The Antler Riddle: Has Lambourne of the Yard been called in 5,000 too late?
“Scotland Yard's top fingerprint expert, Detective Chief Superintendent Gerald Lambourne had a request from the British Museum's Prehistoric Department to focus his magnifying glass on a mystery "somewhat outside my usual beat”.
This was not a question of Whodunit, but Who Was It. The blunt instruments he pored over were the antlers of red deer, dated by a radio-carbon examination as being up to 5,000 years old. They were used as mining picks by Neolithic man to hack flints and chalk, and the fingerprints he was looking for were of our remote ancestors who had last wielded them.
The antlers were unearthed in July during the British Museum's five-year-long excavation at Grime's Graves, near Thetford, Norfolk, a 93-acre site containing more than 600 vertical shafts in the chalk some 40 feet deep. From artifacts found in many parts of Britain it is evident that flint was extensively used by Neolithic man as he slowly learned how to farm land in the period from 3,000 to 1,500 B.C.
Flint was especially used for axeheads to clear forests for agriculture, and the quality of the flint on the Norfolk site suggests that the miners there were kept busy with many orders.
What excited Mr. G. de G. Sieveking, the museum’s deputy director of the excavations, was the fried mud still sticking to some of them. "Our deduction is that the miners coated the base of the antlers with mud so that they could get a better grip," he says. "The exciting possibility was that fingerprints left in this mud might at last identify as individuals a people who "have left few relics, who could not read or write, but who may have had much more intelligence than has been supposed in the past."
Chief Superintendent Lambourne, who four years ago had "assisted" the British Museum by taking the fingerprints of a 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummy, spent two hours last week examining about 50 antlers. On some he found minute marks indicating a human grip in the mud. Then on one he found the full imprint of the "ridge structure" of a human hand—that part of the hand just below the fingers where most pressure would be brought to bear in wielding a pick.
After 25 years' specialization in the Yard's fingerprints department, Chief Superintendent Lambourne knows all about ridge structures—technically known as the "tri-radiate section".
It was his identification of that part of the hand that helped to incriminate some of the Great Train Robbers. In 1975 he discovered similar handprints on a bloodstained tee-marker on a golf-course where a woman had been brutally murdered. They eventually led to the killer, after 4,065 handprints had been taken.
Chief Superintendent Lambourne has agreed to visit the Norfolk site during further excavations next summer, when it is hoped that further hand-marked antlers will come to light. But he is cautious about the historic significance of his findings.
“Fingerprints and handprints are unique to each individual but they can tell us nothing about the age, physical characteristics, even sex of the person who left them,” he says. “Even the fingerprints of a gorilla could be mistaken for those of a man. But if a number of imprinted antlers are recovered from given shafts on this site I could at least determine which antlers were handled by the same man, and from there might be deduced the number of miners employed in a team.
“As an indication of intelligence I might determine which way up the miners held the antlers and how they wielded them."
To Mr. Sieveking and his museum colleagues any such findings will be added to their dossier of what might appear to the layman as trivial and unrelated facts but from which might emerge one day an impressive new image of our remote ancestors.
14. Mr Lambourne is said to have regarded the examination of the antlers as a task
a. rather more difficult than his usual duties
b. different in nature from routine investigations
c. causing him to leave his usual headquarters
d. involving a different technique from the one in which he was qualified
15. What was the aim of the investigation referred to in the passage?
a. to provide some kind of identification of a few Neolithic men
b. to find out more about the period when the antlers were used
c. to discover more about the purpose of the antlers
d. to learn more about the type of men who used them
16. What had been the principal use of the antlers?
a. to obtain the material for useful tools
b. to prepare the fields for cultivation
c. to help in removing trees and bushes so that land could be cultivated
d. to make many objects useful in everyday life
17. How do archaeologists know that Neolithic men relied considerably on flint?
a. they have found holes that were dug with it
b. they have discovered many objects made of it
c. they have found many fingerprints on tools made of flint
d. it was useful in agriculture
18. The Museum's deputy director is very interested in the prints because
a. useful facts about this remote period can be learned from them
b. they are valuable records of intelligent but illiterate people
c. very few objects of this remote period have been found
d. the antlers serve as link with actual people who lived at that time
19. What is the ultimate value of Lambourne's work?
a It has no value as so little of importance can be deduced
b It will provide information about the organization of work
c. It throws light on an interesting facet of early man's methods of work
d It can assist in filling in an increasingly detailed picture
