Time Team S06E04 Cooper'sHope,.Cheddar.Gorge

it may not look very comfortable but before hats 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 use 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 I've washed tons and tons of mud into this cave and wash 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 the cheddar gorge is a three-mile gash carved by an ancient river into Somerset's Mendut 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 archaeology so time team's main goal is to get Cooper's hold 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 so we were standing around in the car pearl I thought you're going to take me in the cave you are in a cave look like that I know I know it isn't but the cave used to extend out here into the car park right 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 thank you that's why so angular not saw that nice natural green soft look that other parts of the gourd you 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 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 dude do you reckon you can target a sitting John well I'm not sure about the reindeer it's probably long gone but signs of a hearth and the artifacts if they're gonna be here I don't you think we're going to find that sort of detail again best we could give you an estimate the depth of the deposits above bedrock and if the bedrock is actually narrowing for an entrance is you know just possible we can get that while john and paul search for the original entrance of the cave under the carpark carrenza tension is fixed on the inside of the cave she's met up with cave archaeologists Kate Robson Brown and veteran cave a Malcolm Cotter to try and work out where else we should dig dig out we knew these 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 she finds it no we didn't unfortunately but what interests us is that on the way he dug through some archaeology 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 sheep boss boss arse cows yes yes yes horse is quite important though because of course there haven't been wild horses in this pot ten thousand years so we're talking once the Ice Age oh that's so this was this was me this was through here and is it just down that way we want to go now that's one to the left as well here did you find anything in there yes we did we found the Flint Thal really could have been washed in or boiling other fallen through a cavity which is this so what 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 possession but he can at least show us where he found them and maybe we can find some of our own 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 stal floor this was formed at the end of the last ice age seven thousand 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 style should be remains 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 will have to re excavate and today the deteriorating weather is making conditions in the tunnels treacherous Oh getting jar a very soggy horrible bit now not so nice poles of water yeah what oh dear lying flat out now to make progress look see if it's getting very narrow doesn't it if you look on this bottom plan here he's going down that's too weird it's only there and he's on his bat and hasn't got to that bit here I can now see pretty well to the top of where we had to break through the stalagmites floor I'm just going to get a closer look I'm crawling now quite tight here he must be ruined down here no no the bad the bad news is that the little step down below the stolid might floor that were reached in 1962 is now blocked up with sediments all right that's down that's down the enemy do you think we'll be able to get it out yeah it should be possible to get it out there it'll be a big effort though within a day may be able to get to the rim of the stalagmites floor yeah now to get below the style of my floor into the into the bone beds you may need another day so he's saying two days between to get to this to get to the stone my floor yeah yeah so already we're under pressure and bearing the brunt our team of cave diggers come now okay 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 and they've got to do it quickly or we might not even reach the bones within three days 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 archaeology Nick 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 now on the Somerset Levels moving up the gorge is an easy access off to 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 get behind those rocks and the horses were coming up through what was probably a boulder-strewn stream bed they'd be very easy to pick off from the side so this was really the classic ambush yeah I mean it was a lot of discussion about it but the general feeling is that hunter-gatherers once they got themselves organized they weren't shooting short of food at all you know they just like 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 its 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 in fact his ground radar results have picked up a hard surface perhaps the 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 now is to dig across malcom meanwhile has set off down Tunnel to where he found a flint tool back in the sixties but he doesn't get very far secure looking plywood they're 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 to off-the-menu our only lead inside the cave is the bone bed in tunnel 1 and progress here slow because Kate and Larry the archeological 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 definitely cooler cam Oh Kate why are you giving us such a hard time every time we get one sound 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 on it yeah I know but there is a simple answer and that's really these sediments in case deposited over thousands in the broad-scale millions of years and what we need to do is not just understand what's going on within anyone there 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 once we found evidence that people actually lived at this cave whether in the front of the cave on 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 at least we've been allowed to dig relatively quickly in the carpark trench and with promising results just a metre under the surface these bones all belong to animals that humans might eat but were they Stone Age animals it's going to be the most interesting item is this a sir so lower has a third lower molar of a Red Deer rather a big individual now this is an interesting find because Red Deer is one of the characteristic animals of the twelve thousand 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 t-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 gone to the edge of the break in the style of might floor it's exciting this is where the bones are show Malcolm talked about earlier but 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 thank after you mouthing mm-hmm water down Larry because it's so cramped it's actually going to take them about ten 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 it's the difference between goth sky here in Cooper's hole up the gorge is the sediments been removed from the the front of Gauss cave already look over here see the stalagmites coming down 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 here above our heads okay so so effectively the silk before this cave was dug out and the Lightning's Angeles's right above our heads certainly what and if you trace that across here to the wall you can see the remains of the old stalagmites floor this is the deposit that kept the ten thousand year old sediments that we're looking for like we've got now just like Cooper's hole I think I'm too big for this you wanna run little water yeah at the end yes that's a Malcom edge by unblocking five meters of the tunnel and exposing the hole in the style floor the diggers have achieved part 1 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 8 o'clock and of my day 1 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 now make my dough on tomorrow I'm going down that hole some of what we'll 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 he's quite unpleasant sorry my doubts about sanity came Oh what's going up Marron anyway while 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 found any evidence of Stone Age activity on his estate and here we've got very fine third lower male s a wisdom tooth of a red deer we could read deer to look rather a fierce animal but there is 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 suggest 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 finds themselves that suggests that humans were responsible for this material getting of course the fact that the sheep and the picker 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 to that entity and the cliffs are kind of steep so flung gee bloody death death yes I think I think some of these could be accidental introduction and his guess is that the bones are iron age or later which means the carpark 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 awesome yeah overnight the diggers have cleared about half a meter of soil and revealed a nice section below the lip of the stile and just in time for our VIP visitor yeah tell us tell us what you're looking at I've got quite a good picture now you see the point of my trowel yes that that's look that that's Larry there yeah it's in that Larry this is the top of the Stalag midok floor and the calcium carbonate crust which we hope is sealing deposit underneath we have bone and maybe even stone tools yeah the this this tile floor is about a foot thick I'd imagine it would just be a thin crust like icing sugar but it's a really solid thing and it 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 sterling mitad floor that you know might be bone or not yeah it really needs cleaning up it's um we're just looking in a small window at the moments and the pit itself still hasn't been completely cleared of the debris from from the year 1968 flood and there's Lord bath got any questions or should we just continue checking out his property the theory of what you're fighting Eve they are not fighting at the moment but this is boasting things well it is only day two and there's still plenty of digging to do before we expect to hit the bones to help us understand the site we're going to reconstruct how our our Lord baths cave would have looked in the Stone Age Victor's busy sketching the entrance and the surveyors have brought along a neat little gizmo that'll record the shape and texture of the inside of the cave 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 thousand years ago when you say Stone Age I think of the Flintstones and then with clams and dragon women over here what do we mean by 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 pigeonholes really for archaeologists to put information into that it 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 miserly phase the Middle Stone Age is the Neolithic Age to imagine a classification so it's imagine if gassification year 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 shirts like flint only flint the southeast Dean that's nice stuff Andy where's that from beautiful stuff this is actually from Goths kayvyun shed honor for us yeah yeah then in there in the middle I think the Middle Stone Age you get these are all the smaller tools that are beautifully made that's great time because you look at the end of that it's got the three facets just like a modern steel drill what there and there and there 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 say a sort of departure into new technologies and this is where we say a lot of these wonderful polished axe 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 really definitely these these blade type tools of about 12,000 years ago here you to have dropped out and turned into caveman hard aim right here we want an well off okay this is a thing that's known as a baton the Commandant it's from Goths cave just down the road it's the base of a reindeer and others had a whole board right through from both sides and a spiral ornament pudding and what's it called a baton to ponder c'mon sir there's an asking stick and I'll speak so it is that one of these examples of archaeologists finding something they have 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 yet when you want to speak to the tribe that's on a GOG a sort of like 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 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 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 knapper and he should be ready to start carving before the end of the day back at the site 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 carrenza and Larry are off to investigate the new tunnel tunnel 3 runs down the center of the cave parallel to tunnel 1 from which it's separated by a wall of mud and there's water down there according to the cave 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 yeah that's it yeah yeah this is this is full of screen we're looking into static medic floor going that way so it's beautiful it was a bit of fuel burn from and it looks less like in our poke a little bit wishful thinking we're desperation we could clean this up that would give us a section give us a cellar one so with currents are installed in tunnel three about 70 feet from the cave mouth we've now got people scraping away in two tunnels and with no stone age fines to our credit so far there's an urgency about their work things are moving faster in the car park trench - Kate is at last satisfied we finished analyzing the relatively recent layers and the next stop for the digger driver will be the Stone Age if he can reach it you changed my viewers Stone Age technology in what way I I never saw these tools is being efficient are you little faith you see look at it oh that's going in better than a metal tone yeah we know it ha ha ha look at that look I mean look at those shavings coming out that is incredible yeah oh good lord daylight oh it already yeah way because the wet weather is right back in tunnel one a meter and a bit beneath the stal the diggers have finally hit something sadly it's not bones it's rather more substantial and that is very likely to be a local water table which is not helped by the fact that the weather is so wet this equation 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 if the bones are only a few inches down we may be alright any deeper and we'll be pumping out a river as they were over here coming in yes yes when Malcolm and Larry investigate for themselves it turns out we've been digging in the wrong place anyway we didn't find any bone that day you don't remember a thing is that way the bone is there if bone is fed x marks the spot yes come now ah now what will happen the start of night floor will meet the roof so your trench neck you bigger than then we really thought we thought we're just gonna do a little oh no no there's a step down yes shows a couple of meters so we've got to clear out a new area under the style even further down the tunnel those sediments 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 sorry okay go the bones are under the roof in that direction that's right down down yes down there I would say about one and a half metres below your travel in that Doric Doby swimming or they have to be pumped yeah yeah but the diggers are exhausted and can only drag up a few trucks better to stop now and start again refreshed tomorrow 9 o'clock day 3 and the hunt is 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 archaeology and then you'd have to start being careful well we've got nowhere near there yeah where we haven't got to the Stone Age you haven't got to the Paleolithic would come to be honest I'm not not too unhappy about that because I was frankly worried that we were going to at this rate break into it and actually destroy some evidence but that's what that's why we would do worry because I thought we might hit on the archaeology but we haven't lost anything but we lost anything never sat in the car always we've gained a lot of information about the site in the ways 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're probably a cook the collapse off this room so we actually have perhaps identifying where the original outline the edge of the roof was which is what we said on day one we're looking for because that helps to find where people might have been living 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 from actually in the cave there's the surface dipping down into the cave and this is our predicted solid floor level and this is the concrete wall here and odd John things his seismic survey has revealed the depth of the stal floor the top of the Stone Age under the carpark 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 stile and the margin by which we've fallen short of our target can you say to the bottom yeah no problem okay she'd have a result now uh oh yeah at three point seven whoa you got y'all that look I have written down here what fill 3.6 3.6 3 litre 16 we've actually got the bottom then 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 pouring in Larry in 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 what's the point forward of it yeah somewhat put under the only hope is that they can pump it out faster than its coming in well it's alright but you know what's gonna happen I turn it off let's keep it on makes it difficult coming work yeah well we're going to have to do it we have to turn it off and shift it out on have to get in there and give it a good go okay all right sir I'd turn it off next door in tunnel three carrenza is 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 this is what we've been looking for this color sediment in hole 1 I think what does that say to you this says to me that this is a certainly pre 68 when the floods were it all we're getting in tunnel one is the gray source if you like that race it rained 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 Phil meanwhile has decided his best route to the Stone Age is the battle do come on give it a flick we fit 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 fighter we know not to speak up not to speak of does me know Larry can you hear me have you found anything yet when a very exciting moment here we've turned the corner Andy's on his back Dean's room rough waters pouring in and we think we hit the old tunnel that's a mouthful described this morning but can you actually see anything down there chocolate moon charlie chocolate mousse that means no carrenza how things hi Tony well we're just going down through this orange layer which we think may be the priests towel there was food and have you found anything down there well we've had a couple of very small bones probably rodent but that's also fiver so basically nothing well couple of small bones yeah over okay thanks it's good to rodent bones what do you mean that's good that was something about the environment like could be from 1960 well not if it's on in the clay layer under the star layer so we have a time team in which we find two rodent bones are we gonna get anything more than that before the end of the day I think some likely arraigned seconds later with water rising fast the situation in tunnel one takes a turn for the worse the pump the most powerful we could fit down a tunnel full of working cavers is struggling the muds too thick it's time for a brainwave Larry make the dig is suggesting that we actually put more water down there in order to dilute the sludge so that you can bring more Sonia is that a sensible idea or is it total madness forget I won the earlier forget it 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 Goths cave ten 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 Goths cave a few years ago 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 but how do you know that that's cannibalism not simply stripping a body down to the bones for some ceremonial reasons well the only evidence we've got for that I suppose is circumstantial the animal bones that we found in the same Deek were horse and red deer and the remains have been traded 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 there but oh yeah well that's that's that chalk on there we had food Oh God it is a bird you're right it is it may not be human it may not even be very old but in tunnel 3 carrenza zat last found a decent-sized bone looks like something she pea sized I would recommend a guest turning on classic words I'm not expert no bigger - Andy current and see what he thinks whatever it turns out to be this and any other bones carrenza can unearth may be our only hope of proving the cave was inhabited because in tunnel one the chances of reaching any archaeology are looking frailer by the minute can we have a chain gang down here begin to drown the pumps finally given up the ghost so all they can do is bail what really - hey you okay - no no it will be cutting part of the cave you know that's great isn't it she's got that spirally the 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 strop er that's first stripper to you and me okay let's drop the fall so what do we do take a load up get it on there some AI put it on this in and give it I see action show you what we can do go up and down like that that's a remarkably effective there they had a lot of time on their name priests are is that you possibly be a knuckle badger a seriously what people think he can't do it's not sharp enough as it is goodbye already thank you it's just no good is he helped me does it possible burning here Pete there's a silver iron iron stained layer here and certainly one of the bits of bone down here quite long because it's um it's picked up that staining and the other ones just there look I mean they could be lamb rib burns ogre so are there any other theories yes there are it could be that it's for controlling a rope actually sort of winching something in like how well let's have a go let's see if we can do it you're right yeah we got some right babe so let's see what we can do with it was the end there's the end Welsh I searched through there do I shove it through so it goes through there either now what's the theory but we need a Paleolithic course and we haven't got one aside looks like a double ah we're going to double up I'm going to be a Paleolithic course we've just been caught I'm going to tie myself into this noose and there a winch you right you go winch me in this seat see we can make this well which I'm gonna kick them faster better fit right well you wheels mean winner oh my god yes you grab on to that Toby I can't get away on cutting off like an efficient uh-oh now did I actually help you well I don't know Tony I didn't really think of it I mean I don't orders gonna help let's do it without like see what happens all right idiot I mean you if we're gonna all right all right without where they start bucking I good are you seeing bucking the table bucking it does it does make difference it definitely makes some really you won't just no loading wheels there oh uh he's dear to cardiac arrest hey this is plausible yeah yeah so up until now the archaeologists have thought it was a totem stick yeah and actually it was just an ordinary tool yeah that's pretty good innit we win oh please 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 carrenza and her finds from tunnel three waited for me why have you brought for us right well this is the stuff let's come out of this orange layer but we think might be very early we've got some bones ah oh right we've got a load of these little sort of really tight things there so soon they're all from the same island we've got this tiny little bone here gonna be a fish bone but the interesting bit is that which is obviously got cut marks on it there Oh oh that's a beauty oh really that's a V really go that's just the kind of cut mark you would get if you were opening up the body cavity and clean out the insides this you know it's just on the inside of the inside of the ribcage but they had their certainly cuts made by stone tools yes hey Chris yeah there's another one a band there yeah so are you happy to say a caveman did that I would be pretty happy to say nearly the end of base three we have evidence that cavemen lived down our cave now we know our cave was inhabited we can picture what it would have looked like 10 to 12 thousand years ago the gorge itself was much narrower and less densely wooded the perfect hunting ground the mouth of the cave would have extended further out into the gorge 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 - standing and he wasn't able to date the bone precisely but he would say that the caveman who butchered it lived sometime 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 it's stone age secrets protected you

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 373,809

Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: XocXO8fpGuk

Length: 46min 59sec (2819 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2013