The Prehistoric Mysteries Of The Cave People Living In Cheddar Gorge | Time Team | Odyssey

this channel is part of the history hit Network stick around to find out more [Music] it may not look very comfortable but before huts and houses this was home in fact this cave and cheddar Gorge May well be one of the oldest homes in the country between five and ten thousand years ago families of Stone Age hunter-gatherers the old cavemen of Legend probably used this cave to eat sleep shelter and do whatever else they did but to find what they left behind isn't going to be easy thousands of years of rainfall have washed tons and tons of mud into this cave and watched an awful lot of the evidence deep into the tunnels behind we've got just three days and if we're going to find anything at all we're going to have to dig an awful long way down there and an awful long way into there foreign [Music] foreign [Music] Gorge is a three-mile gash carved by an ancient river into somerset's mendip Hills our cave Cooper's hole is one of several along the length of the gorge thought to have been inhabited in the Stone Age though no one knows for sure because it's never properly been excavated by archaeologists but any remains down there are in danger because the gorge is a popular venue for cavers who sometimes unintentionally destroy valuable archeology so time team's main goal is to get Cooper's hole scheduled and so protected from unofficial excavation to do that all we need is some proof however small that it was once inhabited our starting point is the car park by the cave mouth if you love history then you will love history hit we have tons of exclusive documentaries about the most important people in history that you will not find anywhere else our extensive catalog of documentaries covers everything from the rise of Hannibal Barker to the illustrious Treasures of King Tut so sign up today for broadcast quality documentaries uncovering the mysteries of the ancient world we're committed to Bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a free trial and odyssey fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code Odyssey at checkout so where we're standing around in a car Pearl I thought you were going to take me in a cave you are in a cave it didn't look like that I know it doesn't but the Cave used to extend out here into the car park so the entrance is probably over there somewhere or somewhere out there yeah all this rock up above you has been quarried that's been taken back that's why it's all angular and not sort that nice natural green soft look that other parts of the gorge got so we're well inside the cave just here what we know from caves not just here in a Gorge but all around the world is that people live where the daylight comes in not much further back so you would expect to find a half near the entrance to the cave maybe another one over there they would have had their reindeer roasted on this half that might have been here or something like that that was around the area 12 000 years ago I can see where this is leading yeah do you reckon you can Target Us in John well I'm not sure about the reindeer it's probably long gone but um the signs of a hearth and the artifacts if they're going to be here I don't think we're going to find that sort of detail at best we could give you an estimate of the depth of the deposits above bedrock and if the Bedrock is actually narrowing for an entrance it's just possible we can get that while John and Paul search for the original entrance of the cave under the car park carenza's attention is fixed on the inside of the cave she's met up with cave archaeologist Kate robson-brown and Veteran kaver Malcolm Cotter to try and work out where else we should dig tunnel out you actually dig out we did these tunnels we did Malcolm spent four years exploring Cooper's hole nearly 40 years ago he was looking for an underground cave system he believes lies under the Gorge ous she finds it no we didn't unfortunately but what interests us is that on the way he dug through some archeology what did you find about him um well we didn't find the cave that we were looking for but we did find a few bones we found some pottery what sort of Bones did you find well we found horse um sheep boss um there's cows yes yes yes a horse is quite important though because of course there haven't been wild horses in this part of the world for ten thousand years so we're talking right into the Ice Age oh that's so this was this was this was through here and is it just down that way we want to go no there's one to the left as well here did you find anything in there yes we did we found the Flint tool really cool it could have been washed in also it could have fallen through a cavity which is this so what's these might have been just the proof needed to get the cave scheduled unfortunately not realizing their archaeological value Malcolm no longer has them in his position yeah see little blokes do have their uses okay Malcolm okay but he can at least show us where he found them and maybe we can find some of our own good luck Malcolm [Music] Malcolm's first destination is tunnel one where he found the animal bones and where he says there are plenty more he found them in a bed deep down the tunnel under a layer of hard white deposit called the style floor this was formed at the end of the last ice age 7 000 years ago when climatic conditions caused water flowing through caves to leave behind a layer of solid calcium carbonate for archaeologists it's a geological signpost towards the Stone Age beneath so animal bones under the stall should be remained of a stone age meal and could be proof the cave was inhabited but getting to them is going to be really tricky a huge flood in 1968 filled the cave with tons of mud and rubbish which we'll have to re-excavate and today the deteriorating weather is making conditions in the tunnels treacherous not so nice pools of water yeah oh dear lying flat out now to make progress because if it's getting very narrow doesn't it if you look on this bottom plan here it's going down it was only there and he's on his Bat and he hasn't got to that bit yet I can now see pretty well to the top of where we had to break through the stalagmite floor I'm just going to get a closer look crawling now quite tight here it must be moving down here now the bad the bad news is that the little step down below the style of my floor that were reached in 1962. is now blocked up with sediments all right that's down there that's down there do you think we'll be able to get it out yeah it should be possible to get it out it'll be a big effort though within a day you may be able to get to the rim of the stalagmite floor yeah now to get below the stalagmite floor into the into the bone beds you may need another day so he's saying two days to get to the stone might floor yeah yeah so already we're under pressure and bearing the brunt our team of cave diggers [Music] okay foreign they've got to shift several tons of wet Earth more than a hundred feet up a steep slippery slope in a very tight space [Music] and they've got to do it quickly or we might not even reach the bones within three days [Music] our cave is just one of several in The Gorge thought to have been inhabited in the Stone Age and in fact this is one of the richest areas in the country for Stone Age archeology Mick what would have been so attractive for a caveman about this area but it's mainly because they used The Gorge to Ambush animals that are coming off the lowland in front of us down on the somerset levels moving up the gorge as an easy access onto the grazing on the top would they have hunted on the slopes or down the bottom I think they're down the bottom you can see how narrow it is through here if you hid behind those rocks and the horses were coming up to what was probably a balder strewn stream bed that'd be very easy to pick off from the side so this was really the classic Ambush yeah I mean there's a lot of discussion about it but the general feeling is that hunter-gatherers once they got themselves organized they weren't sure the food at all you know they just had to have the right strategy to knock off dinner it's the discarded remains of this dinner we're hoping to find at the back of the cave in tunnel one but if there is anything there it's most likely to be fragments washed in by the weather to find more substantial evidence of human occupation we'll need to excavate the main living area in the original entrance to the cave which is what John's been looking for under the car park and we've produced the results especially for you oh wow in fact his ground radar results have picked up a hard surface perhaps to bedrock about five meters down and he's also found what could be the original cave wall which means the entrance and the main living area were probably on one side of it but five meters is very deep and I wonder if we'll ever get that far only one way to prove it they wish to dig [Music] Malcolm meanwhile has set off down tunnel 2 where he found a flint tool back in the 60s but he doesn't get very far looking plywood there Reckless cavers have recently caused a huge Rock fall at the tunnel entrance and they've only put up a flimsy sheet of plywood to hold back several tons of rubble the tunnel is too dangerous to explore and Malcolm beats a hasty retreat with tunnel 2 off the menu our only lead inside the cave is the bone bed in tunnel one and progress here is slow because Kate and Larry the archaeological policeman on this dig have insisted we take time out to examine every cubic inch of spoil even though we're still clearly digging through debris from the 1968 flood it's definitely a cola camp Kate why are you giving us such a hard time every time we get one trowel full of Earth out of that cave you slow us down and you look at it if we've been digging out here we'd have been finished by now yeah I know but there is a simple answer and that's really these sediments in caves have been formed deposited over thousands in in the broad scale millions of years and what we need to do is not just understand what's going on within any one layer but their relationships to each other in three-dimensional space and to do that we have to go through it with a fine tooth comb we have to take it step by step I mean sometimes these cave sites may be exposed to only 10 or 15 centimeters in a year maximum so you're going really fast yes not inside the cave or not there's another thing about the story about the way we're working there are so few caves which are actually intact understood this is one of them and once we find evidence that people actually lived at this cave whether in the front of the cave or in the back of the cave in the middle well then we can ask for the site to be scheduled to be protected for the nature for the nation for the future that's our real Ultimate objective and allowed to dig relatively quickly in the car park Trench and with promising results just a meter under the surface these bones all belong to animals that humans might eat but were they Stone Age animals probably the most interesting item is this that's a it's a lower it's a third lower molar of a red deer um it's rather a big individual now this is an interesting find because Red Deer is one of the characteristic animals of the 12 000 year old fauna this is when we know humans were living in the area at the the end of the last cold stage it's quite a large tooth and we know that the the late glacial deer were quite big so I'd say that was that was quite a winner at the moment it oh tea time day one they've been digging for about three hours and as you can see from the stratification they've got down to the 1970s so there's still some way to go before we get to the Stone Age but the diggers have started getting excited and Malcolm and Larry are going to go down and see what's happening what's it all about well we've heard they've come to the edge of the break in the style of my floor this is exciting this is where the bones which Show Malcolm talk about earlier are underneath that floor so that gives us a sealed potentially dateable deposit that could be the Stone Age we're looking for is underneath there get going yeah afternoon [Music] because it's so cramped it's actually going to take them about 10 minutes to crawl 100 feet or so to the break in the style floor but of course in Stone Age times the cave would have been much less full of mud and flood debris it might even have been quite spacious in fact it could have looked something like this goff's cave 300 yards down the valley the difference between goff's cave here and Cooper's hole up the gorge is the sediments been removed from the the front of Goss cave already look over here see the static mic coming there from the ceiling it's got a truncated base to it it's got a flat base that was where it was resting on the sediment level right up there above our heads okay so so effectively the silk before this cave was dug out in the 19th century was right above our heads certainly was and if you trace that across here to the wall you can see the remains of the old stalagmite floor this is the deposit that capped the 10 000 year old sediments that we're looking for like we've got now yeah all right now speak to me certainly oh yeah now oh nothing see if we can find a lip ah [Music] all right I think I'm too big for this do you want to run a little water yeah so look yes that's a Malcolm Edge by unblocking five meters of the tunnel and exposing the hole in the style floor the diggers have achieved part one of their task now all they've got to do is empty the hole of flood debris but to reach the bone bed they might have to dig several meters down and that according to Malcolm's calculations could take at least another day so for the diggers there's the prospect of a long night ahead eight o'clock end of my day one but they're still beavering away trying to get rid of all the muck so tomorrow we can get down onto the archeology and see what's under all that white stuff let's hope it doesn't take them too long night Meg my turn on tomorrow I'm going down that hole join us after the break let's have a wobble test on the helmet nine o'clock day two and it's my turn to go down the cave Larry's promised to show me the hole in the style floor and I've got to report back to Mick on the diggers overnight progress if I ever get down there games well I'm struggling to get to grips with the intricacies of caving in the incident room the owner of the gorge Lord bath has arrived and he wants to know if we've found any evidence of Stone Age activity on his estate here we've got very fine third lower moles of wisdom tooth of a red deer make a red deer to look rather a fierce animal but yes well for grass probably Close Quarters they're fierce enough when we first discovered this yesterday it I thought well this is rather a large individual and large Red Deer one of the animals that was common in the area about 12 000 years ago now we've washed it and had a better look at it my feeling is that the preservation suggests it's not really very old and so far we haven't actually found any evidence of human activity other than the fact that some of these are domestic animals there's nothing about the fines themselves that suggest that humans were responsible for this material getting them because the fact that the sheep and the pig are both domesticated you know you don't get domesticated animals about humans being around so indirectly yeah you do find them wandering up and down the gorge even today and the cliffs are kind of steep so plungy plungy death death nurse I think I think some of these could be accidental introductions and his guess is that the bones are Iron Age or later which means the car park trench is still several thousand years and as much as four meters above the Stone Age but unfortunately we can't just plow on down the archaeological police are on hand to ensure we finish analyzing the top layers first how long do you think it's going to take to excavate an investigator to your satisfaction because obviously from we're hoping to try and get down to Paleolithic layers this is above that I was wondering how long realistically we're looking at getting this loose out cleaning up getting people here middle of the afternoon so now even the car park trenches on a go slow 48 but at least the hole in the style floor has progressed the bottom yeah overnight the diggers have cleared about half a meter of soil and revealed a nice section below the lip of the style and just in time for our VIP visitor yeah tell us tell us what you're looking at we've got quite a good picture now you see the point of my trowel yes that that's that's Larry there yeah we can see that Larry this is the top of the stalagmitic floor I've got it yeah the calcium carbonate crust we hope deposit underneath which has bone and maybe even stone tools yeah the this this style floor is about a foot thick I'd imagined that it would just be a thin crust like icing sugar but it's a really solid thing and that just below it you've got lots of little broken off little pieces of flinty looking material is there anything you can actually see in that section under the Stelling mitted floor that that you know might be bone or not yet it really needs cleaning up it's um we're just looking at a small window at the moment and the pit itself still hasn't been completely um cleared of the debris from from the 1968 flood and has Lord bath got any questions or should we just continue checking out his property the theory of what you're fighting even though you're not fighting at the moment but most interesting well it is only day two and there's still plenty of digging to do before we expect to hit the bones but we're not just here in search of fines to help us understand the site we're going to reconstruct our hour or Lord Bath's cave would have looked in the Stone Age Victor's busy sketching the entrance [Music] the surveyors of so long a neat little Gizmo that'll record the shape and texture of the inside of the cave [Music] meanwhile John Gator and his team are trying to find the original cave floor so we can tell how big it was the technology works on a reassuringly primitive level make a noise with a big hammer and see if it bounces off a hard surface under the mud into the geophone stuck into the silt all this information will be given to Steve to plug into his computer and by the end of tomorrow we should have an accurate picture of what the cave looked like 10 to 12 000 years ago when you say Stone Age I think of The Flintstones and then with clubs and dragging women by the hair what do we mean by the Stone Age well I think you have to remember that when the early archaeologists were faced with finding this stuff they had a load of stone implements a load of bronze implements and a load of iron implements before they got to the Romans so the logic was to say the Stone Age the Bronze Age and the Iron Age so they were pigeon holes really for archaeologists to put information into they didn't necessarily reflect anything more than the technology and we classify the the stone age according to sort of details of the way the tools are made there's the the Paleolithic is the Old Stone Age there's a Mesolithic age the Middle Stone Age there's the Neolithic Age so imagine it's a classification so it's imagine if gasification yeah it's not it's not subtle but if you you actually look at some of the tools you can get the idea about 12 000 years ago people were making blade tools out of out of church Like Flint ornery Flint the southeast England that's nice stuff Andy where's that from beautiful stuff this is actually from Goss cave here corner from us yeah yeah then in the in the Mesolithic the Middle Stone Age you get these rather smaller tools that are beautifully made that's great Tony because if you look at the end of that look it's got the three facets just like a modern steel drill there and the the yeah yeah and what they would use those kind of things for is for carving grooves in bone and bits of wood in order to set other pieces like this in with resin so they could make things like drills and saws then in the Neolithic the new stone age you see a sort of departure into new technologies and this is where we see a lot of these wonderful polished ax heads so which of this stuff are we likely to find here what I would like to see coming out of Cooper's hole is very definitely these these blade type tools of of about 12 000 years ago foreign okay this is a thing that's known as a bat on the Commandment it's from Goss cave just down the road it's the base of a reindeer antler that's had a whole bored right through from both sides and a spiral ornament pudding what's it called so there's an asking stick and asking stick so is that one of these examples of archaeologists finding something they've no idea what it is at all because it looks the way it does they think oh this is some sort of object you hold up yeah when you want to speak to the trial nonsense like that yeah well it's obviously a tool because of the way it's worn it's obviously something that you grasp to use and we'd really like to try and find out a little bit more about what you can do with them uh we can't do anything with this one this is 12 000 years old and it's a bit fragile so what we want Phil to do is to make a replica of this and then see what we can do with it so we've got a piece of reindeer antler and we're going to turn that into one of those but first he's got to make a set of Stone Age tools Phil's an expert Flint Napper and he should be ready to start carving before the end of the day better that's a nice blade that is sight we've got another lead a local caver who stopped by to see what we're up to has told us about another tunnel in the cave and karenza and Larry are off to investigate the new tunnel Tunnel 3 runs down the center of the cave parallel to Tunnel one from which it's separated by a wall of mud and there's water down there yeah according to the caver it was opened very recently and there's a break in the style floor here which might offer access to the Stone Age without having to dig through the 1968 flood and his head here that's it yeah yeah this is full of scree and we're looking into the stalagmatic floor going that way so it's is that just a bit of dual benefit it looks less like it and I poked at it thinking more desperation I'm not sure right we could clean this up and that will give us a section another one so with karenza installed in Tunnel 3 about 70 feet from the cave mouth we've now got people scraping away in two tunnels [Music] and with no Stone Age finds to our credit so far there's an urgency about their work foreign things are moving faster in the car park trench too Kate is at last satisfied we've finished analyzing the relatively recent layers and the next stop for the Digger driver will be the Stone Age if he can reach it [Music] foreign technology in what way I I never saw these tools as being that efficient no you've little faith you see look at it oh that's going in better than a metal tool yeah we know it is and look at that look at me look at those shavings coming out that is incredible yeah I I I'm impressed I think oh good lord daylight or with her already yeah way ah look at that yeah that is good that's amazing it's going to be easy to make it all right isn't it we could make dozens of well no I don't think we want to go quite that I mean we could make I could watch you make dozens of them thank you very much because the wet weather's right back in tunnel one a meter and a bit beneath the style the diggers have finally hit something sadly it's not bones it's rather more substantial and that is very likely to be the local water table which is not helped by the fact that the weather is so wet this way because you would have raised it by a meter or so now if that is the water table it represents quite a few million gallons of water and they're only a few inches down we may be all right any deeper and we'll be pumping out a river all right is there room for me to come in yes yes when Malcolm and Larry investigate for themselves it turns out we've been digging in the wrong place anyway the bone is there and here bone is x marks the spots yes um now oh now what will happen the style of my floor will meet the roof so your trans is actually bigger than than we originally thought we thought we were just gonna be a little oh no no there's a step down yeah it shows a couple of meters so we've got to clear out a new area under the style even further down the tunnel the sediment's above the floor the passage of 38 years has obviously affected Malcolm's initial memory of where he saw the bones but at least he's now confident we're finally on the right track and the more he scrapes the sharper his memory gets I'm sorry okay gone the bones are under the roof in that direction that's right right down down here yes down there I would say about one and a half meters below your Trail in that direction they'll be swimming oh they have to be pumped yeah yeah were the bones easily spotted they were they were there they were sticking out they were yes and and you left some behind oh we did oh yes oh good well let's do it yes I think I really have to do it but the diggers are exhausted and can only drag up a few trucks better to stop now and start again refreshed tomorrow so end of day two it's been a very exciting day but incredibly frustrating we've done this huge hole here that's so deep we're practically a New Guinea and we hadn't had one single find out of it we've burrowed deep deep deep into there and again not one find but now there's a of light join us after the break and see if tomorrow we can find Malcolm's bones nine o'clock day three and the Hunt's on for Malcolm's bones but something really frustrating has happened which is that we've got to close down this main trench it's so deep now that the shovel on the Digger can't even reach it anymore and it's been raining all night so the sides have started crumbling in and it's far too dangerous for anyone to work in there anymore Larry yesterday you said to me that you wanted to dig like crazy until you got down onto the real archeology and then you'd have to start being careful well we've got nowhere near there yeah well we haven't got to the uh the Stone Age we haven't got to the Paleolithic but um to be honest I'm not not too unhappy about that because I I was frankly worried that we were going to at this rate break into it and actually destroy some evidence but that's well that's why we were doing I was worried because I thought we might hit on the archeology we haven't lost anything but we would have lost anything we just sat in the car all week we've gained a lot of information about the site and the way it's formed I mean if you look over the edge you can see some large Boulders in the section down there which are so large that they probably were collapse off this room so we actually have perhaps identified where the original outline the edge of the roof was which is what we said on the day when we were looking for because that helps to find where people might have been living well I'm glad that you're happy about it I think the rest of us are extraordinarily frustrated although we haven't been able to reach the Stone Age In this trench we can at least tell how much we missed it by these are the seismics we did yesterday if I'm actually in the cave there's the surface right dipping down into the cave and this is our predicted solid floor level and this is the concrete wall here and I just John thinks his seismic survey has revealed the depth of the style floor at the top of the Stone Age under the car park right so we want height to his eye level and using another piece of neat Electronics we can measure the depth of our hole the difference in the two numbers is the distance from the bottom of our trench to the style and the margin by which we've fallen short of our Target can you see it at the bottom yeah no problem [Music] should have the result now uh oh yeah uh 3.7 look I have written down here what Phil 3.6 3.6 3 meters 60. so we've actually got the bottom then or rather the top of the interesting bit and we've had to stop that really is frustrating there's not much to cheer in tunnel one either Larry and the cavers have now excavated deep into the new area where the style floor meets the roof of the cave and water is pouring into the hole they put something the only hope is that they can pump it out faster than it's coming in but it's all right but you know what's going to happen we'll turn it off but let's keep it on well it makes it difficult for me to work yeah well we're gonna have to do it we're gonna have to turn it off and shift it out when you have to get in there and give it a good go okay all right turn it off next door in tunnel three corenza's digging in relative comfort and although she's still above the water table she's hit a layer of orange sandy soil beneath the style that could at last take us further back in time than the 1960s it up this is what we've been looking for this color sediment in hole one I think what does that say to you well this says to me that this is a certainly 368 when the floods were here all we're getting in tunnel one is the gray sort of if you like very very gravel washed in but this is a lot different brilliant so this orange layer looks like it could be our best bet for Stone Age finds inside the cave there it goes yeah Phil meanwhile has decided his best route to the Stone Age is the battle de come on give it a flick look at that then Stone Age Technology wins again that's a bit more like it now all he's got to do is carve some spiral grooves into the hole and we'll be ready to work out what it was actually for it's now 2 30 day three and we still haven't got one single find have we uh no not to speak up not to speak of does mean no Larry can you hear me have you found anything yet we're in a very exciting moment here we've turned the corner and he's on his back digging through Buck water's pouring in and we think we hit the old tunnel that Malcolm described this morning but can you actually see anything down there chocolate mousse that means no corenza how things are hi Tony well we're just going down through this orange layout which we think maybe the pre-style there well that's good and have you found anything out down there well we found a couple of very small bones probably rodent but that's all so far so basically nothing well a couple of small bones yeah over okay thanks that's good two rodent bones what do you mean that's good tell us something about the environment well it could be from 1960 well not if it's on in the clay layer under the style layer so we have a Time team in which we find two rodent bones are we going to get anything more than that before the end of the day I think it's unlikely the moment seconds later with Water Rising fast the situation in tunnel 1 takes a turn for the worse the pump the most powerful we could fit down a tunnel full of working cavers is struggling the mud's too thick it's time for a brain wave Larry Mick the Dig is suggesting that we actually put more water down there is that a sensible idea or is it total Madness complete Madness we'll forget that one man getting down to the Stone Age seems like an increasingly distant Prospect in our cave and if that's not bad enough Andy currents wetting our appetite with lots of Stone Age bones he excavated from goff's cave 10 years ago one of the most intriguing things he found was evidence of cannibalism here in Britain we're very much on the edge of the range of modern humans about 12 000 years ago and all the evidence we've got is that life was nasty brutish and short there's a little friend of mine here which we dug up in golf's cave a few years ago it's top of a human skull and it's covered in Long parallel cut marks that have been made with a stone tool this guy has been skinned how do you know that that's cannibalism and not simply stripping a body down to the bones for some ceremonial reasons well the only evidence we've got for that supposedly circumstantial the animal bones that we found in the same dick were horse and red deer and the remains have been treated in exactly the same way all the long bones have been smashed up it looks as though they're after marrow fat and it looks as though they they just weren't wasting anything you know so when Granny died are you going to clean up a bit though oh yeah well that's that's that charcoal there we had is that a bone oh God you're right it is it may not be human it may not even be very old but in Tunnel 3 karenza's at last found a decent sized bow looks like something classic words so you get to Andy current and see what he thinks whatever it turns out to be this and any other bones karenza can unearth may be our only hope of proving the cave was inhabited because in tunnel one the chances of reaching any archeology are looking frailer by the minute can we have the Chain Gang down here we're getting a drown the pump's finally given up the ghost so all they can do is bail to really tell cave from cable now so we'll be cutting part of the cave [Music] [Music] yeah ready oh oh stop stop again Ian are you just dumping oh please that's great isn't it you see it's got that spiraly bit inside far away from this vision of Hell Phil and Andy have finished the battle and are now ready to work out what it was for one theory is that it was a thong stropper that's first stripper to you and me okay let's drop the phone so what do we do get it on there somehow we'll put it on this end and give it away and see what we can do go up and down like that yeah [Laughter] we've got some more bone in here Pete there's this little Vine iron stained layer here and certainly one of the bits of bed must have been down here quite long because it's um it's picked up that staining and the other one's just there look I mean they could be lamb rib Burns I guess so are there any other theories yes there are uh it could be that it's for control in a rope actually sort of winching something in like how yeah well let's have a go let's see if we can do it okay yeah we've got some rope um so let's see what we can do with it where's he in there's the end should I set through there do we shove it through so that goes through there like that now what's the theory about what yeah you need a Paleolithic horse and we haven't got one so I'm gonna double up we're going to double up I'm going to be a Paleolithic horse who's just been caught I'm going to tie myself into this noose [Laughter] well I don't know Tony I didn't really think about I mean I don't know if it's going to help just do it without let's see what happens all right right without without stop bucking hi all right it does it does make difference it definitely makes some difference truly you weren't just no no oh please do it a cardiac correct so this is plausible yeah yeah so up until now the archaeologists have thought it was a totem stick yep and actually it was just an ordinary tool yeah that's pretty good isn't it we win but in tunnel one the shattered cavers have finally acknowledged defeat The Bone Bed remains submerged Beneath the Sea of mud which means it's all down to karenza and her finds from tunnel three what have you brought for us right well this is the stuff come out of this orange lair that we think might be very early we've got some bones we've got to a load of these little sort of ribby type things there yeah um so seeing they're all from the same man and we've got this tiny little bone here could be a fish bone yeah but the interesting bit is that which has obviously got cut marks on it there oh that's a beauty oh really that's so beautiful that's just the kind of cut Mark you would get if you were opening up the body cavity and cleaning out the insides just you know it's just on the inside of the inside of the rib cage but there there certainly Cuts made by stone tools yeah there's another one above it and there yeah so are you happy to say caveman did that I would be pretty happy to say that nearly the end of day three and we have evidence that cavemen lived down our cave [Applause] [Laughter] now we know our cave was inhabited we can picture what it would have looked like 10 to 12 000 years ago The Gorge itself was much narrower and less densely wooded perfect hunting ground the mouth of the cave would have extended further out into the Gorge [Music] and this is where the inhabitants would have lived deeper inside with no mud filling it the cave would have been very spacious spacious enough even for a stone age Lord bath to stand in foreign precisely but he would say that the caveman who butchered it lived some time between the very end of the Stone Age and the early Iron Age but even that could be enough to get this amazing cave scheduled and its Stone Age Secrets protected

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 140,867

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, Time Team, Bronze Age, Stone Age, Beaker People, tony robinson, tony robinson documentary, tony robinson history of britain, tony robinson walking through history, tony robinson worst jobs in history, tony robinsons romans, tony robinson time team, Odyssey, odyssey, cheddar gorge, cave, cave people

Id: 8hgNyrNhvIU

Length: 50min 52sec (3052 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 06 2023