The First Fire?

Every weekend, rain or shine, whenever the ground is not frozen. Commercial Artist Bertram Wymer, 65, his wife Lea and their son John tramp across a deserted gravel pit at Swanscombe on the down-Thames outskirts of London. They walk with their heads down, eying every pebble. At the far end of the pit they enter a wire-fenced enclosure and start digging cautiously with garden trowels. They have been digging diligently ever since the end of the war, and recently they made the first finds of a peculiar treasure they have long sought.

First Englishman. In 1935 another amateur digger, London Dentist Alvan T. Marston, found a fossil bone 24 ft. below the surface in Swanscombe's Barnfield Pit.

It proved to be the occipital (posterior) bone of a human skull, and its position in a stratum containing crude flint hand axes and the bones of long-extinct animals made it exciting news in anthropological circles. Marston soon found a second bone (left parietal) which fitted the first bone perfectly. The two bones were enough to give some idea of an extremely ancient kind of man who lived along the Thames about 250,000 years ago, before the last of the great glaciers crept over England.

Ever since Marston's find, diggers have haunted Barnfield Pit. Most persistent haunters were the Wymers. Bertram Wymer had been digging for antiquities since he was 19. His wife adopted his hobby on their honeymoon, and son John started digging as soon as he was old enough to handle a small trowel. In Barnfield Pit they found plenty of crude flint tools, but for years neither they nor other diggers found anything very interesting. The great prizes--more bones of "the first Englishman" or clues to the life he led--did not show up in hundreds of tons of carefully picked-over gravel.

Last July came a change of luck. Son John found a right parietal skull bone. It fitted precisely the two bones found by Marston, and proved that "the first Englishman" (probably a young woman) had an essentially modern brain. A wave of excitement brought hordes of diggers to Barnfield Pit. But still almost nothing was known about how the first Englishmen lived.

Home Fires. The Wymer family kept on digging, now modestly backed by the British Museum of Natural History ($140) and New York's Wenner-Gren Foundation ($250). With the help of two hired laborers, they found buckets of flint chips, tools and animal bones. Then Lea Wymer found something odd in the same deep stratum: a bit of black stuff the size of her fingernail which looked like rock but felt much lighter. A few days later she and Bertram and John all found more. They took the collection to Dr. Kenneth Oakley of the British Museum of Natural History, who is the leading authority on Swanscombe man. Last week Dr. Oakley announced that the black objects are carbon, probably charcoal from the campfires of shadowy Swanscombe man. If the first Englishmen possessed fire, they must have climbed quite a way in cultural development.

The persistent Wymers are not yet satisfied. This weekend, if the gravel is not frozen, they will be back in Barnfield Pit. In time, they hope to find more human bones, and perhaps the burned bones of animals or other clues to the Swans combe way of life. "We've got premonitions," says Bertram. "Besides, I like to get to the bottom of things, you know."

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