History series which sees skeletons of everyday people from across the ages analysed in staggering detail, opening new windows on the history of our Ancestors by literally revealing the person behind the skeleton.
The Skeletons of Windy Pits:
For decades experts have remained baffled by a jumble of human bones discovered in a unique series of caves on the North York Moors, known as the Windypits. One discovery in particular stands out - a tangle of bones that might belong to a family from two thousand years ago. The trail to uncover the answers about what happened to these people leads to a dark world of ritual sacrifice and right back to the limits of British recorded history.
The Skeletons of Windy Pits:
For decades experts have remained baffled by a jumble of human bones discovered in a unique series of caves on the North York Moors, known as the Windypits. One discovery in particular stands out - a tangle of bones that might belong to a family from two thousand years ago. The trail to uncover the answers about what happened to these people leads to a dark world of ritual sacrifice and right back to the limits of British recorded history.
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TVTranscript
00:00At Dundee's Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, the History Cold Case team is about to take
00:08on a dramatic new case, surrounding a major unsolved archaeological mystery.
00:14Our next case, wonderful name, it's called Windy Pits.
00:17OK.
00:18You've got human remains that are spanning across 3,000 years.
00:23Setting up a mobile forensic lab, they will investigate the puzzling remains of more than
00:2720 people discovered here in underground caves.
00:30They're believed to be some of the oldest human bones ever found in Britain.
00:35Location even better, the remote North Yorkshire Moors.
00:40Ooh, by Nick of the Woods.
00:42In winter.
00:43Yeah.
00:44Potholing.
00:45Who are they?
00:46And why are there bones here?
00:47You know, perhaps we were taking four or five people to hold them down.
00:51Are the caves simply Iron Age graveyards, or is there a more sinister explanation for
00:56how this became the final resting place of so many people?
00:59If these bones came up as a forensic case, I would be advising the police we need to
01:05look at this a lot more closely.
01:07The investigation will shine a light on a long forgotten period of our ancient history.
01:12Oh!
01:13OK.
01:14A time of brutal rituals and bizarre beliefs, when people lived in fear of what lay beneath
01:21the surface of the earth.
01:22The coup de grace.
01:23There'll be a great spurt of blood.
01:26Can modern forensics finally solve the mystery of what happened at the Windy Pits?
01:31And what dark and surprising new truths will emerge about how we lived 2,000 years ago?
01:56The skeletons at the centre of this investigation were excavated from an extraordinary network
02:01of limestone caves, carved deep into the landscape of the North York moors.
02:08There are believed to be 22 people among the remains, but information about who they were
02:14and how they died has remained tantalisingly beyond our reach.
02:22With so many questions still unanswered, local archaeologists carefully lay out the bones
02:27again in a mobile forensic unit close to where they were first excavated.
02:34They hope a brand new investigation, using science as well as historical analysis, will
02:40help explain what happened here.
02:43Well, this is interesting.
02:48Forensic anthropologist Dr Xanthe Mallett arrives to make the first visual assessment
02:52of the bones, before reporting back to team leader Professor Sue Black in Dundee.
02:59There's a huge amount of work to do here.
03:01There's going to be 22 individuals, we believe.
03:04Maybe more, maybe less.
03:06But you've got to ask what they're doing out on the middle of North Yorkshire moors.
03:10And when you've got 3,000 years' worth of history involved, I can't for a moment imagine
03:16what that's going to turn into.
03:22Archaeologist Graham Lee brings Xanthe up to speed with how this unique and unusual
03:26horde of human remains was discovered.
03:28We're looking forward to you coming in, actually, because this is a real puzzle you've got going
03:34on here.
03:35What do you know about them?
03:37Well, all of the bones here have come from things called windy pits, which are natural
03:42fissures where the rock has cracked apart and created some quite deep kind of caverns
03:47in the edge of the valleys.
03:49And when people started exploring the windy pits, they started finding these fragments
03:55of human bone.
03:56The remains are thought to span several thousand years, from Roman times right back to around
04:012,000 BC.
04:03The team wants to focus their inquiry on a group of four individuals that were found
04:08together in one of the deepest caves, known as Slip Gill.
04:12All of these come from just one of the windy pits, Slip Gill, which is one of the deepest
04:18and steepest of the fissures.
04:22These have been radiocarbon dated to about the middle of the first century BC to the
04:28beginning of the second century AD.
04:31They were found in a heap at the bottom of the windy pit.
04:37It's virtually a sort of, I don't know, 23, 25 metre drop, pretty much straight down from
04:43the entrance.
04:44So they've all ended up being kind of squashed together at the bottom, together with kind
04:48of rocks and other debris.
04:50The suggestion has been made that it could be a family.
05:02But why might a family end up dead in a cave?
05:07At the site where they were found, Xanthi sees for herself why these mysterious caves
05:11are called the Windy Pits.
05:14We're now above Slip Gill, which is one of the deepest windy pits.
05:20And can you see all the vegetation's moving here?
05:25And that's a result of the hot draught coming up from the mouth of the windy pit.
05:28I can see why this would have been a really kind of mysterious place.
05:32It looks spooky, doesn't it?
05:33It does, yes.
05:34Oh, you can feel the warm air from here really well, can't you?
05:37Straight away.
05:38Yeah.
05:39The human bones found in Slip Gill date from around the first century AD.
05:45There was a series of expeditions into these fissures, say, through the 1950s.
05:52I'm not sure that you would actually look at them and say that everyone is necessarily
05:56clad that appropriately for caving.
06:00Some hard hats.
06:01Yeah.
06:02And some ropes, that's pretty much it, and a spade.
06:04And they were the people that recovered the bits and pieces of the bodies from the bottom.
06:11Since being found in the 1950s, the bones have been the subject of much study and debate.
06:16But the job of this new investigation is to look at the evidence again with fresh eyes
06:21and without being influenced by any previous theories.
06:34Back in the mobile laboratory,
06:36Xanthi begins the task of making sense of the puzzling remains.
06:41She will look for signs that could confirm age, gender and any evidence of trauma.
06:48But the incompleteness of the skeletons will prove a major hurdle
06:51in trying to establish the identities of the dead.
06:54Not very much here with this one.
06:57No skull, no pelvis.
06:59Not very much at all.
07:03Initially, we're looking at certainly an adult individual.
07:09Pretty...
07:11..robust femur.
07:13It's been reconstructed slightly, so first gut feeling would be that this is probably a male.
07:22Luckily, we've got quite a bit of skull on this one,
07:24so this might actually work for re-caving.
07:27As her initial examination continues,
07:29she spots a curious injury on the jawbone of one of the males.
07:34Now, that might be our first sign of significant trauma.
07:39This is a... It looks like a sharp force trauma to the side of the mandible,
07:44which would just be along your jawline.
07:47This is not an injury that's happened a reasonable time before death
07:50and the bone has started to regenerate.
07:53Initial impression would be that this is an injury
07:56that could have occurred around the time of death.
07:59So at least one of the four people from Slip Gill may not have died of natural causes.
08:05So we've got some interesting elements mixed in.
08:08We've got some sharp force trauma on a fairly robust group.
08:13It's interesting to look at.
08:15We've got a...
08:16We've got a...
08:18We've got a...
08:20It's a big group.
08:22It's interesting.
08:26By forensically retracing events around the scene of death
08:29and gaining clues as to who these people were in life,
08:33can they uncover what happened here?
08:37This case promises to drag the team back to a largely unrecorded period of our history.
08:43It's a rare opportunity to build a personalised account
08:46life and death in Britain 2,000 years ago.
08:59Back at headquarters in Dundee, they must first agree on the direction the investigation
09:04will take.
09:07Xanthi brings Professor Sue Black up to speed, along with Professor Caroline Wilkinson, who
09:12is in charge of facial reconstruction.
09:14One of the cave sites is literally just kind of like a hole in this bowl in the earth,
09:20and it basically goes straight down. It's like a chimney. So people have obviously been
09:24deposited in here, and we're not sure why.
09:27To help understand the shape and size of the Slipgill cave where the four skeletons were
09:31found, Xanthi shows them a 3D reconstruction.
09:35The CGI will really help you get a kind of visual on the type of system we're talking
09:40about. Can you see that? So this is kind of open, desolate moorland. This is going
09:47down into the cave, so you can see the shaft. It's huge, isn't it? It's amazing. So you
09:54can see how bodies would have tumbled down here. Once they get kind of down the channel
09:59and over that ridge, this is where they would have landed.
10:03Presumed to be the bones of a man, a woman and two teenagers, the obvious question is
10:07why?
10:08You've got to wonder why they're putting people in here. Is this ritualistic? Is this
10:14just vindictive of people just being murdered and, in essence, hidden?
10:18You're concealing them.
10:19Exactly, yeah.
10:21To try and get some concrete answers about who these people were, bone samples taken
10:26in the field will go forward for forensic testing.
10:29DNA is the obvious one. Obviously, are we looking for a biological relationship which
10:35ties all or any of the four individuals?
10:39Yeah.
10:40Carbon dating has already been carried out on the bones, placing them around the turn
10:44of the first century AD.
10:48So that really only leaves us with stable isotopes.
10:51Indeed. Yeah, so obviously with that, we're going to be wondering, are they local? Were
10:56they always local?
10:57But it will tell us a bit about diet as well.
10:59Exactly, yeah. And possibly quality of life, standard, that kind of thing as well.
11:03So we're going to be doing stable isotopes.
11:08So besides all of the tests that we can do, I think we really need to look at the context,
11:12the wider context. Who was potentially using this as a burial site, deposition site, or
11:19was this accidental?
11:20Why?
11:21Why? The bigger picture. It's a real kind of intriguing puzzle, isn't it?
11:26Yes, it's not normal.
11:27No.
11:28No, it isn't normal.
11:29No, nothing normal about this.
11:30There is a story. It's about finding out what the most likely story is.
11:35The damaged jawbone belonging to the teenage male is the only hard evidence they have so
11:40far that this might not be a straightforward or innocent burial. But it's enough to rouse
11:45Sue's suspicions.
11:46The likely scenario, sounding as if what we've got is a suspicious situation where four individuals
11:53are found at the bottom of a very long shaft in the middle of remote moors, but there are
11:59other caves around it where obviously something untoward must have gone on at different times
12:04in history.
12:10One of the first tests is DNA. This could establish if the skeletons have more than
12:18their final resting place in common.
12:22Are they a family? So do we have mum, dad and two adolescent children? The only way
12:29we're going to be able to find that out is if we can extract DNA and we can match them
12:33through DNA.
12:34But the older the bones, the harder it is to get meaningful results. And science alone
12:39won't be enough to solve this case.
12:44The carbon dating places our skeletons in the early part of the Roman occupation. But
12:49If our people were locals, theirs would likely be a very pre-Roman way of life, much as people
12:54had existed in and around the moors for millennia.
12:58Xanthi has come to a traditional Iron Age village to meet archaeologist Steve Sherlock.
13:04She wants to understand how our people from Slipgill might have lived and why their remains
13:09would be in a cave.
13:13So the individuals from Windy Pits, would they have been living somewhere like this?
13:16They would have been living in this sort of environment, in these sort of structures indeed.
13:19How many people would have lived in a house like this?
13:22One family, but it would have probably been 8 or 10 people living in a house like this.
13:26And how many houses like this would have made up a community?
13:28There could have been four or five houses of this size in a busy village.
13:33That's quite a large community then.
13:35Indeed it is, and we mustn't just think of this one community, there would be another
13:38one really quite close by.
13:40And they would have interacted with each other?
13:42They would have traded, farmed and communicated with each other, supported and helped each
13:45other.
13:46We're talking about society here, not individual groups.
13:50During the Iron Age, the British population topped 3 million people.
13:55This was a sophisticated culture and society.
13:59Steve explains how the part of the moors where the Windy Pits are located were a sort of
14:03no man's land between two competing Celtic tribes.
14:08The Windy Pits are an interesting area because they're on the North Yorkshire moors, which
14:12are, let's say, a neutral area between a tribe to the south called the Parisi and the tribes
14:16to the north of the Brigantes.
14:19So it's probable that the Parisi were using the Windy Pits.
14:23They're the people that are having sites and activities on the southern part of the North
14:28Yorkshire moors.
14:29Would the two different tribes have fought?
14:31There may well have been territorial differences, but there's no evidence for battles as such.
14:36Curiously, Steve is convinced that caves would not normally have been used for burials or
14:41deposition, as archaeologists call it.
14:44The normal burial rite may well have been cremation, scattering the ashes to the wind,
14:49or people have been buried at locations nearer to the settlements, a long way away from the
14:53Windy Pits.
14:54So it's a really different type of deposition?
14:56It's a different deposition in terms of the choosing a location and potentially only choosing
15:00certain people, of course, to be buried at those points.
15:04So if people aren't living in the immediate vicinity, it's taking a lot of people a lot
15:07of effort to bury people there.
15:10Indeed, that's telling us there's a religious action to this, and choosing people, location,
15:16for a special reason.
15:19This points to the discovery of the skeletons at Slip Gill being something unusual and special
15:24even for Iron Age society.
15:27How did the bodies end up several feet down in the dark, and why?
15:33Might the bones finally give up some answers?
15:41Back at Dundee HQ, the team is desperate for a new lead.
15:46They assemble to receive the results of the DNA analysis.
15:51Dr Ian Barnes, from Royal Holloway University of London, has the difficult task of trying
15:56to answer the question of whether the 2,000-year-old bones at Slip Gill come from people who are
16:02genetically related.
16:04We're hanging on your every word in the hope that you're going to give us something phenomenally
16:09exciting.
16:10And?
16:11Over to you.
16:12Yeah.
16:13That face says everything.
16:14Go on.
16:15Okay, so basically, we've had a couple of goes at getting DNA from this material, and
16:16there's just nothing that is reliable, and it looks to us like there's multiple sequences
16:17laid over the top of each other.
16:18So we think it's just contamination.
16:19Okay.
16:20Okay.
16:21And I don't think there's any real DNA from those individuals in the samples that he gave
16:22us.
16:23Okay.
16:24Okay.
16:25Okay.
16:26Okay.
16:27Okay.
16:28Okay.
16:29Okay.
16:30Okay.
16:31Okay.
16:32Okay.
16:33Okay.
16:34Okay.
16:35Okay.
16:36Okay.
16:37Okay.
16:38Okay.
16:39Okay.
16:40Okay.
16:41This is disappointing news.
16:42Ian thinks that the bones may have become contaminated, making it impossible to answer
16:47whether the male, female, and teenagers are related.
16:50So it doesn't really help the story in any way, because potentially, A, they could still
16:55be family linked genetically.
16:59We just can't tell.
17:00Yeah.
17:01Well, that's disappointing, but so be it.
17:03That's the way science goes.
17:05Thank you very much.
17:06Thanks for that, Ian.
17:07Good to speak to you. Thanks again. Take care. Bye.
17:18With DNA having failed to provide any leads,
17:21Sue feels it's time she examined the bones herself.
17:27To scour them for possible causes of death,
17:29she starts by looking at the injury to the jawbone of the teenage male.
17:34Her experience alerts her to how serious a blow this could have been.
17:39It's one of the most dangerous places for men who are shaving,
17:42just right there, because if you put your finger just lightly on there,
17:46you'll feel an artery pulsing underneath,
17:48and the facial artery comes up just on there,
17:51just perfectly where that is, may I say,
17:54so that what you have is a real nick into the bone.
17:57That's not a thin-bladed implement.
18:00We've got a large blade, so whether you're talking axe,
18:05you're talking machete, you're talking something that is a large blade.
18:09It's not like a little thin kitchen knife,
18:11because you have a wide entrance
18:14and a narrow point at which it's come to a stop
18:17before it's been pulled out.
18:19And so that when that implement has come up onto that jawline,
18:23what it's then done is it's caused fracturing to run across here
18:27and up there, and then up towards the base of this tooth.
18:32Sue believes this wasn't self-inflicted.
18:35He may have been murdered.
18:38It certainly will have caused a lot of pain and a lot of bleeding.
18:41It could have resulted in death.
18:43This has been caused by somebody else.
18:46Somebody has inflicted this on this individual,
18:49and it's a young individual.
18:52And then, on the leg bones of the adult male,
18:55she spots more suspicious marks.
18:58This is a pattern that's quite consistent
19:01with a fracture occurring in what's called a green bone.
19:04So it behaves very differently from an old bone
19:06that doesn't have much water content and organic material still left in it.
19:11What we don't have is any evidence of healing.
19:14So this is consistent with the person perhaps dead,
19:18perhaps not quite dead, being dropped down onto a height.
19:24There's no proof yet, but Sue feels that taking all the evidence so far,
19:28a picture of suspicious death is definitely emerging for this group.
19:33If these bones came up as a forensic case,
19:36I would be advising the police,
19:38we need to look at this a lot more closely.
19:40There's something very suspicious going on here.
19:42You might cut yourself shaving,
19:44but you sure as heck don't cut yourself shaving at that depth,
19:47so that the sharp trauma injury, if nothing else,
19:50is decidedly suspicious.
19:54MUSIC
19:58Xanthi has an agonising wait to return to Slipgill.
20:02She's keen to test the theory that the breaks on the leg bones of the adult male
20:06could have been caused by falling into the cave.
20:10But the caves are important roosting sites for bats,
20:13and access is restricted.
20:16Finally, spring arrives,
20:18and she's able to meet up again with archaeologist Graham Lee
20:21and local caver Martin Rowe.
20:23Lovely to meet you. Is it quite dangerous in there, do you think?
20:25Have you got any idea?
20:27For anybody who didn't have the right equipment and knew how to use it,
20:29then potentially it is,
20:31because just behind me here is a 16-metre drop straight to the floor.
20:34That is deep, isn't it? Straight down?
20:36Straight down, yeah.
20:39Even an experienced caver like Martin
20:41thinks twice about entering Slipgill.
20:45He'll carefully descend to show Xanthi the inside of the cave
20:48via a camera attached to his helmet.
20:51For the first time, she will see the real anatomy
20:54of the final resting place of the skeletons.
20:58The first few metres of Slipgill are on a shallow incline,
21:02before Martin reaches the main shaft.
21:05Just to let you know what I'm doing,
21:07I'm moving towards the top of the big drop,
21:10and you should be seeing a big dark hole in front of me.
21:14There he goes.
21:15Oh, look at that. That's like going into the abyss, isn't it?
21:19Yeah, you can see there's nothing under him there.
21:22The cave is 16 metres deep,
21:25certainly a potentially fatal drop.
21:28A series of overhanging rocks
21:30make the final descent particularly perilous.
21:38That must be pretty scary in there,
21:40because it's going to be pitch black
21:42except for that little light coming off your head torch.
21:46Oh, dear.
21:48That wasn't very clever.
21:50So he's going to be now touching down where the bodies were found
21:54on that kind of scree slope?
21:56Yes, exactly.
22:01So I'm at the bottom now,
22:03and what I'll do now is I'll turn on the big light
22:06and show you how far I've come down from the surface.
22:09OK, great, thanks.
22:16Oh, wow.
22:18Wow, look at that.
22:20It's an extraordinary place,
22:22and one that's remained unchanged for thousands of years.
22:30That is a long way.
22:32So you can see the nature of the fissure.
22:34That's very slim on the way down, isn't it?
22:37Yeah, it is a very narrow slot.
22:40That's fantastic.
22:42And this ties in with the idea that our man fell from a height.
22:47So once a body went in there,
22:49it's basically going to slide down that chimney,
22:51bounce off some rocks on the way down,
22:53off the ledge and land at the bottom,
22:55down on this scree slope down here.
22:57That's it.
22:58Wow.
22:59I just can't imagine anyone getting out of that alive.
23:04Xanthi's happy that the man's injuries are consistent
23:07with the cave being the scene of his death.
23:10But why were these people here?
23:13What was the significance of this place?
23:17Oh, I think we're going to see him in a second.
23:19Hey, there he is. Hello.
23:21How are you doing?
23:22I'm a bit sweaty.
23:24Well done, sir.
23:25Yay.
23:26I'm in one piece.
23:27Quite relieved to have you back with us.
23:29Yeah, very much so.
23:32Well done.
23:33Hey.
23:34Wow.
23:36Meanwhile, in Dundee,
23:38Caroline is beginning the facial reconstruction.
23:42None of the four skeletons in the group has a complete skull,
23:45but Caroline is hoping there are enough pieces
23:48to rebuild the face of the adult male.
23:53Well, we've got quite a lot of pieces,
23:57and it looks like when you hold them next to each other,
24:01that they do fit.
24:02That piece clearly fits against there.
24:05And we've got large sections that have already been reassembled
24:11that need a little bit of adjustment.
24:13But again, we've got other large pieces that fit.
24:17But this isn't really a problem for us
24:19because we can scan them with the scanner,
24:21and then you can see the join lines on the scan,
24:24and we can just adjust the piece in the computer,
24:27so it makes it a whole lot easier.
24:29than having to get rid of this glue and re-glue it.
24:34But one crucial part of his skull is missing.
24:38And notice we've got no nasal bones,
24:41which are just at the top of the nose here,
24:43which are quite important in predicting the nose.
24:45But that seems like the only bit of the nose that's missing,
24:48so we can do some estimation from that.
24:52Now that Caroline has examined the 2,000-year-old skull,
24:56she will use some very 21st-century technology to rebuild it.
25:10Xanthi's research has indicated
25:12caves were not usually used in Iron Age burial practices.
25:16So she needs to continue on the trail
25:18of investigating why a cave like Slip Gill would have been significant.
25:23She travels to the Dales to meet Tom Lord from Lancaster University.
25:28And we've got a rather atmospheric day to visit a cave.
25:32Tom believes that for our ancestors,
25:34caves had special significance.
25:38Oh, look at this.
25:40It's only very dark and imposing.
25:42We're going underground.
25:44We're going literally into another world, an underworld.
25:48And is that how our ancestors actually would have seen this place?
25:51I think so.
25:52Lights on?
25:53Lights on.
25:54OK.
25:55Helmet.
25:56And we're going into the underworld.
25:59OK.
26:00Shall I?
26:01Yes, please.
26:03It gets darker immediately, doesn't it?
26:08OK.
26:15The cave is wet, it's dripping.
26:18Tom has found evidence pointing to how caves were used in the Iron Age.
26:23This is the cave.
26:24This is the cave.
26:25This is the cave.
26:26This is the cave.
26:27This is the cave.
26:28This is the cave.
26:29This is the cave.
26:30This is the cave.
26:31The cave was used in the Iron Age, including human bones and artefacts.
26:36He thinks the way in which precious objects like these were placed
26:40suggests that caves were spiritually very important.
26:44That's a perforated piece of red-deer antlion.
26:46I was going to say, because this isn't a bone that I recognise.
26:49It's red-deer antlion.
26:51If you hold it up,
26:52can you see the very careful hole that's drilled through it?
26:55We can see it's been drilled through,
26:57it's probably been on a shaft.
26:59It might be used as a hammer or something.
27:02And this was on a ledge about 45 feet down,
27:05so it could only have been put there, it couldn't have fallen there.
27:08But this would have been a valuable object.
27:10Somebody's gone to a lot of time to make this into a hammer or whatever else.
27:13You're not going to leave that down a cave without a good reason.
27:17Tom believes valuable objects were placed in caves,
27:20perhaps as votive offerings or as part of rituals.
27:24We might be seeing, down some of these deep shafts,
27:27beginning about 5,000 years ago,
27:30is actual sacrifice of human and animals at certain times.
27:35So this could be offering to the gods.
27:38Offering to the gods of the...
27:40Underworld. ..of the underworld.
27:42This idea of an underworld crops up throughout history and across cultures.
27:48Wow!
27:50And caves were seen as portals to a mysterious place
27:53between the surface world and another.
27:57Tom's evidence also suggests a new explanation
28:00for how the Slipgill individuals may have died.
28:04He believes they may have been part of some kind of ritual sacrifice.
28:10The archaeologists tell us that there's a distinct possibility
28:14that there's a ritualistic element
28:16to the way in which these individuals have landed up in these caves.
28:21We unquestionably have got evidence of interpersonal violence
28:25before these individuals have met their death.
28:27There is some evidence that, when they've gone down the pit,
28:30that there is long bone fracturing because of the drop.
28:33But there's no evidence that those have healed.
28:36If they've been alive at the bottom of the pit, it's not for very long.
28:40But, you know, that's really just looking at the evidence from the bones.
28:44I think it's most likely that they were killed
28:46before they went down the pit.
28:50To test this new theory
28:52that the people of Slipgill were consciously sacrificed,
28:55the bones are sent to the nearby Ninewells Hospital for CT scanning.
29:02This should reveal new information not visible to the naked eye.
29:07The evidence already points to the adult male having fractured his leg.
29:12But Sue and her colleague Dr Roos Aizma now spot some new evidence,
29:17this time on the thigh bone belonging to the adult female.
29:23Look. On that femur, that's a beautiful butterfly-type fracture.
29:28That's the kind of fracture that is green bone,
29:31so it's bone that's gone down that's still got all its pliability
29:34and its plasticity, and it's fractured.
29:37It produces just such a different pattern.
29:39So, like the other femur, I think that's a perimortem,
29:44around about the time of death-type fracture.
29:47Isn't that interesting?
29:50They found exactly the same type of break
29:52in the male and female adult thigh bones
29:55caused around the time of death.
29:59Sue doesn't think it's just a coincidence.
30:02She thinks it could point to a deliberate attempt
30:05to immobilise the two adults.
30:09You know, we've got two femur now that have got perimortem trauma.
30:14Why just in one bone?
30:19Why is it just the leg that's broken?
30:21In more or less the same place.
30:23In more or less the same place, yeah.
30:29It just makes you wonder if that's part of the incapacitation of the individual.
30:34I don't know. You don't tend to run very fast if you've got a broken leg.
30:39This new evidence begs the question,
30:41what method could have been used to do this?
30:44Were there weapons available back then
30:46which could fit this pattern of trauma?
30:49And then there is also the injury on the jaw of the teenage boy.
30:53Could this tie in with those seen on the adults?
30:56It can be the same implement
30:58that causes both sharp force and blunt force trauma.
31:01It just depends which bit you hit it with.
31:03So the back of an axe causes blunt force trauma,
31:06but the front of an axe causes sharp force trauma.
31:09And we have what we think is some evidence
31:12of sharp force trauma up on the mandible.
31:14So it could be the same implement that can cause it,
31:17but just used in a different way.
31:19The breaks to the femurs on both the adults
31:22support the idea that the skeletons died at the same time
31:26and possibly by the same method.
31:28It's a breakthrough for the team.
31:31This and the potentially fatal blow to the head on the teenage boy
31:35now leads to new questions.
31:39If we are now looking at human sacrifice,
31:42how and why did they die?
31:49Xanthi takes these latest findings
31:51to Professor Miranda Aldous-Green from Cardiff University,
31:55an expert in Iron Age rituals.
31:58She agrees that the skeletons show signs
32:01of having been ritually sacrificed.
32:04Given the fact that you seem to have repeated injuries
32:07and given where they've been put, you know, in a cave system,
32:11that sort of...that rings warning bells for me
32:14in terms of possible sacrificial activity.
32:16And the fact that it's going on over a long time
32:19suggests that, you know, this place is special
32:21and particular people who've met deaths in a ritualistic way
32:25may have been placed there quite deliberately.
32:28Miranda believes that some uniquely preserved bodies
32:31found not in caves but in marshland
32:34could offer an explanation for exactly how and why
32:37the Slipgill individuals met their death.
32:39We have a particular group of individuals that are called bog bodies
32:43which are found in swamps or marshes all over northwest Europe.
32:47And a lot of them, interestingly, are quite young
32:51and show signs of traumatic injury,
32:55sometimes over time, but then would lead to their death.
32:59What types of injuries are you seeing?
33:01Well, persistently hanging, grotting,
33:04you know, various forms of suffocation.
33:06You do get bloodletting.
33:07There are some people who have been to some bowel throats cut and so on,
33:10but there is this very strong evidence from the European Iron Age
33:14and into the Roman period of people who, ever so often,
33:18were chosen for some reason to be sacrificed
33:21in a particularly spectacular way and thrust deep into a marsh.
33:24So you're looking at marsh bodies,
33:26but the individuals I'm looking at are from a cave.
33:28Would that be considered ritualistic?
33:30Well, I think so.
33:31I think the whole thing with bogs and caves
33:34is that they're so-called liminal places.
33:36They're edgy places.
33:37They're on the boundaries between the material world
33:40and the world of the dead, the underworld.
33:45Bog bodies discovered the world over
33:47provide historians with ample evidence about human sacrifice.
33:51Much of the soft tissue remains, revealing crucial forensic details.
33:56One of the most famous is Lindau Man,
33:59who is thought to date from the same period as the Windy Pit skeletons.
34:04Now, that's Lindau Man, isn't it?
34:06That's Lindau Man, yes, indeed, from Cheshire.
34:09Found in August 1984 when peat-cutting was going on.
34:13And he was found in the peat.
34:15And he had been bludgeoned hard on the head twice.
34:18And then he had been garrotted and his throat cut.
34:23And he had various other traumas as well.
34:25He'd been kneed in the back, so somebody forced him to kneel down.
34:28So he had all sorts of other injuries.
34:30He's beautifully preserved, isn't he?
34:32Yes, he is, and he was probably of quite high status.
34:36We can tell that because his moustache was very carefully trimmed
34:39using shears, which are an expensive piece of kit.
34:42And his fingernails showed that he'd never done any manual work.
34:45Oh, I see.
34:46And he was about 20, 25 years old, so he would have been in prime condition.
34:50Who knows who he was? He could have been a hostage,
34:52he could have been some kind of criminal,
34:54but more likely he was chosen to be a sacrifice,
34:58I suspect, at a time of great crisis.
35:02Having studied the evidence in detail,
35:04Miranda has come up with a scenario of what happened
35:07during an Iron Age human sacrifice,
35:09and it all centres on the idea of overkill.
35:13If you're going to sacrifice me, what are you going to do?
35:16Well, I might drug you, I might give you some herbs
35:19or some psychotropic substance,
35:21perhaps to make you a little bit more acquiescent,
35:23because you might struggle otherwise.
35:25Compliant.
35:26And then I will then turn you round, away from me.
35:29Right.
35:30I'm going to give you hard blows on the skull,
35:32and that will crack the skull,
35:34by which time you are stunned, perhaps barely conscious,
35:37hovering on the edge of consciousness
35:39and beginning to sort of weave around.
35:41Don't forget, this is theatre. Yeah.
35:43We have lots of people watching. We're putting on a show.
35:45So it's really important.
35:46The next thing I'm going to do is to garrot you.
35:50Oh, OK.
35:51I'm going to twist that.
35:53OK.
35:54I'm going to leave that in place,
35:56so you are now on the verge of death, but not quite dead.
35:59OK, hold that thought.
36:01And then the coup de grâce.
36:04I will slit your throat, and because of the garrot,
36:06there'll be a great spurt of blood
36:08and a great cheer from all the community,
36:10and the sacrifice will be complete.
36:12Yeah, and now I'm dead for sure. Indeed.
36:15Why so many ways of doing it, though?
36:17I mean, you've drugged me, you've strangled me,
36:19now you're slitting my throat.
36:21It's partly because the overkill violence
36:24is necessary for the sacrifice to be really effective.
36:27Look at the investment of time and trouble and effort
36:30that has been in sacrificing you.
36:32But also, I've got to represent the entire community
36:35who are sacrificing you, perhaps to cleanse the community
36:39of all their sins and wickednesses and ills and pollution.
36:42So if you don't have a marshy environment,
36:44you've only got the caves, what would happen then?
36:47The death would happen, the killing would happen outside the caves,
36:50and you would then be deposited,
36:52and there must be rituals and prayers and fires,
36:55and perhaps feasting as well. Really?
36:57All to do with sending your soul to that place
37:00where it can't do any more harm and where the community is cleansed.
37:05And Miranda also believes that other rituals linked to sacrifice,
37:09such as removing the soft tissue from a corpse,
37:12can leave marks on the bones too.
37:14But the condition of the bones from Slip Gill remain a challenge
37:17in the battle to resurrect a compelling scenario
37:20for how these people died.
37:26DRAMATIC MUSIC
37:30Caroline's colleague, Dr Chris Ryan,
37:33has the task of reassembling the head of the adult male
37:36before he can start work on his face.
37:39Here we've got all the fragments reassembled
37:43into approximately the shape of a skull.
37:47And as you can see, there's quite a large chunk
37:50of the right-hand side of the cranium missing.
37:53And some of the facial skeleton.
37:57But we can, because we have the left-hand side quite intact,
38:01we can estimate much of this by mirroring parts of the skull
38:05from one side to the other.
38:07The green is just estimation of all the missing parts.
38:12There's not enough of the mandible just to mirror it
38:16because we only have this chin area and three teeth.
38:21The next stage will be to add layers of muscle and skin.
38:25Soon the face of the man who died at Slip Gill will emerge.
38:35So, if our people at Slip Gill were sacrificed,
38:38were they members of the local community or were they outsiders?
38:44The team hopes the stable isotope analysis of the bones
38:47could shed some light on this.
38:51If chemical signatures from the teeth and bones
38:54are consistent with those found around the Yorkshire moors,
38:57then it will indicate the skeletons were born
38:59and then lived in the local area.
39:04This could support Miranda's idea of community sacrifice.
39:11Sue assembles the team for the results.
39:16What they basically showed was a very good quality sample,
39:19a typical grain-based diet, almost no marine.
39:23So that's quite interesting.
39:25What it also showed was that they were local to the area.
39:29Now, the particular band that they fall closest to
39:32is actually very localised to where they were found.
39:35It makes it more likely to be ritual than just vindictive.
39:40Yeah, I suppose it does.
39:42Our Slip Gill people were locals
39:44and there was possible violence around the time of their death.
39:47But if they were human sacrifices,
39:49did they offer themselves up willingly or were they executed?
40:00Despite the evidence that's now building,
40:02Sue is reluctant to conclude a theory of foul play
40:05until she has more proof.
40:09We're not ruling out the fact that, you know, it isn't necessarily ritual.
40:13We're not ruling out all these possibilities
40:16because your imagination could run wild.
40:18We're going to try and keep it as focused as we can.
40:21Archaeologists say, got to bear ritual in mind.
40:25But what do the physicality of the bones tell us?
40:28Is there anything on there that supports this or refutes it?
40:34Until now, the team has focused on the four individuals from Slip Gill.
40:39But 18 more skeletons were found in other Windy Pits caves
40:43around the same area.
40:45Sue now turns her attention to some of these other remains.
40:52It's an adult.
40:58And a lot of fracturing,
41:00so a lot of the joints of actually where the sutures have sprung.
41:04And you can see that fracture again dissipating out into that suture.
41:09But a lot of commutative fracturing going on here
41:12so that the blow is to that point there.
41:15So it's coming in round about here.
41:18So, again, I think we've got evidence in at least the three of these
41:23of some form of blunt force trauma.
41:26This was a male, an adult male.
41:29This damage to these other skulls from a neighbouring cave
41:32could mean that the other Windy Pits were used for rituals and sacrifices.
41:37And as Sue starts to look at the remains of a skeleton from yet another cave,
41:42she notices some even more worrying marks on one of the shin bones.
41:46This is a bit of tibia. This is a bit of the shin bone.
41:50It's got a bit of damage at the top and at the bottom.
41:53And there's...
41:56..there's three, or it looks like three...
42:03..parallel lines.
42:06Well, those are not natural.
42:08They're not rodent activity either.
42:11Those look like they could well be knife marks,
42:15or at least a sharp blade.
42:19These are parallel cut marks.
42:21These are...
42:24..a repeat of the same action in the same place.
42:28I used to work in a butcher shop before I started my academic career,
42:33and I can remember having to take pieces of meat off cow bones and such things,
42:38and these are the kind of marks that you leave behind
42:41as you're paring away the muscle to take it away from the bone.
42:45That may well be...
42:48It tends to make you want to go too far,
42:51because what you end up doing is you want to go down the sensationalist route,
42:55and the last thing that forensic wants to do is go down a sensationalist route,
43:00and it looks like muscle's been removed.
43:04Why do you remove muscle from a human bone?
43:08I don't know.
43:10I think we could all surmise.
43:13If these are indeed blade marks,
43:16the investigation looks set to take an even more sinister direction.
43:21The word that everybody wants to say
43:23is the one that we're not going to say, which is cannibalism,
43:27because there's no evidence of that.
43:29All you have is evidence of cut marks.
43:32We don't know what that meat was being used for.
43:38But nevertheless, it's a chilling turn in the story.
43:42Xanthi wants to establish what cutting marks on bone could mean
43:46and travels to Oxford University to meet Dr Rick Schulting,
43:50an expert in prehistoric archaeology.
43:52If I saw these kind of marks on an animal bone, I would think butchery.
43:56But this is a human bone, so why are we getting these marks on a human leg bone?
44:01It's unlikely that they were eating the flesh of this person,
44:05like you would with an animal,
44:07because we have very questionable evidence for cannibalism at this time in Britain.
44:11If this was in the Neolithic, we might think of
44:14sort of trying to deflesh the bones to make them clean
44:18as a part of joining the ancestors.
44:20But how does removing the soft tissue from the bones
44:23help people go to their ancestors more quickly?
44:25Some people in different times, parts of the world,
44:28believe that death is a process and it's not complete
44:32until the putrefaction of the body is completed
44:35and you're left with the clean bones.
44:37And at that point, the soul, if we want to speak of it as that,
44:40ascends to the ancestors.
44:42And sometimes there's an interest in hastening that process
44:45by disarticulation and defleshing.
44:48According to Rick, the practice of removing flesh
44:51is unlikely to be a sign of cannibalism,
44:53but was a way of allowing the dead to cross over to the next world.
44:57But there were also more sinister explanations.
45:02We have to be open to various possibilities.
45:04Some of them might deal with the negative side of things,
45:08the dark side, if you will.
45:10And there is some evidence for slightly strange and odd things
45:13going on with human remains in the Iron Age,
45:15in different parts of Britain,
45:17that sometimes involve taking the body apart
45:21and moving bits of it around.
45:23Usually the skull especially seems to receive special treatment.
45:29So the cutting marks could fit in
45:31with the idea of ritual dismemberment after death.
45:34But how would the marks have been caused?
45:37To find out, Xanthe and Rick head to a local butcher's.
45:42My theme is just about free.
45:46Let me just take off the last little bits.
45:48Now, actually, you can see I've left some marks.
45:50Actually, look, all along that edge,
45:52you can see all of my buttery marks going on there.
45:56Would I use a tool like this to get rid of the rest of this soft tissue,
45:59which I've kind of left behind?
46:01Possibly, but the other possibility is that a stone tool might have been used,
46:05which we know people were still making and using in the Iron Age.
46:08So kind of scraping it. That would save my knife, I guess.
46:11I do have something with me here that we could have a go with, if you like.
46:14Save your lovely sharp blade.
46:16OK, it's not necessarily the sharpest or most appropriate,
46:19but it does have one nice edge here,
46:21and you'll get a sense of what it's like to use that.
46:24So I'm just going to hold this nice and steady, I guess,
46:27and then just scrape the soft tissue off.
46:30You need to actually get a good hold of it, don't you?
46:33There we go.
46:35That was actually pretty efficient, isn't it?
46:38I'm quite impressed, actually. It's much sharper than I expected it to be.
46:45And that's where a lot of the muscle attachments
46:48are actually joining to the bone, just around the ends,
46:51and that's, of course, exactly where we saw them on the human bone.
46:54You can actually see now, look, I've left some really quite deep grooves there.
46:58Oh, those are brilliant.
47:00Yeah.
47:02Xanthi has produced exactly the same marks on the pig bone
47:05that she found on the human leg bone,
47:07and Rick wants to demonstrate one very specialised type of defleshing.
47:11Removing the skin from a person's scalp.
47:14All the way up, yeah.
47:16All the way up.
47:18But why would you do that to a human head?
47:20Well, the head is very important in many societies,
47:23and we have a very good case for it being important in RNA to Britain
47:26and RNA to Europe in general.
47:28Are there any examples from the UK
47:30where the soft tissue has been moved from the head?
47:32There's a few cases.
47:34There's one from a Romano-British context at St Albans,
47:37where they seem to have had a defleshing operation
47:40and seem to have had a defleshed head
47:42placed quite near a temple complex, actually,
47:44which maybe starts to speak again of why you're doing this,
47:47the idea of trophy heads or possibly as a punishment.
47:50We have another case up in the far north of Scotland, on the Murray Firth,
47:54where, again, we have a child in this case.
47:56Oh, really?
47:58It looks like the skull has been cleaned back,
48:00so they're interested in having this white, clean bone to display, presumably.
48:04So it's really rare, then?
48:06It is. There aren't that many cases.
48:08And it's not a normal practice, so it's a very special person
48:11or somebody that's done something terribly wrong
48:13or being made an example of, perhaps.
48:17Xanthe has discovered that defleshing the dead
48:20was practised in Iron Age Britain.
48:22Sometimes it was associated with funerary ritual,
48:25but maybe it served another purpose.
48:30Human skeletal remains recovered from Windy Pits
48:33show that some individuals most likely met a violent end,
48:37possibly as part of a ritual sacrifice.
48:39We know that at least one person had their flesh cut from the bone
48:43before ending up in a cave waiting to be discovered thousands of years later.
48:50Until now, all the people whose bones were found in the caves on the moors
48:54have remained anonymous.
48:58But finally, the face of one of them is taking shape.
49:02The adult male from Slip Gill.
49:06Well, our biggest problem with this skull
49:08was that it was in multiple fragments
49:11and we didn't have very much of the mandible.
49:13So Chris has done a fantastic job at reconstructing the mandible
49:16from just a bit of chin, which is remarkable.
49:19And managing to get the whole of the cranium together in lots of pieces
49:23is also quite a difficult job.
49:25And then from that, it's the same process as it would be for any reconstruction.
49:29We're just building the muscles and putting the skin on.
49:32The biggest challenge, really, was the state of the skull.
49:35Well, let's have a look at the skin then.
49:37And he's turning into an interesting-looking individual.
49:40Wow, that's not what I was expecting to see at all.
49:44He actually looks quite masculine, really,
49:49and I wasn't expecting him to look that masculine.
49:52Because the top of his head is quite gracile, really, isn't it?
49:57And then he's got this big, heavy jaw at the bottom and really small ears.
50:01Why really small ears?
50:03Small ears, small nose, height-wise.
50:07I quite like him.
50:09Good.
50:11We've got a pretty reasonable face
50:14out of really quite badly conditioned skull.
50:20The completion of the facial reconstruction
50:22marks the end of the investigation.
50:25The team will now report their findings to the local community.
50:32Xanthe and Sue have come to Duncombe House, not far from the Windy Pits.
50:39They're here to return the skeletal remains to the local archaeologists
50:43and to present the case results.
50:47Although they've made great strides,
50:49Sue is concerned that they don't have enough evidence on the bones
50:52to confirm that the man of Slip Gill was sacrificed.
50:56Xanthe's gone away and done a lot of historical research
51:00with a lot of people who know a lot about this area.
51:03So we've gone back to the Slip Gill skeletons.
51:07We've had a look through them again, just to be sure, just to be certain.
51:16Sue looks at the Slip Gill remains one last time.
51:20And she notices something on the skull of the adult male
51:23that they missed before.
51:27I don't know, but this is left parietal.
51:32OK, so that's sitting there.
51:34You can see there's one line cut mark along there.
51:38It's quite deep.
51:39There's another one below it.
51:41There's another one below it.
51:43There's another one below it.
51:45Sue has found several parallel cutting lines
51:48around the top of the skull.
51:52You've got a cut mark that is...
51:55If I turn you round a bit, you've got cut marks that are coming here,
51:59and then you've got some that are back there.
52:02It looks like Sue has detected signs of scalping on the adult male.
52:09Xanthe's gone away and done a lot of historical research
52:12on the adult male.
52:15As Xanthe discovered, this practice of removing hair and skin
52:18from the top of the head did happen in Iron Age Britain
52:22and may have been part of ritualised killings.
52:33For Sue, it's enough to finally bring the events
52:36surrounding the death of this man into focus.
52:40I am not a great supporter of defleshing and sacrifice
52:45and ritual, all sorts of things, as anyone will tell you that knows me.
52:49But sometimes when you're faced with information
52:52and you go through all the possible outcomes,
52:54sometimes there's only one left.
53:00These findings will have an even deeper significance
53:03for the local community and the experts
53:05who've been studying the remains for decades.
53:08We've actually waited a long time to get some more information
53:11about the remains from the Windy Bits, so this is very important.
53:15There's lots of unknown questions
53:17that hopefully we'll get some answers to today.
53:27Sue and Xanthe explain the twists and turns in the case
53:30that led to the conclusion that this was not a natural burial.
53:34Did they go up there knowing what was going to happen to them?
53:38Or did they go up there in some way incapacitated?
53:42They're not being used as a kind of normal deposition site for burials.
53:46So why are people going up there?
53:48..caused by that?
53:50Because it does fit in there really rather nicely.
53:54Then the moment comes for Sue to announce her last-minute discovery.
53:58It takes an incredible amount of persuasion
54:01for me to want to talk about sacrificing people to gods
54:05and placing them down portals so they don't come back.
54:08It just makes me uncomfortable.
54:11But then, this morning,
54:13we had a look a little bit closer at some of the areas
54:17as we were laying out the skeletons,
54:19and we came across something that we hadn't noticed before,
54:23and it was all to do with this man.
54:27On this man, and on his head only,
54:31we have evidence of defleshing.
54:34So we have scratch marks, we have parallel scratch marks
54:39that are of a similar width in various parts across his skull.
54:44They're very, very delicate, but they are there.
54:48Now, if they're defleshing, for whatever reason they're defleshing,
54:52they're only defleshing around the head,
54:55almost in the sense of a scalping,
54:58because the defleshing isn't on the face,
55:01and it isn't on the back of the head,
55:03it's just around the area of the crown.
55:05So they put a blade in and just scraped?
55:08Yeah, scraped.
55:10The cutting marks on the skull are the final piece of evidence
55:13that at least one of the Slipgill skeletons
55:16was almost certainly ritually killed.
55:19It's a terrifying story.
55:22We've placed him into an environment
55:25which is a really rather scary, spooky sort of place
55:29that must have had some importance in the local community.
55:33He's been taken there, he's been perhaps immobilised,
55:36he's been murdered, one can assume,
55:38whether by one people or by a community,
55:41and then he's gone through a ritual removal of his scalp,
55:46so his scalp has been scraped away.
55:49But now it's time for the team to reveal the face of the man
55:53whose life ended in such violence.
55:57Because we have only one skull,
56:00there was only one face that we were able to reconstruct.
56:03So do we want to see what you look like?
56:05Yes. Yeah, go on then.
56:20He's got quite a rugged face, hasn't he?
56:23He certainly looks like he was a pretty robust individual, doesn't he?
56:27I quite like him.
56:29Slight asymmetries in the orbits.
56:31Yeah, quite high-defined cheekbones.
56:34If you were walking round Helmsley today
56:37and saw someone looking like that,
56:39you wouldn't look twice, would you?
56:43When you think what he may have gone through,
56:47and you have to ask, why was he chosen?
56:50What was so important about him?
56:53Was it because he was important in the area
56:55that that's why he was selected?
56:57You know, we will never know.
56:59That is really about conjecture.
57:01But what we do know is that he suffered blunt force trauma.
57:05We know that his skull was defleshed.
57:09Following the story through and hearing more about it today,
57:12it's been absolutely fascinating.
57:14It's really filled in a lot of the picture.
57:16That was really amazing.
57:18Absolutely fascinating.
57:20I thought the facial reconstruction was wonderful.
57:23The actual face brought it all very much home.
57:26You know, he's a very human face.
57:29Why did they do to him what they did?
57:32Well, I think it's because he's a human face.
57:35And the possibility remains
57:37that the other skeletons found with this man
57:40also met the same tragic end.
57:43We've added a dimension to this
57:46that we never anticipated we were going to.
57:49And, in fact, it's a first for me
57:51that I've never been involved in something
57:54that has involved this sort of a ritual, if you like.
57:57It does still make me uncomfortable
57:59because I really don't like the words,
58:01but at the end of the day,
58:03the bones have the evidence,
58:05and the evidence speaks for itself.
58:07The human remains presented to the team
58:10were not a recent discovery,
58:12but it took modern forensics
58:14to bring back to life a tragic story
58:17that's 2,000 years old.
58:22Next time, the team's biggest challenge yet,
58:25a hundred skeletons found in York.
58:27The trail provides a new perspective
58:29on the English Civil War.
58:31In the last battle between Christ
58:33and the forces of Antichrist.
58:35Through one man's extraordinary battle to survive.
58:38If I take it off at the shoulder, you will die.
58:46You can see the next cold case unraveled
58:49next Thursday night here on BBC HD.
59:01.