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Precious relics give us glimpses of the people who once lived here. A people who survived, often against extraordinary odds. When I studied to become an archaeologist, it was the sheer challenge of understanding this ancient world that attracted me and the legacy that its people left behind. I've come to the coast of South Wales to try and see some of the most intimate and poignant remains in the whole of Britain. Out there beneath the waves are a few of the most fragile and fleeting traces imaginable of a group of hunters who came here 8,000 years ago.
The added challenge out here as well as the tides, you've also got to deal with the fact that this fantastic evidence is usually concealed under feet of mud as these banks shift about. So, we've got a footprint there. Uh-huh. You can see just see the big toe, the heel emerging from the mud with the side of the foot, the heel prominently marked, the arch of the foot, and then the big toe and the rest of the toes. So rather than being a depression, the the way they've been preserved is gradually filling the print with material. So they appear almost as a mold of the original footprint. That's one of the best things I've ever seen.
I knew about them, but until you see them, it just doesn't seem possible. What have we got here, then? The prints reveal men, women, and children. An entire group of nomadic hunter gatherers. That's not a fossil of that person that day. That is the very day. But what's interesting here, of course, is that these are very obviously part of a trail. Uhhuh. There's another print there. Rather poorly preserved one. That would be the big toe there. Yes. And that's the ball of the heel. That's that's the right foot of the same person, isn't it?
These were people who relied utterly on the natural resources of wild plants and the animals that lived alongside them. If you were to be offered the chance to live this life, would you f is an easy life? They were subject to the natural hazards of the environment, the bad season, the harsh winter, the year when the fish simply didn't turn up. So, there would have been times when these communities were under extreme pressure and extreme difficulty. 8,000 years ago right there. When you delve into the distant past, you soon realize that what you're discovering again and again are stories of survival. Sometimes of evidence like those faint footprints in the mud. Other
times it's the stories of people defying the odds in a hostile world. A world in which your very existence as a hunter gatherer depends completely on your understanding of and your connection to the natural environment. Within the store rooms of London's natural history museum are the remains of someone who lived a staggeringly long time ago. So long ago that this human has even been classed as a different species. It's a real privilege to see these and to be so close to them. I can feel my hand starting to shake just with being in their vicinity.
These are the oldest human remains ever found in Britain. It's two pieces of the same shin bone and two teeth. Uh they were dug up at a place called Box Grove in Sussex. The two teeth have got tiny scratches on them and it's thought that they were caused by the way that this person ate meat that the meat would be gripped in the teeth and then the other bit slashed away at with a tool. There's enough of the shin bone to let us estimate that the individual stood about 1.8 m tall, weighing 14 stone. It's always been known as box grove man, but of course from this there's no way of absolutely determining the sex. So it could be box woman. So
14 stone and looking like a boxer should have been quite a showstopper. Who knows what her boyfriend was like? But perhaps most amazingly of all, Box Grove man lived half a million years ago. Think of that. Half a million years. Chris Stringer is a world expert on our ancient human ancestry. So, what follows Box Grove in the human story? Well, about a 100,000 years later at Swanskum in Kent, we've got these human bones, the back part of a skull, beautifully preserved, but it has one interesting feature here. That little depression is something we find in all the Neanderls. So, we think Swanscom could be a very early member of the Neanderto line of evolution. So there's Neander in Britain 400,000 years ago.
That's right. Very early ones. And then for the next three or 400,000 years, whenever we find people in Britain, they're part of this evolving neanderal lineage. And it was tools like this that they were making. Absolutely. Yes. This is uh a handax, one of tens of thousands that have been found in the gravels at Swanscom. So these people were making these tools and probably using them to butcher animal carcasses. It's amazing. While on the one hand, you're talking about a different species of human, different from us, and yet the tools that they made and used fit so naturally into the hand.
There's a real link to the humanity of these people, even if they are a different species from us. At what point then do we get modern human beings like you and I? Well, much later on. Now, modern humans had been evolving in Africa while the Neanderalars were evolving in Europe and coming to Britain. And about 50 or 60,000 years ago, those modern humans started to come out of Africa. And 40,000 years ago, they're in France. And here's one of the stone tools they were making there. Okay. So, that's been made by hands the same as ours.
Absolutely. Imagine living in a world where there are different species of people, never mind different races or different nationalities. There were several human species on Earth. We were just one of those experiments going on how to be human. Buckland didn't know it at the time, but he was about to discover more than some ancient animal bones. This was going to be the discovery of his life. Entering the cave would have been fantastically exciting for Buckland. Soon as he crossed the threshold, he'd have fired up his lamp. And then, a good scientist that he was, he'd have begun
to make a careful assessment of everything he could see, the whole scene, and all of that he recorded in meticulous detail. This is a book called Reiqua Duvani, Relics of the Flood. And this volume is one of just a couple of copies of the first edition still in existence. It contains within it a depiction of the scene exactly as Buckland saw it and then drew it. Buckland has very helpfully drawn the whole scene. There's the cave itself from the outside. There's the cliff wall and the man coming down on a
rope on the outside. But more interestingly, he's made what is effectively an excavation plan of the floor of the cave. Here are the elephant bones and tusks that drew him to this cave in the first place. More intriguingly, he's also drawn a full-size human skeleton. And it's that human skeleton that secured this cave its place in our history. It was Buckland himself who discovered it, uncovering it from beneath about 6 in of earth right here where I'm crouched down. What on earth was going on here? And more importantly, who on earth was it? As it happened, Buckland originally thought he'd found the remains of a local prostitute who had worked here during Roman times and that when she'd eventually died, she'd been buried in
there, far away from civilized society, the Red Lady of Pavaland. But Buckland was wrong because he'd actually stumbled upon human remains from a far more distant past. Today, the red lady is kept at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Although there's no skull, much of the skeleton has survived, enough for scientists to reveal its story. Within a few decades of Buckland's death, people re-examined the skeleton. They looked at the shape of the pelvis, the shape of the long bones, the shape of the articulation surfaces. Any anatomy student today would recognize this as a skeleton not of a young woman, but of a young man.
Forensic analysis also revealed that the so-called red lady died young in his late 20s. But most importantly, his bones could also reveal just how long ago he lived. All plants and animals on Earth build themselves predominantly out of carbon. A tiny proportion of that carbon is radioactive carbon or carbon 14. When an animal dies, the amount of carbon 14 begins slowly to decline and degrade away. This process called carbon dating used a tiny amount of bone from the red lady. Carbon atoms from the bone gave scientists a date for when he was alive, an astonishing 33,000 years ago.
These are the remains of the very first modern human known to have inhabited our land. 10,000 years ago, there was no Isisle of White. It was part of the English mainland to the north and still joined to Northern Europe and France to the south. And all of that out there, the Solent was dry land. What should mean out there underneath the water are the relics of a lost world and of the people who lived on it. It's a world that's being explored by archaeologist Gary Mber. And I'm going to join him. I'm about to go back to a time when rising sea levels were turning land into tidal marsh. When Britain was an island in the making, the site is 8,000 years old, a time
archaeologists call the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age. It's really opening a picture of meic period that we're not getting from sites on land. So when the sea level was lower, further back in time, and we're finding the wellpreserved remains. So, it's actually the sea that's going to make it awkward for us is what has preserved what we're going to see. If it wasn't for the sea, uh it wouldn't be there. Doing a final diver check. Okay, divers ready for the water. Once this was home to a coastal community of hunter gatherers living a way of life that had barely changed for thousands of years.
Part of actually finding the most amazing world is the fact that we're going to be 30 ft underwater where people once walked. Yes. When people walk and live and have stayed for a while. These big bits of timber here, they are all burnt. That big bit is possibly part of an old log boat. Unbelievable. This has been eroded and going to bring it to the surface. If we don't lift it, it'll be lost. What's been discovered here is more than an ancient hunting camp. It's the oldest boat building yard in the world.
And it contains fragile evidence of the sophistication of the people who once lived here. That was fantastic. It was I can stay down there for hours when it's like that. Yeah. So, this piece of timber is how old? How long is it since it was worked? It's over 8,000 years old. It has come up in association with other bits and pieces. And one piece of timber in particular, which we believe may be part of a log boat. See those grooves? Uhhuh. How clearly defined they are. So that's woodworking. That's not natural erosion.
No, that's woodworking. That's obviously part of something with the grooves either side. So someone 8,000 years ago was working with a stone tool to create these grooves. You don't, as a general rule, you just don't see uh organic material coming out of mealithic sites. You get the stone tools, but to see what those stone tools were being used for, it's the other half of the equation. It's pretty unique and pretty special. These weren't erected by Neolithic farmers, but by mealithic hunters, just as the first farmers started appearing on their doorstep.
This place is just extraordinary. I've known about it for years. I've seen photographs of it countless times, but this is my first visit. And the impact of the stones is just breathtaking. Everywhere you look, there's more of them. They're in every direction, line after line of them. And you look at any one of them, they weigh at least tens of tons. Some of them look as if they weigh even more. They completely dominate the landscape everywhere you look. We use extraordinary to describe a lot of things, but a place like this really deserves the word.
What we're looking at is the result of a collision not just of cultures, but of two completely different belief systems. All of this might be the result of a monumental tipping point in human history. The hunters hauled the stones into place to demonstrate their strength in the face of people they didn't understand. But theirs was the old world. In just a few hundred years, Neolithic culture took over. And many of these great standing stones became building material for something new.
Archaeologist Serge Kassen has studied them for over 20 years. Is there a connection between the change from lines of stones to tombs like this and the change to farming? Yes, it is probably linked with this new process, this new economy, this full neolithic where life of animals, life of plants are very important inside this life cycle. Inside one tomb excavated by Serge, this decisive fork in history is marked by some remarkable rock art. So these are the old style messes hunting weapons almost like a primitive boomerang to kill birds. Exactly. Okay. So this is the old world. Very male, very phallic. Yes. Exactly. One carving in particular brings it all home.
We can observe now carvings. So it's another throwing stick. Yes. the same shape, the same weapon, the same representation. And under we have the Polish axe from the Neolithic period with his handle. So this triangular shape. Yes. That's the neic. Exactly. So you've got the new technology of the axe. Mhm. On top of and even cutting into the old world of the thick. So it's this is almost the moment or it's depicting the moment when the old world and the new world collide and after that collision the new world is dominant over the old. Exactly. The Neolithic Revolution changed our mindset not only towards work but the idea of the land and our relationship to it.
It changed our beliefs. And evidence of these new beliefs can be found in massive stone tombs, some of which mark our countryside even today. One of the most impressive is in Wiltshire. This great long mound was created by digging thousands of tons of chalk rubble from ditches on either side. Some of the stones weigh 40 tons. And they were hauled here from as much as a mile away. This is the work of a whole community, not just one family. And it's people for whom the creation of this mattered as much or more than anything else they were doing. And these were busy farmers.
This isn't just a tomb. This isn't simply about remembering a loved one. This is about creating an entire world. One built by the community of the living for the community of the dead. And wait to see what's inside. About 40 people were buried in here around 3,600 BC over a period of maybe just 25 years or so. What we think happened was when someone died, if it was deemed appropriate that they become part of this place, then their body would be laid out maybe nearby, maybe even in here in the passageway and then the natural process of decomposition would begin and animals and birds would remove the flesh over a period of time. They were they weren't laid out as individuals as intact skeletons. you would have a pile of skulls, a then a separate neat
pile of vertebrae, and another pile of long bones. And that was important because what's going on is a process by which the loved ones cease to be just individuals, members of the community. They become part of one collective presence, the ancestors. Strangely though, tombs like this weren't sealed, but left open. In some ways, they were more akin to temples, which you could enter to commune with the spirits of the dead. And imagine what that felt like for people who truly believed that their loved ones as well as the ancient dead were somehow in here, that their will was in here, and that they were watching them, and that they were aware. So you
would come in here with great reverence and great respect, with the hairs going up on the back of your neck and all over your body as you wondered what would happen next. But these great structures also had an earthly function. All around us is rich and fertile farmland, highly valued. By building this here, the people are laying claim to it. This long barrel forged a permanent link between the community, their ancestors, and the fields they had farmed for generations. This is about the arrival of something new in our history, the concept of ownership. More than 400 of its stones are covered in swirling abstract art. almost half of all the megalithic art in the whole of Western Europe.
This is where the precious mace head was found. And it wasn't the only spectacular discovery. Archaeologist George Ogan has been studying now for 50 years. You could picture that you had a religious person, the equivalent of a priest, you see, who could stand here uh before the entrance. This is directly opposite the entrance and in between you have this splendid uh sandstone uh 6 ft or so in height with the vertical line which leads up the center of the passage. Back in 1968, George was the first person in modern times to break into the tomb.
How long is the passage? About 140 ft. Are you winning? Oh, it'll take me a long time. No hurry. Right. I see why you don't have this place open to the public, George. It's not the easiest place. No. Now, oh my. Look up. Now that's a bit good. And this is as it was. This hasn't been reconstructed. Oh, no. Not at all. What was it like the very first time like this you came in here? But how did you feel to be the first person in goodness knows how long? Well, I was unbelievably exciting.
What George found were the untouched remnants of ancient sacred rights. A time capsule of Neolithic belief. You are the magnificent. And scattered in and around this exquisitely carved basin was evidence of something new in stone age society. burnt human remains. These are some of the earliest remains of ritual cremation ever found. Well, the skull is the easiest to find because the skull is very distinctive. It has an inner layer and an outer layer and a bit of spongy bone in between. Although only fragments survive, under expert eyes, these remains reveal a wealth of information.
Some areas of the skull are more important than others. And this part in particular is called the petrus portion of the temporal bone and it survives very well because it's thick. And from this I can identify which side of the skull it came from. So it's useful in determining the number of individuals because if I've got two left temporal bones then I've got two different individuals. Forensic science reveals that now contained over a 100 cremated bodies but those cremations were accumulated over centuries of use.
The radiocarbon dates showed that was over approximately 300 year time span and that works out at one cremation every 2 to three years. So therefore cremation wasn't that common. What Loren Buckley's work shows is that the new practice of cremation was unusual. This rarity and the discovery of the mouth mace head suggests that it was an honor reserved for only the very highest levels of late Neolithic society. You all right? Yeah. Lead on. Okay. Here we go. Allison Sheridan, a specialist in prehistoric artifacts, is showing me one house that's so well preserved people aren't usually allowed inside.
It's not the easiest place to get into, is it? No, but it's cozy. So what would life have been like for Scarabbury residents? Do you think it would have been pretty comfortable by the standards of the age? Because you've got this wonderful central half. So it may have been dark because of the roof, but it would have been warm. Okay. They've also got convenience. They have a toilet. How do you know that's a toilet and not a storage space? Well, um there's actually a drain underneath it. And actually, they did find poo. Oh, really? Oh, so the hard evidence is there.
Yes. Remarkably, these houses also contained artifacts. The precious possessions of the people who were living here 5,000 years ago. Never find anything like this in my entire life. Miserable bits of broken stone was all I ever found. So, what have we got? Anything but miserable bits of stone. These are absolutely amazing. What are they generally called if you were to group them as a class of find enigmatic carved stone objects only because archaeologists haven't worked out exactly what they are
and in the absence of materials that we would consider precious like gold and silver I suppose these have to be the equivalent of it because of the time that they represent and the skill that they represent. That's right. Because we're in an age that's well before the earliest metal. Yeah. So the stone itself is not intrinsically valuable, but as an object it meant a lot. And what about the rest of them? These pieces of jewelry or Yeah. In fact, they found something like 8,000 beads in this structure in this house. Yes. Right. So on a very practical level, it says that someone's got the time to do this rather than being out growing, hering, whatever. Someone is able to set aside part of their day or maybe all of their time to specializing.
Absolutely. And been provided with everything else they need by the rest of the village. That's right. These are just wonders. Which one can I have? I'll take them all. We know where you live. But as well as jewelry and carved stones, this house also revealed a darker secret. Intriguingly, two adult women skeletons were found underneath the bed uniquely. You mean on below floor level? Yes. Right.
Yeah. It's it's as if during the lifetime of the house, they lived here. They died here. They were buried here under the bed. It's like granny under the bed. It was a house for the living and it's also a house for the dead. The precious artifacts and the presence of human remains might mean that these houses were special. No one can be sure, but the people who lived here might not have been ordinary farmers, but some of the earliest priests of a new religion.
Around 2,500 BC, a new generation of builders created their ultimate monument. Using massive blocks of local sandstone, they constructed something unprecedented. A ring of standing stones capped with lintils. Inside, a horseshoe of yet more stones. And at the same time, for good measure, they moved the original boulders of blue stone right into the center. Unlike the blue stones, these gigantic sars were only transported 20 m or so from up the road. But given that each one weighs anything up to 40 tons, well, the effort required to shift them was phenomenal.
This new Stonehenge marked special days in the cosmic calendar. Spring and autumn, as well as the well-known alignment on the midsummer sunrise. But the midsummer sunrise exactly matches another event, the setting sun. at mid-inter. The latest evidence suggests that our most famous prehistoric monument of all might not have been a celebration of summer and life, but a commemoration of winter and death. Like the Orcne monuments, Stonehenge is not alone. Nearby, this field contains all that remains of an ancient sight of winter gathering.
Have a look at these animal bones and teeth. Just a sample really of the thousands of animal remains found scattered all across the site. These are pig bones. Piglets are usually born in the springtime. And the vast majority of the pig remains at Darington Walls show that the adult animals were slaughtered around 9 months. That's in mid-inter. Also, the teeth reveal that the animals had been specifically fattened up prior to the feasting. And we can tell this because the teeth are rotten.
What we have here isn't just casual feasting. This is one final commemoration. It's one big celebration of life before the ancestors commence their journey to Stonehenge and the land of the dead. It's thought that each winter people would come here from hundreds of miles around to commemorate the lives of their ancestors and to ensure the souls of the recently dead reached the safety of the afterlife. at Stonehenge itself. I think it's fascinating that everyone believes they know Stonehenge. It's like the Mona Lisa or the Pyramids. It's so familiar. It's hard to see it with fresh eyes. But I think we've discovered something by coming here. I think we've discovered
a new Stonehenge. And it's as far from the golden warmth of a midsummer sunrise as it's possible to get. It's somewhere that still carries a charge. You can feel it. And if you come here at mid- winter, you can feel that charge just a little bit more. The coldness of the stones, the open landscape. It's not hard to believe that this place somewhere that belongs to the dead. Britain 2,500 years BC. This is the height of the Stone Age. People live by farming the land, growing crops, keeping animals.
There's little evidence of fixed villages, permanent settlement. Instead, they seek out fresh grazing land and fresh soil season by season. Everything they have, clothes, tools, food, is gathered from the world around them. One material lay at the very heart of their world as it had done for thousands of years flint. And it was needed in vast quantities. Look at this. It's a moonscape of deep hollows and depressions. There are literally hundreds of them. And these aren't the product of ancient farming or ancient settlements.
All of this was created by ancient industry. Each one of these hollows is the remnant of an ancient mineshaft and there are 433 of them. Some of the mine shafts have been excavated, so it's possible to enter the very ground that was worked by our prehistoric ancestors. It's a bit deeper than I thought. Each shaft leads to a network of tunnels hacked from the chalk bedrock with basic tools.
This is red deer antler hunted or collected in the forests above and then it's been used just as the shape suggests as a pick. You can see just how cramped the conditions are down here. And some of the tunnels are so small. It's believed that as well as men working down here, there must have been children because some of the spaces are just too small to believe it was grown-ups. Now, here's what all the effort is in aid of this black stuff here. This is flint. They would have found a complete floor like a black floor of flint as if a black liquid had flowed in and solidified.
It's like glass or trickle toffee. In any case, this is what this mine was all about. Flint, the lifeblood of the Stone Age. If you were going to fell a tree, build a house, shape wood, make a dugout canoe, you needed an axe like this. Bear with me. Apparently, it's quite distinctive when you see it. if you don't break an ankle on the way. Look, the secret to all of this, what those early metal workers were on the hunt for is in this ribbon of black and white rock. It's very distinctive. You see it? It's called cassitarite, a rock that contains tin. Britain had been a late comer to the copper age, but the discovery of local tin, a much rarer metal than copper, was to propel Britain to the very
technological forefront of Europe. And if you were very lucky, you'd find something like this. I wish you could feel it. It looks like any ordinary pebble, but trust me, it's as heavy as a cannonball. And when you extract the tin itself, it's as beautiful as silver. And this is an ingot of tin. It's very lovely. They say that if you bend it, it crackles. They call that the cry of tin. But more importantly, if you have copper and you add this, you transform it into bronze. If you control the bellow speed, it'll hold the perfect temperature for casting. With just the right mixture of copper and tin, metal workers could create an alloy that was hard enough to make useful tools and weapons.
Okay, in you go. Bit lower. Fine. One, too. That's it. Well done, gentlemen. Amazing. It's like it's blood. Better than blood. Okay, that's good. Lift it up a little bit. That's it. We're there. Wow. It's so visceral, isn't it? Oh, definitely. There we go. Look at that. Behold, that is amazing. Look at the color of it. You impressed? I'm very I'm deeply impressed. Look at that.
Yeah. Even makes a ring. It's a very hard piece of bronze. Just amazing. From liquid fire to a metal sword in a couple of minutes. In 1992, while this underpass was being dug, the evidence emerged from the mud. Incredibly, they found a boat, a big wooden boat buried 20 ft underground down here. It's hard to believe, surrounded down here by all this concrete and these painted tiles. But 3 and a half thousand years ago, the boat came to rest and was gradually buried under layers and layers of mud. And here it is. This quite simply is the oldest surviving seagoing vessel in the world.
It's absolutely fantastic. At first sight, it's honestly one of the most impressive archaeological finds I've ever laid eyes on. Originally up to 20 m long, the Dover boat would have carried cargo between Britain and mainland Europe, scrap bronze and other metals, perhaps also wool and fabrics. A vessel this size would obviously have taken some skilled handling. It must have been either paddled with several of these or the thinking more recently has been that it might have been uh rode like a pad like a rowing boat on a paddling pond only
on a much grander scale. I've actually been given the privilege of going inside the case. This is the magic handle that opens the door. There's a real atmosphere in here. I don't know if it's just the case, but it's almost like being in here with someone rather than just something. Yes. It's as if the Bronze Age is and Bronze Age people are preserved in here. The boat's construction relied on the expert skills of carpenters using bronze axes.
Its hull, four enormous planks sewn together. These are twisted U branches. They're called wies and they've been used like thread or cords. So the whole the pieces have been stitched together almost as though rather than wood it was made out of skin or cloth. It's the same sort of technology. It's been sewn together just on a kind of a giant scale. Close up there's a detail that reveals how this boat ended its days. It's it was in good neck but at some point people have decided to put it beyond use. It's been scuttled if you like. You can see at certain points where the wies those twisted U branches have been cut deliberately. So for some reason it was thought
appropriate to put this boat, this perfectly functional boat beyond the use of Man,
