Halling Man

Halling Man can be said to be Halling’s oldest and longest resident  -  around 4000 years in fact  -  although his address in recent years has been the British Museum,  London, WC1.  Halling Man is a skeleton discovered in 1912  by workmen digging for a sewage  tank behind the railway station.  It had rained and the skeleton came to light after a landslip. The bones were more or less intact,  along with flints of fine workmanship and small fragments of animal bones.  The skeleton was carefully removed and sent to Professor Arthur Keith who was the foremost archaeologist of his day.   He  wrote a whole chapter on Halling Man in his 1915 book The Antiquity of Man.

With the crude dating technique of the time Halling Man was thought to have been Aurignacian,  of about the closing days of the Ice Age. Originally the bones were kept at the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1941 a bomb fell on the College and it was thought to be the end of Halling Man but the bones were later found and sent to the British Museum. After the war interest was again aroused over another skeleton, Piltdown Man, who had always been a sore point with anthropologists who could never really accept him as authentic.  New dating techniques had been developed and these showed Piltdown Man to be a fraud. This dating technique was then applied to Halling Man with the result that his age was considerably lowered and he was assigned to Neolithic times.   Unhappily,  Halling Man still lies in a cardboard box with Piltdown Man, the fraud. 

In later years a dug out canoe was found in mud on Halling Marshes when workmen were digging out the footings for building an electricity pylon.  This was near the site of Halling Man on the old river bank so was this a canoe in which Halling Man had travelled down the river?

With acknowledgements to Gowers’ and Church’s  book ‘Across the Low Meadow - a history of Halling  in Kent’  (1979), sadly out of print but available from local public libraries.