Swanscombe Heritage Park

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Swanscombe Heritage Park is a National Nature Reserve and a Site of Special Scientific Interest near the village of Swanscombe in north-west Kent, England, at the Thames east of London. The park, which lies in a former gravel quarry (Barnfield Pit), is an English Heritage site.

The area was already famous for the finds of numerous Palaeolithic-era handaxes—mostly Acheulean and Clactonian artifacts, some 400,000 years old—when in 1935/1936 work at Barnfield Pit uncovered two fossilised skull fragments. These fragments came to be known as the remains of Swanscombe Man, a name they retained despite a re-identification that established that they had belonged to a young woman.

The skull fragments were found in the lower middle terrace gravels at a depth of almost 8 metres beneath the surface. They were found by Alvan T. Marston, an amateur archaeologist who visited the pit between quarrying operations to search for flint tools. A third, matching fragment of the same skull was found in 1955. The estimated age of the cranium fragments is 200,000 - 300,000 years ago. The estimated brain size is 1325 cc, the bones are very thick, show both primitive and modern features, and are believed to belong to an archaic form of Homo sapiens^[1], possibly a descendant of Homo heidelbergensis as found at Boxgrove Quarry, and a distant ancestor of the Neanderthals.^[2]

Further excavations, carried out between 1968-1972 by Dr. John d'Arcy Waechter, uncovered more animal bone and flint tools, and established the extent of a former shoreline that the bones were found on.

Most of the finds are now in the Natural History Museum in London.