Star Carr is an unprepossessing flatscape today, drained by a ruler-straight ditch that is no longer recognisable as a river. Eleven thousand years ago, it was a wetland of extraordinary productivity, teeming with fish and fowl, deer and aurochs, beavers and wildcats.
It was also a home to people, and the site place of their communion with nature. Last week I visited a new exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum displaying artefacts from the site – among the most extraordinary insights into Mesolithic life anywhere in the world. The Star Carr community had no metal, no livestock, no pottery, but seeing their digging sticks and bows, their harpoons and flint knives, their carpentry and decoration, they don’t seem distant at all. Most captivating of all are the antler headdresses, hinting at a spirituality inseparable from the wildlife with which they shared a home. Such belongingness feels revelatory in an age of disconnection and faux dominion.
