By John Morrison
LONDON, July 31 (Reuters) - Britain on Friday announced a sharp cutback in its plans for new roads, but gave a partial green light for the widening of a congested section of London's orbital motorway between the capital's two main airports.
The cutback marked a victory for environmentalist anti-roads campaigners who have staged spectacular protests in recent years, digging themselves into tunnels and perching on trees to try to block new motorways and bypasses.
One young protester, known by his nickname ``Swampy,'' (real name Daniel Hooper) became a household name after entombing himself underground to block a new road.
Transport minister John Reid, announcing the government's review of road spending on parliament's last day before the summer recess, said the government was abandoning the traditional principle of ``predict and provide'' in planning new trunk routes.
He said the 37 schemes now earmarked for the next seven years compared with the previous government's ``massive wish list'' of 150 schemes.
Reid said that with no change in policy, traffic would grow by more than a third on all roads over the next 20 years and by more than half on trunk roads.
But the Freight Transport Association criticised the cutback in spending from six billion pounds to 1.4 billion over seven years as ``a massive exercise in vacillation and passing the responsibility to others.''
``This condemns industry to a future of increasing congestion and inefficiency,'' it said.
Reid said that despite environmental objections to widening London's M25 orbital motorway - which Labour shared in opposition - part of it to the west of the capital was so congested that it would have to go ahead.
The eight-lane motorway will be widened between the M3, the road to Southampton, and the M4, the main route to the west. The expansion will cut the journey time between Heathrow and Gatwick airports, a priority for airlines and business groups.
A strategic study for the motorway will look at other ways of easing congestion including the possible use of dedicated lanes for buses, lorries and high occupancy vehicles.
But despite this, the environmentalist pressure group Friends of the Earth condemned a ``nonsensical decision'' which it said would cost 95 million pounds ($156 million) which could have been used on improving public transport.
Opinion has swung massively against new roads in Britain over the past decade and the Conservatives changed their pro-car policies to reflect this in the final period of their 18 years in office.
Labour has just announced an integrated transport policy which will aim to persuade motorists to leave their cars at home and switch to public transport.
Reid denied he had performed a U-turn over the expansion of the M25 along a section used by 200,000 vehicles a day. ``We cannot ignore the reality of the world left to us by the previous government,'' he said.
He said two other schemes to widen the M25 northwest of London would not proceed.
Reid announced the government would go ahead with a plan to bury in a tunnel a road which passes the prehistoric Stonehenge stone circle in southern England, one of the country's best known monuments.
09:03 07-31-98
By KARIN LAUB
.c The Associated Press
AHIHUD, Israel (AP) - In the cool twilight of a cave once home to prehistoric humans, biologist Stephen Weiner ran a sediment sample the size of a pinhead through an infrared spectrometer.
Numbers flashed on the screen of his computer - protected against bird droppings by thick plastic sheets - and within seconds a printer spewed out a spectrum with the sample's mineral composition.
Weiner, a professor at Israel's Weizman Institute, is a pioneer in on-site analysis. His method examines the decay of wood ash in sediment to reveal the conditions for preservation of bone and other matter. The technique helps guide American, French and Israeli archaeologists digging in the Hayonim Cave, or Cave of the Doves, in northern Israel.
``This is probably the only excavation in the world where we monitor in real time what is coming out of the ground,'' said Weiner, who also has participated in digs in China and Greece.
The scientists were searching for remains that would shed light on the lifestyle of the Mousterians, humans who lived some 200,000 years ago in caves in the area in groups of no more than two dozen.
The dig has already yielded one of the Middle East's largest collection of animal bones, including gazelle tarsals and the scorched shells of tortoises the Mousterians roasted on an open fire.
While biblical digs usually yield a large number of artifacts, from pottery to coins to ancient ruins, those studying the dawn of mankind have only little to work with; a human skeleton, if they are very lucky, stone tools, bones.
Hayonim Cave, located near the village of Ahihud five miles east of the Israeli port city of Acre, is the size of a three-story apartment building. It sits in limestone hills covered by Mediterranean scrub vegetation and olive groves.
During a recent visit, two archaeology students braving the blistering noon sun stood at the mouth of the cave, shaking large sieves to separate soil from rocks. Inside the cave, an iron gangway traversed the floor from front to back.
To the left, a steep ladder descended into a large hole, the Mousterian dig. Students sitting on foam pads loosened the soil inch by inch, using hammers, chisels and small brushes.
To the right, remains of the more recent Natufian period, dating back 13,000 years, were uncovered, including stone hearths and shelters with stone walls arranged in a circle.
Weiner's laboratory stood in the back of the cave, next to a large work table where archaeo-zoologist Mary Stiner from the University of Arizona at Tucson examined tiny bone fragments.
Stiner said the Mousterians lived by gathering wild plants and hunting boar, gazelles, fallow deer and tortoises.
The Mousterians used every part of the animals, skinning them with flint tools and scraping the marrow out of the bones. Stiner said she found hammerstone marks and fractures on the bones, indicating they were broken to get at the marrow.
Like other peoples living in the middle Paleolithic era, the Mousterians did not have pots or pans. Blackened bits of tortoise shell in Stiner's collection are evidence that the catch of the day was roasted on the open fire.
The head of the dig, Harvard University anthropologist Ofer Bar-Yosef, said Hayonim Cave, like several others in the area, was inhabited off and on, with the Mousterians often on the move in search of food.
Bar-Yosef first looked at the cave in 1964 and returned in 1992 in hopes of finding evidence for the widely accepted assumption that modern humans evolved in Africa about 300,000 years ago and spread from there across the world.
On their way to Asia and Europe, the migrants would have had to pass through the narrow corridor of what is now Israel.
``We need to know what happened between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago. No one has found any modern fossils from this period in this part of the Middle East,'' said Bar-Yosef, whose project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation in the United States, the Weizman Institute and the French Foreign Ministry.
Earlier this month, the probability of finding a human skeleton appeared very low. After analyzing nearly 100 sediment samples from the dig's floor, about 16 feet below the original surface of the cave, Weiner was pessimistic about the chances of finding any bones, either animal or human.
Unable to bear the suspense whether the poor conditions would persist, the team drilled one foot farther down, skipping thousands of years of human evolution.
Weiner then analyzed the new samples and came up with good news; conditions were more favorable for finding bone remnants.
Where once archaeologists would have had to forge ahead on faith alone, they now had a much clearer idea of where the project was going.
``It's like skipping a chapter ahead in a book,'' Weiner said.
AP-NY-07-19-98 1202EDT
