The Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) is a historic project—Britain’s first high-speed rail line, linking the Channel Tunnel to London and making short work of the train trip from London to Paris and Brussels. It’s also a prehistoric project. In April 2004, workers constructing the Ebbsfleet station in North Kent unearthed the skeleton of an elephant that lived 400,000 years ago, along with flint tools presumably used to butcher it.
The find added to an impressive list of discoveries that have turned the CTRL into an archaeological treasure trove. In the Ebbsfleet Valley alone, preconstruction investigations turned up an Anglo-Saxon mill and the remains of a Roman town and villa.
“We thought we had found everything,” says Helen Glass, archaeology manager for Rail Link Engineering—a consortium led by Bechtel. “But it seems we saved the best for last.”
The skeleton was identified as a Palaeoloxodon antiquus, an early elephant twice as big as the modern African elephant and weighing three or four times as much as a family car. Its straight tusks distinguish it from the more commonly known prehistoric mammoth.
“It was an amazing discovery,” says Glass, noting that very few elephant remains have been found in Britain, and this was the first to indicate butchery of a carcass by early humans.
