The Ancients - Neanderthal Britain

Episode Date: July 21, 2024

For more than 100,000 years, Neanderthals made their home in Ice Age Britain, right on the edge of the inhabitable world. But what evidence do we have for this early species in what is today Britain?Dr Matthew Pope from UCL joins Tristan Hughes to discuss this fascinating period pre-history; Neanderthal Britain. What do we know about these people's lifestyles, how long were they here for and what ultimately happened to them?Presented by Tristan Hughes. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.The Ancients is recording our first LIVE SHOW at the London Podcast Festival on Thursday 5th September 2024! Book your tickets now to be in the audience and ask Tristan and his guest your burning questions. Tickets on sale HERE https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/the-ancients/Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘ANCIENTS’. https://historyhit.com/subscriptionVote for The Ancients in the Listeners Choice category of British Podcast Awards 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. It's the Entrance on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, we are exploring the story of the Neanderthals in Britain.

What evidence do we have for this early species of human in what is today Britain? What other species did they coexist with? What do we know about the climate? How long were they around? What do we know about their lifestyles? And what ultimately happened to them? This is a tale of many stages, of glacials and interglacials, these cold and warm periods that lasted thousands of years, of groups of early humans coming and going, and the interesting array of artifacts they have left behind, from stone tools to elusive bones. Now to beautifully weave through the narrative of Neanderthal Britain, or at least what is known so far, this is a really exciting area of research with more information coming to light with new technology and so on almost every year. Well, I was delighted to interview Dr. Matthew Pope from

University College London. Matt, he has been on the show once before, around this time last year, in fact, to talk about his team's work in Jersey at Ice Age sites like La Cote de Saint-Brelade. He is a fantastic expert and it's a real privilege to now share this interview with you, all about Neant Tool Britain. Matt, what a pleasure. Welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for having me back, Tristan. Excited to be here. And we're doing it in person once again, but last time we did it at your home on the south coast my luxurious recording garage facilities absolutely now we're repaying the favor one year on from

talking about ice age jersey in the beautiful spotify studios in central london so you've made it welcome it's very gorgeous and very slick wow what a place to talk about this amazing topic we have today which is neanderthal brit And Matt, this is a topic that stretches hundreds of thousands of years. It's unbelievable. It's a big subject. We've got a lot to get through. But what a great story to tell.

Telling a story about this incredible species, but telling it through the lens of Britain and the British landscape. Places that we may live in, places we may go on holiday in, places we can visit, all telling the story of Neanderthal people. Absolutely. And with this topic, I mean, what is the material, the archaeology that we have available to learn more about Neanderthals in Britain, which is more than 100,000 years ago,

in many cases? Okay. And this is where, in telling this story, I need everyone to come on board with the idea of us telling stories about lost people, ancient species, through 95% just stone artifacts. That is mainly what we have to play with in the archaeological record. I'll mention when there's other finds and other materials, but it's stone artefacts. But we have over 160 years of studying these artefacts, understanding them as technology, understanding them as products of culture. And as long as you read stone artefacts in detail, understanding where we found them, we can start to build up quite an exciting story about past people.

So reading the stone artefacts, this is when it gets into the science of like stratigraphy layers, isn't it? And then evolution of particular designs of hammerstones. I don't know, certain stone tools, stuff like that, I'm guessing. Yeah, we've got to build our interpretation from the bottom up. You've got to be sure, as far as you can, of the age of the deposits you're finding the artifacts in you've got to understand how those deposits were laid down are you dealing with deposits that were a river or within a cave system or on the edge of an ocean when you understand the environment then you can start to say things with confidence about the artifacts and build that story up

this was interesting there so 95 of this story this story has been revealed so far. There's still much more that we don't know, but has been revealed through stone artefacts. So the other 5%, I'm guessing, is that the fossil evidence? Is that bones? Well, if we're talking about human material, we're talking there about bones that have been left behind with traces of human activity on, whether that is butchery marks or that could be cut marks from stone tools or hammerstone marks where they're breaking open bones to get it at marrow, or more rarely than that, tools that have been made out of bone or antler. And then even more rarely than that, tools that have been made out of wood. Now, the reality is, in the period we're dealing with, in excess of half a million years,

these people have incredibly rich, organic, cultural lives, making things out of plant materials, animal products, skins, wood, bark. We just don't find it. The aggressive powers of decay and the very few geological deposits that will preserve this stuff within the landscape means we just don't find it. Stones are so incredibly durable, so incredibly resistant that they leave an indelible trace. And we're very good at finding them. And then we have to get better and better at reading them. And of course, the last thing I guess we should mention is

Neanderthal remains themselves. Are those also things that are few and far between? Oh yeah, they're like the most vanishingly rare part of the record. As we go through today, I'll mention them in passing. But yeah, we're dealing with a few teeth, we're dealing with a few skull fragments, and we're dealing with a with a few teeth we're dealing with a few skull fragments and we're dealing with even less bones below the neck so if we were trying to tell this story on the fossil evidence alone we could be out of here and down the pub within 10 minutes well as a

trend as that might be with the down the pub part i don't think that's good enough for us to explain the whole story in the antelope britain as you've brilliantly highlighted out and we're going to go through this and we're going to go down chronologically but this is also something important to highlight straight away the geographical location of Britain back in the Paleolithic in the Deep Ice Age

first off it seems like this is kind of an edge of the known world and this is a story which isn't just a continuous story of Neanderthals in Britain it's of comings and goings depending on the climate and story which isn't just a continuous story of Neanderthals in Britain. It's of comings and goings, depending on the climate and so on, isn't it? And this is where the British story, despite the fact, you know, one reason it's important is we've been investigating it for a long period of time. OK, so that's one reason. The other reason it's important is, yes, when we're telling the story of the British Paleolithic record, of the British Neanderthal record,

but it's also telling the story of this human species and other human species on the edge of their adaptive limit. When we see them appear in Britain, in the areas now Britain today, it's when climate is warm enough. Because the large periods of the last half million years or so, the climate has been so cold, the ice sheets have been so advanced to the south that Britain has been uninhabitable. So we can actually see their reappearance as indications of adaptation to those cold environments. And then in between adaptation to things like the growth of forest, which presents its own challenge in the warm periods and a progressive opening up of the English Channel. So Britain goes from being an always accessible peninsula of Europe to a more tricky island

environment during periods of high sea level. So we'll be telling that story as well. It's amazing to think of Britain as a peninsula of Europe, isn't it, in that framework? And so I'm guessing the warmer periods, these are the interglacial periods, and the colder periods, these are the glacial periods, aren't they? Yeah, yeah. Shall we do climate now? Yes, come on then.

Let's lay that framework out. If we were doing this podcast back in the late 1970s, what would it be then? It would be a radio show. We would be understanding that there were more than one cold stage in the past and more than one interglacial warm stage. We didn't know how many there were. We really didn't have a framework to understand Earth's climate history in detail. This really changed successively through the 60s, 70s and 80s with more and more

investigation of sediments in the sea floor which accumulate over a long period of time and preserve a record of changing climate and that record's preserved in all the microscopic creatures that die and sink to the bottom of the ocean now through time if it's cold the ocean gets kind of enriched with one type of oxygen, oxygen isotope 18, and the bodies of those creatures get enriched with this isotope. So if you trace changing isotopes, you actually are tracing climate change. 300,000 years, during the last 600,000 years, the Earth has been going through these cycles of long cold stages lasting about 80,000 years, which we're going to call glacials or cold stages, and then shorter warm stages of 15,000 to 25,000 years, which we're going to call the interglacials. We are ostensibly in an interglacial now, one that began in 11,500 years ago.

And if there was nothing like global warming happening and the planet was just to behave as it has done for the last million years, within the next 10,000 years, we'd go into a cold stage. So this is what being in a warm stage feels like, albeit a very strange warm stage in which humans are mucking around with everything. Wow, that is amazing, isn't it? And it's sad to think that's the scientific advancements that have become, isn't it? And just, we are in a warm stage ourselves at the moment, and there could be a nice age in the future. But as you say, with modern technologies, it's a bit different. It is, it is.

And it puts things into perspective when you can look back and, oh God, you know, I'm not a climate scientist. I'm an archaeologist. But to be presented with this incredible framework, to be able to look back a million years and see exactly when the cold periods are, when the sea levels are falling because the ice sheets are expanding, to see when the forests are moving back and then know exactly when that's all going to reverse and the sea level is going to rise 150 meters and forests are going to grow up in northern latitudes and the ice sheets are going to melt we're gifted with this incredible view that no pre-historian has ever had but then you turn around from looking in the past and look in the future and you think well that may not happen again that really puts the perspective on what we might be doing now messing with these gears and seemingly irreversible processes that

now may change so that's the perspective yeah very interesting but that's for another episode entirely however of course let's get into the story of neanderthals in britain it seems that this area of the world he said you said, on the periphery, very volatile area for these tens and hundreds of thousands of years. Let's go to the beginning, Matt. What's some of the earliest evidence we have for Neanderthals in Britain or could potentially be Neanderthals in Britain? I stress potentially here.

How far back can we go? And that's going to be the game today, deciding who we are actually dealing with. Because when you look at a stone artifact, you don't know which species left. But we'll talk about how we put those clues together. Well, look, just a bit of wider context. We've got early humans, possibly Homo erectus, out of Africa in Europe, maybe by 1.4 million years ago. No evidence there further north.

We have that appearance in Britain of early humans by just after4 million years ago. No evidence there further north. We have that appearance in Britain of early humans by just after a million years ago, probably episodic periods when it's warm enough, they're moving up into Northern Europe. These are the Haysborough footprints. These are the Haysborough footprints, Pakefield. We're just getting quite simple core and flake industries, maybe in some slightly cool environments. There's a bit of adaptation to northern latitudes. Around 600,000 years ago, we get something quite different. We get the appearance of a new type of stone tool, the biface or hand axe. These are large cutting tools. They're just held in your hand in a freestyle way. They're brilliant knives. They're great for

butchering large mammals. They're probably great for processing plant foods. They appear in Africa in one form or another, maybe over 1.8 million years ago. Oh, wow. That's much older. Yeah. These are quite crudely made, but they kind of spread out. They're outside of Africa by 1.4 million years ago. They get in Europe just after a million years ago. But in Northern Europe and Britain, they appear around 600,000 years ago. Very distinctive kind of pointed forms to them. We just published a paper led by Callum Wilson on some from Kent's Cavern down in Devon, where you get this distinctive form. They've been recognised in Kent with this distinctive form.

They've been recognised in East Anglia. So these people around 600,000 years ago, whoever they are, are coming in with quite a recognisable culture. These aren't pretty hand axes, but they're quite recognisable. We don't know who this population are. We could not tell you which species of human this population belongs to. In Europe at that time, we have very, very scant fossil remains. Probably the nearest to it is the material from Atapuerca in Spain, one of the Atapuerca sites called Grandalina, where they have a juvenile fossil that they've given a new species name to, Homo antecessor, but we're not really sure what Homo antecessor is. It's a juvenile. Juveniles can look a bit strange anyway. We have to really wait until around half a million years ago or later

until we start to get a good fossil record. So who are these individuals? They could be early Neanderthal populations, or they could be part of another population that we're picking up in Europe from around half a million years ago called Homo heidabagensis. We could talk a lot about Homo heidabagensis. It's a species that's very poorly defined, but they're present in Europe almost certainly during the same period where we're getting the first signs of early Neanderthals. So you've got to imagine this is a period in which you have at least two different species. And within those species, maybe a lot of variation. And those species could quite possibly interbreed, just to put the whole dynamic there. So trying to pick out one species journey at this point in time is difficult, but we could try to hang things to a degree on the hand isn't it? And to forget, once again, that linear line idea.

And it also seems important as we go to almost like the first case study I have on my list. Now, we are both Sussex boys. And there is a site in that area of the world, the site of Boxgrove. Now, what is this? And this also feels important in this part of the story. It absolutely is important.

It's the next chapter. We're moving forward to one of those warm stages. The warm stage we're talking about. I'm going to start giving the numbers. Okay. So this is the next layer. Let's give the stages numbers.

This is stage 13, to give its full name, marine isotope stage 13. All the odd numbers are the warm stages. All the even numbers are the cold stages. So this is a stage that started

around half a million years ago 480 000 years ago and it's at this point in time in britain we start to get new types of hand axes appearing not like those crude elongated ones these are very flat finely made beautiful surfaces and the site that shows this ability of this technology of the best is Boxgrove. Boxgrove discovered in 1974 by Andrew Woodcock and Roy Shepard Thorne, excavated under Mark Roberts from 1982 to 1996. Part of a very, very widespread landscape, which has now been mapped over 26 kilometers preserving a series of geological deposits defining really small periods in time maybe like you know a few decades but 480 000 years ago and all laid down with so little energy in like intertidal lagoons that

when the sediments preserve this archaeology, it doesn't move it at all. It preserves it exactly as it was left. So we get the shadow of where people's knees and legs were when they were making stone artefacts. We get butchery sites where people butchered a horse for eight hours and then left and the tide came in and covered it up. You can see this is incredible resolution. So you get knee marks made in the soil for some 480,000 years ago. That's amazing. Well, it's the shadow left by all of the artefacts.

And when they're making artefacts, they get all this debris over them. But of course, when they stand up, they leave behind imprints of the bits of their body. So, yeah, yeah. stand up they leave behind imprints of the bits of their body so yeah yeah so really remarkable preservation showing us minute by minute the behavior that's going on there and showing us this incredible technology now one of the reasons it looks so good is because right behind it it's sussex they're living on the coast as the sea level starting to fall behind the site there's these big chalk cliffs and these chalk cliffs literally falling out

of it is really good quality flint. Not the kind of flint you pick up off the top of the field, the flint you'd get out of the chalk. It's black, it's wet, it's fresh, and you can do anything you want if you've got skills with it. They're bringing that great flint together with a revolutionary artifact hammers percussors the thing you bang on the flint to remove flakes made out of antler now that's the first time we see that in the archaeological record if you're using bone or wood or something organic and you're not hitting stone

on stone you can get so much more control you can thin pieces you can impose symmetry you can create things that are really really refined and these box grove hand axes show those refinements lovely cutting edges good prehensile qualities incredible coming together organic and inorganic technology and do we think that it was neanderthals or some form of neanderthals that were the people who were creating these new tools yeah this is why this is such an exciting beat in this story, because Boxgrove is one of the few sites in our story today that has produced fossil human remains. It produced a tibia, that's a shin bone of a human in 1993 found by Roger Pedersen. found by Roger Pedersen. And then in 1995, it produced two lower front incisors, the front teeth on the lower jaw of an individual. Now, in 1993, when these were studied, the similarity of the teeth, the size of the tibia suggested this was going to be lumped in with this species Homo heidelbergensis, known after the Heidelberg jaw found in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century.

Heidelbergensis has become a bit of a bin species in which you put these middle Pleistocene fossils. You don't know what they are, but they're kind of Homo heidelbergensis and they're a bit like Homo rhodesiensis in Africa. Ten years ago, even, we're seen as being the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans, the Homo sapiens. So they were seen as being a common ancestor. Well, it just so happens we now have an incredible sample of fossil material from Europe at a period just after Boxgrove at Sima Los Huesos in Atapuerca. And we were lucky enough to have a study where Annabel Lockley compared and others compared the Boxgrove teeth to those from Atapuerca. Almost 30 individuals there where you've got a really good sample. The

teeth were the same. The teeth were virtually indistinguishable from those within the Atapuerca sample. The exciting thing about this, the Atapuerca sample is recognised as being an early Neanderthal population. Wow, there you go. So suddenly the box-grove teeth, having been part of this strange mythical creature, Homo adepagensis, suddenly become part of the wider Neanderthal family.

Now, at that point in time, Neanderthals don't look, you know, the same as they did much later on, maybe slightly taller, maybe slightly more grass-armed, maybe slightly more varied, maybe Neanderthals in different parts, early Neanderthals looked a bit different, they all kind of converged together a bit later on, but this is clearly part of the early Neanderthal lineage and it fits in with other research that's suggesting in terms of that anatomy that we're seeing at Atapuerca, it's so divergent from what we see in Homo sapiens. Actually, the last common ancestor

was probably back 800,000 years ago. So we got a whole new perspective. Instead of Boxgrove being the population from which we're all descended, Boxgrove now, those teeth, become part of an early Neanderthal branch. Wow, very exciting. Now, your passion for it is oozing through as you talk.

It's absolutely brilliant to listen to. And of course, this is only almost like stage two of the story of well if we look at those early tools we're talking about before of the story of neanderthals in britain and if these are just potentially early neanderthals almost half a million years ago kind of moving the story on my big question then is what next what do we think happens next what's stage three almost okay what's stage three well let's have a little coda there which is that um after 13 odd number warm stage we get stage 12 cold stage the most intense cold stage in the last half million years oh is this the anglian glaciation what we call the anglian glac. And this is one that sees the ice sheet itself come as far south as Finchley and Muswell Hill.

Okay. So where is that exactly? So North London. Okay. North London. I'm a South London boy, so I don't know as much. So if we were, you know, we're here in South London at the moment, if we were to have a clear view to the north, to beyond Hampstead Heath, we would see hundreds of metres of ice, we'd see the edge of the ice sheet there. It would be extremely, extremely cold. For most of that period, there aren't going

to be any humans living in this landscape. But at the start of that cold period at Box Grove, we do seem to have evidence of human activity, some humans hanging on, and it's associated with another fossil remain, a tibia. And just to put this out there, that tibia would not live happily with the Atapuerca fossils. It probably is another species. So even in the Boxgrove sequence, in this slightly colder period, we might have another species. in the box grow sequence in this slightly colder period we might have another species maybe that is hydropigensis maybe or whatever this other strange human is at that point in time that would have been right at the edge of the inhabitable world surely if you're saying that ice sheet is coming

back and so only places like sussex kent maybe even sorry those are only the places that could be inhabitable during this massive cold period well it's it's occurring early. So that's as the ice sheet is moving forward. The ice sheet probably doesn't get into a place until a bit later on. But there's little warm snaps within the cold periods. And you can see in northern France, and this is where it becomes quite useful to compare what's happening in northern France, human populations are appearing now and then

in the cold stage in northern France. So probably it's like this is on the edge. If it warms up, humans move north, maybe north of the Loire and disperse. And then it gets cold and they move back. We're dealing with thousands and thousands of years. It's really tempting to see this as kind of epic stories of nomads deciding to set out and recolonize. But actually, probably what this is happening in ecological time, animals start to move as the vegetation starts to grow and people go with it because we've got so much time to play with. But it means that there's in that 60,000 year period

where Northern Europe is very cold, for most of the time uninhabitable, there are so many experiments in adaptation. So many times these populations populations whether they're early neanderthal or other are able to kind of adapt to different changing temperature conditions and vegetation and they're pushing their adaptive range so when it does warm up marine isotope stage 11 warm stage we get a sudden burst of human activity back into britain at that point in time the hoxnean interglacial if we want to call it that but that's quite interesting in its own right also you're highlighting there very importantly that when looking at neanderthals in britain it's not through a vacuum you have to look at what's happening on the continent present-day france and you've done a lot of work of course on the channel islands and jersey and so on and so forth

which we might get onto in a bit but it is interesting so the hoxnean interglacial that you highlighted there and i want you to talk about next is it because of this previous glacial period that you've seen adaptations in neanderthal structure anatomy or i guess maybe we don't know that yet but by the time we get to the next interglacial this one you just mentioned do we see almost neanderthals proper starting to emerge in Britain? I think we still should be calling them early Neanderthals because anatomically, they haven't yet attained that kind of classic late Neanderthal form. There probably is also a lot of kind of diversity in their cultures.

But we see such a strong, clear record of human presence in this warm period that's less than 20,000 years long. And we can see different cultural stages within it. The first cultural stage, complete absence of hand axes. We've got a technology that's based on reducing quite large rocks and large boulders, breaking them down in a really structured way and producing big chunky flakes. Big chunky flakes that are really good at cutting, that can be transformed into a load of different flake tools for stripping meat off bone, for working wood. It's an industry that we call the Clactonian, found no human remains with it. This could be Heidabergensis, this could be early Neanderthals, we don't know. But it's very, very clear the first people into Britain

haven't got hand axes. Then you get a horizon of hand axes, hand axe use coming in, a site called Swanscombe, very important, this is going to be our next kind of B and K study. The hand axes that appear there, triangular in form, first of all. And within those units, within the lower gravels, we also get fossil remains. We get, first of all, I think 1935, one piece of skull being found by Marston. 1936, another piece of skull that fits together. And then in the 1950s, John Wymer finding a third piece of skull that fits. That third piece of skull being found in the same quarry, like 80 feet away. All three pieces, the back of a skull of a single individual.

80 feet away was that last third of the skull that has survived. It's in a gravel. It's in a river these are and with lots of other animal bones now river gravels give us so much of our record but remember rivers you know these are the thames at that because we're dealing with the river thames it's not like the thames now it's like a big braided gravelly river that you might get in upland areas or alaska or siberia And so any bodies that fall in the river, bloating up, can float down that river quite a long way until they end up on a sandbank,

and then they start to get ripped apart. And bits will end up. So most of the time, these bodies get so scattered, you never find another piece of them. But here, three bits of the skull. Unfortunately, not the face, which would have been really exciting. But the three pieces of skull are enough for us to say this is a relatively young, quite grass are possibly female, human. But the back of the skull looks very much like Neanderthal backs of skulls. It has very similar structure. So it looks like it's again, an early Neanderthal at that point in time. And this is roughly 400,000 years ago, I'm guessing.

Yeah, 420,000, 400,000 years ago. Yes, 400,000 years ago. So it's this Hoxnean warm stage relatively earlier on. But there's been a whole episode of colonise, of occupation and dispersal without hand axes before this period of time. This seems to be part of a second wave of dispersal into Britain. But that's amazing that you have that variety of artefacts, as you say, whether it's no hand axes, then hand axes, then these fossil remains.

Do we know much else about their lifestyle from the remains from this? You know, it's only 20,000 years or so. Like, are they making fire at this time? Any ideas around that? Yeah, so this is a point in time where we do see some behavioral sort of innovations and you know remember we're looking for adaptation that's as archaeologists that's one of our

biggest stories the things we're looking for we're looking for the new not because it's exciting because it's new but because it suggests a new adaptation now with the people who are making the earlier clactonian core and flake, we have one very exciting adaptation because it's from the site of Clacton, which gave its name to the Clactonian in this period, that we find the portion of wooden spear, which is the oldest wooden

weapon and our oldest wooden artifact in Europe at this time. Recently brought under lots of intensive study by Anna Mika Milks, who's been understanding its projectile properties. And it's an incredible weapon system. And just a quick plug here. We have done an interview with Anamika all about the first spears last year.

She was wonderful. Look it up. The last word on all of it. So that's an incredible object to have. You know, we have to wait until the future to find a bigger sample of these spears. But again, probably most people had these weapons, you know, these weapons were probably part and parcel of everyday adaptation. It's just so rare that you find them. So we're very lucky to have this.

But then with these handaxe using populations who come along a little bit later, if we go to sites in East Anglia, like Beaches Pit in Barnum, we start to pick up potential evidence for fire at that point in time. Not the earliest fire in the world. There's evidence of bits of fire from Southern Europe a little bit earlier, but it is significant. It's a good signal. And it's here in northern latitudes where fire would be so useful, you know, to keep nothing else to keep warm through winters, but also to control space, potentially cook and transform other foods. Yeah, at the end of the day, it's one of those key things to survive as well on the edge of the inhabitable world.

That's kind of laid the basis really nice for this period. We've done Swanscombe, we talked about Clacton, we talked about Beech's Pit and fire. But you mentioned earlier, only 20,000 years or so for this period. So I'm guessing this interglacial it doesn't last long and then we get the next stage almost yeah exactly so we get into marine isotope stage nine another interglacial and during this stage we see some really exciting cultural differences at the beginning it starts off a bit like the clactonian we're just getting big boulders being

worked but then we see some really structured working of course that some people think is the start of a whole new technological world the middle paleolithic yeah this is how you break a stone down into its upper surface lower surface you remove flakes of a predetermined size and shape and we get that appearing at sites like coxton at frinsbury um at botany pit all in the thames Valley at this point in time. There's then the appearance of hand axes. They come apparently a bit later. New work by Luke Dale has put them late in MIS 9. And these hand axes include giant hand axes, things called fecrons that are up to over

30 centimetres long. We don't know how they were used. They're very distinctive forms, something cultural. We've got a site at Maritime Academy that's just produced two of these from the same period. Really distinctive cultural signature. But then right at the end of that interglacial, as you're going into the cold stage and beyond, as you're going into the cold stage and beyond we get a full-blown structured new technology called lavalois technique in a really it's kind of there in this earlier prepared core but we see it really shining out where they are absolutely exercising control over cores to produce beautiful

flake tools and we see that sites like baker's Hole on the edge of the cold stage, producing big flakes that can be used just like hand axes, producing smaller, more linear flakes that can be produced for a range of cutting tools. And at this point in time, there's no doubt about it, we are in the middle Paleolithic. Yeah, a new kind of technological threshold that's been developing very slowly for about 100,000 years

and then gets its full expression in marine isotope stage 8. And the marine isotope stage 8, so just so once again we can kind of set us in a chronology, so is this around 300,000 years ago? Well it starts yes about 300,000 years ago and then quickly it gets probably so cold we're seeing depopulation again and we have to wait to the next integration, marine isotope stage seven, before we see the continuation of the story. Right. Well, let's continue the story straight away. So marine isotope seven. Seven. Well, the story gets a bit patchy at this point in time. There's various reasons for this.

Maybe it's that there's less people here. maybe it's that there's less people here certainly this is a model that's persisted since um nick ashton and simon lewis put it forward that britain gets harder to get into yeah sea level cutting people off you know a lot more quickly so maybe there's just less people here but there's lots of other reasons that could be part of it a lot of these other sites are much lower in the landscape they're covered over by lots and lots of sediment. They're harder to find. People are using artifacts in different ways,

in more clever ways. They're curating stuff in the landscape. So maybe people are discarding material a lot less. But whatever the question is, it becomes harder and harder to find material.

But we seem to see a continuation of hand axe using cultures alongside Lavallois technique right the way through marine isotope stage seven and into the beginning maybe of marine isotope stage six where you have two great sites one crayford in the thames valley which becky scott has reconstructed where the just the most beautiful napping and reduction of stone artifacts producing big blades with excellent control. The greatest expression of Levallois technique by Neanderthal,

and it must be Neanderthal people at this point in time, in Northern Europe, and then Pont-Naweth in North Wales, which is really important because it's so far north, you know, finding Paleolithic record that far north as the Conway Valley is quite rare. Yes, because we've largely talked about the south of England at this point and London, Thames Valley, Sussex. Now we're going to northwestern Wales.

Absolutely, we've got a cave site there, which is just showing North Wales, Northern Britain, early Neanderthals were almost certainly getting in those areas, but preservation there is poor because it's been ridden over by successive ice sheets the reason this is largely focused on a southern british story has been because this is an area that was free of ice and much better preservation in this area of time but there of course we've got fossil teeth 19 or 20 fossil neanderthal teeth, and a mix of hand axes made on local raw material and

some Levauois technique. Unfortunately, quite disturbed, quite churned up. So we can't really see whether the site was being used for burials or habitation, but the amount of fossil human remains there suggests that burial may be part of the process there. So this is the start of a point in our story where traditionally it looks like there's a big hiatus from say around 200,000 years ago all the way to 60,000 years ago. 140,000 years. Very little to no evidence for Neanderthal people in Britain and it's been characterized as a as a hiatus to the point where sometimes there might be a housing development that's going to impact on deposits of this age and people say well there's no point in looking because no one was here yes thankfully that's quite rare but it is raised now we know that if you go to the other side of the English Channel,

not so very far away, 60 to 100 miles away, at sites like Le Côte d'Ismeralade. Ah, your favourite, yes. And this is kind of why we're interested in Le Côte from a British point of view. You can see there are periods where northern France was uninhabitable, but they're relatively short. And effectively, Neanderthal people are there all the way through marine isotope stage six, the cold stage, through marine isotope stage

five, the warm stage, and then onwards. That apparent hiatus in Britain is not a hiatus in northern France. So we should expect, however patchy, however intermittent, however rare, we should expect there to be beats within that 140,000 years where people are there. We just need to keep looking. We just need to test the record. We need to actively go and look for them. These deposits are quite deeply buried. They tend to be quite low in the landscape because that's where they survive. You need to look for them. They're not going to have been hit by an old gravel pit train tracks aren't going to have gone through them in the 19th century they're not going to have been hit by 20th century suburban expansion you're going to have to look for them and we're

starting to do that and i think if i'm come back if i was to do this podcast in two or three years we'll be saying we're really filling in that hiatus that is very exciting and that is one of the things with you know deep human prehistory is that almost every year the slate is being wiped clean and actually more and more information is kind of redrawing the map of what we know. Because so little, let's be fair, so little is still known from that far back in prehistory. It's just quite interesting what you're mentioning there. Obviously, La Cote de Saint-Brelade, which was the topic of our last conversation on Jersey. Amazing site you've done lots of work on. So if you want to learn more about that just listen into our jersey ice age island chat from last year so matt we're not two or three years ahead in the future yeah i wish we could be we'll do this again and you can explain the gaps that have been filled but at the moment

there isn't the evidence present for that last interglacial period of some 140,000 years. So around 60,000 BC, is this quite a moment? Is that when we start to see evidence again emerge? The archaeological evidence and the way it's interpreted at the moment looks like there is a big return of Neanderthal people around 60,000 years ago. And how real that is, that is what it looks like and certainly we get a lot of high visibility archaeology appearing at that point in time one of the reasons why it is so visible is the culture these neanderthal populations are using is quite distinct to northern europe and quite distinct to Britain.

And the French term of it is Mysterian of Acherlian tradition. Acherlian tradition because they're using hand axes. Oh, the Acherlian hand axes. Yeah, they are using hand axes. They look ostensibly very similar to Acherlian hand axes, the hand axes that we've seen at Boxgrove,

the hand axes we've seen coming and going. But they very distinctive in their own way they tend to be relatively small relatively well made instead of just being cutting tools sometimes they're used as a platform or support for other tool edges for scrapers for notches for things so they are a bit more of a bulky tool in their own way and then you get some hyper, very distinctive ones with flat bottoms that we call boucoupes, so distinctive they couldn't be made by any other people than these people at that point in time. But it's very easy to find these things. So this culture, you know, leaving all these hand axes very distinctive, it's very, very

easy to find these artifacts and recognize them. It may be that there are other slightly earlier cultures that aren't using as many hand axes and we're not picking them up but this culture we find them one of the great sites found within the last 30 years is Linford in East Anglia here we've got 500 artifacts associated with lots and lots of mammoth bones unfortunately the mammoth bones haven't really got cut marks on we don't know for sure that they're being butchered they probably are you can remove a lot of meat from a mammoth without leaving a load of cut marks on them but it's probably a point in the landscape people are going back to again and again either to hunt

mammoth or to scavenge the bodies of dead mammoth you imagine you're coming after winter yeah lots of usable meat on a dead frozen mammoth carcass it's great because it's the site we were able to investigate in the last 30 years there's plenty of other sites out there where you've found these distinctive hand axes with animal bones that were taken from gravel quarries in the 1920s or even earlier for which we don't have great archaeological information. We start to get really good cave record, lots of caves excavated in the 19th century and 20th century, producing these distinctive late Neanderthal tools. And we switch over after 50,000 years and radiocarbon date starts working. So we start to pick up a bit of association right on the limit of radiocarbon dating between

45 and 50,000 years ago. But again, most of those caves were all emptied out before modern archaeological techniques. So that's why all our eyes are right now on Rob Dennis and Jenny French and Wogan Cavern, because here we have a beautiful cave from probably spanning this broad time period, maybe further back, which is going to be excavated in a really good scientific way. And that is what we need. We have rinsed a lot from these 19th century collections. We now have to be bold and start looking out for new caves and digging new caves to give us that resolution, test the absence before 60,000 years ago, and find out what happens

to Neanderthals right at the end of their story in Britain. That Wogan Cavern is a very exciting developing story. We did an interview with Rob and Jenny all about it a couple of months back for the podcast, all Wogan Cavern. That period, isn't it, as you say, an excavation to learn more about the Neanderthals in these last few 10,000s of years of Neanderthals in Britain. And as you mentioned earlier on, we shouldn't imagine just one species in Britain at a time. This is a time right at the end when you're getting the last few Neanderthals, presumably living alongside Homo sapiens in that some 50,000 years ago. Well, that's the question. Are they living alongside? What is their interaction like?

Well, one thing we need to think about is alongside? What is their interaction like? Well, one thing we need to think about is what is the rhythm of Neanderthal occupation in Britain? Are Neanderthals coming here and staying here for hundreds of years? Are they just coming here in the summer and then moving back to the continent in the winter? We need to understand that rhythm because then eventually, around 45,000 years ago, another population appears in this region. Homo sapiens are here. And how are they going to interact with each other? All we know is, again, we do not have any good Neanderthal fossil evidence from Britain at this point in time.

We do have, from around 43,000 years ago, a piece of jaw that seems to be a Homo sapien from Kent's cavern. And this is a point in time where we have the appearance in Northern Europe, Castle Rannis, large, beautiful blades made on flint that seems to be the appearance of Homo sapiens around 45 to 43,000 years ago, and no evidence of Neanderthal people after that period. So there are so many still big question marks, but as you say, in the next few years, that could all be starting to be uncovered. And one of those big question marks is what ultimately happened to the Neanderthals in Britain? Well, Matt, this has been absolutely fascinating. It's really interesting, even though there is still so much, it is still a big enigma about these people who lived on the periphery of the

inhabitable world and how this isn't a linear line. They come, they go, they're glacials, they're interglacials. And it's amazing story you've talked us through. What is also really interesting is that even with the evidence we have, you can still start to piece together,

get perhaps theorize about their lifestyles, whether it's hunting mammoth, we should get rid of the old mundane image, archaic image of them being kind of half naked brutes. And brutes. And they would have had clothing, they would have had sophisticated weaponry, their lifestyles. All of this archaeology that's coming out of the ground, slowly but surely, more of a picture is coming together about Neanderthal life over those hundreds of thousands of years, right on the edge of the inhabitable world. Absolutely. And we're seeing the resolution that we can see their culture, we can see their style,

we can see that every different Neanderthal group did it according to their own rules and their own culture. And that was really exciting to see. Matt, this has been absolutely fantastic. And it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today. Thanks for having me back. on the podcast today. Thanks for having me back. Well, there you go.

There was Dr. Matthew Pope talking through the story of Neanderthals in Britain, what is known so far, covering hundreds of thousands of years. Matt, he is a fantastic speaker. It was such a privilege to conduct that interview and I really do hope you enjoyed.

A few episodes to call out that we mentioned throughout that chat. First off, the first spears, an interview we recorded last year with Dr. Anamika Milks in person at the University of Reading, where Anamika, she explained some of the earliest surviving weapons, these wooden spears that are some 300,000 years old, and the Clacton spear, which is almost 400,000 years old, so definitely listen to that, the first spears.

There is also the episode where we go to Wogan Cavern beneath Pembroke Castle. We interview the archaeologists leading the project, like Dr. Rob Dennis and Dr. Jennifer French, all about the exciting archaeology that they're conducting beneath this castle. Could this be the site that they've been looking for, which might reveal more about the end than Neanderthals and the earliest Homo sapiens to reach Britain, which is called Wogan Cavern, finding the first Homo sapiens released earlier this year. And lastly, do check

out the last one we did with Matthew, with Matt last year, all about his amazing Neanderthal work on Jersey on this ice age island at sites like Lacotte de Saint-Brelade which Matthew he is continuing to work at to reveal more about the occupation how Neanderthal groups came back again and again to this site for various purposes it's a really really interesting chat so also check that out too. Do make sure that you are subscribed, that you are following the podcast so that you do not miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. That's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.