Original subtitles

This is the story of how Britain came to be.

Of how our land and its people were forged over thousands of years of

history.

This Britain is a strange and alien world.

A world that contains the hidden story of our distant prehistoric path.

From the enigmatic secrets of our greatest monument.

It's fantastic after 14 ,000 years to get a glimpse of the way at least one

individual was thinking.

To the magical world inhabited by the first people to make this land their

Today modern science and new archaeology are solving ancient mysteries.

and revealing the seismic shifts that created whole new ages.

That is magic.

The first chapter in our epic story.

A battle for survival in a hostile and icy world.

Hell is the oldest complete human skeleton ever found in Britain.

A world in which our land was being shaped by nature's most powerful forces.

into the Britain we know today.

In every corner of Britain there are relics of a long lost past.

The rich heritage of a remote and distant history.

It's a history that goes right back to the Romans.

The very first people who wrote down the names and places, the dates and events

of life in Britain 2 ,000 years ago.

But the world I'm about to enter will take us even further back into a far

distant past.

In South Wales, a team of archaeologists is searching for traces of ancient

people who once lived here.

What they're looking for are footprints from 8 ,000 years ago.

This is a world that only survives in the remains of people and objects.

Fragments. Preserved by chance for thousands of years.

And these precious relics give us glimpses of the people who once lived

A people who survived, often against extraordinary odds.

When I studied to become an archaeologist, it was the sheer

understanding this ancient world that attracted me.

And the legacy that its people left behind.

I've come to the coast of South Wales to try and see some of the most intimate

and poignant remains in the whole of Britain.

Out there, beneath the waves, are a few of the most fragile and fleeting traces

imaginable of a group of hunters who came here 8 ,000 years ago.

The added challenge out here is that as well as the tides, You've also got to

deal with the fact that this fantastic evidence is usually concealed under feet

of mud as these banks shift about.

So we've got a footprint there.

Just see the big toe, the heel, emerging from the mud with the side

of the foot.

The heel were prominently marked, the arch of the foot, and then the big toe

the rest of the toes.

So rather than being a depression, the way they've been preserved is gradually

filling the print with material. That's it, yes. So they appear almost as a

mould of the original footprint.

That's one of the best things I've ever seen.

I knew about them, but until you see them, it just doesn't seem possible.

What have we got here then?

The prints reveal men, women and children.

An entire group of nomadic hunter -gatherers.

That's not a fossil of that person that day.

That is the very day.

What's interesting here, of course, is that these are very obviously part of a

trial. There's another print there, a rather poorly preserved one. And that

would be the big toe there?

Yes. And that's the ball of the heel.

That's the right foot of the same person, isn't it?

These were people who relied utterly on the natural resources of wild plants and

the animals that lived alongside them.

If you were to be offered the chance to live this life, would you find it an

easy life? They were subject.

to the natural hazards of the environment, the bad season, the harsh

year when the fish simply didn't turn up. So there would have been times when

these communities were under extreme pressure and extreme difficulty.

8 ,000 years ago, right there.

When you delve into the distant past...

You soon realise that what you're discovering again and again are stories

survival. Sometimes of evidence, like those faint footprints in the mud. Other

times, it's the stories of people defying the odds in a hostile world.

A world in which your very existence as a hunter -gatherer depends completely on

your understanding of and your connection to the natural environment.

300 generations separate us from the people who made those footprints, most

whom lived in a time before history.

The time I want to discover.

But human presence in Britain goes back much, much further still.

Within the storerooms of London's Natural History Museum are the remains

someone who lived a staggeringly long time ago.

So long ago that this human has even been classed as a different species.

It's a real privilege to see these and to be so close to them.

I can feel my hands starting to shake just with being in their vicinity.

These are the oldest human remains ever found in Britain.

Two pieces of the same shinbone and two teeth.

They were dug up at a place called Boxgrove in Sussex.

The two teeth have got tiny scratches on them and it's thought that they were

caused by the way that this person ate meat.

The meat would be gripped in the teeth and then the other bit slashed away at

with a tool.

There's enough.

of the shinbone to let us estimate that the individual stood about 1 .8 metres

tall, weighing 14 stone.

It's always been known as Boxgrove Man, but, of course, from this, there's no

way of absolutely determining the sex.

So it could be Boxgrove Woman.

So 14 stone and looking like a boxer should have been quite a showstopper.

Who knows what her boyfriend was like?

But... Perhaps most amazingly of all, Boxgrove Man lived half a million years

ago. Think of that, half a million years.

Chris Stringer is a world expert on our ancient human ancestry.

So what follows Boxgrove in the human story?

Well, about 100 ,000 years later, at Swanscombe in Kent, we've got these

bones, the back part of a skull, beautifully preserved, but it has one

interesting feature here, that depression is something we find in all

Neanderthals. So we think Swanscombe could be a very early member.

of the Neanderthal line of evolution.

So there's Neanderthals in Britain 400 ,000 years ago?

That's right, very early ones, and then for the next 300 ,000 or 400 ,000 years,

whenever we find people in Britain, they're part of this evolving

lineage. And it was tools like this that they were making?

Absolutely, yes. This is a hand axe, one of tens of thousands that have been

found in the gravels at Swanston.

So these people were making these tools and probably using them to butcher

animal carcasses.

It's amazing, while on the one hand you're talking about a different species

human, different from us, and yet the tools that they made and used fit so

naturally into the hand.

There's a real link to the humanity of these people, even if they are a

different species from us.

At what point, then, do we get modern human beings like you and I?

Well, much later on.

Now, modern humans had been evolving in Africa while the Neanderthals were

evolving in Europe and coming to Britain.

And about 50 ,000 or 60 ,000 years ago, those modern humans started to come out

of Africa, and 40 ,000 years ago, they're in France.

And here's one of the stone tools they were making there.

Okay, so that's been made by hand, the same as ours.

Absolutely. Imagine living in a world where there are different species of

people, never mind...

different races or different nationalities. There were several human

Earth. We were just one of those experiments going on on how to be human.

Between the distant age of our strange pre -human ancestors and the nomadic

hunters who left behind their preserved footprints, the very first modern humans

came to Britain.

The earliest of all was found here, on the Gower Peninsula in West Wales, a

discovery made over 200 years ago.

In 1823, an ambitious young scientist, the Reverend William Buckland, came here

on a mission.

He was in search of relics of the biblical flood.

He'd heard that, bizarrely, Elephant bones had been found in one of the caves

that pepper this wild coastline.

The thing is, the cave was towards the bottom of a near vertical cliff.

But Buckland couldn't wait.

And it seems, from what we know, that on the 18th of January, 1823, he went

right over the edge of this cliff on a rope, armed only with a pick and a stout

pair of boots.

And now I'm going to follow in his footsteps.

Buckland didn't know it at the time, but he was about to discover more than some

ancient animal bones.

This was going to be the discovery of his life.

Entering the cave would have been fantastically exciting for Buckland. As

as he crossed the threshold, he'd have fired up his lamp.

And then, a good scientist that he was, he'd have begun to make a careful

assessment of everything he could see, the whole scene, and all of that.

He recorded in meticulous detail.

This is a book called Reliquiae Deluviani, Relics of the Flood. And this

is one of just a couple of copies of the first edition, still in existence.

It contains within it a depiction of the scene exactly as Buckland saw it and

then drew it.

Buckland has very helpfully drawn the whole scene. There's the cave itself.

From the outside, there's the cliff wall and the man coming down on a rope on

the outside.

But more interestingly, he's made what is effectively an excavation plan of the

floor of the cave.

Here are the elephant bones and tusks that drew him to this cave in the first

place. More intriguingly, he's also drawn a full -size human skeleton, and

that human skeleton that secured this cave its place in our history.

It was Buckland himself who discovered it, uncovering it from beneath about six

inches of earth, right here where I'm crouched down.

What on earth was going on here?

And more importantly, who on earth was it?

As it happened, Buckland originally thought he'd found the remains of a

prostitute who had worked here during Roman times, and that when she'd

eventually died, she'd been buried in there, far away from civilised society.

The Red Lady of Pavaland.

But Buckland was wrong.

Because he'd actually stumbled upon human remains from a far more distant

Today, the Red Lady is kept at the Oxford University Museum of Natural

Although there's no skull, much of the skeleton has survived.

Enough. for scientists to reveal its story.

Within a few decades of Buckland's death, people re -examined the skeleton.

They looked at the shape of the pelvis, the shape of the long bones, the shape

of the articulation surfaces.

Any anatomy student today would recognise this as a skeleton, not of a

woman, but of a young man.

Forensic analysis also revealed that the so -called Red Lady died young, in his

late 20s.

But most importantly, his bones could also reveal just how long ago he lived.

All plants and animals on Earth build themselves predominantly out of carbon.

A tiny proportion of that carbon is radioactive carbon, or carbon -14.

When an animal dies, the amount of carbon -14 begins slowly to decline and

degrade away.

This process, called carbon dating, used a tiny amount of bone from the Red

Lady.

Carbon atoms from the bone gave scientists a date for when he was alive.

An astonishing 33 ,000 years ago.

These are the remains of the very first modern human known to have inhabited our

land.

33 ,000 years ago, when the Red Lady was alive,

Britain was very different to the one we know today.

Not an island, but a peninsula.

This was an age called the Paleolithic, the Old Stoning Age, in which a few tens

of thousands of nomadic hunters shared the whole of ancient Europe.

You have to imagine small bands of hunters roaming through a landscape much

colder than today.

An open tundra.

These were people whose survival depended utterly on following the

herds of reindeer, wild horse, and of course, mammoth.

It's the mammoth bones that Buckland discovered, the ones he'd thought were

elephant. that provide clues to the possible life and death of the Red Lady.

These are the mammoth bones that sparked Buckland's visit to Paviland Cave in

the first place.

And for 200 years, he'd seemed unaccounted for, possibly lost.

We've rediscovered them.

and I'm now able to bring them back together with the Red Lady for the very

first time.

Their existence means that this sketch made by Buckland, which has the human

remains and the mammoth skull and tusks side by side, isn't based on fantasy.

The rediscovery of the mammoth remains means that we might be able to see who

the Red Lady was, even how she died.

Perhaps we should imagine a hunting party out on the vast plain below

Cave.

They bring a mammoth to bay, but before they can dispatch it, it kills one of

their number.

So they take the body, a young man, up to the cave.

Inside, they dig a grave and they lay him there.

This is a funeral ritual.

They also inter some of the remains of the mammoth that killed him.

After all, this doesn't just do honour to their companion, but also to the

beast. Now the two spirits are united in a shared death.

It's an extraordinarily intimate human moment from 33 ,000 years ago.

Here, on the furthest outreach of Europe, the rare laddie's companion said

goodbye to him for the last time and left.

But the story of the Red Lady represents more than the burial of an intrepid

mammoth hunter.

Because the entire world he lived in, a way of life that had endured for

thousands upon thousands of years, was coming to an end.

The cause was climate change on a massive scale.

Welcome to the world of Ice Age Britain.

30 ,000 years ago, the land we call Britain, along with the rest of the

was cold and getting colder.

Forget the chill of today's British winters.

This was cold on a completely different scale.

The frozen grip of the last Ice Age.

For any nomadic hunter who ventured this far north, life would have been

unbelievably tough and ultimately impossible.

Eventually, the glaciers advancing southwards all the while turned Britain

a frozen wilderness.

The Ice Age reached its peak 18 ,000 years ago.

all but wiping out the entire population of Western Europe.

Just a few groups of people survived in pockets of refuge far to the south.

For thousands of years, almost the whole of our land was utterly barren and

desolate, deserted not just by people, but by all large animals.

It was so cold, not even the mammoth could cope with it.

But then, from around 14 ,000 years ago, there was a period of relative respite.

And here, relative is an important word.

The conditions were still unbelievably harsh, but the ice had lifted just

to allow a few bands of hardy hunters to return to Britain.

These people left behind an exquisite object.

Near to what's now the city of Sheffield.

Inside this box, the oldest art ever found in Britain.

Made 13 ,000 years ago, it's tiny and unique.

Its creator, an Ice Age hunter.

a fragment of horse bone with an engraving of a horse etched into it but

it's infinitely more than that because what you've got a snapshot of

here is is a whole sequence of thoughts someone selected the bone

the the surface of the bone has been prepared in the same way that an artist

would prepare a canvas

And it's been done with fantastic skill.

The hairs of the mane look like hackles that are raised in fear or excitement.

Although it's on the liver of bone, the legs are congested and they're galloping

legs. Everything about it is alive. The horse couldn't be more active and more

vibrant.

It's miraculous.

The horse's head was found here, in a valley of caves near Sheffield.

And recent excavations have revealed that it wasn't the only treasure left

behind by the Ice Age hunters.

In 2003, archaeologist Paul Ban found the only cave art ever discovered in

Britain.

It was this panel where we found our major discovery.

Figures on ceilings are very hard to understand because you don't know from

which direction to look at them. This is actually an engraved and bas -relief

ibis, a water bird. You can see the great beak, the beak sweeping around.

There's a mouth, there's the eye.

They've engraved the top of the head, here's the neck, and then this beautiful

oval body, which is probably natural, but they have outlined it a little bit.

It's amazing that you hear sculptors in the modern age talk about seeing the

block and feeling that something wants to be released from it. And that was a

very old idea, that someone was in here and looked at natural features and

thought, an ibis wants to come out of that rock.

I think so. It's one of the most characteristic features of cave art all

Western Europe, is this constant use of natural shapes in the rock, and clearly

that's what's been done here.

Meticulous searching revealed traces of more engravings, all of them created

within just a few generations when the Ice Age briefly lifted.

They depict animals important to the people who came here.

Some of them are not even meant to be seen.

You can see the old floor level here. There's not much space between that and

the ceiling. They're crawling at this point.

And with their little flickering lamps held in their hands, it's very difficult

for them to get this far into the cave.

13 ,000 years ago, someone was driven to venture into the darkest depths of this

cave simply to make a drawing.

I think they're a series of long -necked...

birds but the important thing about this panel is that it is so difficult to

reach and it's in the total darkness yeah what is the point of art if no one

sees it well there's an important percentage of cave art all over western

which is deliberately placed in these very hard to reach spots they're making

them for something else something non -human to see maybe a god a spirit an

ancestor the forces of nature and i suppose they may not have seen

being quite as separate and different from animals as we do.

They may have seen these and themselves as all creatures that roam the same

habitat. I think they were very much people of their environment, of

around them, and I'm sure that they felt the animals were their kin, if you

like, their brothers, their sisters.

It's fantastic after 14 ,000 years to get a glimpse of the way at least one

individual was thinking.

that took the initiative to crawl down here with a lamp and make that and then

left for it never to be seen again. That's a moment in some individual's

Just a few hundred years after the Cresswell cave art, the ice was back,

with a vengeance.

Britain once again became an empty, desolate, frozen land.

The last wave of glacial conditions came around 13 ,000 years ago, a time

geologists call the Younger Dryas, or more tellingly, the Big Freeze.

It's hard to imagine just how hostile this climate became.

In Scotland 13 ,000 years ago, the ground was buried under a blanket of

to a kilometre thick.

Glaciers scoured the landscape, shaping the very mountains and the lochs we see

today.

For Ice Age expert Jim Hansom, it's a landscape that tells a story of colossal

environmental power.

So if we were standing here at the very end of the Ice Age, what would we be

looking at?

11 ,000 years ago, the glacier Temera, the edge of the glacier, would be at our

feet. The lake wouldn't be here and we'd be looking at a gradient of ice.

disappearing off into the north. As the glacier melted back, then water has

impounded into this hollow, and that's what the Lake of Menteith is.

So everything we can see here has been touched by the ice?

Oh, absolutely.

Ice is a major moulder of the landscape. That's one of the reasons why this is a

classic place to see the elemental effects of ice and what it can do to the

landscape.

Britain was being sculpted.

on a geological scale.

And behind us is the glacier, a great basin that's now occupied by the lake.

And the glacier's bulldozed a whole series of mounds, little hills, that

out the edge of the glacier. We call them moraines.

There's so much force that it's rippling the landscape in front of it. Exactly

right, exactly right. A bit like standing on a loose carpet and the

up in front of you. Right. That's exactly the process.

A substantial force. All around the leading edge of the glacier then there

be these dumps of material that have become hillock and hump.

That's correct.

So there would have been a nose of ice.

Sitting to a... Yeah, which is gone and it's left all the bulldozed material

that was on its nose.

That's correct, that's correct.

The effect of the ice was astounding.

But when it finally melted around 11 ,000 years ago...

The power of ice was replaced by the power of water.

This is just extraordinary.

You could be dropped down here and you would have no way of knowing what part

the world you were in.

It's so otherworldly. It's like Jurassic Park.

Tremendous.

Now, did this river cut this door?

No, the river's far too small for the gorge. We call it a misfit stream.

So when it comes in terms of the last ice age, what had happened to create

Well, during the last ice age, as the glaciers retreat, the meltwater's got to

go somewhere.

There's a lot of ice.

There's a lot of ice. There's half a kilometre of ice very, very close. It

go to the south because there's rising hills. They can't see south. They can't

go to the west. So it comes in this direction straight through this gorge,

that gives it great erosive power. So the sheer elemental force of water

down through here would have been tremendous.

It's like a capture high -pressure hose on a massive scale.

Eroding the valley.

It's hard to think of a more graphic illustration of the raw power of just

rushing water.

Sheer far, sheer far. We couldn't have been standing here at this time 10 ,000

years ago.

The final retreat of the ice ended the age of the Paleolithic.

The remote world of the Red Lady and the mammoths he hunted.

The icy world of the cave artists of Cresswell Crags.

Ever since the ice peaked 18 ,000 years ago, a new Britain had gradually begun

to appear.

Now, as the ice melted, the coast and the Western Isles of Scotland were

on the form we recognise today.

In the East, the Norwegian trench had begun to open into what would one day

become the North Sea.

But despite the rising sea levels, 10 ,000 years ago in the south, Britain

remained firmly attached to the continental mainland.

Gradual warming allowed the first intrepid hunters to return to a new and

different land.

where frozen tundra was giving way to the first forests of birch and alder.

They brought a new culture, new ways of surviving, and a whole new era in our

history.

This new, warmer world, with its different animals and plants, presented

people who came here with a whole new set of challenges.

So much so that archaeologists were moved to give this period its own name,

Mesolithic, the Middle Stone Age.

It was to this period that I was particularly drawn when I was a student

archaeology.

And it was to the island off the coast of Scotland that I came as I was

the skills of excavation.

Now, more than 20 years later, New finds in the Hebrides are giving us a unique

insight into how people survived in this newly emerging land.

You've got very finely worked flint blades here. Look at those beautiful

long blades.

And as you see, it's been very delicately chipped around the edge

And that had been used as a barb, or a point, or maybe a little blade on a

knife. Some of their points have been used as drill bits.

It's a classic Mesolithic artefact.

It's these tiny little items that actually classify thousands of years of

activity. Unfortunately so, yes, indeed.

Steve Mithen's excavations have uncovered an entire Mesolithic fishing

from 9 ,000 years ago.

When we tipped the deposits very finely, we find fish bones.

How are they catching the fish? We do have one artefact that we found here,

which is a tip of an antler harpoon or little fish spear.

Now, it's made from the tine of a red deer antler.

We've only got the final tip of it.

We can see that it has been worked and smoothed down, so it's a rather precious

artefact.

The ice melted.

Bands of intrepid hunters returned to the land.

And from that day to this, our land has been continuously occupied.

They were still hunters. They were still nomadic.

But they were more settled within the landscape.

A person might be born, live and die in the same area.

And that's a different relationship to a place.

Compared to the Paleolithic, in the Mesolithic, the Middle Stone Age, What

beginning to see is not just a continuity of people that leads all the

today.

It's also about the first people who you could say were born and bred British.

Remarkably, the remains of one of these people have survived.

One of a population of perhaps just a thousand or so.

who occupied Britain around 9 ,000 years ago.

And I've come back to London's Natural History Museum to meet him.

This is the skull of Cheddar Man.

His is the oldest complete human skeleton ever found in Britain.

The rest of his bones

are collected here in these white boxes.

He lived over 9 ,000 years ago, which means that either he or his immediate

ancestors were among the very first re -colonisers of the British Isles after

the last Ice Age.

I look at this skull and I can even begin to imagine his face, what he

looked like.

And it's a strange feeling.

Unlike the Red Lady or the Cresswell artist, this man didn't live in an icy

world.

By the time he was alive, the open tundra was giving way to forests of

alder.

So instead of hunting mammoth and reindeer in the snow, he

hunted red deer in the wild wood.

You can tell from the condition of his teeth that he grew up enjoying a good

diet.

But despite that, still in his 20s, this man died.

Now look at this.

This ugly, ragged crater on his skull is to the right of his nose.

That's the result of bone infection.

The infection may have followed an injury.

Or it may have been disease that started perhaps in his sinuses and spread.

But in any case, it would have been debilitating.

It may have caused fever. It may ultimately have caused his death.

So, despite the fact there was plenty of meat around, there was no guarantee of

a long, healthy life.

Little remains of the people of the Mesolithic.

They lived lightly on the land, close to nature, and discoveries like those on

the island of Col are rare.

But there are other ways to discover what their lives must have been like.

We're going to need a quantity of these skins, fresh off the animal.

Smelly, but warm.

John Lord.

is a professional flintknapper.

He's been experimenting with ancient technology for over 35 years.

He's agreed to give me a direct taste of Mesolithic life.

Neil's going to be up against it. He's going to really start to think about the

Mesolithic people when he starts to work on this stuff and make harpoon points

and needles and things out of the antler. It really is laborious work.

The idea is to spend 24 hours depending on ancient technology.

This could be used to make scrapers, knife blades, arrow points. It really is

little Swiss Army flint.

John is going to help me camp right by the spot once occupied by Col's

Mesolithic fish trappers.

Look at that.

It's like watching a borrower arrive from the sea in a button.

Shelters were light and portable. A frame of branches tied with rope made

tree bark.

Over the top, fresh, raw deer skin.

I'm thinking they must have smelled fairly ripe.

Yeah, this smell. If you want some time on your own, work on a skin that's a bit

ripe. How do you come there for weeks?

Oh, I'm getting a definite whiff of it now.

A definite scent of butcher's shop.

Yeah, which is what I expect to smell like in the morning.

Fire was vital for warmth and cooking.

Oh, it's glowing red.

There you go, there you go, there you go.

But also crucial for tool production.

Oh yes, coming away.

This deer antler will become a harpoon, made in exactly the same way as Steve

Mithen's 9 ,000 -year -old fragment found on this very spot.

It's the hours and hours of some time.

It is. It's just time.

And it's starting to look lovely.

What are the chances, do you think, of this fine handmade weapon?

Well, if there's any fish... Collecting something.

They're in trouble.

Unfortunately,

for all of John's skill, we can't recreate generations of experience.

You know, I haven't seen a fish the whole time I've been here.

Instead, dinner has come from the local butchers. That'll do us.

Of course, on coal, they used to hunt in the main hare, but they're a protective

species, so here we are saddled with a rabbit.

Just slayed, yeah?

Yeah.

Nothing would be wasted.

Animal parts were as useful as their meat.

In the deer, what we do is open up the spine and pull out what we call the back

strap. It's a really strong sinew. This is the back strap. Each fibre has a

tremendous strength of its own.

This is the sort of thing that they used to sew their clothes together.

It's like nylon or plastic. It's got that shine on it.

I think the sense of connection you get with the past, to use a piece of flint

to make your tools, channeling your mind in exactly the same way as people did

in the past.

After an uncomfortable night, I'm able to share one more thing with the

Mesolithic people who once lived here.

The view of dawn over the island of Mull in the distance.

Having spent 24 hours preparing tools, making fire, there are glimpses that you

can have.

Handling fragments of stone and...

and long ago burnt wood and hazelnut shell.

It's two -dimensional.

But the third dimension is to be had by doing the things that they did.

And the smells.

When we were doing the thing with putting the skins on the branches to

shelter, that pervasive smell, that animal smell, their world must have been

imbued with that.

Because they were working with animal all the time for food and for bone and

guts and for antler.

The smell of the burnt antler is a smell like burnt human hair.

It's a very evocative smell.

And something as pungent as a smell just knocks that, rips that veil aside.

And their world of 10 ,000 years ago is right there.

Archaeologist Steve Mithen is discovering just how sophisticated the

these Mesolithic hunters were.

It turns out that his call fishing camp was only a small part of a much bigger

picture.

Unlike Paleolithic hunters, these people didn't follow herds over hundreds of

miles, but took all they needed from their local environment.

They moved between a network of islands called Colonsay.

Orensey, and to the South Islay, all had something different to offer.

On Collinsay, Steve is discovering the remains of one of the most important

resources of Mesolithic Britain.

The shells of more than a third of a million hazelnuts.

What they may have been doing is gathering large quantities in the autumn

then storing them as a food for over the winter.

If you roast them and crack them, you can grind them down into a paste, and

it's quite easy for nutritious food to carry away and take away.

On that scale, it almost sounds like a processing plant.

Yeah, the scale of activity here was just astonishing when we discovered it.

It shows that they weren't just, you know, living from day to day, scrubbing

an existence.

It was a really carefully planned activity.

But hazelnuts were only part of the diet for these ancient hunters.

On the nearby island of Oransey, there's evidence that shellfish were

consumed... ..on a massive scale.

It's a remarkable island because there's...

There's no less than five Mesolithic shell mounds or shell middens on the

island. We're standing on one of them now, and these are literally rubbish

from coastal foraging. And you can see it in the rabbit burrows.

And you can see these shells eroding out by the edge of the rabbit burrow here.

Every one of these shells was discarded by a Mesolithic hunter around 9 ,000

years ago.

This is the waste from...

Mesolithic coastal foraging. So there's limpet shells, periwinkles, dog whelks.

Amongst all that, there'd be fish bones.

We've got seal bones from within the middens. All sorts of things.

Yet another island was home to red deer, a key source of meat, skins and antler.

We're just flying over the... The rins are viler at the moment, and the rins in

recent times have been fantastic territory for hunting red deer.

And I think that's exactly what they're doing in the Mesolithic.

So the antler tip that we've got from the site of Piscary Bay...

That could well have come from one of the deer they'd killed in this island.

So the things they needed were scattered all over the landscape. The raw

materials for food, the various food groups that they wanted, the hazelnuts,

rest of the vegetables, the medicines.

And it's a constant shopping trip, going from shop to shop. Yeah, that's right.

These discoveries are revealing a whole new way of living.

A systematic exploitation of different resources available on different

The people who lived here were moving season by season within a landscape they

must have known intimately.

How much of the whole picture do you think you've glimpsed? in your decade

here? I think we've just got a small fraction at the moment. And I'm hoping

the next couple of decades we'll get some more pieces in there. Maybe the big

pieces, like where the base camps are, you know, these aggregation sites.

I think we will find them eventually and get a real, more complete picture of

what that Mesolithic lifestyle would have been like.

The world of Mesolithic Britain was characterised by small communities

very separate, isolated lives.

It's estimated that at any one time, the whole of Mesolithic Britain may have

been populated by as few as 5 ,000 people.

That's as many as you'd find today in just a handful of London streets.

Apart from their hunting party or their extended family, they might never see

another living soul. And that must have shaped the way they saw themselves in

their world.

From fragments of evidence, it's possible to recreate something of the

people lived.

Much harder to understand is what they believed.

But there are some clues.

Here at the British Museum, there's a relic experts believe is nothing less

a sign of Mesolithic religion.

The skull of a red deer that's been carefully worked by hand.

This is an astonishing object.

It's 10 ,000 years old. The feeling you get from something of that age, even

before you touch it, is tangible.

And I suppose the thing you do notice right away are these two holes.

You might think that they represent the eye, but they don't.

They are to take a high strap made from animal skin, because this is

to be worn.

As a headdress.

It's been suggested from time to time that this might have been worn as part

a disguise.

But that seems highly unlikely. Apart from anything else, this is heavy.

The stumps of the antlers would have snagged on branches. It would just have

made the work of hunting even more difficult.

Well, it seems much more likely that this is part of a rite, a ritual, a

ceremony.

When the person wore this, they became something else, something more than

a man.

If you imagine it being worn on the head along with maybe the full pelt of the

animal, by donning this and performing the ritual, a transformation took place.

The person would believe and be seen to be becoming.

a red deer stag, or even more interestingly, some sort of hybrid, part

part animal.

Mesolithic people may have felt themselves to be so much a part of

living within it, enveloped by it, and dependent upon it, not just in the

practical, everyday sense, but in a profoundly magical and spiritual way as

well.

But as we know, Nature can be a very cruel mystery.

At the beginning of the Mesolithic, after the Big Three, Britain was still

firmly attached to mainland Europe.

But as sea levels continued to rise, that connection was reduced to a narrow

marshy land bridge.

Britain was becoming an island.

But its fate was sealed by a certain catastrophe that devastated its low

coastal plains and the communities that depended on them.

The coast of North East Scotland.

Here at Montrose.

There's evidence of the greatest natural catastrophe Britain has ever witnessed.

A force of nature that ripped through the fragile communities of Mesolithic

Britain.

The event was discovered by geologist David Smith.

It's behind this mud. And the mud has come from where?

It's come down from the cliff above.

So if we clean this up now, we'll see the section rather better.

Behind the mud, there should be a bank of continuous clay.

But here, there's something else.

So what are we looking at then?

Well, we're looking at a layer of sand.

So it's that really fine stuff there? It is.

And as far as you're concerned, sand like that shouldn't be there?

Shouldn't be there. Not in that amount and that extent.

Only one thing could have been responsible.

A cataclysmic wave.

that struck the northeast coast of Britain around 6100 B .C.

One of the greatest tsunamis ever recorded on Earth.

The tide goes out very quickly, and the next thing we'd notice would be a slight

wind coming from offshore.

The next thing after that would be a noise, a noise like an express train as

get closer and closer.

The waves would have been...

maybe as much as 10 metres high.

If you were down there and caught in it, is there any surviving it? Could you

let it take you and swim away from it? No, there is no way you could have

survived. The speed is just so great.

Anybody standing out on the mudflats at that time would well have been

dismembered by the power of the wave.

It comes in so fast it would just tear people apart.

Torn apart, yes.

A giant land slide in Norway is thought to have sent the Great Wave charging

towards Britain from the north.

It hit the coastline with such force that it continued 40 kilometres inland,

killing indiscriminately.

In a single moment, the British landscape had been reshaped.

Forever.

By 6100 BC, Britain was well on its way to becoming an island.

Already, narrow, possibly even tidal channels were cutting us off from the

of continental Europe.

But what the Great Wave did was to seal our fate in the most dramatic way

possible, as those narrow sea channels were ripped wide open.

Here at the other end of Britain, the people who made those footprints in

mudflats of South Wales were, in all likelihood, blissfully unaware of the

Wave, far less of the devastation that it had caused in the East.

They were the unknowing survivors of perhaps the greatest natural disaster

to strike our land.

And it strikes me...

that so much of the story of our early prehistory is about survival.

Whether it be the companions of the Red Lady of Pavillon out hunting the

mammoth, or the artist who etched the image of a horse head into a rib bone

while the Ice Age waxed and waned, or the people who faced and survived the

tsunami.

8 ,000 years ago, the people living...

In the land that would become Britain.

We're living through a watershed in our story.

So those footprints aren't just traces of the people who made them.

They're also a snapshot of a moment, the moment, when this

land became an island.

The people here had become different. They'd been made different.

And at the same time, they'd been made a wee bit special as well.

Next time, my journey continues.

The last hands to touch these before mine were those of a Neolithic farmer

and a half thousand years ago.

As I discover a whole new age, the age of ancestors.

Nothing like that.

had ever been seen before in Britain.

When we left nature behind and set out on the greatest social experiment ever

seen.

Surely a chap wouldn't be put to work grinding grain.

The seismic revolution that came with farming.