1
00:00:06,760 --> 00:00:10,560
This is the story of how Britain came to be.

2
00:00:10,560 --> 00:00:16,480
Of how our land and its people were forged over thousands of years of ancient history.

3
00:00:23,160 --> 00:00:27,240
This Britain is a strange and alien world.

4
00:00:27,240 --> 00:00:32,960
A world that contains the hidden story of our distant prehistoric past.

5
00:00:37,280 --> 00:00:40,760
'From the enigmatic secrets of our greatest monuments...'

6
00:00:40,760 --> 00:00:47,280
It's fantastic after 14,000 years to get a glimpse of the way at least one individual was thinking.

7
00:00:47,280 --> 00:00:52,720
'..to the magical worlds inhabited by the first people to make this land their home.

8
00:00:55,280 --> 00:01:01,800
'Today, modern science and new archaeology are solving ancient mysteries,

9
00:01:01,800 --> 00:01:07,400
'and revealing the seismic shifts that created whole new ages.'

10
00:01:07,400 --> 00:01:09,920
That is magic.

11
00:01:12,080 --> 00:01:15,440
The first chapter in our epic story -

12
00:01:15,440 --> 00:01:20,960
a battle for survival in a hostile and icy world.

13
00:01:20,960 --> 00:01:25,920
This is the oldest complete human skeleton ever found in Britain.

14
00:01:25,920 --> 00:01:31,840
A world in which our land was being shaped by nature's most powerful forces

15
00:01:31,840 --> 00:01:34,480
into the Britain we know today.

16
00:01:42,320 --> 00:01:44,120
WIND HOWLS

17
00:01:49,800 --> 00:01:56,160
In every corner of Britain there are relics of a long-lost past.

18
00:01:57,280 --> 00:02:02,000
The rich heritage of a remote and distant history.

19
00:02:03,440 --> 00:02:06,160
It's a history that goes right back to the Romans...

20
00:02:07,680 --> 00:02:11,280
..the very first people who wrote down the names and places,

21
00:02:11,280 --> 00:02:16,520
the dates and events of life in Britain 2,000 years ago.

22
00:02:19,640 --> 00:02:25,840
But the world I'm about to enter will take us back even further back, into a far more distant past.

23
00:02:25,840 --> 00:02:28,640
ENGINE STARTS

24
00:02:31,880 --> 00:02:34,680
In south Wales, a team of archaeologists is searching

25
00:02:34,680 --> 00:02:38,080
for traces of ancient people who once lived here.

26
00:02:43,960 --> 00:02:47,840
What they're looking for are footprints,

27
00:02:47,840 --> 00:02:51,200
from 8,000 years ago.

28
00:02:51,200 --> 00:02:56,640
This is a world that only survives in the remains of people and objects...

29
00:02:58,160 --> 00:03:02,360
..fragments preserved by chance for thousands of years.

30
00:03:03,880 --> 00:03:09,520
And these precious relics give us glimpses of the people who once lived here.

31
00:03:09,520 --> 00:03:14,400
A people who survived, often against extraordinary odds.

32
00:03:17,120 --> 00:03:20,160
When I studied to become an archaeologist,

33
00:03:20,160 --> 00:03:25,400
it was the sheer challenge of understanding this ancient world that attracted me,

34
00:03:25,400 --> 00:03:28,040
and the legacy that its people left behind.

35
00:03:29,960 --> 00:03:32,360
I've come to the coast of south Wales

36
00:03:32,360 --> 00:03:39,320
to try to see some of the most intimate and poignant remains in the whole of Britain.

37
00:03:39,320 --> 00:03:46,440
Out there, beneath the waves, are a few of the most fragile and fleeting traces imaginable

38
00:03:46,440 --> 00:03:50,720
of a group of hunters who came here 8,000 years ago.

39
00:03:53,200 --> 00:03:55,440
The added challenge out here,

40
00:03:55,440 --> 00:03:58,800
is that as well as the tides,

41
00:03:58,800 --> 00:04:03,520
you've also got to deal with the fact that this fantastic evidence is usually concealed

42
00:04:03,520 --> 00:04:07,400
under feet of mud, as these banks shift about.

43
00:04:12,080 --> 00:04:15,720
So we've got a footprint there.

44
00:04:15,720 --> 00:04:20,840
You can just see the big toe, the heel emerging from the mud.

45
00:04:20,840 --> 00:04:25,480
With the side of the foot, the heel prominently marked,

46
00:04:25,480 --> 00:04:29,000
the arch of the foot, then the big toe and the rest of the toes.

47
00:04:29,000 --> 00:04:31,160
So rather than being a depression,

48
00:04:31,160 --> 00:04:33,000
the way they've been preserved

49
00:04:33,000 --> 00:04:35,840
is gradually filling the print with materials,

50
00:04:35,840 --> 00:04:40,040
- so they appear almost as a mould of the original footprint?
- Yes.

51
00:04:41,560 --> 00:04:45,080
That's one of the best things I've ever seen.

52
00:04:45,080 --> 00:04:47,360
I knew about them, but until you see them

53
00:04:47,360 --> 00:04:50,520
it just doesn't seem...possible.

54
00:04:51,680 --> 00:04:53,800
What have we got here, then?

55
00:04:53,800 --> 00:04:57,480
'The prints reveal men, women and children,

56
00:04:57,480 --> 00:05:02,200
'an entire group of nomadic hunter-gatherers.'

57
00:05:02,200 --> 00:05:08,080
That's not a fossil of that person that day, that is the very day.

58
00:05:08,080 --> 00:05:12,760
What's interesting here is that these are very obviously part of a trail.

59
00:05:12,760 --> 00:05:17,560
There's another print there, rather poorly preserved.

60
00:05:17,560 --> 00:05:21,440
That's the right foot of the same person.

61
00:05:23,360 --> 00:05:27,360
'These were people who relied utterly on the natural resources

62
00:05:27,360 --> 00:05:31,520
'of wild plants, and the animals that lived alongside them.'

63
00:05:31,520 --> 00:05:34,320
If you were offered the chance to live this life...

64
00:05:34,320 --> 00:05:36,360
would you fancy it? Is it an easy life?

65
00:05:36,360 --> 00:05:41,560
They were subject to the natural hazards of the environment, the bad seasons, the harsh winter,

66
00:05:41,560 --> 00:05:44,960
the year when the fish simply didn't turn up,

67
00:05:44,960 --> 00:05:46,760
so there would have been times

68
00:05:46,760 --> 00:05:51,120
when these communities were under extreme pressure and difficulty.

69
00:05:51,120 --> 00:05:52,680
8,000 years ago, right there.

70
00:06:00,600 --> 00:06:03,880
When you delve into the distant past, you soon realise

71
00:06:03,880 --> 00:06:08,160
that what you're discovering again and again are stories of survival.

72
00:06:08,160 --> 00:06:12,080
Sometimes of evidence, like those faint footprints in the mud.

73
00:06:12,080 --> 00:06:17,280
Other times it's the stories of people defying the odds in a hostile world,

74
00:06:17,280 --> 00:06:20,600
a world in which your very existence as a hunter-gatherer

75
00:06:20,600 --> 00:06:26,240
depends completely on your understanding of and your connection to the natural environment.

76
00:06:31,360 --> 00:06:35,320
300 generations separate us from the people who made those footprints,

77
00:06:35,320 --> 00:06:39,800
most of whom lived in a time before history,

78
00:06:39,800 --> 00:06:43,120
the time I want to discover.

79
00:06:43,120 --> 00:06:49,360
But human presence in Britain goes back much, much further still.

80
00:06:52,160 --> 00:06:55,240
Within the storerooms of London's Natural History Museum

81
00:06:55,240 --> 00:06:59,440
are the remains of someone who lived a staggeringly long time ago.

82
00:07:01,320 --> 00:07:06,720
So long ago that this human has even been classed as a different species.

83
00:07:11,040 --> 00:07:17,280
It's a real privilege to see these and to be so close to them.

84
00:07:19,080 --> 00:07:24,000
I can feel my hands starting to shake just with being in their vicinity.

85
00:07:24,000 --> 00:07:29,560
These are the oldest human remains ever found in Britain.

86
00:07:29,560 --> 00:07:35,080
It's two pieces of the same shinbone and two teeth.

87
00:07:36,080 --> 00:07:40,560
They were dug up at a place called Boxgrove in Sussex.

88
00:07:40,560 --> 00:07:45,720
The two teeth have got tiny scratches on them,

89
00:07:45,720 --> 00:07:50,080
and it's thought they were caused by the way this person ate meat.

90
00:07:50,080 --> 00:07:52,640
The meat would be gripped in the teeth,

91
00:07:52,640 --> 00:07:56,000
and the other bit slashed away at with a tool.

92
00:07:57,520 --> 00:08:00,600
There's enough of the shinbone

93
00:08:00,600 --> 00:08:07,840
to let us estimate that the individual stood about 1.8m tall, weighing 14 stone.

94
00:08:07,840 --> 00:08:11,040
It's always been known as Boxgrove Man,

95
00:08:11,040 --> 00:08:15,200
but from this there is no way of determining the sex,

96
00:08:15,200 --> 00:08:17,640
so it could be Boxgrove woman.

97
00:08:17,640 --> 00:08:21,920
So, 14 stone and looking like a boxer.

98
00:08:21,920 --> 00:08:24,400
She'd have been quite a showstopper.

99
00:08:24,400 --> 00:08:26,880
Heaven knows what her boyfriend was like.

100
00:08:27,840 --> 00:08:31,120
But perhaps most amazingly of all,

101
00:08:31,120 --> 00:08:35,920
Boxgrove Man lived half a million years ago.

102
00:08:35,920 --> 00:08:39,000
Think of that. Half a million years.

103
00:08:49,080 --> 00:08:54,880
'Chris Stringer is a world expert on our ancient human ancestry.'

104
00:08:54,880 --> 00:08:59,200
So what follows Boxgrove in the human story?

105
00:08:59,200 --> 00:09:03,120
Well, about 100,000 years later at Swanscombe in Kent

106
00:09:03,120 --> 00:09:07,440
we've got these human bones, the back part of a skull,

107
00:09:07,440 --> 00:09:11,880
beautifully preserved, but it has one interesting feature here,

108
00:09:11,880 --> 00:09:14,960
that depression is something we find in all Neanderthals.

109
00:09:14,960 --> 00:09:21,160
So we think Swanscombe could be a very early member of the Neanderthal line of evolution.

110
00:09:21,160 --> 00:09:24,360
So there were Neanderthals in Britain 400,000 years ago?

111
00:09:24,360 --> 00:09:28,440
That's right. Very early ones, and then for the next 300,000 or 400,000 years,

112
00:09:28,440 --> 00:09:33,120
whenever we find people in Britain, they are part of this evolving Neanderthal lineage.

113
00:09:33,120 --> 00:09:38,280
- And it was tools like this that they were making?
- Absolutely.

114
00:09:38,280 --> 00:09:43,720
This is a hand axe, one of tens of thousands that have been found in the gravels at Swanscombe,

115
00:09:43,720 --> 00:09:49,240
so these people were making these tools, and probably using them to butcher animal carcasses.

116
00:09:49,240 --> 00:09:55,440
It's amazing, while on the one hand, you're talking about a different species of human, different from us,

117
00:09:55,440 --> 00:10:00,000
yet the tools they made and used fit so naturally into the hand.

118
00:10:00,000 --> 00:10:05,000
There's a real link to the humanity of these people, even if they are a different species from us.

119
00:10:06,520 --> 00:10:12,120
At what point, then, do we get modern human beings like you and I?

120
00:10:12,120 --> 00:10:16,920
Well, much later on. Modern humans had been evolving in Africa

121
00:10:16,920 --> 00:10:20,600
while the Neanderthals were evolving in Europe and coming to Britain.

122
00:10:20,600 --> 00:10:25,840
About 50,000 or 60,000 years ago, those modern humans started to come out of Africa,

123
00:10:25,840 --> 00:10:30,040
and 40,000 years ago they were in France,

124
00:10:30,040 --> 00:10:33,240
and here's one of the stone tools they were making there.

125
00:10:33,240 --> 00:10:37,040
- OK. So that's been made by hands the same as ours?
- Absolutely.

126
00:10:37,040 --> 00:10:41,440
Imagine living in a world where there are different species of people,

127
00:10:41,440 --> 00:10:44,480
never mind different races or nationalities.

128
00:10:44,480 --> 00:10:47,080
There were several human species on Earth,

129
00:10:47,080 --> 00:10:50,840
we were just one of those experiments going on on how to be human.

130
00:10:57,280 --> 00:11:00,560
Between the distant age of our strange pre-human ancestors

131
00:11:00,560 --> 00:11:04,360
and the nomadic hunters who left behind their preserved footprints,

132
00:11:04,360 --> 00:11:08,240
the very first modern humans came to Britain.

133
00:11:13,360 --> 00:11:15,440
The earliest of all was found here,

134
00:11:15,440 --> 00:11:17,640
on the Gower peninsula in west Wales,

135
00:11:17,640 --> 00:11:20,920
a discovery made over 200 years ago.

136
00:11:24,640 --> 00:11:27,200
In 1823, an ambitious young scientist,

137
00:11:27,200 --> 00:11:30,680
the Reverend William Buckland, came here on a mission.

138
00:11:30,680 --> 00:11:34,280
He was in search of relics of the biblical flood.

139
00:11:37,120 --> 00:11:40,200
He'd heard that, bizarrely, elephant bones had been found

140
00:11:40,200 --> 00:11:44,160
in one of the caves that pepper this wild coastline.

141
00:11:45,720 --> 00:11:50,040
The thing is, the cave was towards the bottom of a near-vertical cliff,

142
00:11:50,040 --> 00:11:54,320
but Buckland couldn't wait, and it seems from what we know,

143
00:11:54,320 --> 00:11:59,080
that on 18th January 1823 he went right over the edge of this cliff on a rope,

144
00:11:59,080 --> 00:12:02,080
armed only with a pick and a stout pair of boots.

145
00:12:02,080 --> 00:12:04,760
And now I'm going to follow in his footsteps.

146
00:12:18,520 --> 00:12:25,080
Buckland didn't know it at the time, but he was about to discover more than some ancient animal bones.

147
00:12:25,080 --> 00:12:28,160
This was going to be the discovery of his life.

148
00:12:33,240 --> 00:12:37,040
Entering the cave would have been fantastically exciting for Buckland.

149
00:12:37,040 --> 00:12:40,400
As soon as he crossed the threshold he'd have fired up his lamp.

150
00:12:40,400 --> 00:12:43,240
And then, the good scientist that he was,

151
00:12:43,240 --> 00:12:47,040
he'd have begun to make a careful assessment of everything he could see,

152
00:12:47,040 --> 00:12:50,720
the whole scene, and all of that he recorded in meticulous detail.

153
00:12:52,800 --> 00:12:57,600
This is a book called Reliquiae Diluvianae, "Relics Of The Flood",

154
00:12:57,600 --> 00:13:02,760
and this volume is one of just a couple of copies of the first edition still in existence.

155
00:13:04,280 --> 00:13:10,600
It contains within it a depiction of the scene exactly as Buckland saw it and then drew it.

156
00:13:14,280 --> 00:13:19,160
Buckland has very helpfully drawn the whole scene - there's the cave itself from the outside,

157
00:13:19,160 --> 00:13:23,560
there's the cliff wall, and the man coming down on a rope on the outside.

158
00:13:23,560 --> 00:13:29,160
But more interestingly, he's made what is effectively an excavation plan of the floor of the cave.

159
00:13:29,160 --> 00:13:35,880
Here are the elephant bones and tusks that drew him to this cave in the first place.

160
00:13:35,880 --> 00:13:39,840
More intriguingly, he's also drawn a full-size human skeleton,

161
00:13:39,840 --> 00:13:44,840
and it's that human skeleton that's secured this cave its place in our history.

162
00:13:53,200 --> 00:13:56,320
It was Buckland himself who discovered it,

163
00:13:56,320 --> 00:14:01,280
uncovering it from beneath about six inches of earth, right here where I'm crouched down.

164
00:14:01,280 --> 00:14:07,240
What on earth was going on here? And more importantly, who on earth was it?

165
00:14:08,840 --> 00:14:14,480
As it happened, Buckland originally thought he'd found the remains of a local prostitute

166
00:14:14,480 --> 00:14:16,640
who had worked here during Roman times,

167
00:14:16,640 --> 00:14:22,720
and that when she'd eventually died she'd been buried in there, far away from civilised society.

168
00:14:22,720 --> 00:14:25,040
The Red Lady of Paviland.

169
00:14:26,560 --> 00:14:29,200
But Buckland was wrong,

170
00:14:29,200 --> 00:14:34,600
because he'd actually stumbled upon human remains from a far more distant past.

171
00:14:39,520 --> 00:14:44,000
Today the Red Lady is kept at the Oxford University Museum Of Natural History.

172
00:14:46,880 --> 00:14:54,560
Although there's no skull, much of the skeleton has survived, enough for scientists to reveal its story.

173
00:14:54,560 --> 00:14:56,840
Within a few decades of Buckland's death,

174
00:14:56,840 --> 00:14:58,760
people re-examined the skeleton.

175
00:14:58,760 --> 00:15:03,440
They looked at the shape of the pelvis, the shape of the long bones,

176
00:15:03,440 --> 00:15:06,560
the shape of the articulation surfaces.

177
00:15:06,560 --> 00:15:12,200
Any anatomy student today would recognise this as a skeleton not of a young woman but a young man.

178
00:15:13,720 --> 00:15:21,280
Forensic analysis also revealed that the so-called Red Lady died young, in his late 20s.

179
00:15:21,280 --> 00:15:27,520
But most importantly, his bones could also reveal just how long ago he lived.

180
00:15:27,520 --> 00:15:33,240
All the plants and animals on Earth build themselves predominantly out of carbon.

181
00:15:33,240 --> 00:15:37,800
A tiny proportion of that carbon is radioactive carbon, or carbon-14.

182
00:15:37,800 --> 00:15:43,120
When an animal dies, the amount of carbon-14 begins slowly to decline and degrade away.

183
00:15:44,640 --> 00:15:50,600
This process, called carbon dating, used a tiny amount of bone from the Red Lady.

184
00:15:53,840 --> 00:15:58,400
Carbon atoms from the bone gave scientists a date for when he was alive -

185
00:15:58,400 --> 00:16:03,600
an astonishing 33,000 years ago.

186
00:16:07,400 --> 00:16:12,600
These are the remains of the very first modern human known to have inhabited our land.

187
00:16:17,480 --> 00:16:24,200
33,000 years ago when the Red Lady was alive, Britain was very different to the one we know today.

188
00:16:27,880 --> 00:16:30,360
Not an island, but a peninsula.

189
00:16:32,160 --> 00:16:36,360
This was an age called the Palaeolithic, the old Stone Age,

190
00:16:36,360 --> 00:16:39,640
in which a few tens of thousands of nomadic hunters

191
00:16:39,640 --> 00:16:41,840
shared the whole of ancient Europe.

192
00:16:48,280 --> 00:16:53,560
You have to imagine small bands of hunters roaming through a landscape

193
00:16:53,560 --> 00:16:56,800
much colder than today, an open tundra.

194
00:16:56,800 --> 00:17:00,760
These were people whose survival depended utterly on following

195
00:17:00,760 --> 00:17:06,600
the migrating herds of reindeer, wild horse, and of course, mammoth.

196
00:17:11,840 --> 00:17:14,560
It's the mammoth bones that Buckland discovered,

197
00:17:14,560 --> 00:17:20,360
the ones he thought were elephant, that provide clues to the possible life and death of the Red Lady.

198
00:17:22,960 --> 00:17:30,200
These are the mammoth bones that sparked Buckland's visit to Paviland Cave in the first place.

199
00:17:33,720 --> 00:17:35,520
And for 200 years

200
00:17:35,520 --> 00:17:38,600
they'd seemed unaccounted for, possibly lost.

201
00:17:43,920 --> 00:17:45,320
We've rediscovered them,

202
00:17:45,320 --> 00:17:50,080
and are now able to bring them back together with the Red Lady for the very first time.

203
00:17:51,800 --> 00:17:55,960
Their existence means that this sketch made by Buckland,

204
00:17:55,960 --> 00:18:02,760
which has the human remains and the mammoth skull and tusks side by side, isn't based on fantasy.

205
00:18:02,760 --> 00:18:05,120
The rediscovery of the mammoth remains

206
00:18:05,120 --> 00:18:11,120
means that we might be able to see who the Red Lady was, even how he died.

207
00:18:17,240 --> 00:18:19,520
Perhaps we should imagine a hunting party,

208
00:18:19,520 --> 00:18:23,240
out on the vast plain below Paviland Cave.

209
00:18:23,240 --> 00:18:28,560
They bring a mammoth to bay, but before they can dispatch it, it kills one of their number.

210
00:18:28,560 --> 00:18:32,320
So they take the body, a young man, up to the cave.

211
00:18:32,320 --> 00:18:35,560
Inside, they dig a grave, and they lay him there.

212
00:18:35,560 --> 00:18:39,200
This is a funeral ritual.

213
00:18:39,200 --> 00:18:42,640
They also inter some of the remains of the mammoth that killed him.

214
00:18:42,640 --> 00:18:48,320
After all, this doesn't just do honour to their companion, but also to the beast.

215
00:18:48,320 --> 00:18:52,920
Now the two spirits are united in a shared death.

216
00:18:55,800 --> 00:18:59,320
It's an extraordinarily intimate human moment

217
00:18:59,320 --> 00:19:01,800
from 33,000 years ago.

218
00:19:04,920 --> 00:19:07,320
Here, on the furthest outreach of Europe,

219
00:19:07,320 --> 00:19:13,120
the Red Laddie's companions said goodbye to him for the last time and left.

220
00:19:17,760 --> 00:19:22,640
But the story of the Red Lady represents more than the burial of an intrepid mammoth hunter.

221
00:19:26,200 --> 00:19:29,040
Because the entire world he lived in,

222
00:19:29,040 --> 00:19:34,480
a way of life that had endured for thousands upon thousands of years, was coming to an end.

223
00:19:37,360 --> 00:19:40,440
The cause was climate change,

224
00:19:40,440 --> 00:19:42,160
on a massive scale.

225
00:19:47,720 --> 00:19:50,240
Welcome to the world of Ice Age Britain.

226
00:19:50,240 --> 00:19:51,800
WIND HOWLS

227
00:19:52,840 --> 00:19:54,000
30,000 years ago,

228
00:19:54,000 --> 00:20:00,920
the land we call Britain, along with the rest of the planet, was cold, and getting colder.

229
00:20:03,720 --> 00:20:07,120
Forget the chill of today's British winters.

230
00:20:07,120 --> 00:20:11,240
This was cold on a completely different scale,

231
00:20:11,240 --> 00:20:14,680
the frozen grip of the last Ice Age.

232
00:20:16,640 --> 00:20:19,600
For any nomadic hunter who ventured this far north,

233
00:20:19,600 --> 00:20:24,520
life would have been unbelievably tough, and ultimately impossible.

234
00:20:24,520 --> 00:20:30,880
Eventually the glaciers, advancing southwards all the while, turned Britain into a frozen wilderness.

235
00:20:40,960 --> 00:20:44,800
The Ice Age reached its peak 18,000 years ago,

236
00:20:44,800 --> 00:20:49,800
all but wiping out the entire population of western Europe.

237
00:20:52,600 --> 00:20:58,040
Just a few groups of people survived in pockets of refuge far to the south.

238
00:21:04,440 --> 00:21:09,960
For thousands of years, almost the whole of our land was utterly barren and desolate,

239
00:21:09,960 --> 00:21:14,120
deserted not just by people, but by all large animals.

240
00:21:14,120 --> 00:21:17,000
It was so cold, not even the mammoths could cope with it.

241
00:21:17,000 --> 00:21:20,520
But then, from around 14,000 years ago,

242
00:21:20,520 --> 00:21:23,240
there was a period of relative respite.

243
00:21:23,240 --> 00:21:26,200
And here, "relative" is an important word.

244
00:21:26,200 --> 00:21:28,880
The conditions were still unbelievably harsh,

245
00:21:28,880 --> 00:21:34,920
but the ice had lifted just enough to allow a few bands of hardy hunters to return to Britain.

246
00:21:38,880 --> 00:21:44,560
These people left behind an exquisite object near to what's now the city of Sheffield.

247
00:21:49,280 --> 00:21:53,840
Inside this box, the oldest art ever found in Britain.

248
00:21:58,160 --> 00:22:02,640
Made 13,000 years ago, it's tiny, and unique.

249
00:22:07,840 --> 00:22:10,640
Its creator - an Ice Age hunter.

250
00:22:16,640 --> 00:22:23,280
It's a fragment of horse bone with an engraving of a horse etched into it,

251
00:22:23,280 --> 00:22:26,840
but it's infinitely more than that,

252
00:22:26,840 --> 00:22:31,160
because what you've got a snapshot of here

253
00:22:31,160 --> 00:22:34,920
is a whole sequence of thoughts.

254
00:22:34,920 --> 00:22:38,200
Someone selected the bone,

255
00:22:38,200 --> 00:22:41,640
the surface of the bone has been prepared

256
00:22:41,640 --> 00:22:45,280
in the same way an artist would prepare a canvas,

257
00:22:45,280 --> 00:22:48,960
and it's been done with fantastic skill.

258
00:22:48,960 --> 00:22:52,000
The hairs of the mane look like hackles

259
00:22:52,000 --> 00:22:55,000
that are raised in fear or excitement.

260
00:22:55,000 --> 00:22:58,040
Although it's on this slither of bone,

261
00:22:58,040 --> 00:23:01,240
the legs are suggested, and they're galloping legs.

262
00:23:01,240 --> 00:23:03,000
Everything about it is alive.

263
00:23:03,000 --> 00:23:07,280
The horse couldn't be more active and more vibrant.

264
00:23:08,800 --> 00:23:10,360
It's miraculous.

265
00:23:15,480 --> 00:23:19,800
The horse's head was found here, in a valley of caves near Sheffield.

266
00:23:24,840 --> 00:23:31,280
And recent excavations have revealed that it wasn't the only treasure left behind by the Ice Age hunters.

267
00:23:33,320 --> 00:23:39,800
'In 2003, archaeologist Paul Bahn found the only cave art ever discovered in Britain.'

268
00:23:44,320 --> 00:23:47,280
It was this panel where we found our major discovery.

269
00:23:47,280 --> 00:23:49,800
Figures on ceilings are very hard to understand

270
00:23:49,800 --> 00:23:52,920
because you don't know from which direction to look at them.

271
00:23:52,920 --> 00:23:57,200
this is actually an engraved and bas-relief ibis, a water bird.

272
00:23:57,200 --> 00:24:01,400
You can see the great beak sweeping around, there's a mouth, there's the eye.

273
00:24:01,400 --> 00:24:04,240
They've engraved the top of the head, here's the neck,

274
00:24:04,240 --> 00:24:09,880
and then this beautiful oval body, which is probably natural, but they have outlined it a little bit.

275
00:24:09,880 --> 00:24:13,600
It's amazing that you hear sculptors in the modern age

276
00:24:13,600 --> 00:24:18,000
talk about seeing the block and feeling that something wants to be released from it,

277
00:24:18,000 --> 00:24:20,000
and that's obviously a very old idea,

278
00:24:20,000 --> 00:24:23,560
that someone was in here and looked at natural features and thought,

279
00:24:23,560 --> 00:24:25,680
"an ibis wants to come out of that rock."

280
00:24:25,680 --> 00:24:30,080
I think so. One of the most characteristic features of cave art all over western Europe

281
00:24:30,080 --> 00:24:34,680
is constant use of natural shapes in the rock, and clearly that's what's been done here.

282
00:24:42,200 --> 00:24:45,680
'Meticulous searching revealed traces of more engravings,

283
00:24:45,680 --> 00:24:50,920
'all of them created within just a few generations, when the Ice Age briefly lifted.

284
00:24:54,120 --> 00:24:57,920
'They depict animals important to the people who came here.

285
00:24:57,920 --> 00:25:02,400
'Some of them are not even meant to be seen.'

286
00:25:02,400 --> 00:25:04,400
You can see the old floor level here.

287
00:25:04,400 --> 00:25:08,480
There's not much space between that and the ceiling, they're crawling at this point,

288
00:25:08,480 --> 00:25:11,400
and with their little flickering lamps held in their hands,

289
00:25:11,400 --> 00:25:14,560
it's very difficult for them to get this far into the caves.

290
00:25:14,560 --> 00:25:21,000
'13,000 years ago someone was driven to venture into the darkest depths of this cave,

291
00:25:21,000 --> 00:25:24,640
'simply to make a drawing.'

292
00:25:24,640 --> 00:25:28,200
I think they're a series of long-necked birds,

293
00:25:28,200 --> 00:25:33,880
but the important thing about this panel is that it's so difficult to reach, and it's in total darkness.

294
00:25:33,880 --> 00:25:37,640
Yeah, what is the point of art if no-one sees it?

295
00:25:37,640 --> 00:25:41,480
Well, there's an important percentage of cave art all over western Europe

296
00:25:41,480 --> 00:25:45,600
which is deliberately placed in these very hard-to-reach spots.

297
00:25:45,600 --> 00:25:49,200
They're making them for something else, something non-human to see,

298
00:25:49,200 --> 00:25:52,840
maybe a god, a spirit, an ancestor, the forces of nature.

299
00:25:52,840 --> 00:25:58,920
I suppose they may not have seen themselves as being quite as separate and different from animals

300
00:25:58,920 --> 00:26:04,320
as we do, they may have seen these and themselves as all creatures that roamed the same habitat.

301
00:26:04,320 --> 00:26:08,240
I think they were very much people of their environment, of everything around them,

302
00:26:08,240 --> 00:26:12,520
and I'm sure they felt the animals were their kin, their brothers, their sisters.

303
00:26:12,520 --> 00:26:19,480
It's fantastic after 14,000 years to get a glimpse of the way at least one individual was thinking,

304
00:26:19,480 --> 00:26:24,200
that took the initiative to crawl down here with a lamp and make that,

305
00:26:24,200 --> 00:26:30,160
and then left for it never to be seen again. That's a moment in some individual's life.

306
00:26:37,000 --> 00:26:43,280
Just a few hundred years after the Creswell cave art, the ice was back, and with a vengeance.

307
00:26:44,800 --> 00:26:49,560
Britain once again became an empty, desolate, frozen land.

308
00:26:53,080 --> 00:26:56,640
The last wave of glacial conditions came around 13,000 years ago,

309
00:26:56,640 --> 00:27:00,200
a time geologists call the Younger Dryas,

310
00:27:00,200 --> 00:27:03,040
or more tellingly, the Big Freeze.

311
00:27:10,560 --> 00:27:14,280
It's hard to imagine just how hostile this climate became.

312
00:27:14,280 --> 00:27:21,440
In Scotland 13,000 years ago, the ground was buried under a blanket of ice up to a kilometre thick.

313
00:27:26,440 --> 00:27:31,640
Glaciers scoured the landscape, shaping the very mountains and the lochs we see today.

314
00:27:38,840 --> 00:27:45,040
'For Ice Age expert Jim Hansom, it's a landscape that tells a story of colossal environmental power.'

315
00:27:51,960 --> 00:27:57,680
So if we were standing here at the very end of the Ice Age, what would we have been looking out at?

316
00:27:57,680 --> 00:28:03,600
11,000 years ago the glacier terminus, the edge of the glacier, would be at our feet.

317
00:28:03,600 --> 00:28:05,280
The lake wouldn't be here,

318
00:28:05,280 --> 00:28:09,800
and we would be looking at a gradient of ice disappearing off into the north.

319
00:28:09,800 --> 00:28:12,280
As the glacier melted back,

320
00:28:12,280 --> 00:28:16,520
then water was impounded into this hollow,

321
00:28:16,520 --> 00:28:19,560
and that's what the Lake of Menteith is.

322
00:28:19,560 --> 00:28:23,480
So everything we can see here has been touched by the ice?

323
00:28:23,480 --> 00:28:26,440
Oh, absolutely, ice is a major moulder of the landscape.

324
00:28:26,440 --> 00:28:30,920
That's one of the reasons why this is a classic place to see the elemental effect of ice

325
00:28:30,920 --> 00:28:34,000
and what it can do to the landscape.

326
00:28:35,560 --> 00:28:39,880
'Britain was being sculpted on a geological scale.'

327
00:28:43,000 --> 00:28:47,240
Behind us is the glacier basin that's now occupied by the lake,

328
00:28:47,240 --> 00:28:50,600
and the glacier's bulldozed a whole series of mounds,

329
00:28:50,600 --> 00:28:53,520
little hills that mark out the edge of the glacier.

330
00:28:53,520 --> 00:28:54,920
We call them moraines.

331
00:28:54,920 --> 00:28:58,720
So there's so much force that it's rippling the landscape in front of it.

332
00:28:58,720 --> 00:29:04,680
Exactly right, exactly right. A bit like standing on a loose carpet, and the carpet rucks up in front of you.

333
00:29:04,680 --> 00:29:07,920
That's exactly the process, so substantial force.

334
00:29:07,920 --> 00:29:10,640
So all around the leading edge of the glacier, then,

335
00:29:10,640 --> 00:29:14,560
there would be these dumps of material that have become hillocks and humps?

336
00:29:14,560 --> 00:29:20,200
- That's correct.
- So there would have been a nose of ice here which has gone,

337
00:29:20,200 --> 00:29:24,400
and it's left all the bulldozed material that was on its nose.

338
00:29:24,400 --> 00:29:26,200
That's correct. That's correct.

339
00:29:28,240 --> 00:29:31,480
'The effect of the ice was astounding.

340
00:29:31,480 --> 00:29:35,680
'But when it finally melted around 11,000 years ago,

341
00:29:35,680 --> 00:29:40,120
'the power of ice was replaced by the power of water.'

342
00:29:41,880 --> 00:29:45,920
This is just extraordinary. You could be dropped down here

343
00:29:45,920 --> 00:29:50,720
and you would have no way of knowing what part of the world you were in. It's so other-worldly.

344
00:29:50,720 --> 00:29:54,800
It's like Jurassic Park. It's tremendous.

345
00:29:56,760 --> 00:30:01,320
Now...did this river cut this gorge?

346
00:30:01,320 --> 00:30:05,120
No, the river's far too small for the gorge. We call it a misfit stream.

347
00:30:05,120 --> 00:30:11,400
So when it comes to... In terms of the last Ice Age, what has happened to create this?

348
00:30:11,400 --> 00:30:14,960
Well, during the last the last Ice Age, as the glaciers retreat,

349
00:30:14,960 --> 00:30:18,200
- the melt water's got to go somewhere. 
- Right. That's a lot of ice.

350
00:30:18,200 --> 00:30:20,480
That's half a kilometre of ice, very close.

351
00:30:20,480 --> 00:30:24,000
It can't go to the south because there's rising hills, the Campsie Fells.

352
00:30:24,000 --> 00:30:28,200
It can't go to the west, so it comes in this direction, straight through this gorge.

353
00:30:28,200 --> 00:30:30,320
That gives it great erosive power,

354
00:30:30,320 --> 00:30:34,600
so the sheer elemental force of water coming down through here would've been tremendous.

355
00:30:34,600 --> 00:30:38,600
It's like a Karcher high pressure hose, but on a massive scale.

356
00:30:38,600 --> 00:30:40,280
It is, eroding the valley.

357
00:30:40,280 --> 00:30:47,480
It's hard to think of a more graphic illustration of the raw power of just rushing water.

358
00:30:47,480 --> 00:30:52,400
Sheer power, sheer power. We couldn't have been standing here at this time 10,000 years ago.

359
00:30:57,840 --> 00:31:02,600
The final retreat of the ice ended the age of the Palaeolithic.

360
00:31:02,600 --> 00:31:06,920
The remote world of the Red Lady and the mammoths he hunted.

361
00:31:08,440 --> 00:31:12,080
The icy world of the cave artists of Creswell Crags.

362
00:31:13,600 --> 00:31:19,480
Ever since the ice peaked 18,000 years ago, a new Britain had gradually begun to appear.

363
00:31:21,600 --> 00:31:23,760
Now, as the ice melted,

364
00:31:23,760 --> 00:31:28,960
the coast and the Western Isles of Scotland were taking on the form we recognise today.

365
00:31:30,680 --> 00:31:37,680
In the east, the Norwegian trench had begun to open into what would one day become the North Sea.

366
00:31:39,200 --> 00:31:44,480
But despite the rising sea levels, 10,000 years ago in the south,

367
00:31:44,480 --> 00:31:48,560
Britain remained firmly attached to the continental mainland.

368
00:31:55,320 --> 00:32:00,160
Gradual warming allowed the first intrepid hunters to return to a new

369
00:32:00,160 --> 00:32:07,040
and very different land, where frozen tundra was giving way to the first forests of birch and alder.

370
00:32:11,160 --> 00:32:15,320
They brought a new culture, new ways of surviving

371
00:32:15,320 --> 00:32:18,560
and a whole new era in our history.

372
00:32:20,080 --> 00:32:24,920
This new warmer world with its different animals and plants

373
00:32:24,920 --> 00:32:28,880
presented the people who came here with a whole new set of challenges.

374
00:32:30,400 --> 00:32:37,120
So much so that archaeologists were moved to give this period its own name, the Mesolithic.

375
00:32:37,120 --> 00:32:39,000
The Middle Stone Age.

376
00:32:41,440 --> 00:32:47,120
It was to this period that I was particularly drawn when I was a student of archaeology.

377
00:32:47,120 --> 00:32:51,400
And it was to the islands off the coast of Scotland that I came

378
00:32:51,400 --> 00:32:54,280
as I was learning the skills of excavation.

379
00:32:55,800 --> 00:33:00,000
Now, more than 20 years later, new finds in the Hebrides

380
00:33:00,000 --> 00:33:06,000
are giving us a unique insight into how people survived in this newly-emerging land.

381
00:33:16,200 --> 00:33:22,680
You've got very finely worked flint blades here.

382
00:33:22,680 --> 00:33:25,680
Look at those beautiful long blades and you can see,

383
00:33:25,680 --> 00:33:28,400
it's been very delicately chipped around the edge.

384
00:33:28,400 --> 00:33:31,600
And that had been used as barb or a point,

385
00:33:31,600 --> 00:33:35,960
or maybe a little blade of a knife, some points maybe as drill bits.

386
00:33:35,960 --> 00:33:40,160
It's the classic Mesolithic artefact.

387
00:33:40,160 --> 00:33:42,720
These tiny little items actually classify...

388
00:33:42,720 --> 00:33:47,280
Unfortunately so, unfortunately so, yeah, yes, indeed.

389
00:33:48,800 --> 00:33:52,000
Steve Mithen's excavations have uncovered

390
00:33:52,000 --> 00:33:57,280
an entire Mesolithic fishing camp from 9,000 years ago.

391
00:33:57,280 --> 00:34:01,200
When we sieve the deposits very finely, we find fish bones...

392
00:34:01,200 --> 00:34:03,160
How are they catching the fish?

393
00:34:03,160 --> 00:34:10,480
We do have one artefact that we found here which is a tip of an antler harpoon or a little fish spear.

394
00:34:10,480 --> 00:34:14,440
Now, it's made from the tine of a Red Deer antler.

395
00:34:14,440 --> 00:34:17,080
We've only got the final tip of it.

396
00:34:17,080 --> 00:34:21,520
We can see that has been worked and smoothed down, so it's a rather precious artefact.

397
00:34:26,160 --> 00:34:27,960
The ice melted.

398
00:34:27,960 --> 00:34:31,600
Bands of intrepid hunters returned to the land.

399
00:34:31,600 --> 00:34:36,400
From that day to this, our land has been continuously occupied.

400
00:34:36,400 --> 00:34:39,400
They were still hunters, they were still nomadic,

401
00:34:39,400 --> 00:34:42,360
but they were more settled within the landscape.

402
00:34:42,360 --> 00:34:46,600
A person might be born, live and die in the same area.

403
00:34:46,600 --> 00:34:50,640
That's a different relationship to a place.

404
00:34:50,640 --> 00:34:56,720
Compared to the Palaeolithic, in the Mesolithic, the Middle Stone Age, what we're beginning to see

405
00:34:56,720 --> 00:35:02,520
is not just a continuity of people that leads all the way to us today,

406
00:35:02,520 --> 00:35:07,800
it's also about the first people who you could say were born and bred British.

407
00:35:14,280 --> 00:35:19,120
Remarkably, the remains of one of these people have survived.

408
00:35:19,120 --> 00:35:26,320
One of a population of perhaps just 1,000 or so who occupied Britain around 9,000 years ago.

409
00:35:29,720 --> 00:35:33,760
And I've come back to London's Natural History Museum to meet him.

410
00:35:40,240 --> 00:35:43,880
This is the skull of Cheddar Man.

411
00:35:43,880 --> 00:35:49,720
His is the oldest complete human skeleton ever found in Britain.

412
00:35:49,720 --> 00:35:55,920
The rest of his bones are collected here in these white boxes.

413
00:35:55,920 --> 00:35:59,160
He lived over 9,000 years ago,

414
00:35:59,160 --> 00:36:05,200
which means that either he or his immediate ancestors were among

415
00:36:05,200 --> 00:36:11,000
those very first re-colonisers of the British Isles after the last Ice Age.

416
00:36:11,000 --> 00:36:14,000
I look at this skull

417
00:36:14,000 --> 00:36:19,200
and I can even begin to imagine his face, what he looked like...

418
00:36:20,760 --> 00:36:22,440
..and it's a strange feeling.

419
00:36:22,440 --> 00:36:27,600
Unlike the Red Lady or the Cresswell artists,

420
00:36:27,600 --> 00:36:31,160
this man didn't live in an icy world.

421
00:36:31,160 --> 00:36:35,360
By the time he was alive, the open tundra

422
00:36:35,360 --> 00:36:39,240
was giving way to forests of birch and alder.

423
00:36:39,240 --> 00:36:44,960
So instead of hunting mammoth and reindeer in the snow,

424
00:36:44,960 --> 00:36:49,280
he hunted Red Deer in the wild wood.

425
00:36:50,920 --> 00:36:54,320
You can tell from the condition of his teeth

426
00:36:54,320 --> 00:36:57,680
that he grew up enjoying a good diet,

427
00:36:57,680 --> 00:37:03,640
but despite that, still in his 20s, this man died.

428
00:37:03,640 --> 00:37:05,280
Look at this...

429
00:37:05,280 --> 00:37:10,160
This ugly, ragged crater on his skull,

430
00:37:10,160 --> 00:37:12,760
just to the right of his nose,

431
00:37:12,760 --> 00:37:15,480
that's the result of bone infection.

432
00:37:15,480 --> 00:37:19,000
The infection may have followed an injury,

433
00:37:19,000 --> 00:37:24,160
or it may have been disease that started perhaps in his sinuses and spread.

434
00:37:24,160 --> 00:37:27,880
But in any case it would've been debilitating,

435
00:37:27,880 --> 00:37:31,520
it may have caused fever, it may ultimately have caused his death.

436
00:37:33,040 --> 00:37:36,680
So, despite the fact there was plenty of meat around,

437
00:37:36,680 --> 00:37:39,680
there was no guarantee of a long, healthy life.

438
00:37:45,960 --> 00:37:49,280
Little remains of the people of the Mesolithic.

439
00:37:49,280 --> 00:37:53,240
They lived lightly on the land, close to nature

440
00:37:53,240 --> 00:37:57,080
and discoveries like those on the island of Coll are rare.

441
00:37:57,080 --> 00:38:02,000
But there are other ways to discover what their lives must have been like.

442
00:38:04,280 --> 00:38:08,800
We're going to need a quantity of these skins, fresh off the animal.

443
00:38:08,800 --> 00:38:11,440
Smelly, but warm.

444
00:38:14,000 --> 00:38:17,480
John Lord is a professional flint knapper,

445
00:38:17,480 --> 00:38:23,320
who's been experimenting with ancient technology for over 35 years.

446
00:38:23,320 --> 00:38:28,080
He's agreed to give me a direct taste of Mesolithic life.

447
00:38:28,080 --> 00:38:29,480
Neil's going to be up against it.

448
00:38:29,480 --> 00:38:32,320
He's going to start to think about the Mesolithic people

449
00:38:32,320 --> 00:38:38,240
when he starts to work on this stuff and make a harpoon point and needles and things out of the antler.

450
00:38:38,240 --> 00:38:39,840
It really is laborious work.

451
00:38:41,800 --> 00:38:47,080
The idea is to spend 24 hours depending on ancient technology.

452
00:38:47,080 --> 00:38:52,880
This can be used to make scrapers, knife blades, arrow points.

453
00:38:52,880 --> 00:38:55,280
It really is a little Swiss army flint.

454
00:39:00,000 --> 00:39:06,680
John is going to help me camp right by the spot once occupied by Coll's Mesolithic fish-trappers.

455
00:39:08,400 --> 00:39:13,520
Look at that. It's like watching a borrower arrive from the sea in a button.

456
00:39:19,440 --> 00:39:25,240
Shelters were light and portable, a frame of branches, tied with rope made from tree bark.

457
00:39:26,400 --> 00:39:31,920
Over the top - fresh, raw deerskin.

458
00:39:31,920 --> 00:39:35,280
- I'm thinking they must have smelt fairly ripe.
- Yeah, they smell.

459
00:39:35,280 --> 00:39:40,440
If you want some time on your own, work on a skin that's a bit ripe. Nobody will come near you for weeks.

460
00:39:40,440 --> 00:39:43,200
Oh, I'm getting a definite whiff of it now.

461
00:39:43,200 --> 00:39:45,920
- Are you?
- Definite scent of a butcher's shop...

462
00:39:47,520 --> 00:39:50,040
..which is what I expect to smell like in the morning.

463
00:39:52,720 --> 00:39:55,520
Fire was vital for warmth and cooking...

464
00:39:55,520 --> 00:39:58,400
Oh, it's glowing red.

465
00:39:58,400 --> 00:40:00,560
There you go, there you go...

466
00:40:02,360 --> 00:40:06,120
..but also crucial for tool-production.

467
00:40:06,120 --> 00:40:08,320
Oh, yes, it's coming away.

468
00:40:12,120 --> 00:40:14,920
This deer antler will become a harpoon,

469
00:40:14,920 --> 00:40:22,120
made in exactly the same way as Steve Mithen's 9,000-year-old fragment, found on this very spot.

470
00:40:22,120 --> 00:40:27,120
- Gosh, the hours and hours of someone's time. 
- It is, it's just time.

471
00:40:27,120 --> 00:40:29,480
But it's starting to look lovely.

472
00:40:33,400 --> 00:40:36,600
There they are, finished.

473
00:40:39,640 --> 00:40:44,960
What are the chances do you think of this fine handmade weapon collecting something?

474
00:40:44,960 --> 00:40:49,000
Well, if there's any fish, they're in trouble.

475
00:40:52,080 --> 00:40:59,800
Unfortunately, for all of John's skill, we can't recreate generations of experience.

476
00:40:59,800 --> 00:41:03,800
I haven't seen a fish the whole time we've been here.

477
00:41:03,800 --> 00:41:07,360
Instead, dinner has come from the local butcher's.

478
00:41:07,360 --> 00:41:08,960
That'll do us.

479
00:41:08,960 --> 00:41:13,280
Of course, on Coll, they used to hunt, in the main, hare.

480
00:41:13,280 --> 00:41:16,920
But they're a protected species, so here we are, saddled by the rabbit.

481
00:41:16,920 --> 00:41:20,360
- Just slide, yeah?
- Yeah.

482
00:41:20,360 --> 00:41:22,240
Nothing would be wasted.

483
00:41:22,240 --> 00:41:25,760
Animal parts were as useful as their meat.

484
00:41:25,760 --> 00:41:28,800
In the deer, what we do is open up the spine

485
00:41:28,800 --> 00:41:33,240
and pull out what's called the back strap, it's a really strong sinew.

486
00:41:33,240 --> 00:41:34,800
This is the back strap.

487
00:41:34,800 --> 00:41:39,960
Each fibre has a tremendous strength of its own, but this is the sort of thing

488
00:41:39,960 --> 00:41:42,440
that they used to sew their clothes together.

489
00:41:42,440 --> 00:41:47,240
It's like nylon or plastic. It's got a shine on it.

490
00:41:47,240 --> 00:41:48,840
Yes.

491
00:41:48,840 --> 00:41:54,360
The sense of connection you get with the past, to use a piece of flint

492
00:41:54,360 --> 00:42:01,720
to make your tools, channel in your mind, in exactly the same way as people did in the past.

493
00:42:20,160 --> 00:42:23,760
After an uncomfortable night, I'm able to share one more thing

494
00:42:23,760 --> 00:42:27,880
with the Mesolithic people who once lived here.

495
00:42:30,960 --> 00:42:34,880
The view of dawn over the island of Mull in the distance.

496
00:42:38,240 --> 00:42:46,120
Having spent 24 hours preparing tools, making fire, there are glimpses that you can have.

497
00:42:46,120 --> 00:42:53,880
Handling, you know, fragments of stone and long ago burnt wood and hazelnut shell...

498
00:42:53,880 --> 00:43:00,960
is two dimensional. But there is a third dimension that is to be had by doing the things that they did.

499
00:43:04,480 --> 00:43:06,160
And the smells.

500
00:43:06,160 --> 00:43:11,960
When we were doing the thing with the... Putting the skins on the branches to make that shelter,

501
00:43:11,960 --> 00:43:14,880
that pervasive smell, that animal smell,

502
00:43:14,880 --> 00:43:20,120
the world must have been imbued with that,

503
00:43:20,120 --> 00:43:26,560
because they were working with animal all the time for food and for bone, for gut and for antler.

504
00:43:28,600 --> 00:43:33,400
The smell of the burnt antler is a smell like burnt human hair.

505
00:43:33,400 --> 00:43:36,200
It's a very evocative smell.

506
00:43:36,200 --> 00:43:41,800
And something as pungent as a smell just knocks that,

507
00:43:41,800 --> 00:43:47,600
rips that veil aside and their world of 10,000 years ago is right there.

508
00:43:52,320 --> 00:43:54,880
Archaeologist Steve Mithen is discovering

509
00:43:54,880 --> 00:43:59,680
just how sophisticated the lives of these Mesolithic hunters were.

510
00:43:59,680 --> 00:44:06,080
It turns out that his Coll fishing camp was only a small part of a much bigger picture.

511
00:44:06,080 --> 00:44:11,120
Some of the artefacts that we excavate have clearly been brought to the island from elsewhere.

512
00:44:11,120 --> 00:44:15,360
You don't get deer on this island today, you didn't have them here in the Mesolithic,

513
00:44:15,360 --> 00:44:19,440
so that deer must have been hunted on another island and the artefact was brought over here.

514
00:44:19,440 --> 00:44:25,000
These Mesolithic people, they weren't having permanent villages or permanent settlements.

515
00:44:25,000 --> 00:44:30,640
The essence of their lifestyle was moving from island to island and to the mainland,

516
00:44:30,640 --> 00:44:33,760
moving to where the particular resources were.

517
00:44:36,560 --> 00:44:42,840
Unlike Palaeolithic hunters, these people didn't follow herds over hundreds of miles,

518
00:44:42,840 --> 00:44:46,080
but took all they needed from their local environment.

519
00:44:47,600 --> 00:44:50,160
They moved between a network of islands...

520
00:44:50,160 --> 00:44:58,120
Coll, Colonsay, Oronsay and to the south, Islay, all had something different to offer.

521
00:45:04,760 --> 00:45:07,400
On Colonsay, Steve is discovering the remains

522
00:45:07,400 --> 00:45:11,880
of one of the most important resources of Mesolithic Britain.

523
00:45:11,880 --> 00:45:17,040
The shells of more than a third of a million hazelnuts.

524
00:45:17,040 --> 00:45:22,040
What they may have been doing is gathering large quantities

525
00:45:22,040 --> 00:45:25,400
in the autumn and then storing them as a food through the winter.

526
00:45:25,400 --> 00:45:30,280
If you roast them and crack them, you can grind them down to a paste and then it's quite an easy thing,

527
00:45:30,280 --> 00:45:33,440
food, nutritious food to carry away and take away.

528
00:45:33,440 --> 00:45:37,720
On that scale, it almost sounds like a processing plant.

529
00:45:37,720 --> 00:45:42,880
Yeah, yeah, the scale of activity here was just astonishing when we discovered it.

530
00:45:42,880 --> 00:45:48,040
It shows that they weren't just living from day to day, scrabbing out an existence.

531
00:45:48,040 --> 00:45:50,400
It was a really carefully planned activity.

532
00:45:54,600 --> 00:45:58,840
But hazelnuts were only part of the diet for these ancient hunters.

533
00:46:01,960 --> 00:46:06,040
On the nearby island of Oronsay, there's evidence that shellfish were consumed...

534
00:46:08,200 --> 00:46:10,280
..on a massive scale.

535
00:46:10,280 --> 00:46:18,200
It's a remarkable island because there's no less than five Mesolithic shell mounds on the island.

536
00:46:18,200 --> 00:46:23,040
We're standing on one of them now and these are literally rubbish dumps from coastal foraging.

537
00:46:23,040 --> 00:46:26,920
- You can see in the rabbit burrows. 
- Yeah.

538
00:46:26,920 --> 00:46:31,320
You can see these shells are eroding out by the edge of the rabbit burrow here.

539
00:46:31,320 --> 00:46:38,160
'Every one of these shells was discarded by a Mesolithic hunter around 9,000 years ago.'

540
00:46:38,160 --> 00:46:42,480
This is the waste from Mesolithic coastal foraging.

541
00:46:42,480 --> 00:46:46,200
Limpet shells, periwinkles, dog whelks

542
00:46:46,200 --> 00:46:49,840
and amongst all that, there'd be fish bones,

543
00:46:49,840 --> 00:46:53,200
we've got seal bones, all sorts of things.

544
00:46:59,280 --> 00:47:05,520
Yet another island was home to red deer, a key source of meat, skins and antler.

545
00:47:07,800 --> 00:47:12,480
We're just flying over the Rinns of Islay at the moment and the Rinns

546
00:47:12,480 --> 00:47:16,480
in recent times have been fantastic territory for hunting Red Deer.

547
00:47:16,480 --> 00:47:20,000
I think that's exactly what they were doing in the Mesolithic.

548
00:47:20,000 --> 00:47:24,120
So the antler tip that we've got from the site at Fiskary Bay,

549
00:47:24,120 --> 00:47:26,680
that could have come from a deer on this island.

550
00:47:26,680 --> 00:47:31,640
So the things they needed were scattered all over the landscape, the raw materials were...

551
00:47:31,640 --> 00:47:35,280
- Yeah, that's right.
- The various food groups they wanted, the hazelnuts,

552
00:47:35,280 --> 00:47:37,520
the rest of the vegetables, the medicines

553
00:47:37,520 --> 00:47:41,600
and it's a constant shopping trip, going from shop to shop.

554
00:47:41,600 --> 00:47:43,600
Yeah, yeah, that's right.

555
00:47:45,400 --> 00:47:49,480
Steve's discoveries are revealing a whole new way of living,

556
00:47:49,480 --> 00:47:52,880
a systematic exploitation of different resources

557
00:47:52,880 --> 00:47:55,200
available on different islands.

558
00:47:56,720 --> 00:48:00,520
The people who lived here were moving season by season,

559
00:48:00,520 --> 00:48:03,680
within a landscape they must have known intimately.

560
00:48:11,480 --> 00:48:17,520
How much of the whole picture do you think you've glimpsed in your decades here?

561
00:48:17,520 --> 00:48:20,320
I think we've just got a small fraction at the moment.

562
00:48:20,320 --> 00:48:23,320
I hope over the next couple of decades we'll get more pieces,

563
00:48:23,320 --> 00:48:27,160
maybe the big pieces like where the base camps are, those aggregation sites.

564
00:48:27,160 --> 00:48:30,920
I think we will find them eventually and get a real more complete picture

565
00:48:30,920 --> 00:48:34,240
of what that Mesolithic lifestyle would have been like.

566
00:48:38,600 --> 00:48:41,960
The world of Mesolithic Britain was characterised by small communities

567
00:48:41,960 --> 00:48:45,040
living very separate, isolated lives.

568
00:48:49,000 --> 00:48:53,800
It's estimated that at any one time, the whole of Mesolithic Britain may have been populated

569
00:48:53,800 --> 00:49:00,720
by as few as 5,000 people, as many as you'd find today in just a handful of London streets.

570
00:49:02,680 --> 00:49:08,400
Apart from the hunting party or their extended family, they might never see another living soul,

571
00:49:08,400 --> 00:49:12,000
and that must have shaped the way they saw themselves in their world.

572
00:49:13,040 --> 00:49:18,680
From fragments of evidence, it's possible to recreate something of the way these people lived,

573
00:49:18,680 --> 00:49:21,720
much harder to understand is what they believed.

574
00:49:21,720 --> 00:49:23,400
But there are some clues.

575
00:49:31,600 --> 00:49:34,600
Here at the British Museum, there's a relic

576
00:49:34,600 --> 00:49:38,640
experts believe is nothing less than a sign of Mesolithic religion.

577
00:49:42,760 --> 00:49:47,320
The skull of a Red Deer that's been carefully worked by hand.

578
00:49:49,280 --> 00:49:53,120
This is an astonishing object.

579
00:49:53,120 --> 00:49:56,200
It's 10,000 years old.

580
00:49:56,200 --> 00:49:59,200
The feeling you get from something of that age,

581
00:49:59,200 --> 00:50:01,800
even before you touch it, is tangible.

582
00:50:01,800 --> 00:50:07,080
The thing you do notice right away are these two holes.

583
00:50:07,080 --> 00:50:11,160
You might think they represent the eyes, but they don't.

584
00:50:11,160 --> 00:50:16,840
They're to take a hide strap made from animal skin,

585
00:50:16,840 --> 00:50:21,480
because this is to be worn as a head dress.

586
00:50:21,480 --> 00:50:23,800
It's been suggested from time to time

587
00:50:23,800 --> 00:50:26,560
that this might have been worn as part of a disguise,

588
00:50:26,560 --> 00:50:28,960
but that seems highly unlikely.

589
00:50:28,960 --> 00:50:31,640
Apart from anything else, this is heavy,

590
00:50:31,640 --> 00:50:35,880
the stumps of the antlers would have snagged on branches

591
00:50:35,880 --> 00:50:39,640
and made the work of hunting even more difficult.

592
00:50:39,640 --> 00:50:42,680
It seems much more likely

593
00:50:42,680 --> 00:50:47,840
that this is part of a rite, a ritual, a ceremony.

594
00:50:47,840 --> 00:50:51,360
When the person wore this,

595
00:50:51,360 --> 00:50:57,560
they became something else, something more than a man.

596
00:50:57,560 --> 00:51:00,040
If you imagine it being worn on the head

597
00:51:00,040 --> 00:51:04,520
along with maybe the full pelt of the animal,

598
00:51:04,520 --> 00:51:08,400
by donning this and performing the ritual,

599
00:51:08,400 --> 00:51:11,400
a transformation took place.

600
00:51:11,400 --> 00:51:14,640
The person would believe

601
00:51:14,640 --> 00:51:20,000
and be seen to be becoming a Red Deer stag.

602
00:51:20,000 --> 00:51:22,440
Or even more interestingly,

603
00:51:22,440 --> 00:51:26,320
some sort of hybrid, part man, part animal.

604
00:51:26,320 --> 00:51:30,200
Mesolithic people may have felt themselves to be

605
00:51:30,200 --> 00:51:37,440
so much a part of nature, living within it, enveloped by it

606
00:51:37,440 --> 00:51:41,800
and dependent upon it, not just in the practical everyday sense,

607
00:51:41,800 --> 00:51:46,040
but in a profoundly magical and spiritual way as well.

608
00:51:46,040 --> 00:51:50,480
But as we know, nature can be a very cruel mistress.

609
00:51:53,360 --> 00:51:57,080
At the beginning of the Mesolithic, after the big freeze,

610
00:51:57,080 --> 00:52:01,680
Britain was still firmly attached to mainland Europe.

611
00:52:01,680 --> 00:52:04,240
But as sea-levels continued to rise,

612
00:52:04,240 --> 00:52:08,680
that connection was reduced to a narrow and marshy land-bridge.

613
00:52:10,720 --> 00:52:13,400
Britain was becoming an island.

614
00:52:15,320 --> 00:52:19,000
But its fate was sealed by a sudden catastrophe

615
00:52:19,000 --> 00:52:22,560
that devastated its low lying coastal plains

616
00:52:22,560 --> 00:52:25,000
and the communities that depended on them.

617
00:52:38,760 --> 00:52:41,360
The coast of north-east Scotland.

618
00:52:41,360 --> 00:52:48,840
Here, at Montrose, there's evidence of the greatest natural catastrophe Britain has ever witnessed.

619
00:52:48,840 --> 00:52:54,360
A force of nature that ripped through the fragile communities of Mesolithic Britain.

620
00:52:55,880 --> 00:53:00,400
The event was discovered by geologist David Smith.

621
00:53:00,400 --> 00:53:03,040
- It's behind this mud. 
- And the mud has come from where?

622
00:53:03,040 --> 00:53:05,160
It's come down from the cliff above.

623
00:53:06,880 --> 00:53:12,440
So if we clean this up now, you'll see the section rather better.

624
00:53:12,440 --> 00:53:16,120
'Behind the mud there should be a bank of continuous clay.

625
00:53:16,120 --> 00:53:18,480
'But here, there's something else.'

626
00:53:18,480 --> 00:53:20,680
So what are we looking at then?

627
00:53:20,680 --> 00:53:23,520
Well, we're looking at a layer of sand.

628
00:53:23,520 --> 00:53:26,640
- That really fine stuff there?
- It is.

629
00:53:26,640 --> 00:53:29,880
As far as you are concerned, sand like that shouldn't be there?

630
00:53:29,880 --> 00:53:33,920
Shouldn't be there. Not in that amount and that extent.

631
00:53:33,920 --> 00:53:37,200
Only one thing could have been responsible.

632
00:53:38,920 --> 00:53:45,440
A cataclysmic wave that struck the north-east coast of Britain around 6100 BC.

633
00:53:48,360 --> 00:53:52,080
One of the greatest tsunamis ever recorded on Earth.

634
00:53:54,000 --> 00:53:56,200
The tide goes out very quickly.

635
00:53:56,200 --> 00:53:58,080
And the next thing we'd notice

636
00:53:58,080 --> 00:54:00,840
would be a slight wind coming from offshore.

637
00:54:00,840 --> 00:54:03,920
And the next thing after that would be a noise,

638
00:54:03,920 --> 00:54:06,880
a noise like an express train as it got closer and closer.

639
00:54:06,880 --> 00:54:12,120
The waves would have been maybe as much as ten metres high.

640
00:54:12,120 --> 00:54:15,600
If you were down there and caught in it, is there any surviving it?

641
00:54:15,600 --> 00:54:18,640
Could you let it take you and swim away from it?

642
00:54:18,640 --> 00:54:23,160
No, there is not way you could have survived. The speed is just so great.

643
00:54:23,160 --> 00:54:27,040
Anybody standing out on the mudflats at that time

644
00:54:27,040 --> 00:54:31,160
would well have been dismembered by the power of the wave.

645
00:54:31,160 --> 00:54:35,960
- Gosh, so it just comes in so fast it would just tear people apart? 
- Torn apart, yes, yes.

646
00:54:37,480 --> 00:54:39,640
A giant landslide in Norway

647
00:54:39,640 --> 00:54:43,720
is thought to have sent the great wave charging towards Britain from the north.

648
00:54:48,120 --> 00:54:54,200
It hit the coastline with such force that it continued 40km inland, killing indiscriminately.

649
00:54:58,360 --> 00:55:04,320
In a single moment, the British landscape had been reshaped, forever.

650
00:55:09,560 --> 00:55:14,640
By 6100 BC, Britain was well on its way to becoming an island.

651
00:55:14,640 --> 00:55:21,080
Already narrow, possibly even tidal channels were cutting us off from the rest of continental Europe.

652
00:55:21,080 --> 00:55:26,520
But what the great wave did was seal our fate in the most dramatic way possible

653
00:55:26,520 --> 00:55:30,040
as those narrow sea channels were ripped wide open.

654
00:55:45,520 --> 00:55:52,200
Here at the other end of Britain, the people who made those footprints in these mudflats of south Wales

655
00:55:52,200 --> 00:55:56,480
were in all likelihood blissfully unaware of the great wave,

656
00:55:56,480 --> 00:56:01,280
far less of the devastation it had caused in the east.

657
00:56:01,280 --> 00:56:04,240
They were the unknowing survivors

658
00:56:04,240 --> 00:56:10,000
of perhaps the greatest natural disaster ever to strike our land.

659
00:56:10,000 --> 00:56:16,600
And it strikes me that so much of the story of our early prehistory is about survival,

660
00:56:16,600 --> 00:56:20,960
whether it be the companions of the Red Lady of Paviland,

661
00:56:20,960 --> 00:56:22,600
out hunting the mammoth,

662
00:56:22,600 --> 00:56:28,080
or the artist who etched the image of a horse head into rib bone

663
00:56:28,080 --> 00:56:31,400
while the Ice Age waxed and waned,

664
00:56:31,400 --> 00:56:36,760
or the people who faced and survived the tsunami.

665
00:56:36,760 --> 00:56:37,920
8,000 years ago,

666
00:56:37,920 --> 00:56:41,720
the people living in the land that would become Britain

667
00:56:41,720 --> 00:56:46,200
were living through a watershed in our story.

668
00:56:46,200 --> 00:56:52,280
Those footprints aren't just traces of the people who made them,

669
00:56:52,280 --> 00:56:56,840
they're also a snapshot of a moment,

670
00:56:56,840 --> 00:57:02,720
THE moment when this land became an island.

671
00:57:02,720 --> 00:57:05,800
The people here had become different,

672
00:57:05,800 --> 00:57:08,120
they'd been made different.

673
00:57:10,800 --> 00:57:15,960
At the same time, they'd been made a wee bit special as well.

674
00:57:21,360 --> 00:57:25,000
Next time, my journey continues.

675
00:57:25,000 --> 00:57:32,840
The last hands to touch these before mine, were those of a Neolithic farmer 5,500 years ago.

676
00:57:32,840 --> 00:57:38,320
As I discover a whole new age, the age of ancestors.

677
00:57:38,320 --> 00:57:42,280
Nothing like this had ever been seen before in Britain.

678
00:57:42,280 --> 00:57:49,560
When we left nature behind and set out on the greatest social experiment ever seen.

679
00:57:49,560 --> 00:57:53,000
Surely a chap wouldn't be put to work grinding grain!

680
00:57:54,080 --> 00:57:57,680
The seismic revolution that came with farming.