The Ice Age Secrets Of The Forest Of Dean Caves | Extreme Archaeology | Absolute History

[Music] all over britain there are archaeological sites that are too dangerous to access or excavate they could contain unique and valuable evidence of our past which if not investigated will be lost forever exa is a team of highly skilled archaeologists katie hurst in charge of excavation alice roberts doctor and expert in human bones meg waters geophysicist and digital imaging specialist all experts in their chosen fields who are determined to get into these inhospitable places to forensically assess survey and extract the evidence the expedition leader will be me mark davis volcanologist climber caver and diver this is archaeology on the very edge [Music] this week we plumb in the depths beneath gloucestershire searching for signs of stone age man this is the forest of dean a lush and ancient woodland covering over 27 000 acres on the border of england and south wales 13 years ago a group of cavers were following this stream as it disappeared down through a hole in the ground what they discovered turned out to be britain's 10th longest cave system now as they began to penetrate deeper and deeper they unearthed human and animal bones including this mammoth tooth a species which disappeared from britain well over ten thousand years ago was it a one-off find was this cave system a treasure trove the xa's objective is to find evidence of habitation for stoneage man in and around this cave system but in order to do that we must first prepare ourselves for a long strenuous and dangerous expedition just to get to the excavation site in the first place the caves are chillingly called slaughter stream we will be the first archaeologists to set foot in them let's hope we are not the last our task is to establish if the caves contain valuable ice age archaeology [Music] we'll be spending a lot of time underground but the delivery team will be on hand to ensure our safety we are going into the caves via an entrance created by the cavers a couple of meters away from slaughter stream i think in no uncertain terms this is probably the most physically demanding site we've investigated um so if anyone is feeling really tired even if it's just an hour into the system you know do say and tell one of the the delivery team okay okay there's a number of sites that we're told there's bones in so there's a lot of excavation food but i think the thing to do is to to go to the first one and if it looks good let's just work there not trying you know bite off more than we can chew by going too deep into the system and alice if we've been told by the cavers that there's absolutely a wealth of bones down there so it'll be great for you so if you can work with katie to start off with and we've had a specific request meg from the caving group to try and locate other entrances to the cave system so i guess if you go down and see how the caving system lies and then come back up take a look at the gis and and see if you can find any and that'll be magic yeah we do have a reasonably strict time limit eight hours underground it's because when we're underground things tend to take a lot more out of you than they do on the surface you know when we're digging when we're you know just sorting through the archaeology you'll be twice as tired down there it sounds hideous bye we've all got small cameras on our helmets as some parts of the cave are too tight for our cameraman to work safely this will be the last daylight we'll see for eight hours our first target is the cross stream junction where an ancient hippo tooth was found by the cavers it's only 100 meters in but it's going to take a couple of hours to get to there the first stage is climbing straight down almost 15 meters of narrow fixed ladders previously installed by the cavers [Music] meg is first in and is closely followed down by the rest of the team i'm not a natural caver that's for sure it's not a place that i would choose to be so are there four of these ladders to go down okay well they put this tight to the wall and their shoulders can't get in at the bottom meg's about to face her first real test my goodness yeah it's not one of the tightest squeezes but it's nice i don't know about this do you find that quite yeah it's a bit of a squeeze it's getting really tight i don't like this 13 years ago when the cavers entered slaughter stream the place was littered with bones they were carefully retrieved and brought to the surface they found that right by the entrance to the cave isn't that a beauty that's an almost complete beaver skull yeah it needn't necessarily be very old uh there were beavers around in this part of the world up to the 13th century if you want something a bit more special right that i think is an aurochs that's one of these wild cattle it's uh the distal the far end of a radius so that's the the equivalent of uh of the human wrist just there but because in a cow you've got quite a bit of leg which is actually made up a toe yeah on that yeah but um yeah that's that's that's an oral all rocks were around in britain until oh the bronze age really they're just just in the early bronze so you know that's that's quite an impressive find and this is uh what you wanted to see this funny-looking little object is actually the very back end of a big tooth the tooth that would have been about so so big and it's the it's on the left side it's that it's the the last lower molar of a mammoth woolly mammoth and the teeth come through one after the other the cheap teeth come they'll say this is sort of back here in the jaw okay that's a nice finder and this is taking us back into the last ice age this has to be at least 10 000 years old and it's probably quite a lot older that's an impressive age range for a very small group of material [Music] [Music] ten thousand years ago when mammoth roamed the forest of dean so did ancient man this means there could be ancient human and animal bones in the caves our task is to find them and bring them to the surface we're in a labyrinth of solid limestone caves formed over hundreds of thousands of years our guide is paul taylor from the forest of dean caving group but he's got a word of warning we we have had one accident on this pitch in front where the guy fell 15 feet really and that was because the the anchor fell off where they'd put their ladder came off and he fell 15 feet was he alright a broken leg and a broken jaw yeah and about six or seven hours to get him out oh yay so you're right yeah what exactly attracts you to coming down these places i'll miss my life and then i just you know just totally do it all the time you are completely insane well katie i think we should look at ourselves for because we do seem to end up doing this all the time we are 25 meters below the surface but amazingly we've only traveled seven meters into the cave with a big team we're moving in single file and waiting for people to catch up so everything is taking twice as long as we squeeze further in and further down oxygen levels will drop as will the temperature we'll tire quickly and if we get wet there is a risk of hypothermia we've finally reached the balcony pitch next we've got a 10 meter drop into the darkness to the next level the only way down is on a rope [Music] [Music] amazing drop [Music] this is an amazing chamber and it just and this is all made by just water action on the water action all water action yeah it's it needs the water needs to be acidic okay again so the water rushes off as soon as it comes into contact with the limestone it begins to etch away and start excavating down through all the little cracks that um were put in place when all this rock and bear in mind this is marine rock it used to be underneath the sea when all this was squashed together and big fractures and fishes everywhere to add to the delay we're dragging down the latest in video technology to try and set up a communication link with the surface this is the bit i'm not looking forward to your video because it looks horrible after three hours underground we 50 meters down but only 30 from the entrance we've used up half our allocated time here we haven't reached the first site and we still have to tackle one of the toughest parts of the cave we are 50 meters under the forest of dean looking for evidence that stone age man lived in this labyrinth of caves we are still heading to our first excavation site the cross stream junction it's only another 23 meters away but we are faced with a squeeze we've all been dreading in places it's barely 5 inches wide so we have to breathe in to get through there are two streams running through the caves if the cold and wet wasn't bad enough some of the streams carry untreated human sewage everyone all right yeah not that happy really but white well it's just a bit of a miserable place isn't it just all the squeezes and it's very cold down here as well but it's the scariest thing i've ever done it's really squeezing through that that tunnel yeah and i kept saying i'm nearly there i'm nearly there and then paul would say well that's halfway okay well you've done it i mean that's the thing you've got in so it's good the only mike how long have they got three quarters an hour less than an hour yeah and then we've got to really start making right can we say that um it's now uh four o'clock can we say that quarter to five everyone has to be back at this stream junction it doesn't matter what you're finding if we say move we mean okay meg and i are going upstream to dig on a silk bank on which cavers originally found some bones katie and alice are heading downstream to where a hippo tooth was found 13 years ago when they first broke in to the cave and came downstream the hippo tooth was literally just lying here just there was it on the on the surface just on the surface there was no excavations done i mean it was almost one of the first bones that they found if the hippo tooth was actually on the surface the stuff underneath is going to be really old it's going to be even older than 50 000 years old yeah unless of course the heavier teeth was washed out of older sediments further upstream yeah and then it could be lying on top of younger sediments we've got less than half an hour left so meg and i are starting our excavations okay oh this is it this is it yeah okay meg we're getting along so you better do what you've got to do we'll just do a one meter swath like this i think just down here on the edge coming off of the wall and what's important actually is we're going to have to measure the the depth of the features when we find them although i imagine that you have some sort of turning around of soil and artifacts and things with the water but i think what we'll do is we'll just measure down i'll we'll fix a point in the ceiling that we use as a main location and we'll measure down from there let's see i'll do one meter we are looking for human and animal bones dating back 50 000 years that's in the last ice age as a volcanologist it's a time frame i understand but archaeologists have their own way of dividing up the period they call the stone age well the stone age refers to the the whole period of human activity in britain up until you get metal cultures so there's the paleolithic period which is the majority of the stone age that covers the whole of the ice age and really just up to the very end of it then you've got the mesolithic period which in britain is it's quite long it lasts up until four five thousand years ago and attacked on at the end of that you've got a neolithic period which is a new stone age and then you move into the bronze age [Music] within a five-mile radius the wai valley is littered with artifacts and bones dating from the paleolithic period why did early man choose to live here and what was britain like back then well over the last four six hundred thousand years or so there have been people in britain but they've been coming and going mainly in the warmer periods until you get right up to the end of the of the ice age and they would be moving into an environment which was inhabited by lots of quite large animals large mammals and depending on exactly what period of time you're talking about those animals change we can work out roughly where we are during the ice age according to what animals were turning up in association with human activity with no time left for excavations katy and alice go in further downstream in search of bones oh wow this is gorgeous it's like a rainstorm wow the cave and team have promised us that there's no sewage in this part of the cave that's beautiful wow [Music] back on our side we've run out of time hey guys hey we're in the party but it's time to uh start packing up we've already gone over a cut-off point so we need to literally pack up now it's a huge disappointment we found nothing in the sediment next time we come in we'll start excavating the area where the hippotooth was discovered six hours underground and we dread in the return trip we wet cold and bruised from all the squeezing and crawling and now we are faced with a 10 meter climb up a rope ladder [Applause] [Music] that's not good i did exactly what mike told me not to do which was to put my feet on the wall and move the stone it's just really dangerous it's really stupid it's just so tiring they're coming up there i just wanted someone to put my feet other than the stepladder well eight and a half hours later we've plummeted to the depths got to the excavation site as yet got no significant finds that tell us that stoneage man did actually live down in the cave system it's hard to imagine actually how they could access down to where we were and at the moment my gut feeling is any fines that we come across must have been washed in with all the intricate stream beds that plow down through the ground [Music] yesterday was about logistics it was an absolute nightmare the sheer size of the team meant that there was a number of bottlenecks right the way down through the cave system and that's not good for morale because people begin to get cold and pretty miserable so what we've decided to do today is to split the team into two groups an underground and a surface party and that will make us far more efficient katie and alice will go back down to the excavation site and continue their search for evidence of stone age artifacts meg and myself will come up on the surface and we'll hunt around for other possible entrances to this cave system you know we've got the worst to come here yesterday was only to you know the first base camp we've got to get to the real sort of sections of stream we've got to go to all the really tight areas and and actually climb up some quite high rock faces down well how much further is that from where we were about another hour in a smaller team katie and alice are moving a lot quicker they've reached cross-stream junction in just one and a half hours that's half the time it took yesterday so our plan is working but it is taking its toll oh my knees have got so many bruises it hurts they're going to dig on a sediment bank where caves found a hippo tooth the hippo died out in britain over 50 000 years ago in the last ice age this is probably the best area in here we put a slot through here right so we get sections exactly we'll go through all the sediments and i think this is actually where the hippo bone was found in the first place i think yeah i think it was just about down there so so seems like a good place to start so if we take some of these boulders out i'll just sort of mark it out yeah something like that so what we're trying to do is work our way through the layers yeah and record how those layers have formed and uh if we find any bones then we will know what level they were exactly it can start giving an indication of time wise exactly yeah while katie and alice have been digging delivery team leader mike and local caver paul have found something surprising yeah in here that's exactly what we've been looking for and they're not they're not planted we're literally just standing here watching you guys dig yeah and chatting and paul just pointed them out well i don't think it's terribly exciting it's carnivorous yeah this is this is a dog teeth i think um and presumably it's just dogs that have fallen down holes and you know got washed down we've got them obvious just to bag them up and take them up to andy isn't it [Music] something yeah yeah it's a cheap you know yeah no idea what it is i've actually no idea but it's um it's certainly it's not human no it's not um and i don't think it's hippo either it's really weird doesn't it it is it is very strange it's almost like it's got two roots fused together yeah it's an anterior teeth it's not a it's not a cheek tooth a molar tooth i can tell that much but we need somebody like andy i'm just going to wash it in the stream a bit then to try and try and clean it up no it's starting to look like a stone there i'm so much less sure about it there i think i've got all excited about a stone oh katie they've been down there for three hours and all they've found are some teeth possibly from a modern domestic dog and one that could be a stone there doesn't appear to be any ancient bones here so katie and alice are closing the trench they head in back to cross stream junction and are ready to move on to the gravity dig where the cavers know there are more bones but katie's got a problem how far away is the next site um distance wise it's only about 100 meters time-wise 20 minutes yeah it depends on how long it takes you to get through the little tight piece really yeah because i i i know it sounds really pathetic but i think i should go back up because i don't feel too good i don't yeah i don't think that's pathetic i think if you're feeling well if you're feeling tired yeah if you push yourself further i just think that i'm just trying to go back to struggle getting back up to the top as it is and are you feeling really tired yeah i'm just shaking right yeah [Music] i hate this letter i've got absolutely no strength left in my arms [Music] [Music] we are 50 meters under the forest of dean in the slaughter stream caves the first archaeologists to have excavated down here we're looking for human and animal bones dating from over 50 000 years ago back in the last ice age but the cave is beating us we've crawled scrambled contorted our bodies and all we found are modern animal bones and as yet we don't know how they got in here it's the team's second trip down and katie our lead archaeologist has dropped out exhausted hi katie you're right yeah i just i just felt so shaky down there i just didn't think i should stay down really yeah well it's best that you come out straight away anyway i mean because if you got even more tired um getting you out would have been a pain what's the matter uh just i just not feeling very well and um just i'm very i feel like really weak and shaky and they were going to head off and it was going to take at least 40 minutes there and back yeah so and it was going to be really tight clappy oh thanks so um i mean i didn't even have the strength to get up that long ladder they had to haul me out yeah so i'm feeling too good yeah i just i'm just yeah just not on top forward moment alice is still deep underground on her way to the gravity dig with meg and katie back up top she's the last remaining member of the archaeological team four hours into the caves and at last she spotted something he's too short yeah it is much too short for a human but the top end of it here is um quite sort of similar shape what kind of bone is that within the body it's a radius um so in other words it's one of your forearm brains down here it's very thin it is could this be the ancient bone we've been looking for further upstream alice has found more okay well i think that's human what makes you think it looks like a human shin bone which is down here obviously um and this is the this is the lump that you can feel on the inside of your ankle that's really exciting it is very exciting they look old but she'll need to take a closer look back in the lab alice has to press on so she'll pick them up on her way out how tight was that that was really tight is that is that the tightest bit that's that yeah that's the worst bit that was snow that was a real squeeze so we're gonna be climbing up up here where you see this trickle of water come [Music] [Applause] [Music] down [Applause] after squeezing crawling and climbing alice is faced with another 10 meter ascent at blues rubble just to get to the excavation site okay climbing [Music] oh it's really slippery oh wow i could see bones already just scattered over the surface here it's amazing yeah well i hate to ruin the party i know we've taken all this effort to get in here but oh mike don't got five minutes yeah i'm just taking some photos so yeah i'm gonna go and get these they've got a three-hour journey back to the entrance perhaps it's just as well alice doesn't know that at the top of the gravity dig she's only 10 meters from the surface katie is sufficiently recovered from her underground ordeal to discuss with andy curran the bones from cross stream junction pieces here these all seem to be dog teeth this is the um upper carnassial tooth this is the shearing tooth that one i didn't recognize at all it's a tooth you don't often see mainly because it's right at the back of the dog's mouth but that's that's his last molar these are little fragments that probably go with that the jaw really yeah what else have we got that's a stone i think oh no no it's it's the root of the tooth this is what we found right next to the hippo tooth area i'm not excited by it there's nothing terribly unexpected these are the kind of animals that you expect on a modern farm alice has excavated and retrieved a small collection of human bones could this be the evidence of early man that we're looking for oh my light's gone out hello my light's gone out back in the lab alice has cleaned up the bones and has examined them for any clues this was the first one i found down in the stream and when i first saw this i wasn't quite sure i thought maybe i was kidding myself and it was wishful thinking that it was human but it actually is i mean now that i've cleaned it up and had a good look at it it's a human radius so that's forearm yeah yeah just sits there in the in the forearm and the other thing about it is that i noticed these marks on it and i was thinking that they might be cut marks so there might be evidence of deflecting which is part of the burial ritual in some prehistoric societies and i showed it's andy currently immediately disabused me of that and in fact what it is is rodent tooth marks um on the bone so a little rat has been sort of gnawing away at it two fragments here of the same tibia or shin bone and this is also in the stream the unfortunate thing about it is that because they're all in this stream where you've got human sewage coming down it means that they've been contaminated with more modern carbon so we can't radiocarbon date it all we know is that they're old the thing which still intrigues me is how on earth they ended up down there in the cave these bones are old but they are not ice age and so our search continues we're in grave danger of collecting an enormous amount of bones with very little meaning no story attached so every single member of the team today has a set of specific instructions on what to target but i think to maximize time katie will stay on the surface in her place we send in jim our field archaeologist but this will be his first time in a cave and all that kind of stuff i think what we're really missing at the moment is some um bones from a really secure context we need stratigraphic layers because everything that we've found at the moment has just come from the surface it's been washed in right well we assume it's been washed in i don't think the ones in gravity dig have been washed in i think they've just fallen from the ceiling and i think that if we dig down in there we might find something that's what we really need to establish i still want to find out how the human and animal bones got down into the caves 30 meters away from the entrance is a geological feature that could answer my question it's a sinkhole where the ground above a cave has collapsed creating possible access points see and so so this is a typical sinkhole in fact you could find them even smaller than that you know this is rather large i think this is quite impressive yeah but you can imagine a stream running you know underneath us etching out a bit of a cabin and then the whole thing like a piston sort of collapses downwards if i was a farmer um i was dealing with a you know group of dead animals or the old dead animal once in a while i wouldn't go to the trouble of digging a hole to get rid of them if i've got somewhere like this at the bottom of my field it's a natural dustbin if we find a sinkhole above where alice and jim will be at the gravity dig it could explain how bones got down there meg hasn't been able to carry out any radar survey because the ground is just too uneven so she's working with mapping specialist pete wilkinson trying to locate the gravity dig on the surface pete's using our gis system to pinpoint the gravity dig then if there's a sinkhole above it pete will find it so what i've done here mark is i've taken the information from the gis i've extracted onto the pocket device so now we can bring out into the field to use we've marked on the sinkhole that we want to try and find so i'm just going to use this tool to draw a line between the two and that's going to tell me that it's a distance of about well between 14 15 meters and it's in a on a bearing of about 70 degrees yeah so if you can tell me which way the north is yeah if we can uh walk in about 14 meters in that direction okay well north's in that direction so bearing of about 72 degrees and it's about 14 meters in fact it works out that it should be just down on on the stream bed so we just have a little uh great so alice alice and the group are just they're just blow us here they should be just 10 meters below us well this is obviously it's a little stream bed it's not a not a sinkhole yeah you've got to put it in the whole geological context yeah i mean in limestone terrain the river will run across the top soon it'll find a crack which will start to etch out and that becomes a sinkhole and that can drop down find another plane of weakness and carry on horizontally so you begin to etch out the big cavern and parts of that cabin can sort of collapse on it so one minute you've got a sinkhole yeah and there's animals falling into it and then the next minute it can be filled up again so these things tend to switch on and switch off the sinkhole above the gravity dig may be a dry stream bed now but i'm certain that sinkholes have been opening and closing above the cave for thousands of years this could explain how the ancient animal bones got down there [Music] alice you made it how's it going up there it's pretty good i hadn't seen it before so i'm just sort of having a quick look around and getting the lay of the land brilliant [Music] cold what have you done well at the moment what i've done is is um i've sketched and measured out this cone of material that we've got collapsing down from the hole in the roof so what i'm just trying to do now i've been collecting material from different sections in it and now i'm cutting down into the bottom when you say material bones absolutely yeah i'm just feeling a bit cold now it is really chilly up there yeah for some reason it's much colder up in this section of the cave and i've been up here for a good hour or so now so do you want to do you want to go down to the bottom and go through wonder yeah yeah i think what i'll do is just sort of wander around to just warm myself up yeah go and get warm alrighty my feet are freezing [Music] there's a cold draft at the top of the gravity dig and the temperature is plummeted to a few degrees above zero you're not doing so well i just can't get my body temperature up again i'm just a bit concerned okay and you've got really cold hands as well hands cold hands cold toes all right my feet are like blocks of ice well we've had something to drink haven't you i've had some glucose tablets something to drink okay well let's get yeah we'll get out slowly because the longer you're down here the worse it gets obviously so we'll tell you out now and uh so let's just take it slowly but steadily out here alice is the last member of the team still working but she's not alone alice this is mark can you hear me yes i can loud and clear good what was that about jim uh well when i got here he was um he was looking really cold actually and uh he went down to warm up but he's he's feeling pretty ill so he's coming back up to the surface okay [Music] you the climbers said that you know i needed to get get out and uh i disagreed with them and said no you know i need to stay and all this kind of stuff and apparently i've just been told that's one of the symptoms of hypothermia is that you become irrational i don't think i had hypothermia but um i was certainly a bit irrational about it but when i started stumbling around and falling over i i realized i'd probably better move and it's good that i did because it was very very tough getting out of there [Music] in our search for ice age bones it's mike not an archaeologist who heads deeper into the 14 kilometer cave system with paul onto my belly and i know we've got at least another half an hour maybe even 45 minutes ahead of us at this kind of level of crawling [Music] only experienced cavers can travel this far into the caves it's extreme even by mike's standards they 150 meters below the surface and three kilometers from the entrance paul wants to show mike possible evidence of previous life in the caves oh wow look at that most certainly [Music] the prints look like they belong to a small dog it can't have wandered in by the same route we've taken it must have come in another way but what happened to it and where are the tracks taking us mike leader of the exa delivery team is four kilometers from the entrance of slaughter stream caves he's on the trail of some animal tracks that are leading deeper into the cave system leading them to a perfectly preserved dog skeleton there's a lot of reduction in size from a living animal down to its bones into this kind of carcass size so it was a good-sized dog the cavers found the skeleton 13 years ago and quite reasonably won't allow it to be taken out experts have examined photos and have said it could be a hunting dog up to 10 000 years old [Music] i've just got this really horrible vision of this poor dog wandering through here banging his head because he would have had to jump up and down certain parts of it you know it's pitch black down here there's no way whatsoever that he's going to be able to see back at the gravity dig alice is using the fiber optic link to show the dome what she's found yeah i've got andy with me yeah you've got some bones to show him correct certainly have they're the ones that jim has been digging out i haven't seen anything that looks like um human bone okay andy can you see this i think it's probably a cow's jaw from the shape of the jaw it's a cow i can't quite see the teeth very well no i think this is going to be a case of getting it back up to the top are the teeth flat on the uh biting surface or is it a saw shaped pattern um trying to feel through the mud i think they're flat okay i'm just not sure just a hint it might be a horse i don't know i feel it's a cow well we can tell when it gets up to the surface but more of the i mean it's all domestic animal stuff it looks domestic again so uh more of the same right it's unlikely we'll find anything older than a couple of hundred years at the gravity dig so alice is closing the trench this area of the cave must have had a recent sinkhole open up over it through which animal bones fell it's been a disappointing trip so far alice is frustrated at the lack of fines but having spent five hours underground mike has finally surfaced from his epic journey hey thank you boy i am completely exhausted oh yeah have you been we ended up in this open chamber that's got big silt banks on and littered literally all over the top of the silk banks are bones and you know i i wasn't going to go digging around because i know that's not what we meant what you know i'm meant to be doing so i'm not an archaeologist you fetch back the bones i didn't have any bubble wrap with me so i had to believe it or not take her off a woolly hat and put them in this and i've been really careful on their way out i think how are you going to tell me that's your job they all look very crumbly and small well the first thing to say is that they're completely different preservation from everything that's come out so far right this looks like really old bone to me right what about that wow well that has got to be elephant bone is that right that that's probably that's probably our old mammoth that's got to be look how thick walled the bone is and it's it's it's sort of cancel a tissue all the way through that's that is that is really exciting that's pleistocene bone that's ice age bone that's an elephant yeah yeah a mammoth but a mammoth is an elephant so yeah i'll be honest with you there are a few more this is nice this is very nice this is part of a humerus that's the elbow joint down here and it's something really quite big i mean that that i don't know have to compare it with other stuff that could even be a woolly rhino really because we did actually you know we had to question whether we should pick yourself up but when did rhino go extinct they disappeared before the end of the last ice age was about 25 27 000 years ago in bridge yeah absolutely i had that my willy hats yeah go back down and get the rest of it go on a long way i'll tell you it's a couple of hours this is this is old bone this is sort of middle of the last ice age type of stuff um wow thirty thousand years and older that's wonderful uh and although these are only fragments they're very very exciting fragments and this is where the mammoth tooth turned up exactly where the mammoth tooth turned out well that's perfect i mean this is exactly what we were searching for because we were talking this morning that these sinkholes switch on and off they fill up they cement up and then a new one opens up again so on the gravity dig it's all we find in is domestic animals so it's not really speaking that that interesting not that old and we were speculating wouldn't it be nice to find the gravity equivalent with with old bones in it because if you find some of them the chances are there's going to be a whole host of stuff in there so i'm hesitant to say it but there are more bones up there there are what are you doing up here then after closer examination andy confirmed we had found woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros bones they've been dated between 30 and 50 000 years ago the last ice age we only went four kilometers into the cave system and there's another ten that need investigating there may well be an ice age entrance to the caves somewhere in the forest alice is coming out with only a handful of bones it's all she's got the show for almost three days of dangerous and deep excavation 23 hours you've been down there over the last three days oh no way really this is the first time she's seen mike's remarkable discoveries this is superb this is better than we can hope for right amazing how lucky you went off on that little dive absolutely yeah and this probably dates from the period when neanderthals are coming back into britain after a very very long period of absence after about a hundred thousand years when there were no people around yeah and this is where we begin to pick up paleolithic archaeology again after a really long gap so it rather puts this cave on the map it's great that both you and alice are happy oh i just think it's you know it's amazing we've had human veins out of there we've had animal veins we've had fossilized veins it's just oh it's good you know for such a short period of exploration it's really pushed information about the cave a long way forward yeah absolutely

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 85,548

Rating: 4.8137045 out of 5

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, slaughter stream cave, extreme archaeology, absolute history, time team, history documentaries 2020

Id: iNlHWiH1K-w

Length: 48min 21sec (2901 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020