Meet the Ancestors episode 1
Meet the Ancestors episode 1
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00:00♪
00:10♪
00:30In January last year, deep inside the limestone rocks of the Yorkshire Dales,
00:35cave divers Andrew Goddard and Phil Murphy were exploring the narrow and
00:39boulder-choked passages of a little-known underground river.
00:43♪
00:50When they surfaced in an uncharted chamber, they thought they were the first
00:54to set foot in these caves, but they were wrong.
00:58They had set foot in these caves, but they were soon to discover otherwise.
01:03♪
01:07As the divers progressed deeper into the cave,
01:10wherever they looked there were bones, but how old were they?
01:14♪
01:18Even more remarkable, a set of bare human footprints in the soft clay floor of the cave.
01:24By pure chance, the divers had stumbled upon an ancient burial site
01:28and one of the most important cave finds this century.
01:32♪
01:40Those bones turned out to be 3,500 years old.
01:44It's an amazing find and means that the cave's probably a burial site
01:47belonging to our Bronze Age ancestors.
01:50This morning I'm on my way to meet the team who are going to explore the site.
01:59That was quite a drive. Hello.
02:01Hi, Phil Murphy. Nice to meet you.
02:03Hi, Julian. Andrew Goddard. Pleased to meet you.
02:05So you're the two that actually found the cave?
02:07That's right.
02:08Do you reckon we're going to find a way in?
02:10No problem.
02:11No problem at all.
02:13As an archaeologist, I've always been fascinated by how much you can tell
02:16about our past from a few scattered remains.
02:21In this programme and the coming series,
02:23I shall be joining in excavations of burials across the British Isles
02:27and finding out more about our ancestors.
02:30I'll be talking to specialists,
02:32trying to discover who these people were and when and how they died.
02:37Excellent.
02:38And at the end of each programme,
02:40with the help of experts in facial reconstruction,
02:43we'll come face to face with one of our ancestors.
02:53Back in the Yorkshire Dales, the team was heading up into the hills.
02:57Their first task is to find an alternative way into the cave
03:00that doesn't involve swimming through dangerous water-filled tunnels.
03:08Heading the team is one of Britain's leading cave archaeologists,
03:11Andrew Chamberlain from Sheffield University.
03:14Our prehistoric ancestors couldn't have potholed their way into the cave,
03:18so there must have been another entrance.
03:20Could one of these depressions on the hillside be the way in?
03:23And there are several of these in the neighbourhood
03:26and we don't want to start digging in the wrong one
03:28and this is why we're using the radio location device
03:31to try and find exactly where we are.
03:35Andy and Phil have volunteered to dive back into the cave
03:38with a small radio transmitter.
03:40We hope that this will guide us to a suitable spot on the hillside
03:44where we can find a way into the cave.
03:54On the surface, Bob's location device can pinpoint the exact position of the divers,
03:59even if they're deep underground.
04:01The divers have to work their way through 120 metres of narrow, water-filled passages
04:06before they re-emerge into air.
04:08From here, they climb a steep, rocky slope up into the burial cave.
04:16That's right, and then it dips off.
04:20And it comes back.
04:22So that's the spot.
04:24We're going to try and find it.
04:27And it comes back.
04:29So that's the spot.
04:31That's the spot there, directly below that, yes.
04:38Andy and Phil are now deep in the cave
04:40and they think they've found the original entrance,
04:43but it's now completely choked with huge boulders.
04:48OK, Bob, what do you want us to do next?
04:50I understand you can move three metres south.
04:53Bob wants the divers to move towards one of the depressions in the hillside.
05:04It looks quite shallow.
05:09Hello!
05:11They can hear us.
05:13What, they can hear us?
05:16Can you hear him?
05:18Yes, I can hear him.
05:20Hello?
05:22Sounds like I can hear Julian up there.
05:24It's not very loud, but I can definitely hear him.
05:26Can you hear me?
05:32What's going on, Julian?
05:35Well, the cave's called the Wolf Den, isn't it?
05:38They're howling like wolves down there,
05:40so I think that means that they've found the place.
05:44OK, lads, that's it, thanks.
05:46You can come out now. We'll see you on the surface.
05:48Cheers.
05:50This was amazing luck.
05:52Andy and Phil had found a shaft that led almost up to the surface,
05:56so all we have to do now is to clear the rocks blocking the entrance.
06:03For that job, Andrew and his team needed some heavy equipment.
06:09Chain hoist.
06:19LAUGHTER
06:21There are lots of caves in the area,
06:23some of which contained human burials,
06:25but many were excavated over a century ago
06:28and very little survives today.
06:30That's why this cave, inaccessible until now,
06:33could be so special.
06:42Now we've got the generator rigged up,
06:44we can have a look to see how far down this hole really does go.
06:54Tell us that, Julian.
06:56It's a bit deeper than we thought.
06:58The floor of the cave is about nine metres down.
07:01That's nearly 30 feet from where we're standing at the moment.
07:05And I reckon... Hang on, put that tape there again.
07:08You can feel? Yeah.
07:10That's about two or three feet of clay and rock that we're standing on.
07:15Yes. So there's not much to go
07:18and quite a long way to go down to the bottom of the cave.
07:21It's incredible.
07:26While the team carried on digging,
07:28I went off to find out where Bronze Age people in this area lived.
07:32I found some clues in the next valley,
07:34where tumbled stone walls marked the remains of a prehistoric settlement.
07:40This may not look like very much,
07:42but it's the remains of a prehistoric hut.
07:44I'm sitting on what remains of the back wall,
07:47level floor in front of me,
07:49and there is the entrance pointing straight out down the valley bottom.
07:55It was probably a small farmstead with pens for sheep and cattle,
07:59perhaps home to two or three families.
08:01And in this wonderfully sheltered spot,
08:03they would have been able to have grown their crops of wheat and barley.
08:08I think...
08:11Back at the site, they'd got a grip on the last rock
08:14blocking the cave entrance.
08:16But it was vital that this huge boulder
08:18didn't crash down onto the cave floor,
08:20destroying any remains that lay below.
08:22More tension.
08:23More tension.
08:27Steady.
08:29Steady.
08:38After three intense days of digging and heaving great rocks around,
08:42the entrance was finally clear.
08:48Very snug.
08:59Lower me away.
09:03All right.
09:08As an archaeologist, I've spent a fair bit of my working life
09:11digging in holes in the ground.
09:13But this will be the first time I've gone underground
09:16in search of ancient remains.
09:18I felt an enormous sense of anticipation and excitement
09:21as I climbed down the flimsy wire ladder.
09:24Andrew had gone ahead and helped me to land on a platform
09:27the team had built at the top of the very steep rocky slope.
09:49Now, don't step backwards.
09:51No. Oh, God.
09:53That's the scree.
09:55This is the scree running down to the flooded passage,
09:59which is where the cavers initially came up into this cave.
10:03I see what they mean about it being steep.
10:06And you can see... I can see bones on the...
10:09When we turned away from the slope the divers had clambered up,
10:12we saw human bones laid out in front of us.
10:15The way you look, there's more bone.
10:18I mean, there's some under here.
10:20They looked so fresh and remarkably well-preserved.
10:24When they were left, do you think, 3,500 years ago?
10:27I think so, yes. Yes.
10:29I've never...
10:31In all the years that I've been an archaeologist,
10:34I've never believed that I could come and see something like this.
10:41Now, you can see here... I'm sort of genuinely quite speechless.
10:44Indeed, underneath the platform, there's one right under here.
10:49Are these all human?
10:51These are all human.
10:53OK, so what's that bone, Andrew?
10:55That's a humerus. Right.
10:57So there's a humerus there, and that's another arm bone, isn't it?
11:00That's a radius. Yeah.
11:02And then that's... Is that a tibia?
11:04Yeah. What about the one that's underneath there?
11:06That's another tibia. Right.
11:08So these are long bones from both the arm and the leg?
11:11From both the arm and the leg. They're all stacked up in a little pile.
11:14That's right.
11:16Now, if you look at this bone here, we have another human humerus,
11:19but it's missing its head.
11:21So you can see that the epiphysis here is missing,
11:23and this indicates that... That's the end of the bone.
11:25That's the end of the bone. It's not fused.
11:27The person died before the age at which that epiphysis fuses,
11:30which is in the late teenage years.
11:32So we can be sure from that that this is a separate individual
11:36from this one here.
11:38So there's more than one... The remains of more than one person...
11:41That's right. ..buried in here, then.
11:43And is that... Oh, hang on, that must be human, isn't it?
11:46That's right. That jawbone there.
11:48It's recognisable as a human jaw with the two left premolars
11:53and the first molar.
11:55And the first molar is very worn,
11:57which is typical of the jaws of early populations.
12:02The team are mapping the entire cave.
12:04In a small space near the boulder slope are parts of three individuals,
12:08a woman, a man and a child aged about 15.
12:12The floor of the cave has partly collapsed,
12:14taking some of their bones tumbling down the slope
12:17into the underground river.
12:19The wolf bones litter every part of the cave floor.
12:23Animal bones specialist Ros Cord was very excited by the evidence
12:26that wolves had been using the cave as a den.
12:29It's quite remarkable.
12:31There's a few passages down there and they have wolves in them.
12:34I mean, there are dog... Not live ones.
12:36There are canid bones. Not live ones, no.
12:38No, we have canid bones and it looks like it's typical denning activity.
12:43What do you mean by...
12:45This activity is when they go into a cave into a hole underground
12:48where they can have their cubs without being disturbed.
12:51There's adult wolves down there and there's juvenile wolves down there.
12:54And you can see the remains of their dinners scattered all about the...
12:58Really? What were they eating?
13:00Well, they're eating roe deer.
13:02Somebody said there was a whole deer carcass down there.
13:04There is. Indeed, there is a deer carcass down there.
13:06It's a small deer and it's mixed up with some other bones.
13:09So is that wolf's dinner as well?
13:11That's wolf's dinner as well.
13:13They're bringing in animals for the juveniles and indeed themselves to eat.
13:17And you can see along the passages as the small cubs,
13:20they've taken off bones and they've dragged them along the passages
13:23and all of the bones are piled up in the corners
13:25where the wolves have been walking through, trampling through.
13:28Amazing. It's quite fascinating, quite fascinating.
13:32Even more extraordinary, though,
13:34are the human footprints in the midst of the wolf bones.
13:37They're impressed in the soft mud of the cave floor
13:40but some are sealed below layers of limestone
13:43which have taken thousands of years to form.
13:45So we know that they're prehistoric.
13:47In fact, they're the only ancient human footprints
13:50ever found in a cave in the British Isles.
13:52I still find it really difficult to grasp
13:55that somebody could have come in here thousands of years ago
13:58and left a footprint in the mud
14:00that we can still see all this time afterwards.
14:05I mean, it's extraordinary.
14:09I mean, it brings you so close to the person, doesn't it, really,
14:14to see that there, especially as it's so small.
14:23Bill Sellers arrived to examine the footprints.
14:26Yeah, if you do it at the same height,
14:28then we might be able to sort of collage them together
14:31to get the whole track, which would be really nice.
14:35OK.
14:37We've got a track here.
14:39We've got several sets of footprints.
14:41We've got three really clear ones
14:43and we've got some others that are obscured
14:46by the kind of flow stem covering.
14:49And so what we're trying to do is get a photograph of the whole track
14:54so that in the end we can try and recreate
14:57how whoever it was would have walked up there.
15:01On the last day of the excavation,
15:03Phil has volunteered to go down the boulder slope.
15:06He wants to see if he can find the human bones he spotted
15:09when he first came into the cave, but it's a hazardous operation.
15:13This is going to involve an awful lot of rock falling down, I think.
15:17Oops. There goes some.
15:21As far as possible, Andrew wants to leave the cave just as it was found.
15:26The only bones that he feels should be removed
15:28are those that have fallen down the steep boulder slope.
15:31They simply wouldn't survive the next rockfall.
15:39OK, it's just on me there.
15:41Well done. Well done, Phil.
15:43You're not running away, are you?
15:46It's just on me there. Well done. Well done, Phil.
15:49Have a look. Dead delicate, though, Andrew. I wonder if it's a juvenile.
15:55I'll send it up to the surface and have a look at it there.
15:58Be very gentle when you're pulling it up, OK?
16:11By the time we'd all climbed out of the cave,
16:13everyone was desperate to see what Phil had found.
16:16It's very fragile, isn't it?
16:18From that loose boulder slope,
16:20he'd recovered part of an incredibly delicate skull.
16:23It's not a very prominent brow ridge, but we need to know how old it is.
16:29After a day that we spent mainly underground down the cave,
16:33it's a real relief to be out in the sunshine
16:36and also to have retrieved this very, very fragile fragment
16:40of one of the people that was buried in the cave.
16:42I can't believe that Phil was able to relocate it
16:45down that boulder slope and bring it out.
16:53Nice.
16:56Well done!
16:58As we plugged the cave entrance, all hints of our efforts were camouflaged.
17:02The burial chamber once again sealed as it was
17:05when boulders blocked its original entrance thousands of years ago.
17:08So how much can we find out about a person
17:11from a few fragments of their skull?
17:13I went to see Richard Neve at Manchester University,
17:16one of Britain's top specialists in facial reconstruction.
17:20I have one of these boxes at home which I put some electric drilling in.
17:31Is there anything in that one there?
17:35Ah.
17:38Oh, look at that.
17:41Isn't that nice?
17:43Female? Female.
17:45From its shape and proportions,
17:47Richard immediately identified the skull as female.
17:50Your reaction's not as bad as I thought it was going to be.
17:53Well, it depends what you want me to do with it.
17:55I mean, if you want me to actually do anything with it,
17:58then my reaction might be very different.
18:02Now, what are you asking me about all this work?
18:05I sense something, some foreboding here.
18:09Was Richard able to rebuild her face?
18:11The foreboding I have is that if you ask a face to be built from that,
18:16you can use that as the basis upon which you can base a face,
18:24but areas of it are inevitably going to be very subjective.
18:30The loss of the lower jaw is one of the more important things, actually,
18:34when it comes to recreating a face which can be recognised.
18:38That is... It is an important feature and it does...
18:42Without that, you don't get the overall vertical proportions of the face as such.
18:51The first stage is to rebuild the skull using casts of the original fragments,
18:55a copy of a suitable jaw and clay.
18:58A plaster cast is then made of the whole thing
19:01and this forms the foundation for the reconstruction.
19:04But before Richard can get on with the next stage,
19:07he needs to know how old the woman was when she died.
19:12I hate going to the dentist, but at least it's the lady from the cave
19:15that's got the appointment this morning and not me.
19:19At Cardiff Dental Hospital, forensic orthodontist David Whittaker
19:23has developed a unique way of ageing individuals using a thin slice of tooth.
19:29Well, let's look at the maxilla.
19:32That's the upper jaw of this incredibly delicate piece of bone.
19:38And we're going to take this tooth out to see if we can do an ageing on it.
19:45From my point of view, it's a slightly hairy problem, this,
19:49because this very ancient material is so fragile that it can suddenly shatter.
19:57It's not quite like taking teeth out of living people.
20:03Well, it looks excellent.
20:05I mean, it's in amazingly good condition,
20:08considering the age of a tooth like that.
20:11Before the tooth can be cut, it's first set into a block of resin.
20:16Then it's mounted on what looks like a tiny bacon slicer.
20:20What we're expecting to see under the microscope is something like this.
20:24This is a tooth that we've dealt with before.
20:27What we're going to be looking for on the section is this change here.
20:31And from the age of about mid-twenties onwards,
20:36this transparent change starts here and spreads along the root of the tooth.
20:43And it's a little bit like this.
20:46It spreads along the root of the tooth.
20:49And it produces this glass-like transparent appearance
20:54compared with the living, healthy tooth up here.
20:59And we've got a scale here so that we can actually measure how far that change has gone.
21:07When the cutting was finished, our slice was just one tenth of a millimetre thick.
21:13It looks pretty good.
21:16It really is in super condition.
21:19And the enamel over the top of the tooth is beautiful.
21:23By measuring how far the crystalline area has progressed along the tooth,
21:27David can calculate the age of our Bronze Age ancestor.
21:30Along the bottom, we've got the numbers of millimetres
21:34that this process has progressed up the tooth.
21:38So we'll just take this across from the regression line to the age line,
21:44and there we are.
21:47It comes out at 48.
21:5048?
21:52That's not a bad age, is it, for the Bronze Age?
21:56I'm very comfortable with that.
21:58If this were a forensic tooth, I'd be really very happy about that age.
22:02Give or take the six years, either way.
22:05Now we know the woman's age,
22:07Richard can calculate the correct depths for facial muscles and soft tissue.
22:12Richard's reconstructions are based on a sound understanding of anatomy
22:16and the way a human face ages.
22:19Some people say, why bother about the anatomy?
22:25Why bother about this sort of laborious process of building it up?
22:34And the answer, really, to that is that without it,
22:39one can't demonstrate how you've arrived at what you've arrived at.
22:48You can't demonstrate that it isn't just imagination.
22:53What we are doing now is...
22:57I suppose it's a bit like wallpapering or plastering.
23:02We're putting the final coat on,
23:06that which you see underneath.
23:11One of the things when you're doing this, if you're doing a young person,
23:15is to try to get the soft tissue,
23:18One of the things when you're doing this, if you're doing a young person,
23:21is to try to get the surface of everything very smooth.
23:25Now on this one it doesn't matter,
23:27because the skin surface, the skin texture, is less than perfect.
23:33It's lost that sort of peachy, bloomy quality
23:37which you associate with a young skin.
23:43While Richard continued to work on the woman's head,
23:46I asked Bill in his lab at Edinburgh University
23:48to see what we could learn from the footprints.
23:51First, he showed me how he can reconstruct the way people walk.
23:55This is a reconstruction of a human walking.
24:00So it's a computer-generated animation
24:03based on the actual physical properties of the leg bones
24:08so that you can actually make it walk through the footprints that you've actually got.
24:13Can you do this sort of thing with the footprints from the cave?
24:16Well, I hope to be able to do this sort of thing with the footprints from the cave.
24:19That sounds ominous.
24:20Well, it's not ominous, it's just that the data we got from the cave
24:23was actually rather different in the end.
24:25Let me show you.
24:28This is a photograph of the footprints.
24:32I must admit, I can't see very much except one of the caver's woolly boots.
24:37Well, the footprints are actually here and here,
24:39but if I outline them, they're a lot clearer.
24:43Oh, yes, I can see the toes there.
24:46They're actually lovely.
24:47You can see the individual toes
24:49and you can see an impression from the ball of the foot
24:51and then you can see a mark from the heel well-preserved.
24:54So can you do anything with the gate, with the action from these?
24:57Well, I was hoping to, because what we initially thought
24:59was that this was a trail of footprints,
25:02but I think you can see that one of them is pointing this way
25:05and the other one's pointing in a completely different direction.
25:08And the other thing I did was, if you actually move them around
25:11so that you can measure them...
25:13Oh, they're different sizes.
25:15They're different sizes.
25:16Is that the real size?
25:18Yes, those are life-sized.
25:20But they're not adult ones, are they?
25:22No, not at all.
25:24This one's children's size 11 and this is children's size 8.
25:27So what sort of age does that make?
25:29Well, approximately, this is probably an eight-year-old
25:32and this is a five-year-old child.
25:34So there were two children in the cave.
25:37I mean, what were they doing? Were they running?
25:39Well, if you look at this picture again,
25:42you can see you've got very clear imprints of the heels.
25:45So these are flat footprints
25:48and you only get that if someone's walking or standing.
25:51So I actually think these were walking slowly.
25:54I mean, what we think they might have been doing
25:57was that children this age are likely to have been herding sheep
26:00up on the hills
26:02and, you know, maybe they wandered into the cave because it was raining
26:06or they just saw the opening and wanted to have a look around.
26:09That's an incredible thought.
26:11They were probably told not to and got a rocket when they got home.
26:14Absolutely, yes. So some things don't change, really.
26:16Nothing changes.
26:18But it's amazing to actually have a record
26:20of actually what these people were doing.
26:22I mean, this is a direct record of their behaviour
26:24rather than just an artefact.
26:37In his studio, Richard was putting the final touches
26:40to the woman from the wolf den.
26:43If you can show me, then, I'll be able to show you.
26:45Yes, all right. Here you are.
26:53I think it's fantastic to see this face
26:55and I'm amazed that you've managed to do so much
26:58with those tiny little fragments of bone.
27:00I mean, when I saw them come out of the cave, you know,
27:03I really wondered whether we were going to be able to see a face.
27:06It's not a face that I could have invented.
27:09It's not one that I could have just made up out of my head.
27:12It's one that's grown of its own accord.
27:17I think it's possible that those people who knew her
27:20could recognise her from this.
27:23So I'm reasonably happy with it, yes, I am.
27:26Yes, I am.
27:31We'd finally met our Bronze Age ancestor
27:34and this is the landscape that she knew as home.
27:38When she died, she was taken on a final journey
27:41from the place where she lived, across hills and rivers,
27:44to a very special place, perhaps one she knew during her life.
27:49Bearing offerings for the next life,
27:51her grieving relatives laid her to rest deep in the cave.
27:56Perhaps it wasn't nature that sealed the entrance.
27:59Maybe their last task was to place the boulders that ensured her rest,
28:03safe from the wolves that roamed the hills.
28:15Your Dead To Me is the history podcast
28:18for people who don't like history and those who do.
28:21Join Greg Jenner to learn and laugh.
28:24Listen via BBC Sounds.