The Ancients - End of Ice Age Britain

Episode Date: February 23, 2025

As Ice Age Britain thawed, temperatures surged, sea levels rose, and humans and animals faced a fight for survival. But this shift was anything but simple.In this final episode of our Ice Age miniseries, Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Danielle Schreve to uncover the turbulent end of the last Ice Age in Britain. Discover how mammals like Siberian lemmings and Saiga antelope roamed this icy landscape, how the Younger Dryas cold snap 13,000 years ago reshaped Britain's prehistoric environment, and how early humans adapted to survive it. With echoes for today’s climate challenges, this is a story of resilience on the fringes of the Ice Age world.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on

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Malcolm Gladwell. Go to audible.ca slash Unusual Suspects podcast and listen now. The end of Ice Age Britain, a time of rapidly changing temperatures, of ice sheets melting, sea levels rising and humans adapting to a more expansive and warmer Britain, a Britain that became cut off from the rest of Europe that became an island. But these changes didn't happen overnight, and it wasn't a simple straight-line case of things going from cold to warm either. The Ice Age took thousands of years to end in Britain and had a massive impact both on the animals and humans that then called Britain

their home. Extreme temperature switches that forced them either to adapt, leave or die. It's an extraordinary story, starring various animals ranging from Siberian lemmings to Saiga antelope. And of course, humans. So what sorts of animals lived in Britain during these last fluctuating throes of the Ice Age? Why did the climate suddenly get much colder again roughly 13,000 years ago, the so-called Younger

Dryas period? And how were humans affected by all of this change? It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're releasing the final episode of our Ice Age mini-series this February, and boy what an episode this is. The end of the Ice Age in Britain. Joining me to explain what we know, I was delighted to interview the paleobiologist Professor Danielle Shreve from the University of Bristol. Danielle studies animal remains, particularly mammals, to understand how they responded to these abrupt changes in climate that define the end of the Ice Age and what lessons we can learn from this when tackling climate change today. She's an expert on the end of the Ice Age in Britain and how this tumultuous period affected life on this

edge of the Ice Age world. Enjoy! Danielle, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Let's talk about the end of the Ice Age in Britain. I know it's quite a massive statement to start, but it feels like this is a time when Britain's world completely transformed. Absolutely. I think some of the changes that we witnessed, whether it's to do with the landscape, the environment, the fauna, they're just some of the most remarkable changes that Britain witnessed, whether it's to do with the landscape, the environment, the fauna. They're just some of the most remarkable changes that Britain has ever witnessed.

And just first of all, do we know how much time we can roughly talk about if we're exploring the end of the Ice Age? Should we be thinking in thousands of years? Definitely thousands of years. So I think probably a sensible starting point is probably the period that we would call the last glacial maximum. So from about 26,000 years ago until really the early parts of the current warm stage or interglacial that we're in now. Yeah, that's more than 10,000 years in total, isn't it? And it's absolutely extraordinary. But before we delve into that, and you mentioned the last glacial maximum, archaeological material that you a lot of information surviving for what actually happened at the end of the Ice Age? CK We do. I think it's important to make a difference between archaeological material, which would be that related exclusively to humans, so things like human

artefacts, whether that's stone tools or other types of evidence, and the paleobiological evidence that we might have, so things like fossils of animal bones, plant remains, shells, that kind of thing. We have lots of different types of evidence that are available to us, and sometimes that comes in the form of the sediments themselves because the deposits of sands and gravels and all sorts of things that we might actually dig into, we can understand a story of how climate changed from those. We can also look at the remains of animals and plants and they tell us very clearly how things change in response to climate change, often very rapid and abrupt

climate change. There's also different types of evidence out there as well. For example, things like sea level rise. We know that at times Britain was connected to the continental mainland and then as we come towards the end of the last ice age, the sea level rises and Britain becomes cut off. Actually, there's a whole host of different types of evidence out there. A slight tangent straight away, but I remember doing an interview a few months back where they were analysing deep sea cores, kind of taking up information from the sediment beneath the sea to get a sense of climate and the ecological world. And in that case, it was more than a million years ago. I'm guessing whether it's a million years or 10,000 or

20,000 years ago, is that one of the ways that you can learn more about the whole landscape and environment at that time? Definitely. One of the things we try to do is to reconstruct that landscape. To understand, for example, the changing coastline of Britain. Britain is in quite an extraordinary position, really, at the edge of the North Atlantic. It's very sensitive to climate change. position really at the edge of the North Atlantic. So it's very sensitive to climate change. And we can get at that evidence for change through doing things like coring into deposits that might be, for example, buried below the sea now, but also on land as well. And actually looking at those cores of sediment through time and extracting as much information from them as

possible. So does this all belong to the field of study that I know is very close to your heart? The name paleoecology. Yes. So paleoecology or paleoecology really deals with the ecology of the past. So the paleo bit just means the old part. So in the same way that an ecologist today would look at the habitats, the behavior, all aspects of the ecology of the animals that they might study today, this is what I'm trying to do in the past.

Sometimes it's easy or relatively easy because the animals that I study are still around today or very close relatives. In other cases where you've got animals that are extinct today, we have to draw on different lines of evidence in order to try and reconstruct something of their life ways. I must also ask about the word fauna. Now what does this word entail? How big a term is it when studying paleoecology and so on? Fauna is animal life.

By that, anything could come into fauna, whether it's vertebrates, so that might be fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, but it could also include all sorts of invertebrates as well, so particularly things like beetles or snail shells, that kind of thing as well. So it covers a very broad range of different types of material. So whereas megafauna is kind of related to the big beasts like mammoths, rhinos and so on, fauna is a more wide-reaching term for all different animals living in the past, is it? Definitely. One of the things that I am interested in is studying the fauna as a whole. Not just focusing in on the biggest, most impressive species, although obviously things

like the megafauna are really interesting and charismatic animals, but actually things like small mammals as well. They can tell you a phenomenal amount about the local environment, about climate. Small things like beetles are really good for reconstructing climate events in the past, telling you about local vegetation. Some sites preserve some types of evidence better than others, so we need to go after all of them in order to try and reconstruct the best, most holistic picture that we can. I know it's archaeology, but can human remains and human interactions with these fauna help in that puzzle too? They can indeed. I guess it's a moot point whether you want to include humans as part of the fauna.

I think for much of the past, the Paleolithic or old stone age, humans are doing something interesting in the landscape. They are certainly doing unusual things like making stone tools, but they're very much part of a wider fauna. They're responding to the same kind of climatic and environmental trends that other species are. Luckily, they do leave behind useful things like stone tools, so we are able to derive an enormous amount of information from that in terms of their behavior. Remains of the actual early humans themselves are very

rare in the UK, but we do have other types of evidence, for example, things like cut marked bones and broken bones, which tell us about butchery and hunting practices as well. And talking about something that seems to have been important for early humans at that time and for these animals, a particular type of site, cave sites. Danielle, for deriving more information about the end of the Ice Age, how important are cave sites for finding that information and piecing together more of this puzzle?

Caves sites are often really good places to target for this type of information. They can be very rich resources of information. Often, of course, we have caves that form in limestone areas across the UK, so things like the southwest of England, the Peak District, South Wales, for example, North Wales. These are all really good places for finding material in caves. And you can often get a buildup of quite long sequences through time as well. That's because caves act as large repositories or archives for material coming in. Sometimes it might be washed in by a river or a mudflow, but a lot of times you get cave sediments building up over time and containing the remains of animals that were either living in the cave, so things like carnivores, for example,

or which were brought in as remains of prey. And that can build up over long periods. So caves are great generally for preserving animal remains in the form of bones or teeth. They're also very good for preserving mollusk and shell, but they are not so good at preserving things like pollen or what we call plant macrophossils. So, bits of plant, whether it's bits of leaf or twig or seed, for example. That's just because limestone tends to be a very calcareous environment. It's good at preserving things like bones, and it's not good at preserving things like pollen, which needs a more acidic type of deposition environment. Is limestone alkaline and that's why good at preserving things like pollen, which needs a more acidic type of deposition

environment. Is limestone alkaline and that's why preservation is better in limestone cave environments than other types of stone? Yes, it's very alkaline. That's good for the preservation of bones and teeth. We get different types of evidence from these caves, but they can often contain really detailed sequences that allow us to examine how animals and indeed people on occasion, if we have evidence for archaeology in those caves, we can examine how the fauna, how people have been responding to climate and environmental change. Before we go through almost the main phases of those last, well, quite a few thousand years in the story of the end of the Ice Age, I feel it's important, first of all, to highlight your work at a particular site because it feels like we'll

explore examples from these sites and dot them throughout the interview today. Tell us about your work at Ebel Gorge, where this is and what this is, why it's important to today's discussion. This is work we've been doing for a number of years now, about 15 years. It's based in a previously unexplored cave site in the Mendit Hills in Somerset. It was a wonderful opportunity to explore a site that had not had any previous excavation in it. Already that's quite rare because many cave sites have been discovered. They were discovered by Victorian antiquarians. A lot of them were dug out. Yes, they liked to dig to find the big stuff, didn't they?

They certainly did. They were very keen on finding things like specimens for their cabinet of curiosities. They would go out. In some cases, there were very rather systematic excavations done. In other cases, people were literally going along and looking for souvenirs. All of this happened at a very exciting time. In fact, really, Britain and places like the Mendip Hills played a crucial part in that move away from the teachings of the church and understanding about evolution, the discovery of the bones of extinct animals, and then later in association with human tools as well. This was really the first insights into the antiquity of humans.

So the Mendip Hills have always been a great place to work, and the research that we've been doing in this particular cave site has generated some fantastic information. We have a sequence that goes back over 50,000 years now and it's one of the most important sites, certainly in Britain and in Northwest Europe. And how rich a site is this? Are we talking about hundreds of mammal bones or are we talking a bit more than that? We're talking about hundreds of mammal bones. Now, they're not all complete, it's important to say that because at some levels within the cave, we have things like spotted hyenas that have been denning there and they're crunching up the bones. So we collect

all of the fragments because even the very broken bits tell us something about the origins of what we call an assemblage, so that collection of bits of bone, and they tell us what those animals were up to. But at this particular cave site in Ebergorge, we have, for example, in some of the upper layers, we have got hundreds of thousands of bits of small mammal. So these might be things like bats, mice, voles, shrews, lemmings, and they've been brought in by birds of prey that have been hunting over the landscape, that have swallowed this over the landscape, that have swallowed this material down, they come back to the cave to roost, and then they

regurgitate the undigested bits as pellets. Eventually thousands of years later, those have started to turn into fossils and that's when we can come along and collect them. Well, let's start going through the chronology, Danielle. Should we go to maybe 25, 20,000 years ago? What does Britain look like at that time, in this period that you've mentioned, this last glacial maximum? The last glacial maximum, Britain was a pretty chilly place, subject to really savage cold. As the name implies, the last glacial maximum witnesses the coldest point of

the last ice age, which began about 100,000 years ago. And round about 26, 25,000 years ago, you get the expansion of ice sheets in Britain. They cover all of Scotland. They cover almost all of Wales. They cover most of northern England, and they just reach down into the northern coast of East Anglia. If you can imagine a huge glacier, a huge ice sheet going pretty much all the way from East Yorkshire at an angle down to South Wales, that's the extent of the ice sheet and extending into the North Sea basin beyond. In front of that ice sheet, there would have been really a polar desert, so permafrost conditions, very, very cold indeed. Britain is connected to continental Europe at that time because sea level was much lower. That's

because water is drawn off during the buildup of the ice sheets on land. There's evaporation of the water from the oceans and sea levels fall by about 120 metres globally. That's more than enough to reconnect Britain to the continent. There is a land bridge in the southern part of the North Sea Basin. It would be possible for species that were able to tolerate those conditions to move in and out. But it would have been a pretty inhospitable place.

I was going to say, almost kind of reinforcing literally what you just said there, Danielle, that even below, even south of that great ice sheet that you highlighted there, it's still quite, as you said, inhospitable barren landscape. And so I'm guessing, is there a rich diversity of species able to adapt and live in that incredibly cold environment at that time? There's a surprising number of species, I would say. Biodiversity is, of course, much lower than you would find in many warmer climate periods. But nevertheless, we still get some smaller species around. So we find, for example, evidence of mountain hare. We also have remains of cold adapted species, such as woolly mammoth. We have also reindeer around, for example. But some of the most interesting remains that we've got are things like muskox, which are obviously obligate cold species. They live today up in the high Arctic, and yet they were living around, for example, Northamptonshire.

We've got a series of muskox remains that are dated to about 20,000 years ago. So that is a really, really clear indication of just how different conditions were on the ground at that time. Wow, basically Arctic conditions, isn't it? It's really, really interesting. Naturally, there were humans and early humans in Britain before that time. So many sites talk about the Neanderthals and early hom in Britain before that time. So many sites throughout the Neanderthals and early homo sapiens as well. But are humans there at that time when it gets much

colder again in that last glacial maximum? There's no unequivocal evidence of humans being present. It's a tricky one because I think when you have certainly a period of very cold climate conditions, often it's hard for material to get preserved because just the cold and the action of ice sheets, it's not conducive to the preservation of fossil material. Now, certainly across Northern Europe, there were other areas that were believed to be abandoned by modern humans at the time, but of which have been demonstrated subsequently to have some limited evidence. So it's possible that humans were making forays into Britain at that time, perhaps during the slightly warmer parts of the summer months, but we really don't have any good evidence. We don't have any artifacts, and there

is a putative human humerus from a site in South Wales that may date to this period. But certainly if people were around, they are in low numbers and they are not long-term residents. turn residents. the slippery origins of lube or how Vikings linked sex and magic together, then listen no further. Join me, Kate Lister, on Betwixt the Sheets where I delve into the most outrageous, the most taboo and the downright sexiest parts of our history. It's the kind of history that you probably wouldn't bring up at a family lunch, but you might bring it up down the pub. From the history of swear words to answering important questions like just how incestuous were Neanderthals and so much more. Listen every Tuesday and Friday wherever it is that you get your podcasts.

A podcast by HistoryHit. It may well be that we don't know the answer for this, but could there have been any life north of the ice sheets in regards to animals during that last glacial maximum, or is it all beneath the ice sheets? It has to be lower than the ice sheets. You might have had some species that perhaps could tolerate being out on the open ice, so much further to the north, although we don't have evidence preserved. You might have got things like polar bear, for example, at the very highest latitudes. But really, for the herbivores, of course, they need something to eat. They need vegetation. So they cannot survive out on an open ice sheet. They have to have vegetation.

And in the case of something like a reindeer, that can be sort of fairly short grasses and lichen that they might be feeding on. But it's not like having a herbivore, there's not a herbivore bonanza up on the ice sheet. You might have had polar bears that are predating on seals, for example, in the way that they would do in high latitudes today. But really, everything is going to be south of that ice sheet limit. So when does the ice sheet, when does it start to recede and what's the story of the end of the last glacial maximum? What happens? At the end of the last glacial maximum, we enter a period of abrupt warming. This is referred to as the Late Glacial Interstadial.

It's about 14,500 years ago. It marks the first evidence towards a significant warming, albeit later interrupted, but a warming and really the end of the last ice age. That warming event is very abrupt. Really you're looking at rapid warming conditions in Northwest Europe, so the ice sheets begin to retreat. And really, by about 16,000 years ago, they're much reduced up to the northern part of Britain. And I mean, when talking about rapid changes, I know when looking at Paleolithic history, rapid can sometimes mean hundreds of years. Do we know roughly how

rapid we're talking about with the climate changing back then? We do because we can measure these things, for example, by going to the ice sheets in Greenland. Oh, wow. Yes. So you can extract ice cores from Greenland and they have annual records in them where they've got things like greenhouse gases trapped. So we're able to measure this and document this really, really closely. We can date those bands in the ice. And so we do have a very good idea about just how quickly some of these transitions took place. Mason Hickman Wow. So you can do that today. You can go

and get ice cores from Greenland and that's almost undisturbed natural resources that can tell you the speed of the changing climate and I guess give you more of a sense, an environmental record of what happened at that time. It's a great archive, if you like. It's a great benchmark for understanding how climate change in this part of the Northern Hemisphere happened. Because Britain is really quite close in that part of the North Atlantic, we can actually see the major transitions as we come out of the last glacial maximum, the rapid warming into the late glacial interstadial, and then some of the subsequent oscillations, the climatic fluctuations that we see. We can actually see that evidenced on land in Britain.

Let's focus first of all on that first great warming period, Danielle. I mean, if it is pretty rapid that it happens, how does this affect those animals that had adapted to survive on that far edge of the hospitable world? of the hospitable world? So at that time you would see a retreat of some of the species that had been adapted to very cold conditions. So things like mammoths begin to contract their range back to Siberia. During the late glacial interstadial in Britain, you do get other species that are cold adapted that still hang on. So things like reindeer are still regularly present.

But because of the warming event that we see, we get other types of herbivores in particular coming in. So at first things like horse and then subsequently red deer. We get a real mix of species at that time though. So for example, in the cave sites that we're working in in Somerset, we get both species that are today indicative of cold climate conditions. So, for example, things like collard lemmings, and those are mixed in with other small mammal species that require more temperate, but also some kind of vegetation cover as well.

So these might be things like wood mice, for example, or common shrews. These are small mammals that we think are probably able to eke out an existence in some of these very deep limestone gorges. So particularly where there are more shrubby habitats or even trees that are growing there, there would have been sufficient shelter to support both the ones that needed more temperate conditions, but also up on the plateau, you've still got pretty exposed conditions and you would have been able to support things like reindeer up there as well. So from that cave site, so from that time period in southern Britain, you need to imagine collared lemmings alongside dormice. I mean, that's

extraordinary. That's such an extraordinary breadth and variety. I mean, kind of in the, in the environments, as you say, that they would have to live in. And yet they were able to live side by side at that time. Yes. And I think, you know, certainly back in the past, we used to wonder whether these were sort of jumbles in the fossil record, that there wasn't good resolution in these sites, that we didn't have the precision to say level by level exactly what was going on. But now, for example, with the types

of sites that we're working on, we have got really good resolution. So actually we can see that within just a few centimeters of sediment, we can extract these animals that have rather different habitat preferences together. It really has an important lesson, I think, for how we understand fauna and responses to climate change at the present day because it shows us how quickly animals can respond to these events. Obviously, one of the challenges that they have today is the fact that we have changed the landscape, we've removed connectivity of habitats.

But in the past, even very small animals could expand or contract their range according to changing environments, changing climates. They could do that really, really rapidly. So it's interesting there. So for those animals that were already there before it gets warmer, is it very much a choice of adapt or move incredibly long distances away like the woolly mammoths? So, animals such as many of these animals would be relatively more tolerant as mammals because mammals are warm-blooded and they would have had certain adaptations as well. They're certainly more tolerant than things like reptiles or amphibians

that are obviously completely dependent on external temperatures. So mammals can often, because they can maintain their body against a temperature gradient, they can often survive in more marginal areas outside their core range. But yes, the story there is very much one of move, adapt, or die out. So we've already seen some species such as woolly rhino disappear from Britain about 35,000 years ago, but they live for another 20,000 years up in Siberia. And so when we look at, for example, the extinction of species, we need to understand that it's different triggers in different parts of their range at different

times. Species are not necessarily responding as communities here, but very much as individuals. Some of them, the climate change is too quick for them to adapt, really. Actually, although some of them may be able to switch to different food sources, often the way that they would get out of difficulty is to change their range. They would migrate to areas that were more favourable. How does this climate change affect humans? Do humans come back at this time? Humans are around during the late glacial interstadial and they come back just before

the warming event. They're really poised and ready to come back into Britain. They seem to occupy areas of the southwest first and then move further north into the Midlands. We're able to establish this because of very precise radiocarbon dating. We know that when they come in at about 14,500 years ago or just before, they are primarily hunting horse, but also going after things like red deer as well. And then later on, they move to doing things like trapping, mountain hare, and exploiting those. So that's really interesting that there is a switch to smaller game. That's consistent

with the disappearance of things like the megafauna, that people are having to adapt their diets as their own environment changes and they're having to switch to different food sources. Yeah, exactly. The days of humans hunting or scavenging off mammoths has long gone by that time in Britain, isn't it? It's really, really interesting. I'm guessing, should we mention one of those key sites, which is Goff's Cave? This feels an important site to highlight for evidence of humans returning at this time. Indeed. Goff's Cave was a really spectacular site and probably supported a decent group of individuals

for perhaps a couple of hundred years. Even though this site was, primarily excavated a long time ago during the Victorian period, there have been more recent excavation of remnants of the sediments that were preserved below overhangs on the side of the cave walls. And those were carried out by colleagues from the Natural History Museum in the 1980s. One of the most astonishing things about Goff's Cave is the abundance of actual human remains. In fact, human remains generally, whether it's modern humans, whether it's Neanderthals or their forebears, are so incredibly rare in Britain. And yet, they make up approximately a quarter of all the material that came out of Goff's cave. In fact, there are anecdotes about, I think, 12 tea chests full of bones being removed

from the cave and essentially destroyed because they were viewed as duplicates. When you think about the amount of material that must have been lost. So the Goth's cave remains are very special, partly because there's good evidence of humans, but also because of the superb preservation of the material. And we can see the remains of animals, whether it's, for example, butchered horses, we see cut marks on horse teeth, on horse bones. We see exploitation of red deer. There's remains of carnivores such as links that are present in the site, and almost certainly exploited in the case of the links for its lovely pelt for the fur. We see exploitation of things like mountain hare and

the modification of hare bones into little tools such as piercing, sort of all type tools. Really just a very sort of complete picture of what humans are doing. And of course, one of the most notorious things there is that there is also evidence of breakage of bone from our extraction and butchery of the human remains themselves. So those humans are being treated in exactly the same way as any other butchered animal bone at the site. Goff's Cave, so is that Southwest England as well? Is that Somerset or Wiltshire?

It's near the Mendips, is it? It's Somerset, right in the Mendips. So it's part way up Cheddar Gorge. So a really well-known area that people can go and explore. And you can walk into the cave today. It's a visitor attraction and the Paleolithic or old Stone Age deposits are very close to the entrance of the cave, just tucked away on the left-hand side as you come in. Let's move on to the next stage. Danielle, it looks like things are getting warmer.

Humans are back. New species are in the fold in Britain. But as time goes on, what happens? Something very different happens. DL. Yes, I think just as we seem to be climbing out of the last Ice Age, we have a sudden reversal of conditions and a huge climatic deterioration. This is a period known as the Younger Dryas. It starts about 12,900 years ago and it finishes about 11,700 years ago. Now, it's pretty precise dates as well for Paleolithic times too. Pretty precise dates. And again, we can get that chronology from the Greenland ice core, but also, of course, with the benefit of radiocarbon dating as well.

core, but also, of course, with the benefit of radiocarbon dating as well. We know quite a lot about this time period in terms of the effects on land of this sudden deterioration in climate. Broadly speaking, that's caused by a mixture of factors. There is some evidence, for example, from Germany, from the Eifel region, that there is a period of intense volcanism, so volcanic activity that precipitates a cooling in climate. But also there are other things going on at this time. So particularly in North America, you've got the decay of the big ice sheets, the Laurentide ice sheet, and pulses of very cold meltwater that are entering the North Atlantic. What they do is to disrupt the ocean circulation and Britain is plunged back into the freezer

once more. Mason Hickman And how does this rather abrupt switch of climactic conditions affect the lifestyle, the world of Ice Age Britain at that time and the animals and humans as well that were living in it. So again, this would have been an abrupt reversal of fortune for a lot of the more temperate adapted species. And certainly in the caves that we've been digging in Ebbogorge, we can find, for example, evidence of reindeer. There's also evidence of arctic fox in there. So there's several individuals, including a complete specimen that was curled up in a little niche at the back of the site. So beautifully preserved.

There's lots of crunched up bone in there as well. So you can imagine the Arctic fox is running in and out of the cave. They are predating small mammals. So we get a variety of small mammal species that are present, but also things like birds as well. Species that we would find in the northern part of Britain today, so things like ptarmigan. Again, those small species are on the move very rapidly. Within the cave site, we have remains of three species of lemming that today are not sympatric, by which I mean they don't live together today. So we have remains of Norway lemming, which come from Scandinavia. We have remains of collard lemming that today have a sort of circumpolar distribution in the northern

hemisphere. And we have only the second record from Britain of a Siberian steppe lemming. Wow. All those three species congregate in the southwest of Britain during the Younger Dryas. So again, these things were expanding their range very rapidly. I want to talk a bit more about lemming. If you discover the remains of a lemming, is that one of the go-to signs that that was a cold climate time in Britain's Ice Age story? Yes, it certainly is for those particular species. There is another species called a wood lemming, though it inhabits more boreal forests today in Scandinavia. Traditionally, it's very difficult to separate from things like the Norway lemming, but through

a mixture of ancient DNA and also very novel types of shape analysis on the teeth. We've been able to separate out the wood lemming species from the Norway lemming species. And because they both like different types of environment, that's been really important for us in terms of understanding the local vegetation. So if we have something like a Norway lemming, these are typical tundra species. They can tolerate sort of fairly boggy types of environment. They would feed on grasses and sedges. And we know that obviously they can tolerate snow cover and they are a great indicator of local conditions on the ground.

And in regards to those conditions, do we think the temperatures during the younger dry ice in Britain, do we think it was as cold as it had been in the last glacial maximum or not quite as cold, but still a shock to the system? Perhaps not quite as cold but still a shock to the system. You're looking at a decrease of perhaps four or five degrees centigrade in terms of air temperatures, certainly for the Younger Dryas across Europe. It's not the same globally, so the Younger Dryas is manifested differently in different parts of the world, but certainly that's what we would expect for Northwest Europe.

Mason And is it an alternate name for the Younger Dryas in Britain? Is it the Loch Lomond Stadium or something like that? Do we need to say that name too? Kate It is indeed. We often use local stage names, which are particularly appropriate for Britain. So, if you were to say the Loch Lomond Stadium, people would understand exactly what that was. And that also, it conjures up a very specific set of circumstances.

So, the presence of ice sheets up in Scotland, the kinds of cold climate animals that we've been describing just now. Whereas, obviously, if the younger dryus is manifested differently in different parts of the world, then they would also have their own local stage names as well. Right. Scotland's covered in ice sheets again. Good for the sking in Aviemore, but not much else at this period. I'd like to ask about one more particular type of animal before we move on to the next stage. This was just a name that really caught my eye when doing some research on this topic. It's the Saiga antelope. Danielle, what is this?

Danielle Hicks So Saiga antelope are fantastic animals and they are a small bovid, a small antelope. They live today in the heartlands of dry central and eastern Asia, so particularly populations in Mongolia and Kazakhstan. Until recently, they have been critically endangered, but thank goodness their numbers are now on the rise again. They are very well adapted to living in arid and pretty dusty environments. If you happen to look them up and you see photos of them, you'll see that they have this fantastic nozzle-like nose and they can use it to filter that dry, dusty air, cold air before it gets into the lungs. Although they are essentially Central Asian animals and always have been, in response to this cold and arid pulse that we find in the younger Dryas, they expand their range

at the time. We find them over in Alaska and to the west, we find them over in Somerset. So there are radiocarbon dated remains from Goff's Cave and also from some other cave sites in Cheddar Gorge as well. A fantastic but rare addition to the fauna in Britain at this time. Now, I know that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but is there any evidence at all for humans at this period of time or do we we just not have that surviving? MS No, again, we just don't have the sites. Certainly, at the sites that we've been working on in Ebbogorge, we don't have evidence of artefacts, we don't have evidence of cut-marked remains, and we certainly don't have evidence of people themselves. So again, it's perfectly possible that people were making occasional forays into Britain,

but we think that Britain was largely abandoned during this period. Until, because the Younger Dryas does reach its end, is it right about 11,000 or so years ago as you mentioned? What happens? What happens when this shock to the system, this reversal in temperatures, this cooling time, what happens when that ends? Is it a continuation of the warming again? So, we're back on that warming trajectory. Again, there is rapid warming. The early part of the current interglacial, the Holocene, is even warmer than at the present day. Then

we sort of settle down to a period of relative climatic stability. But yes, the real end of the ice age, you start to see really up in Scotland, you start to see the last of those glaciers, those ice sheets retracting and leaving behind what we call dead ice environments. So for example, lakes, you would have had the ice melting and creating a lot of lakes in areas of deeper topography. You would have had a window of opportunity for animals and people to come back into Britain before sea level rises and cuts us off completely. So remember that land bridge that had existed for pretty much all of the last ice age, that is becoming

smaller and smaller. As that ice across the Northern Hemisphere melts and the water is returned to the ocean, that land bridge becomes more and more compressed and harder and harder to access. People and animals would have come back into Britain very rapidly. We see things like reindeer hanging on for a little while into the early part of the current warm stage, but eventually it becomes too warm and too wooded for them to survive and they go locally extinct. And instead we see a whole suite of fauna that we would regard as native species coming into

Britain in the early part of the warm stage. These are things like aurochs, the ancestor of our domestic cattle. We have things like elk or moose as it's known in North America. Red deer would have been abundant, roe deer, wild boar. These are the major herbivore food stock really for the last hunter-gatherers that we find in Britain, and those are the Mesolithic people. So that's the Mesolithic people, and then you get amazing sites like Starcar, which we've done an episode about in the past, exploring those human people right after the end of

the Ice Age. But it's fascinating, isn't it, Danielle, for the animals involved? I'm guessing it was those who were able to adapt to that change in temperature to the warming period. Those are the animals, as you say, become the most recognisable in the British landscape and for many of them, like red deer, down to the present day. Yes. So some of those species have gone right the way through to the present day. So red deer, roe deer would be a case in point. Others such as the last remaining carnivores, whether they happen to be brown bears, lynx or wolves, we hunted to extinction really sort of from the Middle Ages onwards.

Other things like elk disappear quite early on in the Holocene, again probably hunted to extinction. Some of those smaller species as well, so the Arctic foxes have gone, but instead we have red fox, we have things like wild cat as well. They're all distributed really all over Britain. Things like wild cat, which today survive only up in the Scottish Highlands, their natural habitat, which we can see from the fossil evidence, is actually deciduous woodland. The fossil record can play a really important role here in helping to address modern conservation

issues today by giving more detailed baseline information about where species should be distributed or where they should be reintroduced today. One of the youngest specimens that we have from the Mendip Hills, from the excavations, is a beautiful, complete skeleton of a wildcat. It was found in association with other evidence that indicates warm and wooded conditions. This was really optimal habitat for them. It's such a fascinating journey. Thank you so much for talking us through this. Those 10,000 years ago, it feels like by then it's kind of definitive end of the ice age. If you say the ice caps have receded from Scotland, Britain is now an island again, at least in the story of Britain, is 10,000 a good number to say the ice age is now over? Technically by 11,700.

That's when we would say, yeah, I mean, it depends whether you count in radiocarbon years before the present or some people look at it from a sort of BC or before the common era. So round about that, 11,700 years before the present day, that would be when we consider the ice age to be finished and We've got those warm and wooded conditions and then obviously some spectacular transitions further in the human journey really. The move from hunter-gatherers to settled peoples and agriculture, all of these things then kick off. It's fascinating to think that actually those 15,000 years we've just covered is less time than between the 10,000 BC or 11,700 years ago and today. So we've actually got more time

than between the end of the Ice Age and where we're sitting now recording this interview together. Lastly, Danielle, as you've kind of hinted at there, but I feel it would be nice to do this as a final remark, how important is studying the end of the Ice Age, the paleoecology, looking at the animal remains and the climate and the effect of humans as well? How important is all of that when exploring current issues like climate change today? It's a really nice question to end on because this is one of the things that I think is so important and it's something that we're really trying to push and to work with modern ecologists. I've got a lot of great work that's starting with, for example,

Natural England and other colleagues, particularly around some of these joined up super national nature reserves where there are some really exciting developments that are in play involving perhaps reintroduction of large herbivores to modify the landscape. The disappearance of many species is only just starting to be understood in terms of their legacy. The important things that elk and bison, for example, that they had in terms of opening up the vegetation, in terms of fertilizing the land with their dung, in terms of transporting seeds around, all sorts of things that we have lost in the way of ecological benefits. We are understanding very well now how animals such as beavers, ecosystem engineers, the role that they can play in terms of helping

to control, completely cost-free, flooding episodes by trapping water upstream and away from areas of human settlement. But there's a lot more to be done. And really the fossil record can give a really important insight, working hand in hand with ecologists in terms of understanding the range, the habitats, coexistence of different species and different behaviors in the past. We can provide a more nuanced insight into, for example, things like species distribution models where we think about where animals could and should be distributed, especially in view of climate change in the future. The fossil record can help us make better informed decisions in terms of the conservation of

those species. A really important role to play and some really exciting work to be done in the future. Mason- Absolutely indeed. Well, Danielle, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the work to be done in the future. Toby you enjoy today's episode. As mentioned, if you want to find out what happens right after the end of the Ice Age in Britain, then you can search in the Ancients Archive from an interview we did last year about Starr Carr, this incredible Mesolithic site and one of the earliest sites we know of for humans post-Ice Age living in Britain. Starr Carr in Yorkshire. Search Starr Carr Ancients and you'll find that episode too. With this episode, we also bring to an end

our special Ice Age mini-series this February. I hope you've enjoyed it. Please let us know your thoughts. We love hearing your feedback for episodes like this, for special mini-series episodes like our Ice Age mini-series. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be

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