Hunting for Mammoth | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

[Music] underneath all this rubbish a remnants of what life was like here in Oxford 200,000 years ago over there archeologists have discovered evidence of huge tusks mammoths and giant elephants can we find out more about these animals have we got the resources to recreate the environment in which they lived and is it possible that we can find clues as to whether our early ancestors prehistoric man lived here too side-by-side with the mammoths [Music] what do you think about name carrenza buy some hold on it we all ask that over there that's where the business is that's the site in the middle there I mean this is les be honest this is typical of them though I didn't know many percentages of Palaeolithic suits in this country simply because most of them are a lot of the good ins are in gravel pit yeah I mean you know I mean this is this is pretty pretty typical big old lots of war yeah and lots of rubbish well let's see what he's looking at down there it's not raining so what's this level here well this is the Oxford clay Tony it's about 250 million years old but that's not really why we're here you see within the Oxford clay there is a channel been cut and in there is our site but what you've got to realize is that that whole channel has been sealed by this amount of gravel where are we going up the slope there was gravel that was laid down boy the River Thames very very cold climate at that stage and so that's why we're standing and this in Northwest quarry we were to go over now look at that but yeah it seems the water from a huge river carved a channel through the clay that lies at the bottom of this quarry about two hundred thousand years ago a remarkable collection of mammoths and elephant bones have been recovered in this channel by archaeologist Kate Scott and geologist christine buckingham but their excavations have failed to find the channel edges and the areas of prehistoric land beyond them intact land surfaces from this far back are extremely rare but crucial if we're going to learn anything about prehistoric environments over the next three days we're going to search for this land surface with techniques more normally used to detect man-made features and for the first time ever geophys are going to try and use their instruments to distinguish clay banks from a gravel riverbed how practical is it in the course of three days to use your kind of technology in order to create a picture of this area yeah we're not used to working in sort of situation where we've lost twenty feet of gravel and we're sort of below ground level so it's an unusual challenge for us to say the least there's a river course to find you know which is only just under the gravel that we've got the weather stays like this we might be alright yeah but if we get some rain let's do wet results and can we get that data onto computer we're waiting you know to set up the computers and we think as soon as we get that data room we can then actually do a 3d visualization of the landscape and move around it and light it we think we can do it yeah we're talking positive already what about Victor what can you lose in there you know I've been practicing my Mamet's last week well it's 1035 on day one we've got quite a lot to do I think create this picture of this landscape 200,000 years ago so let's get moving prehistoric sites like these may look barren but they contain a wealth of tiny environmental finds like seeds insects and molluscs our air shelters will house all the technology needed to analyze these microscopic clues we don't know much about the environment 200,000 years ago so it'll be fantastic if we can gather enough information together to reconstruct the ancient land stake here even less is known about our ancestors at this time but if we do find land here then we can start looking for evidence of early man on our riverbanks half-past eleven and our first trench is cutting back beyond Kate's excavations this is part of the river channel but we may be lucky and find an edge Kate's been prevented from excavating the site more extensively by the constant discovery of bones and it seems our first attempt isn't any different a large bone takes three days to excavate properly and we can't afford to spend that much time on one find a try telling Phil we've uncovered a two hundred thousand year old mammoth tusk which could be as much as nine foot in length but coming from the river channel it can't help us find land and we can't afford to be distracted by it what's needed a seeds from mature plants land snails and beetles and that's where our environmental archaeologists come in as we get down into this we've got to be very careful because the environmental evidence she's going to be very important yes you know we need to we need to you know identify the areas where we might take samples from it well because we've got a view of the side of the section here you can see this gray stuff look here just show you what I mean by this where the sun's got out it you'll see it's very pale but when they get down to that that stuff contains the animals and plants that actually lived in the bottom of the river right so when you get down to that let me know because then we can take bulk samples of that while we search the south end of our site for environmental clues to our land surface carrenza and the survey team were with Christine using geology to find where the river flowed out of the north end I can show you one oh yes so you've got a channel is that that that's enlarging where the river is cut a groove in the clay and redeposited all sorts of material so it's either a quiet water part of the river or its material that slumped from the bank if you can help me to map individual snapshots of this river then together with the geology eventually we can pick to put together an idea of what we think was was going on absolutely and where this channel goes across Christine believes the river moved around a lot during the thousands of years it flowed through this site but if geo fees can show up the difference between the gravels and the clay we should be able to chart the various courses the river channel carved out a clear picture of the rivers course across our site will increase the possibility of finding surviving land surfaces but back at trench one we seem to have narrowed the odds already well big tree here might where Kate is not wood there haven't you and it's certainly coming across to about here look does it what's this Kate resting on the riverbank perhaps yes great big chunks of tree like this tend to be more middle of a stream so it's it's an indication land snails and other things around here that we may be near to a margin and what so it's end of the morning and it looks like we've found our riverbank complete with fallen oak trees but is this habitable and tell me if I'm getting too excited or not but I've got some flecks of charcoal down here did you get that anyway you see down down here look I'm sure that looks like a bit there isn't charcoal it's some kind of oxidization or something but it's not fire is back yeah I won't get excited pretty amazing on a banana scrape my first crepe so these are actually the beetles from the sediment that have the trunks of oak in it they are indeed in this site we've got species that come from Southeast Europe from even Bosnia and Herzegovina from Spain but the bulk of the former is found in southern England at present and we can therefore conclude that the environment was warmer than now they come the species of beetle that are in here live south of this area did you say something [Laughter] at 6 inches mix mammoth tooth is smaller than an elephants and shows our mammoth s primer Jenica s-- was consuming lush soft vegetation mammoths only have four teeth at any one time as one wears down it's replaced by another the ridges on our tooth show this mammoth had already worn out three of his teeth this tooth came from a mature animal probably thirty years old smaller than an indian elephant a male mammoth from our site would have stood about ten foot tall its size shows it had adapted to a warm climate so as well as being a good two foot shorter than a woolly mammoth it may well have been bald as well but it was still found in the river and Mick feels it's diverting us from the main task this weekend finding the land inclination would be to seek a trench across this to look for the old ground surface on but I can see that you would risk going through a lot of stuff but to pick up the relationship of the river to the ground alongside yes if you like except that in one meter you're going to destroy odd-odd bone the odd tusks or whatever but you're leaving that wouldn't be construed as being really bad archaeology to plow through evidence is what you're trying to do and one of the things that we intended to do here was to try and get the environmental context or today and I think it's the information we would gain from the trench would far exceed mix proposing a huge gamble destroying a wealth of finds we already know exist in search of better environmental pointers below a second trench at right angles to our first would cut back through the tusks and teeth on the edge of the riverbank but would we find the land surfaces beyond them that's for tomorrow today we're relying on Geo fizz we can't find anything magnetically but with the resistance we are getting changes and I mean basically on the plot the low is where we think the clay is the Oxford play the black then a the high resistance that's where we've got the gravel deposits on top of the clay the oxide play there you were hoping for a channel going in that direction and we've got certainly normally it's going in that way I mean it's easier to see on the screen that's where we were stood there was the cut at that point and there we've got a trend along there so this time the clay in blue gravel in red and well you're gonna carry on that way well we'll extend our survey areas in between where the trenches are at the moment and hopefully join up the dot dots the excellent we seemed to have learned so much about the site in the past seven hours that I was beginning to wonder if we'd need three days here but MIT decided I needed an overview to put today into perspective so it starts to make some sense from up here isn't it yeah I mean you can see what a sort of small patch we've got in the bottom of it really why we're so locked into geology this week it seems as though archaeology hasn't got a look in yeah I think I see never table with something as early as this really you know we're talking about 200 thousand years ago but I mean BC makes no difference really that that length of time ago and so at that time you're dealing with hunter-gatherers they're very dependent on what resources the landscapes got in it whether its animals plants or rust with the stuff they collect they hunt they fish so to some extent you you need to know something about that general background before you can see where people might have fitted in is there any realistic possibility of finding evidence of human settlement I think I'll a very very long shot the trouble is you've got a landscape and so that's been that's buried for a start I mean it's worse than looking for a needle in a haystack isn't it I mean you got everything you can see in front of you for many many miles to the west of hey it's all gravel across to there now there wouldn't have been many people living in that area there might have been say one family operating over the whole of this area so and chances are finding their campsite in this area you know a pretty remote really but somewhere in this landscape between here and the horizon there was a family hunting and operating yeah we think it is part of mammoths skull and back on the ground we've uncovered a whole jumble of bones and then there's bone over there so there's any amount of it it's all over the place it's getting really quite a complex little group of bone see her in there and then we got some neg coming in there my dad bit careful there tini you've got bone all right all the way around there and then we got some we don't come in through there that look slim that's probably also limited they live yes come and meet the earth watch people a glass of wine I just played up my loose to help us excavate as much of the site as possible over the next two days we've been joined by volunteers from the earth charity all these bones need to be accumulated on the edge of the river if evidence of people living on the river changes back meanwhile it's left to Christine as the geologist to peg out Mick's second trench ready for the digger to do its worst first thing in the morning so tomorrow we're gonna dig a big trench right through Kate's mammoths tusks and Bisons heels and all the other bones in order to see if we can establish what the environments like further down it's a price worth paying [Music] [Music] start of day two and a complete change in the weather means a complete change in conditions at the site five hours of solid rain have reverted the Oxford play to the sticky mud that once lay at the bottom of the prehistoric ocean while the earth watch volunteer's shelter from the weather we have to cope with the problems it's causing yesterday's excavation needs a cover the rain could also affect the geophys results we are making progress with mixed trench which is looking for the old land surface beyond our riverbank but in all this mud are we really going to find anything such a hailing in mighty well the late 20th century interglacial appears to be over and we're diving back into another Ice Age what we didn't do Mick well we've got this stench that it's been done morning Kate the digger joy was here 8 o'clock a gallon it was snowing a bit snowy then what we got then we thought over there with all those stilts that we had very nearly the margin of the channel deposits yeah by taking this through you realise that but yet another cut from the channel we thought we'd get the bank didn't we somewhere so we've got a whole series of river channels halfway through here we're in a warm period with ease then yeah so mix second trench hasn't revealed our land surface we had thought that the edge of the trench here where we found the wood and bones yesterday was the start of the rivers bank but as we go back into where the land surface should be the soil and silt that's covering the clay dips back into the orange gravel of the river channel so what we actually have is merely an island between two of the rivers channels back in the dry Russel is explaining why we're unlikely to find an intact land surface at this end of the site now this is the situation when the channel was functional yeah and in this we've got all sorts of animals on the aside we've got all sorts of agonizing mammoths doing their vast droppings here and the dunk is falling in all sorts of things now time goes by you're getting please the whole area is gradually cut down I decide what they call it cold gravels and the land surface disappears - that's right that's right get rid of it get rid of all that and in in this you're getting rid of all the evidence of the mammoths and you're getting rid of all the evidence of possible fly beings now if now somehow you've got to highlight this as the last bit of that surface which we started with because if this is the north end that's a little bit that surviving right is the last bits of the land surface that didn't get the rain stopped Suns coming out just at the moment when we managed to get this temporary roof over the trench the weather takes a turn for the better but I hadn't realised that the rain is so problematic when you're digging because it makes the earth so much heavier normal you can just fill a bucket with this sort of shiny stuff and tuck it on the spoil heat but as soon as it starts raining everything's about five times as heavy and all of the soggy earth sticks dear shovel and sticks to everything that you're using to scrape the little fines with it's murder they'd get nothing they saw like mini R Tony it really is don't you remember last night we had this bit here which we thought was skál and then we had here a Busan horn well we've cleared all the way around that and we've now got bone which comes all the way around there this is all bone so I'm pretty sure that this is all part of this just massive Posehn skull and then we got some announced another piece of bone running in there and then here we appeared our part of a tusk which has been sliced off when they machined April gravel so we've only got basically half of it any here what do you think of this here then max did you say what that's mammoth tusk yeah but you see what it's doing it's running right in underneath all that lotta bone so how long do you think that it will take you to do - tardy all this upcoming can we get it done by tomorrow night we can have a trolli but we're not gonna certainly risk ripping it out just for the sake of getting it finish to start be done right and yet yesterday we were blithely happy to cut through all the bones to get to the environmental stuff I'm really split down the middle alpha we think this is really interesting and then what we ought to be doing is protecting it and the other half of me says been three days really what we ought to be doing is getting further down and getting some more environmental where we have done that with a machine trenches and so we I mean with that the idea of those trenches or so we can and get get our environmental evidence so really we're getting two boats of the cherry it seems the ice age gravels have sliced off any old land surface at the south end at the site but at the north end where Russell believes we'll still find a land surface Cates team were keen to show us what they'd uncovered that's what 200,000 years old at least 200,000 years it's probably not in situ that is a piece of wood that's been deposited there yeah but this area here you can see from the tentacles of roots that are coming out and the little stumps remnants of stumps yeah but this is a land surface undisturbed from it's incredible these pieces of wood are the roots and stumps of trees which actually grew beside our River we found a tiny piece of the land surface what strikes me is he's so incredibly small I mean it's like a sixpence in the hole yeah and the whole quarry that is surviving exactly what you were saying earlier about this is the edge of the riverbank that survived and here it is that seems remarkable how do we feel about disturbing any of this then I mean it's all going to be buried eventually we have recorded it drawn it photographed it sampled it so I'm ready now to take it down further to see where there's any more roots underneath places it's an indication of how profitable it's going to be just look at the width of most a washed-out on the surface just there and you can the one that's the rather bigger thing there is called bicular flume in august that is exciting because it's near locality the counters in it that's the one it's near locality at the moment is in the Nile in Egypt so it's beginning to tell you there's some exciting signal in here whatever let's get on with it in the gravels that now fill the channel Kate's found a number of stone tools including flint hand axes because they've been found in the river they were probably washed here maybe from miles away still that does mean man was in the area and it gives one of the country's top stone tool experts a chance to do what he does best flint knapping so you've got this family of nomadic people right they pick up a piece of Flint like this what they do with it they would probably go on for something a bit more of all like that and really they're just probably running around up on the children's and they pick up a stone like that and the first thing they do is what we would call alternate flake in which is one flake off on one side and one flake off the other side and you just going around the edge like that this is that's really about we still already we've got stomach which is really very much a functional tool I mean you know you can you can just knock police a whenever you want them do different tribes of people make them in a different way no no I mean you can find you can find axes that were made in Africa you could virtually put them alongside some that was made in Oxford he couldn't tell the difference you see what just lately I've been using an antler did you know that they would have and bone hammers have been found on sites of you know this sort of age so I mean this is only one example of a soft hammer which sometimes won't take the piece of Flint away I really shouldn't be doing that so funnily enough it's one of these really weird things it's kind of nice because I can look at an implement and maybe I don't know all those years ago and you realize just how human they were because they do exactly what I do you see a bit of Flint you think I want to get rid of that and you know you shouldn't try to get rid of it because it will probably bust the peace but because you're Hume and you think I really gotta give it a go and they just went through exactly the same things and you can look at a piece you know baby 400,000 years after it was made and you think I'll come on you try to get that piece of Flint off there's no way they're gonna get that piece of loon they knew it I know it and it's just one of these amazing things you can break you can bridge a gap I mean one of the great sort of comparisons has been made was like calling it the original Swiss Army knife yeah yeah I mean you name it they've probably used it for that particular purpose butchery scraping chopping cutting but you know okay that's a pretty rough hand axe but the thing of it is it works well it only took that probably took about four minutes there there you go I know you saw me make it we've been sat here okay we were just a bit confused about what we are actually tracing on the ground I don't know did you see those results yesterday basically this is the this gravel the face along here the thought was that that's going along this line we've now done work at the other end this end of the site and so we're still getting trends following similar directions so the real difficulty we've got because we're looking at keyhole areas when we see changes between the gravels and the Clay's we can't actually be confident that we've got an edge to a riverbed we may just be seeing undulations within that so it's going to be very difficult for us to join up the lines and say to you there it's one major river channel why don't you geophysical the middle yes not the major problem no space it's all covered in trees and a bit the tents you know everything we can't get to the site no access for it an apartment a call so that's our feeling we need to do some more work that even Big Mac can hear me attorney sample my help I'm talking to John in the in the tent and he's a bit stuck really he can't tell whether he's got one big river or lots of little bits unless he geophysicist the middle of our area well I've got currents are over here as well and we're both sort of nodding to each other so I suppose we could take it as that it's a sort of executive decision I mean I'm quite keen that we should get a you know a complete a plan so that we can do the reconstructions on the screen of what the landscape was like and and this is all part of the landscape work so that yeah I think we should go ahead with that clearings a bit more ok thanks Tony well come over have a look when we just looked at what we've got over at the north end of the site here while Mick and wood expert Rowena Gail set to work identifying our two hundred thousand year old trees we start clearing today's vegetation from the middle of the site [Music] back in the air shelter Rowena is trying to match thin slices of the wood samples to slices from modern truths hope she succeeds era Tony took that day in a minute come and have a look at this you were talking about Oh Oh sharp a piece of Flint is how much it does it cut did you might have Flint yep it's just one of the ones I saw and we were shot over there this afternoon amazing okay have you seen this before ever seen anybody worked with a piece of Flint on a unmeet before well I haven't but one of the research students gave a set of flakes hand axes and things to a local butcher who butchered a roe deer and the thing he found the best for doing the whole deer without making any mess at all with one plaintiff lake believe that the whole carcass yeah so what are you waiting for I mean I thought you were making a fire so we could cook this stuff up well stick this on the barbie just about another 45 we need oh [Laughter] tonight we decided to eat prehistoric style with just a few concessions to the 20th century metal barbecues plates and of course veggie burgers for Mick but at least some of us were prepared to enter into the spirit of the occasion right what are we gonna do tomorrow [Laughter] where's Rowena have you managed to get the data together yet yes the spread out root of it is almost certainly a willow outside chance it might be pop sir but it's more likely to be willows we've got windows growing on the riverbank going into there yes sir and the the long thin bit beside it is not from the same tree or bush it's most probably elder but I'd still like to have another look at that and make certain about that this is very interesting because he's showing us in detail what the local landscape was like next to the river and that's presumably a climate that's not particularly a hot or cold it's rather temperate like today so that gives us a picture of the immediate locality along this bed of the river and do you think there is a realistic possibility that by the end of tomorrow we'll have a picture of this whole environment yeah I I don't see any problem with that I think the amount of background information that's come out of this small area in with what Kate's done before and what we've managed to go he's incredible you know got a whole batch of techniques they're all producing useful stuff no doubt about that at all so it's the end of day two let's hope we've got the big picture tomorrow stay with us nine o'clock day three and we've been given a helping hand by the owners of the quarry they're giant earth mover is going to clear away all the spoil heaps that are preventing geophys from surveying the center of the site there are some advantages to digging in a gravel pit after all clearing a whole new area on the site hasn't only helped the survey team it's also allowed Mick a chance to dig an even deeper trench this time where our geophys results predict will find the course of the river in the middle of our site [Music] I hang on John yeah that's good condition that's good condition that could be quite a recoverable task so the edge of stuff that we've actually cut through Java so that was the last load which is thinking there is that possibly no that's that's right no no hang on hang on hang on that's the only pink be like no I I think I think you'll find that seat is here have a look it's very smashed but it looks the right stuff well I think I think we you know we're prepared to sacrifice a little bit right to gain the overall picture of the the environment so we ought to carry on with this now okay what about this edge we've got here we saw it in the previous trench we did yesterday yeah if I just move this material back a little bit you can see that very very approximately that line there divides clean clay from the gravel we don't really want to go any more into that do we or do we want to empty that out well we are with the idea is to take the whole thing down to the clay right and back and then we'll see it in section you'll be able to pick it up and survey yes but if if we can have somebody in with a with a scale rule and the grid would just take a photograph of this yeah so we have it recorded then we will excavate it out and carry on so we can now start to plot the course of our River across the site and we can populate its edges with the animals we've found like the Bison which Victor's sketching here the bones we've uncovered this weekend also give us clues as to climate and environment on our site but by far the best information will come from the insects mollusks and aquatic life hiding in the soil samples collected by our environmental team who are now busily washing and civic the earth from trench three yeah there's one just there but there's another one up here and these are both land snails and that one down there the round ones trickier hiss pa'dar is not very fussy lives anywhere so that's not much used to us we've got my shoes this one's pillow miss chorim it likes dry grassland urban areas so it's not a dense woodland they're very small and light I could imagine they'd wash a long way but by looking at all the species if the species look cohesive looks like we have a single assemblage from a single environment and we can combine that with Russell's insect information yeah and combine it with the wood identifications yep that's the way you can tell the big story yeah that's the way we can get the information and if it's not just this one line of evidence is the combination of all the vines evidence that is really and that's what beginning to get now it's really getting very excited by this afternoon we should have a really good picture street I hope so while Mike sieve today's samples Russell and fishbone expert Brian Irving we're examining yesterday's catch under the microscope now explain well I've been looking at the fish bones here and we do have rather a large species list now we have a lot of fish here which are still common in the British Isles but we have three three-spined stickleback Pike perch you green good young days chub Road sure so it's rather a long list what does that tell us about the kind of water that they would well all the bones are from very very small fish so with these being so small it's probably a very a very very small water course and then we've got the eel as well and Rob Rob Russell made an interesting comment about the yield well the interesting thing about the eel is it spawns in the sea yeah now the presence of eels here means first of all they could get to the sea the adults and it means that the youngsters coming back back must have come back on the Gulf Stream so the gas stream must be washing our West Coast of this and it's the Gulf Stream which is responsible for our warm climate it's lunchtime day three and we've got an absolute avalanche of information coming in here now we've got Russell working on the beetles we've got snails and seeds here Corinne's is doing the mapping here's the geophys going into the computer Victor's working on the animals Steve's creating a grid which shows us what the river bank would have been like Stewart's plotting everything onto a big plan and I'm beginning to get a picture of life here 200,000 years ago but there would have been a big river meandering through here and the whole landscape would have been a bit like the African savannah although maybe the temperature would have been a bit more like southern France nowadays and on the banks there have been oak and willow trees but it wouldn't been thickly forested because if you think of the size of the animals that we've been picking up remains off they would have been the sort of animals which would have bashed down the trees and not the trunks into this thick caked cracked mud on the riverbank that would have been crawling with frogs and beetles and little snails its goodness but what I don't understand is how our early ancestors Stone Age people fitted into this landscape in the centre of our site mix deep trench is complete John we've been hearing great things yeah it's been very good hell of a length yeah it must be close on 65 meters now so it's a really truly splendid trench yeah anyway the exciting thing is this it's an elephant tooth bones so does that help us with the environment whether it's hot cold whatever well yes elephants are only warm right and this is really really good yes looks like the condition as well solid well it's really good what about other stuff cuz I see this earth there's a bucket down here with something in a big rock yeah well this time it wasn't just somebody's lunch you know funny should say that well in in the bucket we saw some wood near the sir this one we stripped it and this is this is if you look at the curvature that are that would it's a fairly large trunk we're dealing with yeah so we can get that looked at and see what sort of identifications really well preserves across it yeah I'm finished yes so this is the this is the the riverbanks getting deeper yeah and we then found these bones which although very dirty and smashed they are I've been told daily one of the leg bones of a mammoth joint in it yep you can see the bone structuring is here [Music] that's great innit Kate we've been doing well we've been at dinner land we've been hearing great things you must been getting pretty excited about all this but there were all this stuff coming out all over the place now let's see you can tell by the way surfaces on it it's quite a short stocky little for the environmental fines from this trench tell us even more what you can do is in the channel there are prostrate trees yes we know that they are submerged trees because they've got beetles that need submerged trees right now the so that in a natural environment trees would fall in the river and set up the water tower to come and clean them off they would in fact be just washed downstream now so there are trees which are in here now we know from yesterday that we have willows along the yes yeah the snails are telling you that the margins of river are very weedy gathering even though the water course itself might be quite narrow you got a nice wide marshy areas yes a lot of that's right there's a lot energy we take some plant weed seeds things like that so yeah quite a lot it's not it's not a definite boundary this either every talking wet Marsh and you've got pond I'm grading into meadow and occasional open arena at them I would like some good ripples to distinguish the rig left on the pools exactly yeah yeah because it was there are two clear-cut aquatic habitats one is the pool of slowly dying water yes and this goes from the most tuned and some of it which is rippling and running fast for now the only evidence that I've got are from the caddisflies and the caddisflies say moving water on a mature stream now mature is usually a matter of measure of velocity not size but in other words it's not a trickling stream it is a proper small River okay but has our final trench proved geophys right have they found the edge of our channel how does this fit with all the stuff we but we so me you when we started John you were very ready to go home yeah exactly you ready fee about whether you were going to get anything out of it at all weren't you I wasn't that confident no and now well no we were told by geophysics that that the edge of the trench the edge of the the deeper part of the channel was here and guess what we've got the edge of the channel well done to use the bits in between that we haven't dug from your survey and see well so you've got whatever a year or more to go or seasons to go and you can now see where perhaps you might you might want to do we can give you a plan by the end of today certainly of the main area that's been stripped it must be pretty encouraging for you John mustnít to actually be able to put geophysics and this sort of site yes it's different not something we do every day of the week we've now got only a few hours left to record and preserve everything we found this weekend we won't have the time to lift our first fine for the task or search for man on our newly discovered land surface barda's Mik says looking for our ancestors on a site this big encompassing such a vast period in prehistory is like looking for a needle in a haystack I'm just beginning to get my head around the enormity of the time scale involved in this week's dig if you think of this horizon there's a massive continuum of time then the remnants of the first man that's ever been found in Britain Boxgrove man we can place round about where that gray hopper is over there and then there were lots of ice ages and warmer periods and more ice ages until the period that we're looking at this week the warm interglacial at stanton Harcourt is about where that white van is there and that continued for about 50,000 years until where that yellow digger is and then there was another Ice Age and a warm period and another Ice Age which ended around about with those trees are that's the beginning of the middle Stone Age the Mesolithic where we saw lots of hunter-gatherers appearing on the scene and then the Bronze Age is round about where that triangular tower is and the present day is where that big square Tower is and if you want to put your own life into the equation well each human life is about the width of my thumb sobering thought we may not have found man but we have discovered more than enough to give us a clearer picture of the environment here 200,000 years ago our geophys survey has clearly given us the channels of our River we found at least one intact land surface and geophys has pointed Kate in the right direction of a second she can now spend the time she's allowed to remain on this site excavating these former land surfaces our environmental evidence shows our River moved through flood two periods of drought in a climate as warm as southern Europe there were willows in the river margins and a forest of oak and alder on its banks Kate now knows the animals she's found the bison the horse the mammoth and the straight tusk elephant lived as well as died here and her excavations may yet reveal evidence of human life [Music]

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Views: 167,663

Rating: 4.9232578 out of 5

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Full Episode, time team full episode, mammoth, wooly mammoth, dinosaur, pre historic, bones, dinosaur bones, time team season 3, oxford

Id: vZuIbam4Rxg

Length: 50min 16sec (3016 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 09 2019