The Search For The Real Life Flintstones | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

time team are hot on the trail of one of the very few places in britain which shows evidence of human habitation dating from the early stone age surprisingly it's down there in the grounds of a centre park's holiday village see you by the pool welcome to suffolk lovely isn't it this is what most of england would have looked like 400 millennia ago to the small stone age population who lived here lots of lush vegetation and plenty of animal life including lions rhinos and elephants and contrary to what you see in the movies definitely no dinosaurs time team have come here to centre parks in elves and in suffolk to try to find out more about the stone age people who lived and died here 400 000 years ago and as usual we've got just three days to do it [Music] so where exactly are we now well we're still in the middle of the center parks complex but we're in an old clay pit which was a brick making place in victorian times what's that got to do with the stone age well down the side of the clay pit there is a layer for dating from the old stone age how do we know at stone edge because it's got hand axes in it and it's got the flakes where they were making the hand axes so is that all we're likely to find well it is but it's a very important size and it dates to 400 000 years ago so that'll be the oldest site we've ever done and so it's a very very unusual and rare site very important site if it's that rarer site how come we're allowed to dig here because we're working with the british museum archaeologists uh nick ashton he's a great friend of phil's and he's been digging here for several years phil you started without us well there's so much muck to get away from the the front of the face so we've got a jcb in for that and now we're back hand digging and you can see we're straight onto uh in situ archaeology so what have we got here nick effectively we have a riverbank you see this dark horizon here this is an ancient land surface at the edge of the river the river flowing in front of us behind us here through the middle of the pit we have a chalk cliff on the far side which we can see in section we think there's probably a chalk cliff the other side so there would have been like a narrow gorge running through absolutely with people living in it stone age people people living or at least napping flint making flint tools on the edge of this river how much do we know about these people well very little because we've got very few sites and and very few finds off those sites it's very rare to find something in this sort of situation isn't it we've got a piece of the original ground surface to work on be great if we could find a skeleton wouldn't it uh i think there's a very very remote chance extremely remote these are casts of three fragments of one skull that was found on one site and from another site you've got two teeth and a leg bone and these are a hundred thousand years older than the site we're on and that's the whole assemblage of human remains of this period from england i mean i'm afraid oh it'd be a dream come true wouldn't it with so little physical evidence remaining of these early humans we can only guess at how they lived here along the riverbank over 400 000 years ago with virtually no chance of finding any human remains in our excavations one of time team's main tasks this weekend is to see if we can find any traces of plants and animals that lived alongside early humans this could complete our picture of the prehistoric river valley habitat we've got andy and simon here are going to run the environmental part of the project hopefully tell us from animals beetles pollen so on you know what's going on so simon what exactly are we going to be doing in this trench we're going to cut back into the face using a machine removing the spoil that's been tipped off the edge of the quarry and take the face back to in situ deposits we know in this part of the site we're finding shells and there's a good chance we'll find animal bones as well what kind of animals might we find we're looking for voles my favorite animal is so exciting voles are really great animals they're very important for us we can find our way around the last two million years or so just using volteath so if simon and i can get enough volt teeth from these deposits here we can confirm the age of this material so you use them as dateable evidence in the same way that roman archaeologists use bits of pottery it's exactly the same principle yeah you're gonna have to shift an awful lot of soil to find the small bones of those yeah we written what about a ton yes yeah what we're going to be doing we'll take all this material from behind us we're going to put it into the buckets tipping in some hydrogen peroxide to fizz it up into a kind of goo and then in the morning we'll come back and hopefully we'll be able to tip that glute through the sieve hey presto full teeth and then you will tell us what the conditions were like what the environment was like from the vault teeth yes and that is incredible to be able to do that we are short of manpower aren't we where's carrenza well you know i said that these sites were very very rare the reason in fact another one five miles away at barnum the barnum clay pit like our main site at elvton has been the focus of previous british museum excavations but this one hasn't been used for over five years hence the jungle oh right so is this your your section this is one of our main archaeological areas yeah right and this is your layer of plastic protecting your old excavation yeah we put that down in 94 when we left so what do you want us to do here over the next few days well what we're going to do today is we're going to cut a section at the back wall there so clean it up clean it up compare it with what we've got elf done and that'll give us the geological layers precisely yeah and then take another spit another layer off of the cobbles looking for artifacts and other bones again to compare with the sort of thing we're getting the other side exactly yeah well it's some big job isn't it we need to get a motorbike we need to clear the foliage first so cameron [Music] here's the flake you might want to have a look at phil come look good god that is in mint condition aren't it certainly yes and that a beautiful flake look at the edge on it oh that's razor sharp is that the way you normally get them like that yeah in that condition from the area we had last year on the land surface uh they're all absolutely mint condition just like that let's dig it out because i mean the weather doesn't look like it's going to help us much it's going to come on the rain you see the only difference between it now and when it was well dropped there 400 000 years it's got that just that slow staining on it from the from the minerals in the clay and other than that well yeah you could have made it yesterday i'm glad i bought my watercolors boy's [ __ ] beginning to move yeah it's ready to come out well let's go for it i mean i've been bumping weight in the anticipation for a minute let's go for it oh yeah there we go oh look at that oh look at that oh what a gem look at that oh look at that it ain't broke no either look at that there's the there's oh yeah just got that little bit of lip in look yeah yeah nice beautiful yeah and that really sort of characteristic pro for that profile yeah dead ringer yeah absolutely typical of a hat of a hand axe thin inflatable yeah you've got the surface of the house yes that's right and it's just going down on the other side so it achieves the aim of thinning the whole thing down yep what a cracker eh the hand axe was the single most important item made by early man crafted by striking or napping a flint nodule with a hammer stone it was a hand-sized multi-purpose tool a hammer striking a flint leaves a scar the bulb of percussion and the concentric ripples show the angle of striking flake scars on the edge show where the tool was sharpened the flint artifacts found in elvedon and at barnum are very similar in asian appearance so the two sites may once have been connected geophysics have been given the task of trying to find out if the same prehistoric river ran through both sites john we really do need to find out where this ancient river channel went because it's our only way of linking the two sites really but it strikes me from your point of view it's going to be very difficult and it's not archaeology it's it's geology really you're actually going to try electrical imaging all right that does sound a bit too different well it could be six meters down that we're having to look and what we've got to try and do is a transect across that river valley so you've got all one straight line or one straight line we've got the buildings in the way we've got the farm machinery in the way so we're trying to find a line between those have you managed to do that yeah if we go over here i should show you the gear and what we've got is this cable oh yeah that comes from the battery running the length of the field oh right up past sue to that that's right and at every five meters we've got these probes oh right yeah so we're sending electric currents into the ground we use the first pair of probes to measure the resistance at that point right then we switch to the next set of probes which are further apart further apart and measure that point and we do that all the way along the line and so we actually gradually build up a picture a vertical section getting more deeply into the ground finding this ancient river or paleo channel is of immense importance to paleontologists if geophysics can establish the root of the river it could help to locate further stone age sites in the area steward meanwhile is doing it the hard way by walking the fields between barnum and elfton to see if there's any evidence of the paleo channel nearer the surface at eldon it's all hands to the pumps in an attempt to protect the trench and stop the site reverting to a prehistoric swamp this looks like around a ramshackle absolutely safely covered the digging goes on but it takes an expert eye to tell whether the tiny fragments of flint are man-made or of natural origin different sort of archaeology for me this isn't it well it's nice of you to increase your education mick i think it's it's good for your education i've come to the feet of the master i don't know about that effectively you've got something that is coming around here but it's coming back all the way up there right they shouldn't be doing that no way that can be no don't weigh that because percussion that ain't been it off yeah so it's probably frost yeah yeah you don't disagree i don't disagree 20 meters along the cliff face we've got a team of diggers hard at work cleaning up one of the british museum's earlier excavations so what's going on in this trench then nick i noticed it up on the bank but we haven't had a good look at it yet in effect we've we've got the same river edge but this time instead of a river bank we've actually got a beach uh a cobble beach so this is the same as the one down there it's part the same part of the same riverbed right right but it's much more commonly than clay that's one of the interesting things that they're actually using these cobbles to make some of the stone tools so what we've got marked here then is every flake and blade that's been identified in the top of the cobbles yeah all the white markers are marking uh flakes that have been been mapped uh possibly in this spot what are we going to do we're going to take this away then and look underneath it uh what we'll do is uh record where the artifacts are uh lift them back them yeah and then we're going to take off another seam of cobbles and see whether any more artifacts underneath because presumably it could have built up with cobbles and blades and it may be yeah at certain depths we think in this area the material is slightly moved not very far yeah and so you've got one or two artifacts mixed in with the cobbles okay the laborious process of trying to extract 60 buckets of clay to find traces of preserved organic material carries on despite the weather so simon what what's the chance of getting uh mammal teeth small mammal teeth from here very good i think um we're finding fragments of shell quite large uh fragments of shell probably fresh water muscle a freshwater muscle shell in the clay is a good indicator that the organic evidence may not have been destroyed by the passage of 400 000 years what it means is that there's bone in there there will be bone in this this would be exciting dig with only another 48 buckets to go andy begins to add hydrogen peroxide to the samples overnight the chemicals should dissolve the clay and reveal any organic material if the rain doesn't dilute it too much karanza with everyone else on flood alert guess who's been promoted to t-boy grinder okay yeah i've got you oh yeah so it's amazing what i got oh wonderful wow that will cheer everyone up actually it's a bit wet gloomy and depressing take you forever to find you i was taking forever to get on this afternoon to be quite honest tease up oh you've got on really well don't you we're actually bearing in mind the weather we have done i think we've been cleaning up the sort of vertical section there which will tell us about the geological layers that we compare to eldon you can see it's all sort of got gungy and silty underneath it's been covered up like this for five years so if we start to clean it up um reveal these these are the cobbles that the old the side of the old riverbed basically this is where they were sitting getting the flint and working it into tools so we'll clean all that back and then carry on down if we look at what we've got here we've got um a bit of the cobble band that we've never exposed before at the back layer and hopefully we will get these uh fresh in-situ artifacts that haven't been moved possibly even refitting and they'll be sitting on top of the cup they'll be sitting on top of the cobble band and then when we take our spit out from the main area here we'll get the stuff that's been reworked over time and possibly slid down cracks and they might be a little bit more rolled and abraded at eldon it's still pouring but phil's taken the opportunity to practice the finer points of flint napping victor also braves the elements to capture phil and fellow craftsman john lord as they use stone age tools in an attempt to make a prehistoric hand axe hi hello tony just about finished it it's uh he's coming along i mean i've got a bit more thinning to do down here and then that'll be ready for use so what would they have used that for just about any purpose you could think of i mean the the great thing that everybody compares it to is the swiss army know if you know you name it they used it for it they're good butchery tools and i also processed some ox bone with them recently how about cutting it's all done in a few minutes yeah it cuts excellently it's quite efficient doesn't it you wouldn't have thought so i'm going to make a spear tomorrow we're also going to like try light fire with the grand spark from the flint well let's hope that the rain's eased off by that time at least to give you a fighting chance yes i'll see you later okay cheers tony bye tony how did we get on down there today mick oh i think pretty well despite the weather you know we've done a lot of cleaning and both sites are ready to be taken apart now and tomorrow well the main thing we thought was to join the two together then that'll give us a really nice long section running right up the side of the river excellent and then we're going to go down where the buried soil is because that's where the hand axes have been found and we're going to go in that area here's john and karenza hopefully with the geophysics results well it's nice and colourful these are from barnum yeah that's barnum and this is a transect right across the valley looking for the small channel and this is where the big channel is and within it i think we've actually got two or three smaller braided childs yeah so it's like we've got a load of little channels with little islands in between and you're going to do the same thing tomorrow on this side at this end and see if we get the same sort of picture so join us after the break hopefully we'll find out more about stone age man tomorrow and hopefully we might even find a tool even better than the one that phil made for us today it's day two and for the moment the sun's shining so we've made an early start an extended trench one to try and see if the prehistoric cobble beach we found yesterday continues along the face of the clay pit in their environmental trench andy and simon finally managed to extract their 60 buckets of samples but things aren't looking too good not going anywhere we've got a problem yeah i'm not going to find anything in there oh god look at that it's like play-doh hydroxide's just not breaking it down you're going to need a week we haven't got a week time we haven't got a week what do you reckon we could do we could try because it's very very chalky we could try something like uh weak acetic acid pickling vinegar something like that five miles away at barnum carrenza and her team are carefully cleaning the mud from their prehistoric cobble beach and extending into the face of the clay pit john and phil are testing the efficiency and sharpness of the flint hand axe the first stage in making a prehistoric spear see an amazing thing looking at that john is that if i found that i wouldn't actually think it was at all you'd think it was an unfinished piece maybe a piece of flint that somebody had a few flakes off i've wanted either to use the flakes or just gave up on the tool but seeing you use it it's a really efficient tool oh got ice going it's definitely going yeah yeah after successfully finding a river channel at barnum yesterday john needs to get his bearings at elvedon for the second part of the geophysics survey well i brought you here because there's a very good view over the clay pit i think it's a bit simpler here well i'll show you what we know and then you can see what you think you see over by the tent around there where we're digging that's where phil is that's where phil is and the riverbank he's sort of back 10 meters or so to the left of that okay and then this clay piece actually occupies the the river valley and then the other side is about sort of 10 meters or so back behind that big excavation where the sampling's going on so it's about 50 meters wide and they reckon it's going roughly in that sort of direction through you know almost into the sun i mean that's where we've been working yeah 25 miles away towards barn i mean that in that direction over there the question is whether you can find it you say yes it's just a question if we can get 125 meters well perhaps along the paths you know yeah as well the obvious place through of meters of cable are needed for the electrical imaging survey but john's hampered by centre park's natural landscaping and man-made barriers [Music] let's try again that's okay so guys cup of tea yeah you may even take a question hey phil this has changed the business you're telling me i mean i've only just got here myself but i mean when i went away last night there was a tree standing here i don't know what what nick's been up to but he certainly got excited about it what's going on there we seem to have the two levels of human activity two yeah total surprise how long have you been digging here five years and this is the first time that you've discovered two separate layers absolutely this is important it is yeah it really is yeah i'll bet you're glad you invited time to myself how do you know that there are two different layers of down here we have the cobble beach layer that's the one that appears over in our trench over there is it yep yep we've got artifacts over there lo and behold cool that's not just an arbitrary piece of stone no way i was making flakes exactly the same as that when i was making the handouts yesterday and what have you got on top of that on top of that we've got this orange sediment here which is material that's washed in down the edges yeah okay and above that we've got the land surface that we're looking at yesterday again with different artifacts we've got to see this thing in plan we've got to see whether there are any more tools distributed across the surface so the obvious thing to do is to chop back down looking at that it's going to be devilish hard going but we got to do it do you think we can do that by the end of the day i think if you give me a pick you probably will oh there's one right down here carrenza and her barnum team are making good progress in cleaning back the cobble beach layer yeah that's a nice flight karenza that's the top the bulb of percussion isn't it where it's been struck yeah and you can see the ripples coming down where the fracture forces gone through the the flint i mean we've got well but nearly 10 finds out of this trench haven't we now are you happy with that it's more than we expected really in terms of the fact that all we've done at the moment is just clean up after removing the plastic we haven't taken off our spit and we've got some really nice things this is a particularly good one carrenza we've got these facets here which while in a cobble band there's always a possibility that this has just been caused naturally but this does look like it might have been reworked just to maybe sharpen the edge or just sharpen it up sort of so you've been using it to cut or something it's got blunt like that and you just knock another chip off knock another chip off like that and go sharp fresh yeah i mean these have all been they're all in the cobbles aren't they these are the ones that have been rolled about in the river i mean this one i've just found that's quite sort of knocked about at the edges yeah the edges have been damaged uh quite a bit and there's a lots of natural chips around them to tony tony we're getting some really exciting finds from this trench now i'd really like um you to come and have a look at it and phil as well if he's there yeah i'll bring him over straight away could you possibly bring an intact a whole hand axe as well it'd be really quite useful to have that if you've got one over that's fine i'll see you in quarter of an hour bye okay i'm going to barnum it's raining again it's also pretty wet in the environmental trench where and is sieving the samples in an attempt to separate any organic remains from the wet clay despite the addition of pickling vinegar to break the clay down even further it's still very lumpy and they've now got just over a day left to find those elusive vole teeth but before the samples can be sorted and analyzed they have to be left to dry in the sun it's just around this corner here well that's a bit tidier than when i last saw it well it's it's like elven revisited with this sort of cobbled surface and and are these all the fines on it yeah we've had a really good run of fines actually and this is where we had i think the fine we're most excited about is this is our big find phil did you bring a hand axe yeah we're wondering what you've been wanting to ask me to bring that over speak into the trench band oh you've got one what do you think of those good lord there's no question that's part of a hand axe isn't it you've got flaking on that edge and then flaking again across there i mean that is broken but i guess it's going to fit in what yeah that is pretty good fit in it gosh it is just remarkably close what about that bit then this here is sloppy napping i mean it's up and across and down i mean this right angle there's no way you're gonna that's that's pretty awful but in his defense i mean you've got a a big thermal fracture in there that's a a natural flaw in the flint he probably didn't even know it was there and as he's napping away at this end banging away at it and the vibrations gradually build up and build up that bit drops off end result you swear this is bad bad raw material and this is bad luck because i mean this is what we call n-shock and you can bet your life on it when he's working at this end this is the end that flows off and i don't suppose there's a flint knapper in christendom who hasn't had this at some stage or another i mean yeah happens to me all the time i've got my own bit of n shock the consensus at the other trench is that they need your labor up there and that we ought to close this one down what do you think um yeah i could live with that we could certainly do with some extra help over there i mean there are areas of cobbles that really do need this is not a bad point to stop is it i mean we've we've cleaned up this area that area's cleaned up we've done most of the recording so if you really need to pull people off this trench so you're almost in a point where you can lift and lift and lift and leave put it to bed yeah we'll see you later john lorde's making good use of basic flint tools in making us a prehistoric spear first the side branches are stripped away then the bark then the most important part the business end honed to a seriously sharp point using only a thin but razor-sharp flake of flint [Music] victor's included in his painting all the known elements of the river valley but what about its inhabitants so how were the people who lived on our riverbank 400 000 years ago related to us we're not really sure about that tony they might be a little evolutionary offshoot they might be our direct ancestors what's important though for our point of view is to know roughly what they look like what we really need is a face this is what we laughingly call modern man if we can super impose on that something that might be mixed skull this is a modern scar this is a modern skull you can see a lot of the features that characterize modern humans it's got a high cranial vault as it's called smallish face and the most important feature here a pointy chin if we go back to say a late neanderthal late neanderthals have got a big cranial vault but it's flatter and wider and it's got this bun on the back very big face and it's got a very strong jaw but there's no pointy chin niandra tell me they were first found in the neander valley in germany it just characterizes a particular skull shape but they were actually probably quite smart they were probably as bright as us there's no reason why they shouldn't be if we go back a stage further to the steinheim skull here we've got a decent face to go on and we can use this to try and reconstruct what our people here might have looked like but it hasn't got a job no jaw with this one but we do have fossil jaws which tell us that these neanderthal characters were still present back 400 thousand years ago yeah so this is what mick would look like if he had the skull of someone who was living 400 000 years ago that's a pretty close approximation to it it's marginally better looking than the modern mic isn't it fortunately mick was concentrating on what stuart was saying this business of whether the sites are connected by river channel yeah that's some ideas ah over to the east of the barnum pit i've got something really interesting i've got a brown stripe across a field oh yeah i think it's really significant brown strike because it's uh when you look at it it's a whole load of flint nodules plowed out through the plough soil i think that might be a continuation of the river channel in that direction right now it'd be really nice to prove if we could run a geophysical line across there to see whether they get the same results if we can demonstrate the linearity of the channel there yeah and down here yeah i think that will give us fairly conclusive proof that they in the pleistocene period we have a whole set of either a single channel or a number of channels all flowing in this direction and you were arguing about what to do tomorrow i'll raise that then you can you can lend some support there yeah i think it's a good idea yeah and if that turns out to be prehistoric that'd be wonderful this tea's not very good is it with the barnum site closed down carrenza and her team arrive at our main trench at elvedon ready willing and possibly able to find that elusive hand axe what we're going to get them to do nick well we cut this long section going around there which links this cobble beach horizon yes okay you can trace it right the way through that section and i want you to remove the block of clay from over there down to the beach level okay so if you start digging maybe from that end and we'll come from this end we'll meet in the middle and of course there is the extra you've got to find us a hand don't laugh don't laugh because what was it a couple of three years ago two or three years ago just underneath here nick found two hand axes so they are there we found this couple of bits yesterday so let's hope you've got it you're right in ambient street end of day two and tomorrow we're going to pour all our resources into that trench there because we've got just one more day in which to find a complete 400 000 year old hand axe but before we go tonight we've got one more task get our dinner if phil doesn't improve his stone age talent soon i think we're going to be very hungry tonight join us after the break i did try not hard enough yes we've lost the spear tony yeah got a minute come here and have a look at this it's the beginning of day three and already phil looks like he's up to something we've got our first complete tool look you see it's been a flake that's been struck off there but not only that somebody's actually taken a hammerstone and they've trimmed it around there you see these each an individual flake scar where the hammer has landed and made this concave notch now these are ideal tools for making spears anything that needs whittling see the beauty of me is that they won't actually slip out of the diameter of the piece of wood or bone that you're scraping wonderfully efficient tools and then when they're blunt you maybe make another notch and you can use it again so that might have been used on something like the spear that we made yesterday unfortunately phil's skill with a spear wasn't up to the standards of early hunters and i had to make a trip to the local butchers to get tonight's dinner once again demonstrating the versatility of flint tools john made short work of the haunch of venison using a combination of sharp flakes and a hand axe he easily skinned and disjointed the meat yesterday the geophysics survey proved the existence of a prehistoric river channel emerging from the elvedon site and heading towards barnum useful information for archaeologists as they may be able to find other sites of human habitation in this long-lost river valley but john's got one last job to investigate the mysterious brown stripe that stewart's discovered in a field near the barnum clay pit you know where the entrance to the farm is don't you john i have been doing something the past few days here you see where the pig houses are we're going over there yeah it's just beyond the pig field why don't you like pigs i'm vegetarian but nothing to do with it we've had to do several surveys in pig fields and they're diabolical with all the criss-crossing wires yeah absolute nightmare so i'm glad it's not actually in there do they chew the wires then is that what they well they wouldn't chew the wires in this system because they'd soon know about it bacon would it be bacon tonight yeah see this ridge here john you see how they you got this brown staining actually on the bottom of the ridge that's right that's that that's that clay band being plowed out and then down below it is where all the flint's been playing look at this size of this these whole concentrations of flint nodules this size that's what all this stuff is here it says the plowing's gone backwards and forwards and dragged it all out this should be the same edge of the channel that's been found in the pit so if we do a transect across this line and then we should get the profile if it's still surviving to any extent hopefully yes i mean we should get if we get chalk over that side that might define the edge of it this clay should be right on the edge of it with the flint's being plowed out so hopefully the channel is that side of us right as the environmental trench is being closed down andy makes a disturbing discovery they may have taken all their samples from too high in the clay at a level where all the ancient organic material may have been destroyed by natural acids present in the groundwater this is where we took our samples from yesterday this is where we took our 60 buckets out and we've actually processed 45 of those and reduced it down to a residue and we're going to sort that and see what we can find in it so there is still hope it doesn't look very rich then there's no way we're going to get them out of this orange stuff what do you reckon son i don't think so everything above here this top part of the section has been completely uh devoid of any uh remains wow that's a bit of a disappointment really isn't it particularly 60 buckets you don't know how gutted i am mate you do not know to try and clarify once and for all the position depth and age of these ancient river deposits andy decides to open a last minute trench andy it's a bit late to be starting something new isn't it well we know that but what we want to do is try and find the bottom layer in this this site the earliest the earliest deposit in which we're going to get any organic remains and how much earlier would that be than the stone tools that we're finding up there probably about 20 000 years earlier we reckon it'll be the earliest part of the warm phase in which people were living in this area so it's about 420 000 years ago about that yeah and how much further down do you reckon you're gonna have to dig we're wrecking four meters and simon here is going to do it with his pole he's going after it with an auger and it's going to be hard work with our full complement of diggers hard at work on our main trench the prehistoric layers in the section are now clearly visible this is a lot cleaner and looking very colorful now isn't it yes i i think it's a lot clearer it shows the cobble beach down here you've got this land surface up there these two layers we were talking about yesterday now you've extended it we can trace that all the way around can we we can you can follow the cobble beach right the way through right here corner here and it goes all the way around now we've joined the two trenches together you can trace it through right through to where carrenza's team are working oh and you're getting lots of fines from here as well yeah we've just had a really nice find here a little scraper i think there's another tool from the site which is nice and it's different to that sort of spear sharpening thing that you had earlier yeah so that would have been used something like that well well probably more like uh like this scraping along probably cleaning the you know the fatty guns from the inside to hide is this the sort of density you'd expect from this sort of layer well i'm hoping once we get really down onto the cobbles it's actually going to be you know much richer so um the other thing is we're getting some really nice little pieces um tiny little flakes look at that oh yeah i mean that they're very sharp they've not gone very fast so obviously whatever they're doing tiny little chippings that you're getting the flaming process and if the artifacts have moved then you'd expect them to be completely washed away we're getting those which means you know we've probably got nothing very near to the spot so you're in the right place again it looks like i hope so yeah yeah it's obviously going to get very exciting the next couple of hours well i'm looking forward to it yeah comes up that's great with our venison dinner expertly butchered and ready to be cooked all that remains is for phil and john to light the fire are you sweating i am sweating now using only prehistoric methods of course striking a flint against a large piece of iron pyrites to make a spark is boy scout stuff good lord sadly we didn't have a boy scout nothing happening at all is it wow well we're gonna that was fished with this true i think i might be able to produce yeah okay let's go with that look at that corn yes that should keep the cave bearers at bay tonight after almost two hours the augur has hit pay dirt six meters below the eldon site the most ancient level that could still provide clues to the prehistoric environment tony i think we're there why'd you say that look at this look the color of that mud this is the the black goo that we were looking for this is the organic mud that underlies this entire site what does it comprise of that black goo it's a very organic clay clay with probably quite a lot of plant debris in it and there it is when you say organic matter what kind of stuff well imagine your village pond with all the leaves going into it you know that kind of smelly goo that you get around the edge of a pond yeah this is what it becomes with time so 420 000 years ago we had this black goo covering what's now suffolk yeah and then what happened and and then you got the development of a proper drainage system after a glaciation the land is left in a very uneven condition with lots of little lakes and bogs all over the place and then people who were probably migrating across continental europe would come to the area that's now britain and they'd live along the riverbanks just as they are on our site here today the black goo represents our oldest deposits and the flint tools our youngest andy and simon's experiment should help us fill the dating gaps between oh got a big fish tooth it's definitely a tense handy something new a new species wow hey you're getting some good results out of me yeah look at this wow what a it's a tench is it it's tooth tooth for the fish and it's the biggest thing we've found so far wow it's not that big on reality isn't it i'm afraid it's changing this that's really rather small is that all you've got from those 45 buckets of soil you saved you like to rub these things in don't you you know just wondering if you haven't got trays and trays of it elsewhere that's it so far and we've got a group of other fish as well so if we move along and look at these we've got a pike this pointed tooth here such as a pike tooth this is an amphibian bone oh yeah a frog or a toad gosh and this small group of bones here these are rodent bones including two fragments of of teeth these are really exciting this is the stuff that we've been after right this is what i've gathered it's the roles order that they're going to give you the crucial dating evidence yeah is that right now have you got that from them we haven't got well preserved enough material to be able to identify these two species but this tells us that they're out there in those deposits so you just have to do another 45 buckets and you'll be there things are looking bad simon i'm not going to someone else can do you think that this is contemporary with the human occupation here almost certainly and what we found in the sample is a tiny flinch that's fantastic oh you couldn't have hoped for that could you know that's a brilliant yeah i tell you what we've had flakes very very similar to that from our trench so some of these tiny little waste works same sort of flint very fresh very sharp in the process of attempting to confirm stuart's theory about the mysterious brown stripe in the barnum field mick seems to have made some new friends they know i won't eat them you see that's no good for me oh you must be the farmer then hello i'm mick i'm david hello i was looking forward because i gather you you have found some archaeological stuff got one or two bits and pieces there oh that's nice isn't it look at that that's part of a hand axe isn't it it's gonna have the other the other part like that so two-thirds apparently yeah so the archaeological they could tell me anything no no i think i think that's probably right that's probably right they wouldn't tell me anything we were interested here because of this this ridge in the field yeah we we saw it on the on the maps and the ear photos and so uh stuart if you've met stuart but he thought this may be one of these old rivers and i think mark was uh let's just give him a [ __ ] mark yeah that's what we're looking for something like that is that from here yeah david just got it out of his pocket oh that's enormous he would have been quite quite a hefty one as well yeah yeah but you haven't got anything like that from there well no all i've got over there is a lot of naturally broken flint a lot of flint that's been broken by the plow there's nothing of this sort of what we come to expect from the barnum cobble band which is this very characteristic sort of orangey or yellowy staining there's a lot of these every pocket something comes out of that's another that's a nice scraper lovely that is the nice thing about these two things david is that here you've got an artifact which is 400 000 years old and here you've got an artifact which is say 4 000 years old so you've got humans living and working on this site for all of that time it's fantastic although no more flint tools were found in the field geophysics confirmed that the brown stripe was once part of another prehistoric river channel back in the incident room stuart brings nick ashton up to date i know you've been stuck in a clay pit for three days but i thought you would like to try and find out more information about the potential connection in a river channel between eldon and barnum yeah i would love to find out what's been happening on here i've plotted out where all the paleolithic fines are there yeah there's barnum there's elven all these circles are where there's been politic pines the important and the exciting thing about this is how they're all in that west to east trend there's a line there a line there and a line there these triangles are chopped okay trending east-west now if you'd asked me before we came before we we started work to some extent with this information was there a potential river channel between the two yeah i would have said it was going to follow the line of this clay band down here yes okay with the work that john and the geophysics team have done they've proved that a channel is coming in that southeast direction directly along that line of pits and also to the east of barnum where they've taken two transects they've also demonstrated that there is a channel going that way now if you put that information on top of this what that seems to indicate is you've got a west east trend for a river pattern in effect three parallel rivers that's right possibly with connections between them so i think we can demonstrate there's a channel along that line between there and there yeah and there's a channel along that line at barnum in that direction so we've got it between there and there the only bit we can't actually prove is that small bit in the middle so what the evidence is indicating is that we've actually got three river channels of which yours yours is the middle one running in this west to east direction so that's completely different to the present drainage pattern that's right which is south north right do you believe it it's the most convincing evidence obviously yeah i think i do it's almost the end of day three and it looks like our stone age chef has successfully completed his cookery tasks and back on the main site we've almost completed our weekend's work the hundreds of artifacts we've uncovered may just look like pieces of flint to you and i but they encapsulate five minutes of someone's time as they sat on a riverbank and made a hand axe and we found them exactly where they fell almost half a million years ago ten to seven and they're still hard at it these stone tools may not look much but when you think how incredibly old they are finding them has been the archaeological equivalent of finding a needle in a five hundred thousand year old haystack that's been beaten up by a whole procession of glaciers holding these in my hands is really amazing these are some of the oldest things that we've ever found on time team not bad for just three days in the old stone age not only that but it looks as though phil's got his dinner as well what's it like delicious gonna cut me a bit [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 431,728

Keywords: Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, Stone Age, Prehistoric Britain, Suffolk, Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, glacial, interglacial, hunter-gatherers, Neanderthal, Time Team

Id: 7hn-4PYaG90

Length: 49min 41sec (2981 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020