 of this website.
Apparently huge strides forward have been made over the last 30 years into how much information can be gleaned from Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) hominid remains. However, although dating techniques are much more advanced a definitive answer to the issue of whether a series of ‘missing links’ (s.p.b.) were evolutionary stepping stones between homo erectus (when man first walked on two rather than four limbs, say four million years ago) and homo sapiens (us), or whether the missing links were short-lived separate but very similar species.
Homo sapiens evolved in the continent of Africa, but, from evidence so far obtained, spanned the continent north to south (the Sahara region then being an agreeable region for hunter gatherers). At some point the species moved into the Middle East and from there into Asia – the ‘Out of Africa’ era. Also they began to interact with Neanderthals who were the only hominid to evolve in Europe. It seems likely that early homo sapiens liked coastal locations, this enabling them to cross the narrow neck of land where the Suez Canal now is in moving ‘Out of Africa’.
For the moment a word about ‘cave men’. Palaeolithic Man was often portrayed as just living in caves, this being where a lot of the human remains have survived. However, there are lots of areas where there are basically no caves so the ones that did exist must have got crowded. Another possibility must surely be that they lived temporarily in other forms of shelters, but the evidence from such non-cave locations is much less likely to have survived in any way.
So we come back to the question what degree of hostility/acceptance existed in a given region between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens?