Stone age flints

This may not seem like much, but the type of tools, from axes and arrowheads to scrapers for removing skin from meat and bone, tell us much about how our local ancestors hunted the creatures they shared the land with.

We recently received two boxes of local bones and flints from Newham Museum Service.

They had formerly been housed in the nearby Passmore Edwards Museum, named after John Passmore Edwards, a Victorian social reformer and champion of the working classes.

Besides some early flints of the lower Palaeolithic period (500,000-70,000 BC) from Dawley, there are two puzzling horse skulls, once the property of West Drayton Historical Society - fragile but intact.

These bones are quite a mystery.

Are they from wild horses which shared the prehistoric hunting grounds with deer and mammoth, or from later domesticated animals used by our early forebears for ploughing or even pulling war chariots?

Why not arrange to see them and decide for yourself?