Original subtitles

Here at Cerney Wick, in southern England,

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just north of Swindon,

the remains of Ice Age mammoths

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have just been discovered.

These beasts were found not by professional scientists,

but by two amateur fossil hunters digging in their spare time.

It's like a time travel through the gravel.

What they've found is sensational.

Even I can see that's a tusk.

It's one of the oldest mammoth graveyards

ever uncovered in Britain

and could hold secrets about several extinct species.

Must've been rather enchanting.

But why and how did these mammoths die here?

To find out, a team of archaeologists

and palaeontologists is carrying out

a forensic investigation of the site.

It's like a really big whodunnit, isn't it?

Hidden in this gravel pit are clues that reveal an Ice Age world...

Really beautiful, actually.

..a period about which we know very little,

when prehistoric people lived alongside Ice Age animals.

This is very typical of early Neanderthals.

This excavation could open

a new window onto ancient Britain

and help us understand the lives of the humans who once lived here.

You might expect to have to travel

to remote parts of Siberia to uncover bones of Ice Age beasts,

but, just outside Swindon,

less than two hours from my home in Surrey,

two of Britain's most prolific amateur fossil hunters have made

the discovery of a lifetime.

I've come to meet Sally and Neville Hollingworth.

Hello. Hello.

Nice to meet you. Lovely to meet you.

Absolute pleasure to meet you. Come on in.

This is our humble home.

Gosh.

Sally and Neville both have office jobs,

but they spend their weekends hunting for fossils.

Like me, they have a passion for doing so,

but theirs went rather farther.

When we went on fossil hunts, and Nev would invite me,

and he passed me half a vertebrae,

it's Jurassic, it's marine reptile. Yeah.

A couple of weeks later, he texted me to say,

I think I might've found find the other half of that vertebrae.

Do you fancy meeting for a drink

and we'll see if they join together?

It's a good line, isn't it?

This is true. Well, of course.

So we met for a drink and...

They joined together. ..they joined together.

I thought there we go, it's a match made in heaven.

Not a dry eye in the house.

No, no, not at all. No.

We've got some in the kitchen.

More fossils? More finds.

I thought for a moment it was going to be sandwiches.

These are the finds I've come to see.

Mammoth bones.

Wow. Gosh.

This is our kitchen-dino.

Yes. Well, I know it's leg bone, isn't it?

Yes. Where was it?

It was, actually, literally just sticking out of some gravel

on the floor of a working quarry.

Which end? This end.

So that bit was all you could see?

That's all you could see. Probably only that bit.

We thought there might be a bit more of it.

So we started to excavate and, as we started digging,

we found that it was actually a complete humerus of a mammoth.

This pelvis bone has actually gone through

the processing plant

and it dropped out in the reject pile yard of the quarry.

Two years ago,

Neville and Sally asked for permission to look

for fossils in a freshly dug quarry.

They never expected to find pieces of bones of several mammoths.

A cup of tea for you, David. Thank you very much. There we are.

Oh, hang on, mammoth cake.

Yeah, so, mammoth cupcakes.

Aren't you having one?

Yes, how is it?

I'm gonna have a chocolate one.

But there's one find that raises intriguing questions

about how the mammoths died,

a stone tool, a hand-axe, made by an ancient human.

There was a small glint. And I thought,

"Well, that looks a bit interesting, a bit different."

You saw this?

Yes.

Well, the main thing is that it was made by man.

Yes. Yeah. And it was that feeling that I was the first human

to touch this stone tool in hundreds of thousands of years.

It's a great thrill, isn't it?

It is. Yes. The whole of this business.

Finding a stone tool near mammoth bones is extremely rare,

but we don't yet know if it was left by humans

from a more recent time in prehistory.

Well, you could certainly cut things with that, I'm sure.

Yeah, we did.

We did. You did?

We cut our wedding cake with it.

You cut your wedding cake? Yes.

Yeah. Really?

There we are.

We cut our wedding cake, got married and had...

And had a mammoth meal.

And had a mammoth meal, had a mammoth event. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mammoths once roamed the open landscape of ancient Britain.

These extinct cousins of elephants

had huge curving tusks and thrived during the Ice Age.

Their remains are usually tens of thousands of years old,

but Sally and Neville's finds could be far older.

They could offer an extremely rare glimpse of life deep in the Ice Age,

a time we know little about,

when early humans lived alongside mammoths.

But how did these mammoths die?

Was it from natural causes?

Or could they have been hunted?

The quarry where Sally and Neville made their discovery

lies just ten miles north of their home in Swindon,

near the village of Cerney Wick.

Groundwater was deliberately allowed to flood the site,

to prevent any bones in the ground from drying out.

Now, two years after they made their first find,

that water is being pumped out

ready for a team to begin investigating.

Leading the dig is another husband-and-wife duo,

Brendon Wilkins and Lisa Westcott Wilkins.

Those ducks must hate us.

They had this place filled with water and now they've got nothing.

The team starts by mapping the site from the air.

It's so important to record this from the instant that we're doing anything,

so that we can build that exact picture

of how it was before we came along and disturbed it.

The drone images provide a detailed map of the site

so that the exact location of each find can be plotted.

The team searches for fragments of bone.

Biologist Ben Garrod has been helping co-ordinate the dig.

That, we think, is mammoth bone, cos it's so thick.

Yeah. It's definitely mammoth.

Ben was the first on the team to hear about the site

and quickly realised its significance.

Sally and Neville got in touch. And I'd never met them.

And they said, Ben, we found some fossils that

I think you might be interested in. I said,

yeah, that's great, send some photos across.

And they did. And I was here the next day.

I jumped on the train and dropped everything

and came to the site

and it was like someone had sprinkled

mammoth bones everywhere, which I'd never seen.

I thought I had to go to Siberia to see that.

By looking at this in a forensic level of detail,

that'll give us this really in-depth understanding

of what was going on here whilst these animals

and these people were walking around.

What intrigues Ben, and me,

is why there are so many mammoth bones here,

from at least four different animals.

And the tantalising mystery of who left that stone tool.

So, what did the landscape look like when the mammoths were here?

OK, up.

To find out, geo-archaeologist Keith Wilkinson extracts samples

of the underlying sediment.

So, at the very bottom we've got these blue sands.

So they are probably the layer with the mammoth fossils in.

We've got these river gravels

and then these silts and sands at the top

are of the same ancient river channel.

The layers of sediment beneath the surface

reveal the bed of a prehistoric river.

This is probably the ancient route of the River Thames,

which, today, lies nearly two miles away.

Could the mammoths have died further upstream

and their bones have been washed here when the river flooded?

To find out, the team plots target areas for excavation...

..and the digging begins.

They sieve every shovel-full of soil

in their search for fragments of bone or stone tools.

When the trenches start to reveal new finds,

I can't resist stopping by to see how they're doing.

Welcome. Thank you very much.

What do you think?

I haven't seen it yet.

Even I can see that's a tusk.

Let me get it right. Where was the head?

So, this is the proximal end.

And that's the tip of the tusk.

So coming round the tip here. So it's curving backwards.

Yes, exactly. Yes.

This is possibly a bit of a mandible, this was just found.

So it's a left mandible?

Well, yes. And because we think that might be a left tusk,

you know, it's possible that these belonged to the same animal.

You can see bones running into the section there

and here

and you can also see a rib bone here. Yeah.

One of the things we wondered with so many of these tusks around,

could it have been that they all fall into the river somewhere

and then get washed down in one big event?

But what we're looking at is not a high energy environment.

If it was a wash-out, you would expect to see more debris

in the channel, more debris in the sediment around the tusks.

But this is basically lying in where it fell.

And the same with the tusk over there. So, we think, you know,

they could have just died and fallen.

But it's a bit of a coincidence, really.

This pit has been dug out by excavators

because, until just recently, it was full of gravel,

down to about this level.

But here is much more solid.

It's not gravel. It's mud - sticky mud at that,

and it's in this undisturbed mud

that these bones are now being discovered.

And, because it's been undisturbed,

very careful excavation can reveal a lot of details about

the circumstances in which these animals got here

and left their bones.

The most complete bones seem to be lying in the riverbed.

And they've been covered by the fine sediments of slow-moving water,

not pounded by fast-moving flood water.

So, perhaps the mammoths died where the bones are lying now.

Could their remains give us clues

about what the mammoths looked like?

Conservator Nigel Larkin has come to remove the tusk

in the centre of the trench.

All right?

Hi. Oh, my goodness. You've been plastered.

OK, Sal, you smiling? Yes. Good, great.

With a heavy plaster casing in place,

the fragile tusk is ready to be lifted.

Do we need an extra person? I think we do.

OK. So if you get in there.

We're gonna lift up to sort of waist height.

You need to get your hands underneath, OK.

On my knees.

Go that way, that's better.

Do we need a rest?

Up to you.

I'm good. My back's about to give out.

Go up a bit.

Just rest it there.

OK. Stop there.

Is it in? Yeah. Well done, guys! We'll just shove it over a bit.

Woo-hoo!

Yeah! Well done.

Thank you. Well done. Well done, well done.

It's a heavy old beast. The question is,

how are you going to get out the other end?

I'll get the wife to help me.

This ancient tusk will be carefully preserved

and prepared for future examination.

Spectacular fossils like this have always fascinated people.

Hundreds of years ago,

it was thought mammoth tusks belonged to mythical beasts.

In Siberia,

mammoth remains were once thought

to be from huge underground burrowing creatures.

In 17th century Europe,

mammoth bones were said to be those of giants or unicorns.

By the 19th century, mammoths were described as prehistoric animals,

but they were thought to have existed long before humans.

Then, in 1864 in France,

a piece of mammoth ivory was found with an engraving so accurate

it was clear the artist had seen a living mammoth.

The engraving shows a woolly mammoth,

the most recent species on the mammoth family tree.

We now know that early mammoths first evolved in Africa

around five million years ago

and then spread into Europe and Asia.

Around 1.7 million years ago,

steppe mammoths evolved that grazed the grassy plains.

They then moved into Europe and North America

where Columbian mammoths later appeared.

The famous woolly mammoths developed around 700,000 years ago,

adapted for colder climates,

and they eventually spread first into Europe

and then North America.

So, which kind of mammoth lived in Britain at our site?

To find out, mammoth evolution expert Steven Zhang

is examining the remains found at the site.

The teeth have given him a crucial clue.

Looking at a mammoth tooth is like looking into

a barcode for the mammoth itself.

We start by counting the number of enamel ridges,

so this one has about 18,

which is a very typical number for a steppe mammoth.

Looking at this piece of tooth,

we know that it's a last molar or a wisdom tooth.

So we know this was a fully-grown adult.

Except, this is one of the smallest steppe mammoth teeth

there probably is in existence.

It's like finding a German Shepherd the size of a Westie.

These teeth appear to be from

a population of small steppe mammoths.

Their reduced size could be a consequence of food

becoming less abundant.

If a steppe mammoth was here now,

you would see that it wasn't particularly hairy.

A sign that the climate must have been quite temperate.

And as for size, well,

the female was about my size,

male a bit bigger

and the baby,

well, I guess, like that.

Must've been rather enchanting.

There are also remains of another type of mammoth.

Over here, I would say this is a typical woolly mammoth.

So these two different kind of beasts

were occurring at the same site.

One possibility was that this site was a habitat

shared by both steppe and woolly mammoths,

or, as woolly mammoths migrated westwards from Siberia

into Europe,

they started to mingle with local steppe mammoths.

This is interesting because not often do we see

a snapshot like this.

It's exciting.

Our site could be rare evidence of a transitional stage,

when woolly mammoths are taking over from steppe mammoths.

These bones could have belonged to some of

the last surviving steppe mammoths in Britain.

Back at the dig,

Sally and Neville have ringside seats

as the professionals continue their meticulous search.

There is almost a forensic examination of the sediment

and everything else.

But that's, that's good, though. So they don't miss anything.

It's like a time travel through the gravel.

I'd like them to solve the story.

Was it hunted?

That's the big question, isn't it?

Yeah. One of the questions. What was the climate like?

Yeah. What was the vegetation like?

And, also, what else was here?

Not just mammoths, but were there early humans,

hominids wandering about?

Well, yes, they were, because we know there's a hand-axe.

You have established that there were mammoths here

and there were human beings alongside them.

A human being wielding that axe.

I can say, at this particular site, there were definitely mammoths.

There were definitely human beings, early human beings, admittedly,

but I don't know yet if they were here at the exact same time.

Now, the issue is, it could be like you or I walking on

a Viking settlement and dropping a crisp packet.

That's not from the same time period, obviously.

Now, that might have happened here. I'll let you know in a few months.

Ben's "few months" becomes two years

as Covid lockdowns keep the team away from the site.

But, in 2021, they pick up where they left off,

this time with some mechanical help.

If only we'd had this last time,

it would have just made it so much easier.

The idea at the moment is just to plane down to that level

where we've got material that hasn't been disturbed.

They clear down to the undisturbed layers

and dig new trenches.

Mammoth bones soon begin to appear.

Oh, wow. That looks good, doesn't it?

Look at that.

Wow, we've got this wonderful little tusk here.

It's beautiful, isn't it?

To determine the age of these finds,

they send sediment samples from the trenches to a specialist lab.

In darkroom conditions,

grains of quartz from deep within the sediment are placed in

a machine that records tiny levels of radiation.

The amount of radiation emitted by the grains

reveals when they were last exposed to sunlight

and allows the team to estimate

the age of the ancient river channel.

So here we've got our distribution of age within our sample.

So, these three age estimates indicate that the channel

was formed about 215,000 years ago.

Our site dates to a period deep in the Ice Age.

But the Ice Age wasn't always icy.

Over the last two and a half million years,

huge ice sheets travelled down from the north

and then retreated during warmer spells.

The advancing and retreating ice changed the sea level

and the coastlines, but, for most of this period,

Britain was connected to mainland Europe.

215,000 years ago,

when the mammoths were living at our site,

conditions were only slightly cooler than today,

ideal for a variety of animals,

and our site is providing evidence for what they were.

So we've got some lovely vertebrae here from steppe bison.

So these were very, very large,

up to two metres at the shoulders, big cow-like animals,

that were again on the steppes, on these plains,

herbivores, they would equally have been hunted.

We also have....

..this, which is wonderful.

That's part of a lower jaw from a brown bear.

A bear. Yeah. So we know that...

That's the socket of the teeth.

That's it, yeah. And that...

Little canal for the nerves and blood vessels.

And this is the hinge.

It would have been sitting at the back.

So you've got this lower jaw sitting there,

the big tearing teeth, shearing teeth,

doing exactly that process here.

So we're starting to build up a picture of what this environment

would have been like. This isn't Arctic tundra

where there was nothing available.

This would have been a good place to live.

The bison and bear bones give us clues about

the Ice Age landscape of the site.

But there are also the remains of far smaller creatures

that enable us to piece together a picture

of what was growing on this land back then.

There's loads of small shell fragments throughout this.

We've got this little snail in here.

Environmental archaeologist Matt Law carefully identifies samples

of tiny, but perfectly preserved shells.

We have one land snail in there,

so that's a very common species of short grassland snail

and the rest are looking like they're coming from

a river-type setting.

Well-vegetated, well-oxygenated water,

but not too much flow either.

What's really remarkable is the level of preservation,

not just the snails, but things like beetle remains,

seeds and bits of wood that we don't often see

with the level of detail that they are here.

The discovery of these species of animals

and plants enables us to get a quite detailed picture

of what the landscape here was like

when the mammoths were roaming around.

This stretch of the ancient Thames was flowing through an open,

grassy landscape, a perfect place for large herbivores

to feed and find water.

Back at the site,

after weeks of searching for more hand-axes

or stone tools among the mammoth bones,

there's been a breakthrough.

The telltale signs of humans.

I think this may be a flint artefact.

Ben is eager to see the new finds.

It's really over in this area where we're starting

to find the really exciting stuff.

Hiding in this sand we have

a relatively large piece of mammoth bone

sticking from the surface.

And, just in the last few days, we've started to pick out

just a couple of flints,

so little bits of stone

which are being worked by humans.

And they're next door, just 50 centimetres away

from this lovely bit of what looks to be a leg bone of a mammoth.

You can see they've been taking little chips out of the edge

to create a sharp cutting surface,

which they could scrape along bones or along hides to remove fat.

Something as simple as this starts to connect those dots,

starts to bring the human story together with the mammoths,

and that's really quite special.

The presence of these tiny fragments alongside

the bone suggests people were here

at the same time as the mammoths.

The tool Sally and Neville found

could also have been made by the same people.

To find out how these early tools were made,

Ben and I arrange to meet Karl Lee, an expert flint-knapper.

So here we go.

He uses a rounded stone

and then a piece of antler as a hammer,

just as the early humans did.

There we go.

That is amazing.

Thank you very much.

What do you reckon, David,

could you take down a mammoth with one of those?

I should certainly cut up a deer,

they're around here. Yes.

If you killed it with a spear,

that's for the butcher

and you'd butcher it in half an hour.

So I have, completely normally,

brought a piece of meat on the bone.

Gosh.

Mind your fingers.

Yes. Mind your fingers.

Thanks, David.

Oh, yeah. That's gone straight through.

No problem at all.

I think you should keep it for a cookery show, David. Yeah.

So it seems that the hand-axe Sally discovered

could well have been used to butcher mammoth meat.

Karl also shows us a second method of making stone tools,

in which thin shards of flint,

known as Levallois flakes,

are knocked away from a large flint core.

I have to prepare a platform at the base of the core

and then try and take a nice flake.

Using this method,

they're actually planning exactly what that flake's

going to look like. So I'm going to be striking right at the base of

the core here and the flake will hopefully come off on the underside.

That's a brave thing to say.

That is a Levallois flake.

Now, do watch your fingers on that one because it's going to be sharp.

Yes, it's razor sharp.

Yeah. Razor sharp.

Where the edge is so thin it's translucent,

it looks as though it's all got a halo all around it.

Really beautiful, actually.

This is a very versatile technology,

it's portable, very lightweight,

rather than carrying around something

four or five times the weight.

I can't imagine you teaching me this

without a really good grasp of language.

Teaching this without language would be,

in my opinion, impossible.

And my guess would be that children,

just as they mimic their parents today,

would have been mimicking their parents back then, as well.

So, try and catch it about two millimetres

back from the edge...

Oh, I've got you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's it. You're away.

For hundreds of thousands of years,

human beings have passed on that sort of skill,

that sort of insight into

the materials that lay around them.

Of course,

they had to be fortunate to find such marvellous material as flint,

but, once they did,

what fabulous things they created with it.

So who were the flint-workers at Cerney Wick?

We know very little about prehistoric people.

Most evidence of their existence has decomposed

and disappeared long ago,

but their stone tools remain.

They reveal the remarkable story of early species

of humans spreading from Africa

throughout Northern Europe.

To find out which type of human was living at Cerney Wick,

I've come to a secure facility in London.

It holds one of the largest collections

of prehistoric artefacts in the world.

Curator Nick Ashton is a renowned expert on these ancient tools.

He begins by showing me simple flint tools found near Happisburgh

on the east coast of England.

We know that in Africa they've been making these tools for some

two to three million years.

But this is the earliest evidence that we have in northern Europe

of humans reaching this far north.

Dates to an astonishing 900,000 years ago.

How much?

900,000 years ago.

Really? So it's the earliest evidence for humans

in northern Europe.

In 2013,

Nick's team made a truly extraordinary discovery

at Happisburgh.

A storm washed away sand on a beach

and revealed ancient footprints, set in hardened mud.

They were the oldest human footprints

ever documented outside of Africa

but, within two weeks, they had vanished,

washed away by incoming tides.

It's thought that early humans spread out from Africa

around two million years ago.

A million years later,

some of their descendants reached Britain.

What sort of people was it who did this?

Did they have clothes of any kind

or were they covered in hair?

Do we know what they look like?

We actually know very little,

but the species of human in Europe at that time was Homo Antecessor.

They would have looked very similar to ourselves.

Apart from slight different facially.

But it's a guess whether they were hairy or not?

It's a guess as to whether they were hairy or had extra body fat to cope

with these cold winters. Yeah, yeah.

By 500,000 years ago, humans in Britain were capable

of crafting hand-axes like the one found at Cerney Wick.

We know that they're hunting by this point,

and they're certainly butchering a range of different deer

and probably larger animals as well.

And one of the important things is, if you're a hunter,

you get to the carcass first. The hide is intact.

It hasn't been chewed to bits by the hyenas

or the other carnivores or the big cats.

And that hide, you would almost certainly use

for either clothing or shelter

to help you cope with those cold winters.

Humans first used fire in Africa

and, by 400,000 years ago,

they were using it in Northern Europe as well.

This is burnt flint. It's a block of flint that shattered under heat.

What we think we're dealing with is a small campfire

which has all kinds of benefits.

It's not just warmth, it's not just keeping away the big cats.

It's also a hub for social life.

It extends your daylight hours into the night.

It means you begin to tell stories.

It's all part of the development of language

and those all-important social bonds that make us human.

You paint a very, very convincing picture, actually,

and anyone who has sat by a fire knows how hypnotic it can be.

Yes. Just sitting there watching the flames.

Yeah...yeah. That's a very exciting picture.

By 250,000 years ago,

Levallois flakes appear like the ones that Karl had showed us.

Here we have these carefully crafted points.

And this is a massive step forward in terms of technology.

So where does our site fit in?

I've brought Sally and Neville's stone tool.

Now this,

which I know you haven't seen before,

was found alongside this mammoth which we have been excavating.

What does that tell you about dating or indeed anything else?

Well, it's undoubtedly a hand-axe

and very typical of early Neanderthals,

quite similar to some of these.

I gather that the site dates

to roughly about 200,000 years ago.

So it would actually be contemporary

with these Levallois points.

But it's very different.

Here we have a traditional hand-axe.

So what's going on?

One idea is that you've got different populations coming in

from different parts of Europe with different technologies.

Another idea might be that maybe you've got

a residual population in Britain, in western Britain,

who are still making hand-axes.

We're still talking about Neanderthals?

We're still talking about Neanderthals.

Stone tools like these reveal in detail

the history of the occupation of these islands by human ancestors.

At least four different kinds of human beings occupy them.

The stone tools and the dating of our site both suggest

that the humans who were living there were, in fact, Neanderthals.

To find out more about them,

Ben is meeting anthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi.

So our ancestors and the ancestors of Neanderthals were in Africa

and, then, at some point, a group of them left

and we don't know where and we don't know when.

But they became Neanderthals.

We have sites all the way as far as Siberia

and then we have a whole pile of sites in Europe,

doesn't mean that they're a European species,

it just means that a lot of the archaeologists

are actually in Europe and were digging in their own backyards.

We've got this massive array, actually, of Neanderthals

in this whole region.

And if you look at that region,

that's a number of different environments

and a number of different climates, as well.

And do we know what they looked like?

Yeah. So Neanderthals were very similar to us,

but there were crucial differences.

So, for example, we know that Neanderthals, on average, were,

well, they were shorter.

So male Neanderthals would have come in at about five-foot four

or five-foot five. They were also really stocky.

So we know that our site at Cerney Wick

is about 200,000 years old.

How much do we know what life would have been like for those people?

It would have been hard.

The interesting thing is the date of that,

because we know that, pretty soon after, you're looking at

a massive ice age that comes in, a really, really cold spell,

and Neanderthals pretty much disappear from the map in Britain

for well over 100,000 years.

So, potentially, what you're looking at there

with your site is some of the last Neanderthals in Britain

before that really cold phase.

It's not going to be good for them.

Back at the site,

the team is finding that nearly all the tusks and bones

are lying in a single layer of sediment,

suggesting the mammoths all died around the same time.

What could have killed a group of mammoths in such a short period?

We can trace this line pretty much all the way round to

the tusk on the far right now. So they're all...

..it's all formed at the same time.

And we can't see flooding?

I'm trying to think what is forcable enough to move a tusk.

No. There's nothing.

This is weird, it really is.

There's not enough mud. There's not enough... There's no flood.

No. They just died in this area for some reason. Yeah.

Ben is doubtful that the mammoths got stuck in the mud.

The mud's deep, but it's not up to a mammoth's armpits deep.

Disease? I mean, there's nothing really in terms of modern relatives,

the elephants, that would kill a whole group that quickly

in one site at one time to explain this.

And we've got adults and juveniles as well.

So it's not the classic elephant graveyard

all being left in one site either.

And it leaves this idea,

this possibility that it was people.

So were they chasing them in?

Were they corralling them somehow?

Were they...? I don't know.

But that's almost weirder

because I can't imagine quite early Neanderthal people

bringing down a bunch of mammoths

cos these things were tonnes of anger and intelligence.

Evidence suggesting that Neanderthals

could successfully hunt mammoths is extremely rare.

But this is the Island of Jersey

and, here at La Cotte de St Brelade,

piles of mammoth bones have been

found that suggest that Neanderthals may indeed

have been killing mammoths here.

Archaeologist Matt Pope has been studying the site for years.

Our first glimpse of La Cotte de St Brelade towering up above us.

Oh, wow.

It's like this huge cathedral fortress, isn't it? It's beautiful.

We can see a lot of the site from here.

The main granite structure.

The arch that takes you through to the north ravine

and in front of us

the west ravine, the main open space.

The site has been investigated since 1881.

And, over the years, archaeologists excavated down into the ravine.

At two levels, they discovered heaps of bones

of butchered mammoths.

The mystery is how these bones got there.

An original explanation, and a very good one,

was that the mammoth were all herded together by Neanderthal hunters

and driven over the cliffs to their death. So you imagine...

From right up there? Right up there.

That's quite a thought to think of,

a whole herd of mammoths coming

cascading over the edge right there.

It's a good theory

but it's not a very good headland for actually concentrating a herd.

There is simply no way you could funnel

the mammoth into this ravine,

they'd be splitting off into all different directions.

We've been recently relooking at those bone heaps

and looking at the evidence

and we put forward an alternative idea.

And that idea is that these bone heaps didn't form

in one go, in mass kills.

Actually, they formed over a long period of time.

The hunting was taking place out here on the surrounding landscapes.

They were bringing the bones back.

And, then, over time, they put these heaps of bone together.

And this whole area, as we look out now,

is this beautiful coastline that stretches out to

the Channel here.

But this would have all been one big grassy plain.

We've got the seabed landscape mapped.

And that's an amazing landscape for intercepting game.

There's little cul-de-sacs where you get dead ends

and you could control game.

And we know from other

Neanderthal sites where hunting is taking place,

they love landscapes in which they control game.

Probably the whole

Neanderthal community would be involved in hunting -

corralling, controlling, moving,

isolating particular members of a herd.

Most archaeologists now think that

the Neanderthals were capable

of hunting large prey like mammoths, as they seem

to have done in Jersey.

But it would be much harder to trap them on

the flat grasslands of Cerney Wick.

Perhaps the river might have slowed the mammoths down.

But how would the Neanderthals have killed them?

Wooden spears may well have been used.

Wood, of course, rots away quickly,

so we're very unlikely to find one. But there are some.

In 1911, in Essex,

a wooden spear tip was found in waterlogged soil.

And, in 1948,

stronger evidence of spear hunting was uncovered -

a spear was found within the fossilised ribs of

a straight-tusked elephant.

Then, in 1995, at a mine in Schoningen in Germany,

ten miraculously well-preserved Neanderthal spears were found lying

among the skeletons of around 50 horses -

the oldest complete prehistoric hunting weapons ever found.

Archaeologists had assumed these

early hunters thrust their spears into

the flanks of prey at close range.

But is it possible that Neanderthals at

Cerney Wick threw their spears long distances at dangerous animals,

like mammoths?

To find out,

we asked a wood carver to make exact replicas of

the Schoningen spears from spruce - the same shape,

weight and type of wood as the ancient spears.

Hi, guys.

We've brought you some spears.

Annemieke Milks is

an investigator of Neanderthal hunting methods.

She wants to see how well these replica

Neanderthal spears will perform in

the hands of Bekah Walton and Harry Hughes -

two of Britain's leading javelin throwers.

I'm really curious to see what

an experienced thrower makes of how they feel.

They are the right length compared to like a normal spear.

Yeah, the balance is really good. They're surprisingly similar to

a normal javelin, actually.

Yeah, really surprised at how far they're flying!

I won't be that far!

Fantastic.

The spears fly well.

So Annemieke now wants to test if they can be used

with real accuracy, to hit a target.

We want to know -

can you two kill that mammoth silhouette for us, please?

Shall we give it a go? Let's go.

Oh!

First time.

These spears are flying true.

They're hitting it every single time.

On a mammoth,

that target zone would be much larger.

Up until fairly recently,

most people were arguing that Neanderthals were only capable

of hunting at immediate distances.

And this shows that their technology was capable of distance hunting.

Oh!

Brilliant.

OK, big question of the day.

At our site, is there any chance that our

Neanderthals could have been hunting mammoths, do you think?

Given the fact that we have

a whole load of evidence that

the spears are functional weapons,

both as thrusting weapons and as throwing weapons,

and that we see this evidence of exploitation

of mammoth, I think it's very much in

the realm of possibility that

mammoths were being hunted by

Neanderthals with spears like these.

So Neanderthals could possibly have hunted mammoths at

Cerney Wick over 200,000 years ago.

But, in the millennia that followed,

both the Neanderthals and the steppe mammoths disappeared.

Neanderthals resettled in Britain around 60,000 years ago.

But our own species,

Homo sapiens, arrives soon after that.

And evidence of

the presence of Neanderthals vanishes.

It might be that we out-competed them,

right, we were just better at using the landscape

and resources.

One of the things that we know is that they lived in small,

isolated populations.

That is not going to do your gene pool any good at all.

There's even an argument that they're still

with us today.

Me and you will have about 2% Neanderthal DNA in us.

And that's because our ancestors, multiple times,

it seems, interbred with Neanderthals.

So, actually, the end of the story isn't completely tragic

because it turns out there's a little bit of them...

Still here. In us, yeah.

Back at the site at Cerney Wick,

there's excitement as they assess their haul of flint tools.

Are you OK? Breathe.

Wow. I think you forgot to breathe.

This lovely little flake.

So you can see it's got a little point where they hit it

with a stone hammer to remove it.

It's perfect.

And that was the first hint that you found? That's the first one.

Yeah. So there was a party straight after that?

And then the next one we found... Oh, my goodness.

..is this beautiful scraper edge. Typically, we think, you know,

you would have held it like this, they would have pulled

the fat off of the hide. It's really quite impressive.

We've got these five flint tools all from the same area,

all finely worked, all really, really clear.

And that's quite exciting and quite rare.

I mean, it's really easy to say, "Oh, five things.

"That's not many." But, actually,

when we're talking about 200,000 years ago,

we might only be finding one or two things in

a site which has been excavated for decades.

On the mammoth leg bone they found next to the flints,

they've seen scratch marks that could provide evidence of butchery.

We see little marks and nicks in the top.

Two lovely parallel lines. There's one slightly longer.

There's another one, just a short one, just in beside it.

And it's really tempting to call them cut marks,

but we'll have to get it back into the lab to actually determine.

It's like a really big whodunnit, isn't it?

So did they all die of a disease?

Was there a massive flood that came in, or were we hunting them?

Having worked with elephants in the wild,

I think possibly a juvenile, very,

very young one might have just got stuck in the mud.

It panicked the group. Things went really badly,

really quickly. And we came along as scavengers

and possibly found the world's biggest buffet lying there for us.

We were just opportunists. I think we were opportunists.

Well, I just love the idea that the, you know,

Neanderthals are sitting on the ridge over the far end,

hiding amongst the tall grass.

And then mammoths are coming down to the water

and they're panicking them.

The Neanderthals come in

and they take advantage of the mammoths,

they sort of start butchering them

and taking away their nice meat for meals.

Isn't it wonderful to think that

the last time someone sat exactly on this spot in

a little group

with that stone tool in their hands was 200,000 years ago

as a mammoth's lying just over there? Wow.

And here we are talking about it... They were about to have their lunch.

..hundreds of thousands of years later.

It's quite poignant, isn't it? Absolutely. It really is.

As the excavation comes to an end...

..Ben and I survey

the whole collection of flint tools.

Some of these,

the one you've got in the far corner there, are scrapers.

Well, hang on, let me have a look at that.

That someone's very delicately taken the edge off.

Yes. You can see?

Yes, yes, you can.

Now, these would have been used for cleaning skins,

taking fat off skin in order to preserve the skin,

but also taking little bits of meat from the bone as well.

Yeah.

So what we have as well, if you've got your hand lens.

Yeah. There are tiny, well,

quite indistinct little marks along this bone here,

if you can see just there.

Oh, there, yes, absolutely.

There's definite, well,

there's strong evidence that there is

a cut-mark series along here. This is, we think,

evidence of people accessing the animals in this area

and using them for their own food, for fuel, for warmth.

Does that make you think that this site was a camp?

I would find it very, very difficult

to believe that these animals that weighed tonnes and tonnes

and tonnes wouldn't have offered this wonderful opportunity to camp

there for at least weeks or months.

It's really bringing this site to life.

This isn't a table of bones.

This is a point in history where something happened.

Peering back 200,000 years, it's hard

to know exactly what happened at our site.

But the evidence that has now been uncovered paints

a tantalising picture of Ice Age Britain.

An ancient River Thames flowing through grassland.

A group of some of the last steppe mammoths in Britain.

And Neanderthals using flint tools to butcher mammoth meat.

Whether or not they hunted

the mammoths requires more evidence,

but, at this site, it certainly looks

as if something extraordinary happened -

Neanderthals feasting on mammoth on the banks of the River Thames.

At the end of the dig

and before the area is flooded again,

we invite Sally and Neville to return to the site

so that we can show them what

the scene might once have looked like.

We've prepared something where you don't have

to use your imagination to visualise this area.

If I give these to you. Thank you! Put them on.

Make sure they're comfy. And enjoy.

Righty-ho.

Ee! Mammoth!

Oh, that is just incredible!

Oh, my God, that's amazing!

The finds at this remarkable site have given us

a rare glimpse of early Britain...

..a time when humans were fully immersed in the wild,

living as part of nature.

It's thought that Neanderthals may

have been around for some 400,000 years.

Their survival relied on their understanding of

the natural world.

Whether our own species can thrive for quite as long

remains to be seen.