The Ancients - Ice Age Britain: Finding the First Homo sapiens

Episode Date: February 17, 2024

Roughly 40,000 years ago, Ice Age Britain was undergoing a transformation. The first modern humans, Homo sapiens, were arriving and beginning to settle in the British Isles. Their evolutionary predecessors, the Neanderthals, were on their way to extinction. Until now we have known very little about this period. But that might be about to change with the discovery of a new centre of Stone Age archeology in South West Wales.Wogan Cavern, situated underneath Pembroke Castle, was the ideal place for newly-arrived prehistoric hunter-gatherer communities to dwell and is littered with stone tools, bones and other hallmark remains of ancient human settlement. In this special on-location episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes went to visit the cavern and speak to the archeologists who uncovered it, Dr. Rob Dinnis and Dr. Jennifer French. This episode was produced by Joseph Knight and edited by Aidan LonerganDiscover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial HERE.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Roughly 45,000 years ago, deep in the Stone Age, a major shift was happening in Britain. The first modern humans, Homo sapiens, were arriving. Their predecessors, the Neanderthals, were nearing extinction. It's a really important time in British prehistory, and yet it's one that we know very little about from surviving archaeology. But that might all be about to change because

of an incredible new site in southwest Wales. Directly underneath the heart of Pembroke Castle is a massive cavern. In the castle's medieval heyday, this space was a storage larder. But long before the Middle Ages, when this space was natural, this was an ideal site for prehistoric hunter-gatherer communities living in this area of the world tens of thousands of years ago. And over the summer of 2023, a team of archaeologists led by Dr Rob Dinis and Dr Jennifer French conducted a new, exciting excavation in the cavern, hoping to unearth evidence left behind by some of Britain's first Homo sapiens, and maybe by more archaic humans too.

It's possible that we have even earlier Homo sapiens archaeology, but it could be that we even have Neanderthal archaeology before that too. I wouldn't rule it out. In this special On Location episode, I headed to the excavation to interview Rob and Jenny all about their work so far, and what's still to come. So this is a really new, exciting technique in archaeological science that basically allows us to extract ancient DNA from both humans and animals from soil sediments. There were lots and lots of large herbivores, reindeer, heads of reindeer, but other herbivores like woolly rhinoceros, mammoth and of course the things that then eat them, so hyena and cave lion as well. We have to make sure that we're excavating carefully and we're getting as much information out of the site as we can.

We've either been extraordinarily lucky or this is an extraordinary site and I actually think it's the latter. I really do hope you enjoy. So without further ado, to kick off the episode, here's Rob. Rob, first off, it is so exciting to be here. I mean, what's it like to excavate in a place like this? It's insane. It's brilliant, isn't it? I mean, forget the archaeology for a minute. It is a wonderful, wonderful cave. And actually, what's really nice is it's really, really useful

for undertaking archaeological excavation because we've got a light supply, we've got as much room as we need, and of course, we've got the cafe upstairs as well, so it's perfect. All right, well, set the scene for us then. 30, 30 to 40,000 years ago, what do we think is going on in Britain at that time? So this of course is our primary interest research-wise and this is why this cave has turned out to be so exciting. Around about that time, so maybe pushing back to 40,000 years ago, we know from recent work

on sites in Europe, outside Britain, that actually what you're seeing is you're seeing waves of modern humans come in, Homo sapiens, people like us. And by around about 40,000, they were pretty well established. But the issue we have in Britain is that we really don't understand that period at all because we don't have the sites. They have incredible sites elsewhere in Europe, but we have always suffered with this. It's partly because there weren't so many people who came here. We were right on the fringes because it was an ice age, right on the fringes

of where people lived. But also we had a few sites but they were excavated in the early years of archaeology and so as a result there's only so much we can do with those old collections. What we really needed was a new site and that new site we needed it to contain evidence for these early waves of modern humans which it would seem that's what we needed it to contain evidence for these early waves of modern humans which it would seem that's what we've got. So when did you and the team realize that this cavern was potentially the site of your dreams the site that you guys have been looking for? The core team we've worked together for a long time now and in 2010 our main excavator John he mentioned this cave he'd been to visit and he thought this was a really good cave.

And, you know, he mentioned it every summer when we were working elsewhere. And then eventually in 2014, we came down together and we looked. And we thought, hmm, yeah, there are a few little hints that maybe it hadn't been dug out. Because this is the issue is that the sites we have were largely or completely dug out in the Victorian period or the early 20th century. But this one, it looked like it might not have been. So we put together, we did a lot of research on the archive, we put together a research proposal, got the permissions, and then we came down here. 2021 was the first season. And talk to me about these first seasons excavating here. What did you and the team discover? Well, I mean, the first day we were here was actually quite remarkable because

we'd actually come prepared that we would probably find nothing or rather we would find a cave that has been disturbed. So we actually had permission to dig somewhere else as well just in case. But when we came we decided on our first trench and we scraped back the very, very surface soil. And under that was a calcium carbonate deposit, like a stalagmite floor. And that showed that this hadn't been dug out this was an intact cave and then we went through that stalagmite floor and after maybe 20 centimeters we found not quite an ice age archaeological layer but one that's just after the ice age so

Mesolithic around about 11,000 years ago and just in one square meter we then excavated that and if you include the minuscule bits we actually had 350 bits of flint so it's a rich archaeological layer along with bone and that sort of thing but then of course our primary interest is a bit older than that and underneath that layer we found intact ice age deposits and then over the course of last year so the first year and then last year actually we found that that had archaeological material in as well So we have this really really old Ice Age archaeology And when we take into consideration that you've only excavated such a small part of the cavern, to find Ice Age archaeology so quickly

That must really bode well. It must say that this is a good sign. It's good for a variety of reasons, but you're absolutely right. We've either been extraordinarily lucky, or this is an extraordinary site, and I actually think it's the latter. I don't think we can be that lucky, you know. What we've found is not just archaeology for this period, this period of early Homo sapiens, that we're badly lacking archaeology for that period. What we've also found is it's got multiple periods of occupation, and actually the layers are are separated so we can really see these moments in time going back in the past when people used the cave. And what sorts of artefacts are you looking for for Ice Age archaeology? So of course the main thing we find is stone tools and there

of course the smoking gun that tells us that people were here and that they were doing things and that they were making metals and using metals. We also find animal bone. One of the things with this site is we can use modern methods to analyse that animal bone. So much of the bone we're finding in the Ice Age is actually quite fragmentary. And as a result, it's very difficult to tell what animal it's from. But we can use modern methods now. So, for example, we can use this method to work out the animal just from a fragment of bone. So we know that in these layers where we get stone tools, we've also got a mammoth and reindeer, particularly reindeer actually, which tells us maybe the humans were

leaving it and other ice age animals, wild horse, that sort of thing. So it's really exciting therefore as we come to this year's excavation season here. What ideally are you and the team looking for this year from Wogan Caverns? Okay so what we think we're dealing with is a early Homo sapiens site maybe 35,000 years ago maybe a little bit older but one that's incredibly well preserved one from which we can learn a lot we are confident actually that that's what we're going to have by the end of this season but you never know because we're actually only about one and a bit metres down into the ground. So it's possible that you have older archaeology beneath that too. I mean, it's possible that we have even earlier Homo sapiens archaeology, but it could be that we even have Neanderthal archaeology before that too. I wouldn't rule it out.

Wogan Cavern is such an exciting site. This could well be the site that archaeologists have been dreaming of, one that will finally reveal more information about when and how the first Homo sapiens came to Britain. You'd be forgiven for wanting to excavate lots of trenches, digging deep and finding those artefacts as quickly as possible, but that's not the right approach. Dr Jennifer French and the team are determined to do this excavation properly and that means going slow and steady. Jenny, why is it so important when doing an excavation of a cave to do it so slowly? Well, caves were really important sites in early prehistory. We know there

are hubs of activity for both humans and animals and they're also really excellent spaces in terms ar gyfer y dynion a'r dynion. Ac mae yna hefyd llefyddion gwych o ran adeiladu. Felly, rydym yn dod i ddod o hyd ar lythog, felly argyfwngau archeoleiddio, ond hefyd mae caebau'n arbennig dda ar gyfer adeiladu materion organig. Yn yr un pryd, mae caebau'n systemau cymhleth iawn, gyda hanesau fformio cymhleth iawn.

A rhaid i ni fynd yn ddysgu a'i ddysgu yn ddiogel i ddeall y brosesau fr ffurfio, sut yw'r leiafau seddimentaidd wedi'u ffurfio, a sut mae hynny'n ymwneud â unrhyw un o'r arian archeolegol neu palentolegol sydd yn cael ei chael. Felly mae'n bwysig mynd yn ddysg i ddechrau'r holl brosesau hynny. Ac pan fyddwn yn siarad am safleoedd yng Nghymru sydd ganddo archeoleg gynharachol, fel y gwelwn ni at Wogan Cavern,

which is so rare to find in situ, we have to make sure that we're doing the archaeology justice. We have to make sure that we're excavating carefully and we're getting as much information out of the site as we can. And what do you mean by in situ? What I mean is material that hasn't moved or hasn't moved very much since it was deposited back in prehistory. So here specifically, we're talking about material that hasn't been churned up or moved around the cave by earlier excavators, by those antiquarians who famously liked to come along and dig up British cave sites. So more infamously than famously in those cases, isn't it? So they were the examples of doing an excavation wrong and this is more trying to do it I guess correctly and making sure

that everything is recorded in meticulous detail making sure it's as accurate as possible. I mean I wouldn't perhaps say badly or incorrectly they excavated according to the standards of the time and according to the research questions that they were asking so they wanted to be able to yn ôl y cwestiynau ymchwil y roedden nhw'n eu gofyn. Felly roedden nhw eisiau gallu ddewis pethau'n fawr iawn, er enghraifft. Felly roedden nhw'n chwilio am ddewisiadau diagnostig neu dynion a allai gael eu darparu i brydau arbennig â sicrwydd. Mae hynny'n wych, ac mae'r wybodaeth sydd gennym o'r ysgrifennu hynny yn gallu ddweud rhywfaint am y bywyd, ond mae'n ddim yn llai o ddynion. Felly mae llawer o'r ddau ardal hwnnw, Cavern Cents, yn ddiweddar yn un enghraifft, lle mae llawer o gwestiynau am y

ddwyloedd o gwaith yn y cae, o ran y datglu. Ond ni allwn ateb y cwestiynau hynny oherwydd y gwybodaeth ynghylch lle mae artefactau wedi dod o mewn y system cae wedi gadael nawr. Felly rydym am sicrhau bod gennym y wybodaeth gynharachol hwnnw i bawb sy'n cael ei ddod o fewn yma. Oherwydd i ateb y cwestiynau hynod hwyl, fel pan ddodd Neanderthals neu sut mae'r prosesau o Homo Sapiens cynnig i Brifysgolion, mae angen i ni ddod â llawr ar y pan a ble. Ac mae hwnnw'n y math o wybodaeth sydd angen i ni ddod o hyd i'r pan a phwy. Ac mae hwnnw'n y math o wybodaeth sydd angen i ni ddata cyfranogol dda. Felly er mwyn casglu'r holl data hwnnw, beth sy'n digwydd yn y

hwyr yma? Mae mwy na dim ond digwyddo, ydy'r hyn sy'n digwydd, ydy'r hyn sy'n digwydd? Ie. Felly mae popeth yn dechrau yn y trech. Rydym yn digu'n dda iawn, yn ddifrifol iawn, yn edrych ar newidiadau mewn tegstur a gyd-ddyfodol, yn ogystal â chyfartalion, wrth i ni fynd ymlaen. Gallwch weld ein bod yn ysgrifennu mewn faterion bach iawn ar gyfer ymgyrchu'r math hwnnw o gofal. Mae'r holl beth sy'n cael ei ddod o'i ddodd yn ei ddodd, felly yn ystod ei ddodd, ac rydym yn recordio'r lleoliad o'r holl artefactau sy'n cael eu dod o'i ddodd, yn ogystal â'r gwaith palentologaidd mewn tri dimensiwn,iwn yn defnyddio ein EDM. Felly mae gennym ddata cywir ar leoliad y gwerthfeydd o fewn y trech a mewn y system cae llawer. Unwaith bod popeth wedi cael ei ysgrifennu a'i recordio, mae popeth,

wel, y rhan fwyaf, yn mynd drwyddo i'n sifoedd. Felly mae'r holl ddifrifoedd o'r lefelau uchaf yn mynd drwyddo i un o'n sifoedd dry yno ac yna pan fyddwn ni ar y lefelau mesolyddig a palolyddig, mae'r gwaith yn mynd i'n sif gwyd. Felly gallwn weld beth sydd yno, unrhyw beth a oedd wedi cael ei anodd yn ymgymryd ac yna unwaith mae'r gwaith sif wedi cael ei ddryd, mae gennym resigwyr y gwnaethom eu gweld i edrych ar ffynion microscofic bach, nid microscofic, lle gallwch weld nhw, ffynion bach o microfauna, not microscopic, where you can see them, tiny bits of microfauna, tiny bits of lithic, basically anything that might have been missed at earlier stages of the process. So it's pretty thorough. A very thorough process indeed.

The cavern is filled with archaeologists and students working in different areas, wet sieving, dry sieving, taking measurements, examining finds. But it all starts in the areas, wet sieving, dry sieving, taking measurements, examining finds. But it all starts in the trenches, digging deep through the cavern's many soil layers. Jenny takes me over to one of them. It's quite a small trench, perhaps one metre wide and two metres long, but it's also roughly a metre deep. All right, Jenny, what have we got in front of us here? What is this? Okay, well, this is Trench 5. It's the first trench that we opened at the site and we've been digging it for three years. So what we have here then is a section through the trench. So essentially a kind of timeline of what's been going on in this spot in the cave. Starting

from the youngest at the top to the oldest at the bottom and we're currently about a metre down. So what sorts of layers? So we have almost different layers therefore this is to say this is a chronology that we can see right in front of us. Yeah so I can talk you through it actually. So what was particularly fascinating here is right at the very top we just scraped off literal millimeters of what we call tread, so this kind of clay mud basically and came right down on what you can see here which is a calcium carbonate flowstone

level which once would have been the floor of the cave and we were very excited when we found that because finding that basically told us that we were in an area of the cave that hadn't been excavated before so anything under it would be intact so any archaeology or paleontological remains we found there would be undisturbed. So once we got through that you can see immediately under this level this kind of reddish brownish clay silt across there, two sub-levels of that and in there we found early Holocene or Mesolithic archaeology. So lithics and then animal remains that are indicative of kind of post-glacial

environments. So mesolithic, so this is right after the end of the Ice Age that we're talking about. Warm conditions. After that we came across this level, a scree level full of compact kind of angular limestone glass and that was mostly empty but then it got really interesting because under that, I don't know if you can see it there, with the white pins. Oh yes, yes, I see there. From there until the base of the trench, those are our Pleistocene levels.

So that is where we've been finding Paleolithic archaeology and the remains of Ice Age animals. Just to quickly clarify, whenever we mention the words Paleolithic or Pleistocene here, we're talking more than 11,000 years ago. We're talking about the Ice Age. And what we think we've got at the bottom is potentially two separate Paleolithic levels.

One at the top, which we've called informally the mammoth layer, because we found some mammoth bone in there. And then one at the bottom, which we've been calling informally the reindeer layer, because we found some mammoth bone in there and then one at the bottom which we've been calling informally the reindeer layer because we found some some reindeer remains in there. And of course because the Paleolithic it's such a huge time in human prehistory how do you then almost subdivide these layers of the Paleolithic to learn what's let's say maybe 30,000 years old and what maybe 40,000 years old say? Well we, we work primarily on the technotypology of the lithictals. That's Rob's specialism. We've also got some radiocarbon dates back.

And we look at the types of animals that are there because we find different fauna associated with either kind of the warmer or the colder stages of the Pleistocene. So we can use those as chronological indicators as well. And so what's all of the surrounding DNA analysis that you can also do on the soil here? Yes, so this is a really new exciting technique in archaeological science that basically allows us to extract ancient DNA from both humans and animals from soil sediments. So essentially from microscopic traces of bone and faeces in the soil

that we wouldn't be able to see with the naked eye. So we haven't applied that to the site yet, but we have taken the samples to allow us to do that in the future. And what's particularly exciting about this technique is that they have already, well, it's already been applied at other sites to Pleistocene archaeology, so Neanderthals and Denisovans as well over in Siberia. It's the meticulous nature of this whole excavation isn't it, you're not just finding

those artefacts, it's getting a fuller picture of the ecology, of the whole environment of this cavern deep in the Paleolithic. Yeah absolutely, and that is one thing that's often lacking from a lot of earlier cave excavations. So a lot of British caves were dug out by antiquarians and what's missing from their ysgrifennu cae yn gyntaf. Felly, roedd llawer o caeau Brydeinig wedi'u dynnu allan gan antycwerion ac yr hyn sy'n angen i'w sgriwm o'u sgrifennu yw'r cyd-destun. Roedden nhw'n cadw a chyflawni'r math o artyfiaethau dewis neu gwaith dynol, felly yn y bôn, y rhai sy'n ateb gwestiynau ymchwil eu hunain. Rydyn ni'n gwestiynau ymchwil gwahanol yn y diwedd nawr ac mae'r cyd-destun yn bwysig i ddeall hynny. to understanding those. It's very exciting to see that the team have already reached these Paleolithic levels. And it does bode well for the team have already reached these Paleolithic levels,

and it does bode well for the future that they will uncover even more artifacts, animal bones, stone tools, evidence of burning, and so on. Because this trench is a minuscule fraction of the entire cavern in its size after all, and if this trench is already showing signs of Ice Age activity, there must almost certainly be more still waiting to be unearthed. Evidently, early humans did once use this cavern. So what did the environment surrounding Wogan Cavern look like back in the Ice Age? Why was this cavern, today in western Wales, so appealing to early Homo sapiens and potentially Neanderthals too? So Rob, we're outside Wogan Cavern now

and now we have this huge stone wall in front of us but back in Paleolithic times this was the entrance to the cave. This was the entrance to the cave and it was a big entrance to the cave. So the wall you see here, this was put up at the beginning of the 13th century but prior to that we know from our excavations it will have been an open cave for people to go in and use for a long long time at least back to 40,000 years ago. Well let's say 40,000 years ago you're looking out from that

cave into the area around do we have any idea what the landscape would have looked like? We do and we do in terms of the the type of animals and more generally what the the landscapes would have looked like as you go back in time of course it's similar to this and then you're back into the ice age and that's when things become different so just based on the the evidence that we found we know that that around about that 30 40 000 year period you've got a cold type of landscape and it's actually cold and arid conditions you have um large herbivores we've got lots of reindeer bone we've got a no at the moment no hint of the things that were hunting them but we know from other the moment no hint of the things that were hunting them but we know from other sites that hyena were hunting things like that so you've

got these big ice age beasts but then we've got evidence from the small mammals as well, we've actually got a nice assemblage of lemming from the ice age from here as well so it's a much colder environment than today. No such thing as a silly question, but why caves for these early Homo sapiens in Britain some 40,000 years ago? What was so appealing about a massive cavern like Wogan Cavern? Well, I think that's the key. I think actually that Wogan Cavern is different from the other caves we have because it's a really, really big space. We know from the better archaeology we have elsewhere in Europe that although people didn't routinely live in caves they built structures in the landscape including in the mouths of caves they did actually use those spaces. The other caves we have in Britain as a rule they tend to

be quite small they're the sort of places you might expect people to be for a short amount of time but we know from our excavations that the size of Wogan Cavern has pretty much remained stable for that period right back into the last ice age so it looks like this will have been as it is now a very very useful space a very very usable space and lots of different activities so i think that that this will have been sought out it will have been a very useful cave for them because it's interesting with so many sites we have that tendency to want to have one purpose for what a site was used for but we should kind of step back from that mindset and think that actually a cavern like this could have been a multi-purpose

place for these prehistoric people. It could have been we don't have yet much evidence to say that about the people in the ice age but we already have enough to say that about the people just after the ice age so the people in the Mesolithic. We can see that they're doing different things in the different trenches that we've dug there evidence for a lot of burning in one place and then stone tool manufacturing in another and it's really nice we've got that patterning. You can see that they're doing different things in different places and why not? It's a really really handy space and a useful place to be. And do we have many cave sites from this area of Britain that date to this period that also reveal Ice Age archaeology? We do. We have a few sites. I think that the problem we have is the sites that we have is

they were excavated a long time ago, so the evidence is no longer there and we don't really have a record of the excavations that allows us to analyse it properly. But we do have evidence, and particularly in this part of the world, we do have several caves with evidence for occupation in the last Ice Age. So, of course, just along the coast on the Gower Peninsula, we have the famous Pavelland Cave. And we've actually found some material here that we're confident links to that site as well. So that's quite nice. But more generally in the Ice Age and closer to here, we have a site over there, Priory Farm Cave, and then a site in that direction, Hoyle's Mouth. But unlike those,

even Pavelland, they're smaller caves, so unlike at Wogan Cavern, which is a lot bigger and probably was used in a very different way. And it also begs the question, why is this area of Britain, southern Wales, why is it so rich in Ice Age archaeology, particularly dating to some 35,000 years ago? Well, to start with, it is rich, but it's relative. We know that there weren't actually that many people in Britain overall. So relative to elsewhere in Britain, it is rich, but relative to continental Europe, not so much. But to answer your question, I think there are two reasons. The first is that you have conditions seemingly in southwest England and in southern Wales we know from the the animal bones we find they're actually a bit like further south and

therefore it's a natural place for people who are further south to come to. But the other thing is the Bristol Channel which of course wasn't a sea then there was a river running through them so you've got this big river you have these grasslands in the in the river valley you will have seen lots of herds of animals which of course the hunters will have liked to have seen so that i think is why you originally had people in south wales and in southwest england but actually i think the reason that we still have the archaeology is because when it was then glaciated a bit later on the ice sheets stopped before they got down to south wales and to southwest england and I think that has really helped because it means that our archaeological evidence has survived. And that's

also key to highlight isn't it, even though we have names such as Ice Age, we shouldn't imagine this area of the world covered in ice sheets some 35,000 years ago. No, it's a little bit later was the maximum extent of the last Ice Age but even even then, we now know that the last Ice Age was actually a series of warmer and colder events, many, many of these events. So, yeah, it was complex. Back inside the cabin, in one corner right at the back, Rob, Jenny and the team have set up a finds table

where artefacts discovered in their trenches are assorted and recorded. Just before I leave, Rob takes me over here to show a few of the objects they've discovered so far. Small bones, stone lithic artefacts, some much more minuscule than others, as well as a much more modern looking object that admittedly seems a bit out of place. Rob, feeling very privileged right now, you've brought out a select number of artefacts from this year's excavation. Yep, so the things that obviously we've found are a huge amount of bone and shell and stone tools but I've selected out a few things that I think tell a bit about the story of Wogan Cavern.

The story indeed and the story that lasts over several tens of thousands of years doesn't it, especially if we start with this artefact right on the right here. This doesn't look very prehistoric, I must admit. It very much is not prehistoric. So this is actually a fragment of clay pipe stem. And we think all of the clay pipes we've got so far, we think, date to the 19th century. And this is actually quite nice because we found these in deposits which seem to be jumbled up. And it seems to be a typical sort of spoil deposit from people working previously in the cave. Although most of what we've looked at has actually been intact we

do have this evidence for these early digs and that's really nice because it's always been assumed that there were excavations here but actually when you scratch the surface the record of that is very poor so as part of our work we've actually been able to find what is consistent with them having excavations in the 19th century. You've affirmed a more recent historic suspicion about the cavern. Well therefore let's move into the prehistoric period. What we've got here first of all, these look like bones. Yes, so the next two things are bones.

This one, we're not quite sure how old this is, this is a rib of a very large animal and this is probably no more than a couple of thousand years old. But the reason I'm showing you this is because it's to show you that the bone looks like bone. In terms of its colour, it looks like bone, as you would expect. And it looks like this all the way back to the Mesolithic material that's 11,000 years ago, just after the Ice Age. It generally speaking looks like you would imagine bone to look. But then when you go back into the Ice Age it looks very very different. So this is a piece that's come out today and we know the layer that it's in, or we think we know the layer that it's in, is at least 35,000

years old, so well back into the last Ice Age. And you can see it's totally different. It's very very dark in colour. This is actually quite a big piece. Most of the time we find small fragments of bone in these layers. But that's OK because we can do analysis on them and work out what animal they're from anyway by analysing the collagen in them, which we have collagen surviving, which is great. So it looks very, very different. And so when you find bone like that, you're happy you're in the Ice Age. In the Ice Age and 35,000 years ago. And then start piecing together once again more of a picture of the ecosystem of the fauna that were living in this area of the world back then. Exactly this layer that this bone was from we have several determinations of species and so far everything seems to be consistent with a reindeer assemblage.

So it looks like it's lots of bones of reindeer. Yeah, so lots of animal bone that you found but you've also found these lithics that come in all shapes and sizes. First off, you've got this quite pointy one here. Now what do we think this is? So this is from a layer that we are confident is at least 30,000 years old, and this seems to be an actual tool. It's a blade that's been shaped at the end, you see it's shaped to a pointy end. Yes, a bit pointy there, yes. So this we would call a piercer, and this was probably used to sort of pierce hides and that sort of thing as a tool but of course we don't really know how they're

used for unless you do analysis of the wear traces on them and maybe even the residues remaining on them and at British sites we can't do that apart from this one of course because in this material future we can actually look at that sort of thing under the microscopes and try and work out exactly what we've been doing with these tools. So that would be the next step for something like this in the analysis stage would it be? Yes. Well going on from something a bit bigger like that which looks like as you say a stone tool of some sort, I'm so intrigued by these small ones because I know you've got a particular

fascination with them. They look so small and easy to miss but you found them and they do tell an incredible story. I must confess I didn't find them. My very talented excavators found them. You probably just found them. Yes, the team found them. But no, you're absolutely right and also you should imagine if these things are covered in clay, incredibly hard to pick out and yet the excavators noticed them. Yes, so these are very, very small pieces and these are not tools. These are small flakes from either the creation of tools or perhaps more likely the rejuvenation of tools, sort of

resharpening of tools. And what I really like about these is it tells us about the archaeological layer. So we know that in the archaeological layer, we don't just have evidence for using tools, we have evidence for working or reworking these tools which is wonderful absolutely wonderful for me I love the fact that once you start to use this you can piece together what people were doing in very specific terms how were they making their stone tool why were they making the stone tool precisely the things that maybe as an individual they do or as a group they do. And that's when you really, really get an insight into the life of, in this case,

someone who was in here 35,000 years ago. These really small flakes, minuscule, so easy to miss, and certainly not the most eye-catching of archaeological finds for you and I, well, they are deceptively significant. Because they have revealed some really interesting information about another really important cave site for early Homo sapiens, also situated in southern Wales. Of course, this is Wogan Cavern,

but there's another famous site along the coast in Wales called Pavilland. And Pavilland is a very, very famous site and most famous for its burial. It has a paleolithic burial from the last ice age and that burial was found in 1823 a long time ago and we don't really know much about that but the majority of the stone tools from that other site were actually found later in 1912 and when the excavators were there they said there's no organization to the stone tools and they simply removed them and now they're basically one assemblage and it makes studying it very difficult because you don't know whether

those stone tools all belong to the same period you don't know which ones belong with which and and not with others and of course the fundamental question we don't know whether they belong with the red lady burial we don't know whether it was the red lady and the red lady's kin who made these stone tools so the reason for me selecting these out is because these confirm something we recognized very early on at Wogan Cavern which is the material that we have from our Ice Age deposits here is very very similar to the material from Pavaland Cave except of course for us we have really good archaeological context. We know exactly where each of our stone tools has come

from. So these two different materials match materials used at Pavelland. And actually, further than that, we have some little technological behaviours that match Pavelland as well. So it looks like this site here, as well as tellings about this site, will actually then be able to tell us much more about Pavelland as well. It's a fascinating example, isn't it, of how small, seemingly insignificant-looking artefacts can potentially answer great archaeological mysteries, in this case, those artefacts at Pavelland Cave. Absolutely. That's absolutely the case.

And this is why it's so important to have a site like this where we use modern methods and we have a really, really good quality archaeology so that we can address those new questions. I really enjoyed my time down at Wogan Cavern over the summer. Not only is the location absolutely stunning, but what's so admirable is the meticulous attention to detail by the whole team there. The trenches are pretty small, and yet the artefacts that they have already uncovered are showing the great potential of Wogan Cavern for years to come. Could this be the site that archaeologists have been dreaming of? Finally, a site which might reveal more about that enigmatic period in Britain's prehistory,

more than 40,000 years ago, when we start to see Homo sapiens arriving here. It really does bode well for the future. And this is just the beginning. We're going to be following Rob, Jenny, and their team's work over the following months and years. I really can't wait. More Ice Age archaeology coming your way in the future. So I really do hope you enjoy today's very special On Location episode. Don't worry, we've got more of these

on-the-scene episodes coming your way very soon, so stay tuned for those. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.