The Ancients - Jersey: Ice Age Island

Episode Date: July 16, 2023

The largest of the Channel Islands, when you think of Jersey, it's doubtful that Neanderthals, Woolly Mammoths, and Woolly Rhinoceroses come to mind. But thanks to 20th-century excavations and advancing science in the modern age, we now know that Jersey was one of the largest sites of Neanderthal occupation in Northwestern Europe. With over 200,000 stone tools discovered and skeletal evidence of both Neanderthals and Mega Fauna, it was an island where many coexisted. But how were these incredible items found, and how did Nazi Occupation nearly prevent these brilliant discoveries?In this episode, Tristan welcomes Dr. Matt Pope, the leader of excavations at the Neanderthal site of La Cotte de St Brelade in Jersey, to talk about his team's work and excavations. Looking at how sea levels changed over time, the discovery of Bone Heaps, and Neanderthal migrations, what was Jersey like in the Ice Age, and what remnants of the past can we still see on the island's surface today?Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.For more Ancient's content, subscribe to our Ancient's newsletter 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. It's The Entrance on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, where we're talking about an island that is revealing so much information

about Neanderthals in Northwest Europe hundreds of thousands of years ago. I'm talking about Jersey, because in Jersey, archaeologists to this day are conducting excavations at various sites and uncovering more really exciting archaeology that is highlighting a big neanderthal presence here more than a hundred thousand years ago and indeed over many different generations sites were used and then reused for different purposes and the archaeology is showing that. To explain all about Jersey's amazing Ice Age archaeology, well I was delighted to head down to Sussex a few weeks back to interview Dr Matt Pope from UCL's Institute of

Archaeology. Matt, he is part of the team that is currently excavating one of the jewels in the crown of Jersey's Ice Age archaeology, the site of La Cote de Saint-Roulade. Well, what is that site? Well, you're going to hear all in today's episode. I really do hope you enjoy. And here's Matt. Matt, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast. It's wonderful to have you here. Yeah, and we're doing it in person too so absolutely the best of all options and we're doing it in your little shed too. Got all your work all around us early human stuff and

your work recently has been focused on the island of Jersey and this is in many ways an ice age island. Yeah it's an island at the moment you know we're just leaving the ice age really if we're going into the Anthropocene then we're leaving leaving an era, the Pleistocene, which is the Ice Age, a period where the Earth has been getting cooler, sea levels changing all the time, a place like Jersey occasionally becoming an island. It is a point in the landscape at all times which is distinctive, which is contained, which has unique resources, which has unique topography and so what a great unit to study when we're looking at early prehistory. And particularly

focusing on Neanderthals, I can't think of many other places in northwest Europe that you have such an incredible density of Neanderthal sites and also incredible visual remains of the Neanderthals too. Yeah, it's a unique site in the region of northwestern Europe for a number of reasons. There are other incredible sites telling us bits of the stories of Neanderthal people preserving maybe 5, 10, 20,000 years of Neanderthal history. 10, 20,000 years of Neanderthal history. But it really is nothing like it in this region to have an entire span of maybe up to 200,000 years of time preserved in a headland that's 50 meters by 60 meters in size. And it's a very dramatic point in the landscape as well. If you go and you see it, even today on your own senses, the scale of it, the size of it, the right angles of the granite, it has a really strong power over the imagination. And it was obviously bringing back Neanderthal people again and again over a huge span of time through lots and lots of different environmental changes, lots of changes in sea level. And that's why we end up with such a great record in one

place. And you mentioned 200,000 years. So when are we talking with these 200,000 years? So we're talking, and of course, we work within a system of global climatic change, cold periods, which can last, you you know as much as 60 70 000 years where you're getting advance of the ice sheets we generally call those glaciers and then shorter periods of maybe 10 15 maximum 20 000 years when temperatures are warmer and sea levels are higher we're in what we call marine isotope stage one right now this is a warm period sea level is high we're going back to marine isotope stage seven maybe marine isotope stage eight this marine isotope stage seven is a warm period and the sea level is high about 220,000 years ago. Right. And when we're talking about Neanderthals at that time,

if it's covering some 200,000 years, I'm guessing there are glacial periods in that time. So when we're envisaging Neanderthal occupation of Jersey, is it not one linear straight line? Do we think that they're there, then they leave, then they go back, then they leave? And is that what we're kind of thinking? Yeah, it's absolutely not a linear occupation. We've got over 13 different occupation levels at Lakot. And some of them are in warm stages,

where the sea level is high, and others go into cold stages. And some of the levels, it's so cold, no one is here at all it's so cold no one is anywhere in northwest europe you might have arctic fox around you might have arctic hair that's about it so we know this is a site that gets completely depopulated in fact the entire region gets depopulated so then when above these cold stages we find more occupation of neanderthal people we know people have come back in they've moved back into the landscape and they found Lakot again and they re-establish occupation there. Now we've got at least four or five hiatuses where no one is there at Lakot so you've got like a repeating experiment.

Let's see what the Neanderthal people do now they come back and rediscover this site, which is really exciting. Most of the time they do remarkably similar things. It's not radical changes, but incrementally these changes build up over time. And we need to think of each population as being a separate culture, a separate population, maybe with some genetic affinity to whoever came before but actually re-establishing, working out the logic of the landscape, working out the logic of the site and doing their thing. Logic of the landscape, logic of the site. You mentioned Le Cot, we're going to get there very, very soon but first of all this seems important to really stress. Jersey at that

time, today we think of it as an island, big block of sea between that and mainland France and mainland Britain. I'm guessing it wasn't an island back in Neanderthal times? No, we think it finally became an island around 120,000 years ago. That's during a warm period, MIS 5, when sea level is high and whatever permanent land bridge with continental France existed, it was cut off at that point. Prior to that, it was a peninsula. It was a peninsula of France extending out from Normandy into the English Channel. On one side the River A and on the other side the River Seine. So at that point, Jersey is high ground, but high ground at the end of a peninsula.

Right. So already you're starting to get an idea of its strategic value, aren't you, for anyone looking at that site more than 100,000 years ago. And therefore, let's delve into Lacot. Matt, what is Lacot? Lacot de Saint-Brelade is a headland on the southwest coast of Jersey. It is a granite headland, which means it's incredibly resistant to erosion. And that's important because it means it stayed put. You know, in the soft coastlines of where I live, Sussex, up this end of the English Channel, the chalk just gets washed away by every high sea level. That stayed but the sea has pounded it if you look out to the southwest from jersey it's a straight line to north carolina a huge fetch across the atlantic

it gets big swells it gets big storms and so the granite headland has been pounded and over hundreds of thousands of years maybe initiating over a million years ago a ravine system has been eroded out of this headland initially these would have been sea caves and the sea caves would have collapsed and we just have one remaining great big granite arch that looks like a flying buttress of a cathedral and that's all that remains of the cave system but actually for most of the more recent history the last couple of hundred thousand years very little of it has been a cave and most of it has been an open ravine. The granite is straight sided and within that granite system, the sea gets in every time there is a high sea level during warm periods and erodes out all the sediment and erodes back into the granite. And then during the cold periods where the sea level is lower, it becomes huge receptacle what we call a capture point for sediment to accumulate some of that sediment

is eroding off the edges of the granite cliffs but the exciting thing for us is when things get really cold and the sea level is really low and gets exposed you get prevailing northerly winds whipping up fine-grained sediment off the exposed landscape of Britain and Northern Europe and Doggerland, blowing it up into the air, and it falls down as dust that we call lus. It's just fine, dusty, dusty sediment. Now, in parts of the world, this can be tens of meters thick. In Eastern Europe, it can be easily in excess tens of meters thick in eastern europe it can be you know easily in

excess of 20 meters thick in jersey it's five meters thick and it preserves all of the different warm periods and cold periods and it's going in jersey is granite and granite gives rise to acidic sediments which dissolve rock but the lurse is calcareous and that means it can preserve bone so where we get the lururse we get bone preserved. So when did people start clocking on? Did they start realising that hang on we've got a really important prehistoric site right here? Well it's important to like contextualise that with when did science realise we had prehistoric artefacts and you know the plenty of indications before but the ground zero

for that discovery is 1859 and joseph presswitch and john evans going and seeing bush of the perth finds in northern france 1859 same year that darwin's origin of species is published massive paradigm shift once stone artifacts have been recognised as having antiquity and belonging to extinct forms of humans, the scientific community, Europe and further afield, starts looking for these artefacts. Now we know two years after that, two 16 year old boys, Samuel Dancaster and Joseph Sinao, two Jersey boys, discovered at another cave called Le Cote-a-La-Cheve on the north of the island, flint artefacts. They didn't recognise them as artefacts. They recognised there was flint there. And flint doesn't belong in Jersey. The nearest flint is either found on the seabed or it's found

in France. Obviously, it made a bit of an impression. But by the time they became men and grown-ups of course the scientific community knew that these flint artifacts had significance and Samuel Dancaster was reminded of what they'd found at Lechevre when he was exploring Le Cot de Saint-Brelade in 1881 and discovered stone artifacts eroding out there. At that point in time the entire ravine system was full up with sediment and these artifacts were just eroding out. So that was the point of discovery but of course in that discovery they had the realization what they were seeing at Lechevre 20 years before was also artifacts. So in some ways two Neanderthal cave sites were discovered on the same day in 1881, that realisation.

And then over the course of the 20th century and early 21st century more and more archaeological work I'm guessing occurred at the site again and again and again revealing more of this site's importance for ultimately what we now know as the Neanderthals. Yeah it's a huge site and it's been excavated for a long period of time. Yeah, excavations in the 1910s, the 1930s, and then big excavations after the war by a Jesuit father called Christian Bordeaux, and then Charles McBurney, Professor McBurney of Cambridge, a big season campaign of excavations from 1961 to 1978. A few little investigations in 1982 by Paul Callow and then nothing until 2010.

And we start in 2010. But it's that realization that we are just the latest chapter in this story that goes back to 1881. These groups of researchers who are coming in different ways and different times, each telling their bit of the story with the techniques that they have, with the resources they have. We are not going to finish this job. But I think we have the very conscious realisation there will be others coming after us. This will continue on. You could continue digging this site for another couple of hundred years. The reason I wanted to cover all of that, first of all, was all about the original, almost interpretation of what Lacot was because what was this original interpretation pre-2010 as to what this site was what it was used for by these Neanderthals?

Well of course that changed a little bit through the 20th century but if we look at the first serious campaign carried out by a learned society that's based in Jersey 150 years ago. It was formed in 1873. They carried out what they considered to be scientific excavations at the time. They were using quarrymen to remove the first sediment. And I mentioned the arch that now sits as this big exposed structure. But at that point, the arch was completely full of sediment. At that point, the interpretation was quite full of sediment. At that point the interpretation was quite simple. They thought they had a cave and they thought that in the cave when they came across combusted material, charcoal and burnt bone with stone artifacts they had the

habitation site of what they would have called back then prehistoric man. They then in 2010 found teeth, 13 teeth in one little area and those teeth were taken to London and they were looked at in London by Arthur Keith and others, the same little scientific group that at the same time were about to be looking at the Piltdown material. So you know there's a lot of crossover there and it's an important story because Jersey has these scientific networks with France and Britain. And it was clearly identified as these teeth are having Neanderthal affinities at that point in time. So Neanderthal anatomical remains were well studied and been known for, you know, 50 years or more at that point in time. So it's quite clear the distinctive roots of these teeth looked Neanderthal. In fact, or more at that point in time. So it's quite clear the distinctive roots of these teeth looked Neanderthal. In fact, it was at that moment that they suggested giving the name

Torodontism to the root structure, these big, chunky, fused roots. So the LeCotte teeth played a part in describing part of the anatomy of Neanderthal people. So at that point, it was clear Neanderthal people were living there, they were making fires, there were two occupation levels. It was considered to be relatively simple. It was a cave site and maybe they were burying their dead there as well. If we move forward later in time the full size of the site becomes apparent. The fact that it isn't just under the arch, the rest of the ravine system has archaeology. In fact, under the arch itself, it goes down another 10 meters. And the key moment

for us really is 1939 and a geologist called Frederick Zeuner, who was effectively a refugee from Germany. He left Germany and he got refuge within the scientific community in London and Britain and he was studying sea level change and Le Cot was a great place to go there. They had beach material, there's raised beaches in Jersey. He spent a day just digging a couple of test pits in one corner of the site whilst the societe were digging in another part and he said you know you've got a lower level here and it's also got archaeology in and when they looked at it the artifacts were different of a different character and they realized there was an entire different suite of deposits they were about to dig it and then the following year

the Germans invaded and of course Jersey has this occupation by the Nazis and absolutely stops any research happening at all by By the time the islands are liberated, two of the three main leaders of the original excavations are sadly dead and the excavations continue on in that place that Frederick Zoiner pointed them to go. And that's where the story of the late 20th century and Charles McBurney's excavations begin and we find an older set of deposits deeper in time that changes our understanding of how the site was used. And what is that new understanding? Is this when we do get to the game driving theory? Yeah so the game drive is definitely part of that. This is where we get

into a set of older deposits. The little cave occupation that they discovered in 1911 probably dates to the last maybe 20 or 30,000 years of Neanderthal time on this planet so maybe somewhere from 70 80,000 years ago through to 40,000 years ago these older deposits are older than 120,000 so it's an entire different cold stage it's an entire different world in terms of Neanderthal evolution. And what you have there is 10 further occupation levels with some hiatuses. Most of the time, it's just mass occupation, mass discard of artifacts. Maybe up to 40,000 were found in the later deposits. It's over 100,000 artifacts in this, just a mass.

And amongst it, two layers, maybe three, but it didn't preserve very well, but definitely two layers in which large heaps of mammoth and woolly rhinoceros bone were found. But it's important before we talk about the bone heaps that they are only two of eight to ten different levels. So they are particular behaviours that occur at two separate points in time where bone is accumulated. So is that something also very important to stress with Lacoste's site, that almost giving it one function over these many, many, well, more than 100,000 years of prehistory, is incorrect because you have all of those different occupational layers and so at different times this place that people are coming back to again and again and again could be used for different purposes absolutely and that is the way you conceptually have to

think about it you have to think about it as a whole series of stacked if you like sites the term site is quite problematic anyway but occupation episodes periods of settlement across a very big time span with gaps in between every one of a slightly different character you can trace trends through it you can trace you know long-term changes over time but we have to first deal with each layer each geological unit separate point in time separate population separate series of functions and then tell the story by stacking those one on the other it's the same for many paleolithic sites especially where they occur in capture points like caves you can point to other sites like in china's acudienne or in south of france arago the incredible complex at atapuerca. All of the different capture points and all of the

different levels are each an individual site. It's all or nothing sometimes in the Paleolithic. You can look for ages and not find anything in a landscape but then you find one of these capture points and it's all there. I'm James Patton Rogers, a war historian, advisor to the UN and NATO, and host of the Warfare podcast from History Hit. Join me twice a week, every week, as we look at the conflicts that have defined our past and the ones shaping our future. We talk to award-winning journalists. ISIS, this peculiar strain that we all came to know very well

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were immediately murdered. Auschwitz combined the functions of death camp and concentration camp and slave labour. Join us on the Warfare podcast from History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. So let's delve into the type of artefacts that we've found, that you and your team, not we, that you and your team and everyone has found, I have absolutely no role in this whatsoever. But if we go back to the beginning of those 200,000 years of Neanderthal occupation, what are some of the earliest artefacts that you've been able to date that seem to come from this earliest time? So it's important to always think

when you're thinking about the artefacts to think about the landscape and think about the context. And what we know at the beginning of the landscape and think about the context. What we know at the beginning of the sequence is it's relatively warm, the sea isn't particularly far away from the sequence at the time, and we can imagine quite a forested sort of environment. Sea level is low and Lakot is sitting there on the edge of rolling plains and river valleys. At the bottom, in the earlier sequences, we find abundant artefacts dominated by flint. Flint is this incredible resource that's very abundant in places where there's chalk and calcareous rocks and the Cretaceous period. But actually

out there in the western approaches of the English Channel, where the coast of Normandy and the coast of Brittany is largely metamorphic and igneous rocks, there's not much flint. So where's the flint coming from? Well, it's probably coming from the beds of rivers that are flowing out from France that can be accessed, and it's being brought to the site. There might be an outcrop near to Guernsey as well that maybe appears during periods of low sea level. So they're bringing in abundant flint into the site and they're making tools for processing organic material. That's all we can say. They're bringing in lots of flint and they're making tools that are notched to create little concave sort of scraping edges and tools we call denticulates, which, you know, have lots and lots of these

little notches on their edge. Brilliant for shredding, maybe plant resources, brilliant for maybe taking meat off the bones of animals. So they're bringing resources there and they're processing with these flint tools. And of course, Neanderthal people, as we know from other sites where you're getting rare glimpses of the preservation, would have had a toolkit that extended into all sorts of organic materials. The clothing they would have been wearing, containers they probably would have been carrying things in, spear shafts made out of wood. None of that survives at most archaeological sites.

Stone artefacts are so incredibly durable, we have to see all these processes through the lens of the stone artefacts themselves. We have to mine each of those artefacts as a bit of data in itself, what it can tell us about technology, what it can tell us about activities like subsistence. And what it tells us is the site is a place not at the beginning for primary butchery, there's not lots lots of knives there's lots of processing tools so they're either bringing in bits of carcasses to to remove the last bits of meat and do things like extract marrow almost certainly doing that but also probably bringing in other organic material and they're doing this in a relatively warm benign environment neanderthal people in fully temperate conditions getting access to great flint they seem in complete command of their environment so that's how the story begins but this is an interglacial long time ago and then of course the climate begins to deteriorate sea level gets even lower as the planet becomes colder and the landscape becomes more open.

And at that point, we start to see some changes in the stone artefacts. OK, therefore, you've given us the teaser there, Matt. So I've got to ask, therefore, what are these other artefacts that we now start to see in the archaeological record? Well, as it starts to get colder, a couple of things happen. You know, in some ways, as the sea level gets down, they've got more access to landscape and more access to raw material but there isn't much more flint out there to be discovered. But so as time goes on we find other raw materials coming in. So they're making tools on other good pieces of stone other than flint and they're bringing them all in from from the landscape and we start to see those notches and inticulates move over to lots more scrapers.

Now these are really chunky flakes with specially prepared edges that aren't particularly sharp but they have very smooth edges and they're quite steeply backed so they're great for processing a material very efficiently without damaging it. Now we haven't got use where from these tools they've been too stained by the sediment to give us a really clear indication what they're being used for. Our assumption is there's a lot of things like processing hides and skins going on which is a bit of a change in emphasis from maybe processing vegetable remains, processing plant foods, lots of hide preparation. We also start

to get some large cutting tools coming in. Now, large cutting tools is our kind of a technical term for something we colloquially call hand axes. These are bifacially worked tools that sit in the hand and they're very good at cutting. They are knives. Yeah, that's what a cutting tool is. It's strange that we don't see them at all in the earlier levels than probably in their toolkit. They're probably capable of making them, but the people who are coming later are making them. So we see a lot of primary evidence for primary processing and cutting of meat continuing. At this point, when things start getting really cold, that the occupations start becoming a bit more

sporadic. There's points where it gets so cold they're leaving and then they come back. So it's within two of these levels where we find big accumulations of bone. Bone is there all the time but we find two levels where we have large big heaps of bone forming alongside the tool kit that in the first bone heap has lots of really small cutting tools made on tiny flakes and in the upper bone heap has a lot more kind of imported lovely finished tools that are coming in probably at a distance from where they have access to flint sources so they're using the site in a very particular way in these two places and over the years there's been discussions about what those bone heaps mean.

They're very provocative. They require an explanation. And at the moment, I don't think we've got agreement on that. Well, these bones, you see these bone heaps, they're always bones, but you have these massive bone heaps at those times. To what creatures do these bones belong to? So yeah, in the two bone heaps, the predominant animal in both bone heaps is woolly mammoth, so Mammuthus primigenius. And alongside it, there is also

the bones of woolly rhinoceros as well. There's a little bit of horse, there's a little bit of bear, there's a little bit of arctic fox, but this is incidental. The main bulk of this is woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros so megafauna extinct megafauna large bone elements in the lower bone heap lots of mammoth skulls nine mammoth skulls make its way into to the bone heaps the palvices of mammoths and their tusks mammoth ribs in the upper bone heap less skullss, but we've got plenty of palvuses, lots of shoulder blades. And on the top of the upper bone heap, three woolly rhinoceros skulls appear to have been placed. So these are big bone elements. The mammoth themselves are relatively

small, not standing much more than two meters at head height. That's's the that's the adult so there's a reason why they're probably becoming smaller maybe it's resources maybe it's uh over predation maybe it's being on an island but still notwithstanding these would have been extremely distinctive and impressive sculptures made out of the bone of megafauna so that's interesting so it is not just the discarded remains of a mammoth once they've been done with the butchering there's careful almost crafting of those skulls afterwards so is maybe this is too much of a stretch but if it's crafting do they almost see this as a some kind of artwork almost could that potentially be a reason artwork it's a stretch but the fact that the piling up of these bone elements appears to be very careful appears to

be very structured means that we can't see them as just piles of refuse something else is going on there now to tell this story we need to go back to the original excavations that were carried out in well it was the 60s to 70s campaign, but the main focus being the 70s. And under Charles McBurney, Kate Scott, a brilliant, amazing faunal specialist we're still lucky enough to work with today. As a faunal specialist, she took control of the recording of these bone heaps, the lifting. I said the lowest preserves bone, it doesn't preserve it brilliantly, so every single bone needed to be jacketed in plaster of Paris and lifted. So she

never got to see the bone heaps in their entirety. It wasn't as if you could just dust off this Lurse and leave behind the gleaming parts. Everything needed to be recorded. The enormity of them, the structure of them, revealed itself in post-ex excavation. Kate picked up some really interesting things about the way the bone heaps were formed. So if we think of the lower bone heap from a layer we call unit A, it was dominated by skulls, far more mammoth skulls than you got in the upper bone heap. The skull seemed to be placed on the outside of the heap. In one case, two ribs had been placed upright alongside the skull, resting against the skull. So you can imagine mammoth skull on the ground, two big mammoth ribs sticking up to the sky.

Similar placement of tusks. And one crazy bit where a mammoth skull had already been sort of prepared maybe to remove its brain to eat by having the top removed off placed on the ground and then a rib driven through the skull into the ground below so sort of being anchored by this skull so if you imagine that if the thing had just been finished and you're looking at it You're seeing a big pile of bone But lots of strange structuring going on and lots of elements pointing towards the sky in the upper bone heap She found less than the mammoth skulls less of the rib placements But in one place lots and lots of woolly rhino shoulder blades stacked on top of each other crossways Creating this pile of shoulder blades and then of course the three woolly mammoth skulls on the top of each other crossways creating this pile of shoulder blades and then of course the three woolly mammoth skulls on the top of the bone pile so her

interpretation and it's a really good interpretation is that these represent two episodes in which neanderthal people were working cooperatively and driving herds of mammoth off the cliffs to their death in the ravine. The woolly rhinoceroses maybe got caught up in the stampede that would have happened. And then when these animals die, they're butchered, they're extensively processed, and then the bone elements are stacked. and that structuring within her hypothesis just takes place as they're butchering as they're piling this material up there's really good reasons why we should take kate's hypothesis very seriously first of all all those skulls are there now normally when people are bringing back meat to a home base we imagine that lecote is functioning

pretty much as a home base at least for some of the year you bring back what you can carry you bring back the main meat bearing parts of the animal or you just bring back the meat you're not carrying mammoth skulls any great big distance and also things like the vertebrae are there you know again you see these strip the meat off the vertebrae you don't need to bring it back so it looks a prime, what we call a primary butchery signature. They're butchering where they killed it. And similar to a degree for the upper bone heap. Where we looking at it afresh, what sort of 30 years later, you know, put forward another hypothesis.

We raised the following questions. First of all, the headland is not great for a stampede. It's not just a flat plateau. It's got little ravines within it and it's got big rocky outcrop just before the main plunge that would split a herd. But anyway, maybe the herd did split and went to its death. It's not a big change. Secondly, within these two levels, there aren't the big, large cutting tools in any kind of number that we would expect that you would need to, say, butcher 11 mammoth. So if you've got 11 mammoth there, why are you butchering them down to such an extensive forensic level that you're removing every bit of meat pretty much and smashing open long bones together at the marrow? You know, Neanderthal groups we envisage

of being sort of extended family size maybe 40 or 50 individuals so you know 11 mammoth is a lot of meat to extensively process and we also see that the landscape immediately around it is very very good for hunting so we just proposed an alternative hypothesis we've got no way of knowing whether we're right or kate's wrong it's just alternative. That in fact, what we have here is accumulations of bones that occurred over time from multiple hunting episodes in the relatively near vicinity of the cave being brought back in. And gradually, over time, these bone heaps being made. Myself and Clive Gamble recently writing on this, think about it and describe it, you know, as kind of a collective project, something that a group is engaging in. There's rules, there's kind of grammar there.

There's you're leaving behind something that's kind of monumental and arresting. But there's not necessarily a reason for it. You know, there doesn't necessarily need to be ritualization or particularly formalised symbolics going on here. We don't need to call it art. But these are humans leaving behind a very, very arresting structure in their landscape. It's fascinating to picture Lakot as potentially being this Neanderthal home base, isn't it? And if it is that, as you said, there's the theory that you and your team have proposed, and also this other theory, which there's very credible

reasoning behind both. If it is some sort of home base with people coming there over many, many generations of Neanderthal groups, what other sorts of artefacts do we find? My mind is instantly thinking fire, fire making. Do you have any evidence of like burnt ground that might suggest deliberate fire of a potential hearth again and again and again? That's the thing about the levels where there is burning. The two bone heap layers have very little evidence for burning at all. So at the points they're forming there doesn't seem to be much burning going on in that part of the cave at all, which again suggests something strange. But most of the other levels have abundant evidence for burning not as discrete hearths but as entire

spreads of burnt charcoal but mainly burnt bone so for these levels temperatures cold there's not much wood in the landscape what are they burning they're burning bone now if you're going to be burning bone you've got to be collecting it it's not just going to be what you're consuming that's not going to be enough as a fuel stockpile so we think they must be bringing bone in as a fuel and if the landscape around there is being used regularly for hunting you can imagine what you leave from a mammoth carcass there's going to be a lot, but over a few months or a year, scavengers take everything else, eventually going to strip it, and that landscape is going to

have these shipwrecks of mammoth, which are being pretty stripped, and then you can take what's left back, break it up, and burn it. So you end up with layers there that just look like cat litter, and that cat litter is combusted bone, huge amounts of it. So much so that it's forming the very geological deposit the artifacts are preserved in. So the fact we're not getting discrete halves is probably down to one or two things. Either the cold temperature conditions, which are creating freezing and thawing in the sediments, are kind of dispersing them, or they're kind of dispersing their own halves and disturbing their own halves themselves because of the abundance.

But it would create a great, well-drained substrate to live on, all this burnt bone. Absolutely. I could ask so many questions, but we'll keep moving on. If we go to, let's say, the later Neanderthals at this site, so let's say roughly within the last 100,000 years, what sorts of artefacts are we finding from these later occupational layers? And is there much difference between the earlier occupational layers? The differences are not hugely remarkable. They're not a leap in terms of technology. We're still dealing with what we call a basic middle Paleolithic toolkit.

So we are seeing everything made at that point on cores, which have been carefully prepared to remove these blanks that we went through a technique we call Levaloir technique, where you remove a blank of a predetermined size and shape so at that point they have a very sophisticated way of working the cores to produce products that are very very useful but what we do see in the later deposits is far more use of that technique and far more I said originally flint was kind of declining through the older deposits well flint comes back with a bang they're getting access to good quality flint they kind of declining through the older deposits well flint comes back with a bang they're getting access to good quality flint they're bringing it in in large amounts they're making a range of processing tools the scrapers the denticulates and the notches and they are making projectile points as well we see clear projectile points so they're making using the levawar technique pointed tips that they could halved and use as spears now we know from normandy and from

brittany there's caves and and other sites at the same age with very similar technology so we know this technology is being shared within the entire region but But Le Cot is pulling them back. We've got at least two episodes there in the later period. We don't know their dates yet, but we're pretty sure one is less than 47,000 years ago. So we're getting to the end of when Neanderthal people are on the planet. What we don't see is any innovation to what we call initial upper Paleolithic deposits. We're not finding small backed bladelets, we're not finding composite toolkits where you might make an armature using lots of different flint elements. It's really classic middle Paleolithic archaeology. There's a little link, you know, these populations are separated in time by tens of thousands of years,

link you know these populations are separated in time by tens of thousands of years but at lecote because they are on the edge of where they can get access to good flint their stuff imported they make use of local raw materials but they've got a trick and this is a trick about recycling flakes taking the little bits of discarded waste material that on another site might not be used at all and using them as little cutting tools and taking resharpening flakes off the edge to make that little flake that you're holding even sharper. Now you don't really find that in most of middle paleolithic Europe. You do find it at Le Cot and you find it again and again as they almost rediscover the same recycling tips to extend their range, extend the use of flint. It's a constant preoccupation to them. How can we keep reusing

these tools? The great wealth and diversity of artifacts that you've discovered so far at Le Cotte, it is such an extraordinary site. It's almost like the jewel in the crown of Neanderthal archaeology in Jersey, in Northwest Europe. I mean, how many artifacts have been discovered so far and how much is there still to do? Yeah, the McBurney excavations found over 100,000 artifacts altogether, and that's artifacts, you know, greater than a centimeter in size. Smaller stuff was just sort of packaged up. We think in the 1910s, 40,000 artifacts were found. Unfortunately, only about 10% of those remain. They were lost during the war, along with a lot of records. And then a similar amount was found by Bordeaux in the 1950s.

So let's say we've got 200,000 artefacts, all currently curated by Jersey Heritage, kept in Jersey Museum and available for study. Only about 40% of the sediment that was originally there has been excavated. So there is a location that we know of where there are still hundreds of thousands of artefacts in situ within their geological context waiting to be discovered. There are more known Middle Paleolithic artefacts from Lakota St. Bralad than the rest of the British Isles put together. You know, these are superlatives, you know,

but it's really down to the persistence of that place, the fact that the granite keeps it so safe, and the fact that, as we said at the beginning, Neanderthal people keep on coming back to it keep on coming back and back and I feel as we wrap up now one other thing to mention Lacot it's this amazing place for it but Jersey as an island as a nice age island almost has not just one Neanderthal site there are many others and you are learning you and your team are learning more about these sites more and more about them every year yeah so we began the project in 2010 and it was a project to look at the entire prehistory of the island with Lakot just being

part of it we have the cave that I just described at the beginning Lakot Lachev on the north coast that's currently being studied by Dr JC Mills of our team who is is working on that the upper palethic site of Le Varin being led by Chantal Cannella and Ed Blinckhorn but then lots and lots of other fine spots around the island which we are investigating one by one and trying to understand the island is undergoing you undergoing rapid transformation with every tide. Every high tide brings erosion. The whole focus at Lakot at the moment is to protect it from erosion, with Jersey Heritage investing hugely in protecting the site. Now, ongoing excavations about stabilizing the site. Now, all that incredible investment is going in to protect Lakot, but the rest of the island is

wild, and the rest of the island is undergoing erosion and that allows for discovery. So what we're finding now around the coast is there are lots of locations where under the beach, just on the edge of the sea at low tide, there are Ice Age deposits exposed and those Ice Age deposits contain ice age artifacts almost exclusively middle paleolithic so you have a preserved entire ice age landscape it's important for us because when becky scott published the non-game drive hypothesis we suggested it was that landscape out there that was where the hunting was taking place that was being used the stuff was just coming back to lacoste we didn't think we'd be able to test it particularly because that was being used the stuff was just coming back to Lakot we didn't think we'd be able to test it particularly because it was all under the sea but our recognition now

that at low tide you can just walk through that landscape is now offering us a chance to go and test that hypothesis that the hunting grounds are out there beneath the sea and Lakot is the place that everything is coming back to. And so Matt what are you and your team looking at now at Le Cotte? What's the plan ahead? Plan ahead at the moment is we're just bringing to a close all the publication of our recent research with a book coming out next month. We're going back into the field at Le Cotte in July through Jersey Heritage funded excavations aimed to investigate a new part of the site that's never been looked at before the West Ravine see what's there and

protect it from the sea but really it was um the publication of the the paper showing that the Neanderthal teeth have shared ancestry have features of both Homo sapiens and neanderthal people that is really setting up our new research questions so matt skinner and tim compton have done this amazing analysis of the teeth showed that they're not classic neanderthal at all we know roughly their age less than 47 000 years so they're right at the end so we've got to go back to the site back to the archives back to scientifically working on all of the fauna found with it to get as much as we can out of the archive to understand this unique population of humans from jersey so this is fascinating this is that time period when homo sapiens are living at the same time as Neanderthal people in this part of the world.

It's a really fascinating period of prehistory. It is, and it's getting more and more fascinating. We just found out recently from further south in France that there's an incursion of Homo sapiens around 52,000 years ago. It's a complex story, and we're only really just getting a grip on how complex the interaction between Neanderthal people and Homo sapien people really was. Well Matt, good luck with all of that. This has been fantastic and that book, as you mentioned, is coming out next month. It just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you very much.

Well there you go, there was Dr Matt Pope talking all things Neanderthals and Jersey's incredible Ice Age archaeology, particularly highlighting the site of La Cote de Saint-Brelade. If ever you do get the chance, do visit Jersey. Do see its incredible sites and have a look at this archaeology that is being uncovered. It is revealing more about Neanderthals in this area of the world and how important this part of western europe was for these communities living tens sometimes hundreds of thousands of years ago anyway last things from me you know what i'm going to say but if you have been enjoying the ancients recently and you want to help us out well you know what you

can do you can leave us a lovely rating on apple podcast on spotify wherever you get your podcast from it really helps us as we continue to grow the podcast and to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible that is our infinite mission that is why we continue to do this week in week out and we love putting the work and effort in. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.