Happisburgh, Deep History Coast: Footprints in the Mud

 

No, not the monolith of 2001 but nevertheless
equally as mysterious

This September the wife and I took our third break on the coast of the out-of-the-way Norfolk village of Happisburgh  As I noted in my post of Oct 2022 Happisburgh, in spite of it having that back-of-the-beyond, on-the-way-to-nowhere feel about it, nevertheless is a very notable location not least because of its paleontological significance. Seven standing wood monuments at the side of car park tell the story as it is currently understood. (See pictures above and below of two of them)

Happisburgh can lay claim to the earliest hominid footprints outside Africa. See the pictures above. See also below for pictures of the actual footprints before they were washed away by the restless sea.

At 850,000 years old these footprints are in the middle of the quaternary period; the age when Milankovitch cycles drove the complex beat of repeated glaciation. These footprints would have been made in mud during a warm interglacial interval. The mud is now soft rock, soft enough in fact for it to be possible to dig out small chunks with one's fingernail. Nevertheless, these hardened layers of mud are harder than the rock forming the cliffs which one can see in the background of the above picture. The cliffs overlie the interglacial strata but are being rapidly eroded leaving outliers of the relatively hard paleontological mud. The interpretation boards explained that these cliffs are largely the deposits of a later glaciation that bulldozed its way through the region 450,00 years ago. A section through the resultant glacial till can be seen in the photograph below of the cliffs. I'm no field geologist but this is my expectation of what the chaotic till left by glaciation would look like.....

In spite of the huge time scales that this landscape is evidence of, as we walked along the beach my overriding feeling was of the changing ephemerality of it all, especially of life.  The soft cliffs of Happisburgh are quickly eroding and each year a few more feet are lost. On the day of our walk the waves were wild with the restlessness that has carried on for eon's carving the coastline, churning the sand and depositing sediment along with fossils. At one point we came across a large bloated dead seal, perhaps ultimately to be buried by the waves and fossilized.

I took a picture of a cormorant perched on a break water. He was probably looking for fishing opportunities.....

The bird, of course, was completely unaware of the deep history drama still playing out around it; it has only been given to human beings to become conscious of that. In the background of my picture can be seen a huge container ship creeping along just over the horizon; a testament to human knowledge & technical prowess but nevertheless dwarfed by the scales of nature. The cormorant, whose mind was entirely focused on the fight for survival, wouldn't have a clue about the meaning of that ship or about the purpose of the orange cage on which he was perched, or about the bipedal ape who was contemplating him; not a clue about these things, any more than he had the slightest inkling about the deep history out of which his species had emerged. In a few more years his fight for survival would be over and he would be forgotten by the world. (Mat 10:29-31)

Later when returning to our caravan via the cliff path we saw another marvel of technology; a large potato harvester (See picture above, looking north): The driver was having his sandwich break in its comfortable air-conditioned cab. In the background are two line-of-sight microwave towers of the Bacton Gas Terminal. The technology in this picture is testament to the warmth and food delivered to modern homes on an industrial scale. Looking along the cliff top in the opposite southerly direction is another kind of communication tower, a monument to an entirely different kind of culture and this can be seen in the centre of this picture: 

This tower is none other than the tower of Happisburgh church. This website tells us that the church was completely rebuilt in the 14th century, the perpendicular period of church building. The late mediaeval culture of the day was emerging from earlier times when a feudal economic base meant that most utilities were generated locally rather than via a market supplied by industrialized production, By the late 14th century the black death had started to break this feudal system. However, pastural farming in Norfolk had brought a brisk trade in wool making the region wealthy enough to build such imposing churches. The market was starting to gain traction as a wealth creator. Since then, in just a few hundred years, human culture has changed beyond recognition as the market and a highly technological industry has generated wealth that the builders of Happisburgh church could not even imagine; the key to it was an agricultural revolution that had reached a pinnacle in our potato harvester where just one man could harvest a huge field in a day - or less.

Seven hundred years later that wealth has bought leisure, health and above all the knowledge and time to contemplate the mysteries of existence; but with it our culture has lost the assurance that those late medieval church builders had about the meaning of life; does our modern culture understand the meaning of the wider cosmic perspective about which we have learned so much? For some scholars the universe "just is" and believe that apart from meanings we create ourselves there is no other meaning to be discovered. So, is the man in the street who has been tutored by numerous academic authorities any better off about meanings than that cormorant? In the "light" of what some authorities will tell us the universe is all very random, empty, dark, cold and meaningless. So, it is no surprise that large swathes of our otherwise blessed & rich Western populations have given up seeking meaning altogether and are content to keep their heads above the economic waters as best they can. But really, although I've critiqued some of these authorities, I can't be too hard on them: The huge empty scales of the cosmic perspective are perplexing to say the least. In comparison those medieval church builders knew very little about this perspective; in their cosmology earth was so obviously the centre stage of a sacred drama that had run only for a few thousand years. In an attempt to cut the knot, the Christian Biblical literalists have returned to those cozier cosmogonies of past ages, reducing cosmic ages to less than 10,000 years and in some cases returning to a cosmogony that even our medieval forebears, who inherited Greek science, knew to be obviously wrong; namely, that the earthly drama takes place on a flat circular stage, not unlike the circular setting of Avebury. 

The universe is so organized that it allows us to describe it in terms of those elegant mathematical forms which our God given minds have distilled from the top of that organization. But that doesn't in anyway give the universe the necessity of aseity: Those mathematical forms are computational devices which only describe. As I've said so often, my view is that the universe is a work of art selected from the platonic world of possibility; laws or no laws it is not a necessity. There is good art and bad art but all is art and art is but reified possibility. Our deep history by God's grace is a reification from just one of the many possible stories in the platonic realm. Just as Tolkien selected one possible history to tell from all the possible stories that could be told, our cosmic history is as equally unique. That history, although perplexing to some, is nevertheless a miracle of creation and grace. With these thoughts in mind as I looked at a crystal-clear coastal night sky at 3am marveling at the visible milky way for the first time in years, it is a remarkable fact that at Happisburgh cosmic history becomes palpable.