Cold Case - Skeletons of Windy Pits
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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.