Meet the Ancestors episode 8
Meet the Ancestors episode 8
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00:00Music
00:29A Dorset farmer noticed strange crop marks in a neighbour's field.
00:36As the soil was peeled back, a prehistoric temple appeared
00:40and at its centre, a mysterious burial.
00:51What could be better than being out in the Dorset countryside
00:54on a lovely day like today?
00:56What makes the day even better for me is the fact that I'm on my way
00:59to see an excavation where they've dug up a burial
01:01that dates to the time of Stonehenge.
01:10Martin Green is a farmer and an old friend of mine.
01:13He's also the archaeologist who's excavating the site
01:16and he told me how he'd found the burial.
01:18I started travelling away, removing small loose chalk
01:23until I got down to this level of this much larger blocky chalk
01:27that you can see there now.
01:29And then I decided to lift this loose block here
01:34and it revealed a hole underneath and I looked in there
01:38and wow, there's a skull in there!
01:41And does it look pretty well preserved?
01:43It looks very well preserved.
01:45How did you feel when you realised there was a burial underneath there?
01:48Well, I felt a little bit like Howard Carter
01:50when he peered through the little hole into Tutankhamen's tomb
01:53for the first time. It really was quite a shock.
01:55But you're not expecting the same sort of riches
01:58that Tutankhamen had down there?
02:00No, no, I'm not, but it's still a remarkable discovery
02:03and something I was totally unexpecting.
02:07Oh my goodness, look what we've got!
02:10A second skull!
02:15Do you think this might be a family grave, Martin?
02:17Well, it's possible. We've obviously got two individuals here
02:19but the question at this stage is, are these just skulls
02:22or are they parts of complete skeletons?
02:25We've yet to discover that.
02:31From above, we get a clear idea of what the whole site looks like.
02:36At the centre is a huge circular hollow
02:38and in the bottom the burial pit was hidden.
02:42Surrounding it is an outer ring of large pits.
02:47Back in the burial pit, Martin was in for another surprise.
02:51Look, there's another one!
02:56This is incredible!
02:58It looks as though there's going to be a ring of skulls
03:01all the way around the outside of this pit.
03:03We've got two over here so far
03:05and we've got two at this end
03:08and there are large blocks here
03:10and I suspect they might be covering skulls as well.
03:13This is quite remarkable.
03:16This one here we can see is actually sort of caved in a little bit
03:20and we're actually looking inside the skull down there,
03:24inside the brain case.
03:26But as more chalk was removed,
03:28it became obvious that the pit contained more than just skulls.
03:32Cripes!
03:34Well, here they are.
03:36I've never seen anything like this before.
03:38By the time that bone specialist Jackie McKinley arrived the next day,
03:43Martin had uncovered four complete skeletons scratched in the pit.
03:48Jackie gave us the first clues about these people.
03:51One was an adult woman, but three were young children.
03:55Perhaps hers?
03:59It's still got some of the milk teeth.
04:01These are still deciduous teeth along here
04:04and this is one of the permanent teeth.
04:07The first one to erupt is the first permanent molar
04:11and that's just about starting to erupt there.
04:15It's a bit younger than I thought at first.
04:23It's very odd seeing graves emptied.
04:26This seems a bit stranger
04:29because we know so little of the circumstances
04:32in which the bodies were put in the pit.
04:35The fact that it's turned out to be three children
04:39I find quite disturbing, really.
04:42When you see the first milk teeth and things like that,
04:46it just really brings it home how old they were
04:50and it makes you wonder how they died.
04:56It's actually a very sad burial group.
05:03Back in her lab, Jackie has calculated
05:06that the woman was about 30 years old and of slender build.
05:10The children were aged about 10, 9 and 5,
05:16although at this young age it's impossible from bones alone
05:20to say whether they were girls or boys.
05:23None of them showed any signs of how they'd died,
05:26although Jackie had found a small hole
05:28in the skull of the youngest child.
05:31Can you see how it's just very slightly raised?
05:35It's bulged out a bit, isn't it?
05:37It's just very, very slightly bulged out.
05:41Right, if we look over here at the X-ray,
05:45this is the area here where that break in the bone was.
05:49Can you see how that's got little bits of bone missing?
05:53There's also a similar area up here, if you notice, as well.
05:58It's quite faint, but it's there.
06:01It looks very similar to this bit here.
06:04What cause is that?
06:06Well, the only thing I can think of is that this must be some form of tumour.
06:11Quite what? Within the bone?
06:13Actually inside the bone, so it is a bone tumour.
06:17But quite what type of tumour yet, I'm not sure.
06:25The other thing you've got, which they all do have,
06:28is a condition called cribra obritalia.
06:31Now, this is something you get in the eye sockets.
06:37Can you see in there? I'm not sure. It's not easy to see.
06:42Just in the top of the orbit there, there is pitting.
06:47Oh, yes, there's pits in there. Can you see the pits in there?
06:50Now, all three of the juveniles have that condition.
06:54Now, that is believed to be due to iron deficiency anaemia.
06:59Now, there could be a number of causes for that.
07:04One would be that the diet is just deficient in iron.
07:12Another might be that the individuals were not being able
07:16to absorb the iron properly that was in the diet.
07:21Later that day, Paul Budd and Janet Montgomery arrived.
07:26They're scientists from Bradford University
07:28and they were curious about the lead levels in such ancient teeth.
07:33Now, where are these people going to have been getting lead from?
07:36Because, I mean, they're Neolithic, aren't they?
07:39So they hadn't got any metals.
07:41Well, that's right, and that's what makes them particularly interesting,
07:44in fact, because, although people might not realise,
07:48but we're actually exposed to very high levels of lead
07:50comparatively these days.
07:52In fact, it's been estimated that the amount of lead in our atmosphere
07:56is perhaps as much as 100,000 times higher than natural levels.
08:01Frightening, isn't it?
08:03Yes, it's rather terrifying, really.
08:05In this context, these people would have been getting lead through their diet.
08:09They lived on the Chalklands, which is a very low lead geology.
08:12There was, as you say, no metals around. This is pre-metallurgical.
08:16So one of the things we're hoping to get here is to establish,
08:19if you like, what that sort of natural level of exposure to lead is.
08:24But there's still one question on everyone's mind.
08:27Is this a family group?
08:29Was this woman the mother of these children?
08:32The answer might lie in DNA.
08:38One of the few people in Britain who can help
08:40works here at UMIST in Manchester.
08:44Christine Flaherty explained how.
08:46Well, we use a certain technique
08:49that lets you look at inherited bits of DNA.
08:53And if the mother has these and we find them present in the children,
08:58then that will tell us whether or not these children are offspring of this woman.
09:05One of the best places to find ancient DNA
09:08is inside teeth protected by the hard enamel.
09:11If any DNA has survived,
09:13then the tooth that Christine takes from each child
09:16will also tell us whether they were a boy or a girl.
09:22From Manchester, it was off to the Oxford radiocarbon dating lab,
09:26where Paul Pettit had been analysing small samples of bone
09:29from the Cranbourne burials.
09:32Were the burials really Neolithic, as I'd thought?
09:35I hoped that Paul was going to tell me.
09:37Well, what we have first is a range
09:40that is going to be the age of Cranbourne woman.
09:43And that age is roughly 3,500 to 3,100 BC.
09:48Within this range, what age is she most likely to be?
09:52Well, all we can do is really say that it's slightly more probable
09:56that her age range will actually be in certain areas within this.
10:00And looking at the peaks here, of course, this is the highest,
10:03but I suppose if I was a gambling man,
10:05I'd put my money on her real age being somewhere around 3,300 to 3,400 BC.
10:13So she's something between 5,300 and 5,400 years old.
10:19She is.
10:21So she's definitely Neolithic.
10:23Definitely Neolithic.
10:28When our woman from Cranbourne lived, it was a time of change,
10:31when the crops and herds of the first farmers
10:34replaced a life of hunting and gathering wild foods.
10:38This change in diet can also be seen in the bones,
10:41as Mike Richards had discovered.
10:44So can you tell what little group we're eating?
10:47Well, we measure the nitrogen isotope,
10:49and this tells us about something called trophic level.
10:52It can tell us about the amount of plant versus meat
10:55or milk protein in the diet.
10:57And the way we do it is we measure the isotope values
11:00of sort of herbivores who eat plants from the same area
11:03in the same time period, and carnivores who, of course, eat meat.
11:06And we look at what the human values are, and that's a sort of a scale,
11:10and we see how the humans compare.
11:11Are they more like the herbivores, or are they more like the carnivores,
11:14or are they somewhere in the middle?
11:16These are the Cranbourne humans,
11:17and they are quite high in the nitrogen scale up here,
11:20very similar to carnivores,
11:21a lot more similar to carnivores than they are to herbivores.
11:24And I interpret that as they're having a great deal of meat
11:26or animal protein, meat or milk, in their diet.
11:31Interestingly, modern people who eat meat
11:33would fall just below the Cranbourne levels, about here.
11:41The final part of my journey took me to University College London
11:44and facial reconstruction expert Robin Richards.
11:50The first stage of the facial rebuild starts with scanning the woman's skull.
11:54Robin's computer collects the data,
11:56and the depths of overlying facial tissue are added.
11:59Unfortunately, it won't be possible for us to rebuild
12:02any of the children's faces,
12:04as the information about tissue depths has never been collected.
12:07So do you, in some ways, sort of almost decide
12:11what sort of a face you ought to put on?
12:13Yes, I have a look at the skull,
12:15and you get some idea of the facial type from that, yes.
12:21Robin has chosen a set of tissue depths for a slender face,
12:24and the computer moulds the data around the skull.
12:29And this is the reconstructed face.
12:32Strangely, this is just the sort of face that I was expecting.
12:38In her studio, series illustrator Jane Brain
12:42began to transform Robin's computer printout
12:44into a full-colour portrait of Cranbourne Woman.
12:56It's been a few weeks since I've been to see Martin,
12:58but he's been beavering away the whole time,
13:00and I expect, knowing him, he's found something else extraordinary.
13:03The site has changed quite dramatically.
13:06Next to where the burials were found was a huge hole in the chalk.
13:10Martin?
13:11Julian!
13:13Where, then?
13:14Hi!
13:16How far down is that?
13:18It's 6.6 metres, or about 22 feet.
13:21You're mad!
13:24Right, and have you got to the bottom of it?
13:26Definitely, definitely got right to the bottom of it.
13:29Right, and have you got to the bottom of it?
13:31Definitely, definitely got rocky, solid chalk down here.
13:34Right, so can I come down and have a look?
13:36By all means, if you use the ladder.
13:38Yeah, that was the way I was intending to come down.
13:41Right.
13:43Come on down.
13:45I couldn't believe how deep the shaft went.
13:48What Martin has excavated was originally dug here over 5,000 years ago.
13:52But how did they do it?
13:54What have you dug here, Martin?
13:56Welcome to the shaft.
13:59I can't get over the size of it!
14:01I know, and it's been dug right through this really rocky, solid chalk.
14:05And we've just removed the loose rubble from it, exposing the original sides.
14:11And we can tell this is the original sides because you can actually see marks in the wall, tool marks.
14:15Here's a long groove where probably an antler pick was dug into the chalk.
14:19And down here, these sort of scallop-shaped marks,
14:21which are probably the marks of an axe when it's being used to cut out the chalk.
14:26I mean, why do people go to the extraordinary effort of building something like this?
14:31Well, we think it has something to do with a sort of Mother Earth worship,
14:35that they're trying to get deep into the chalk, into Mother Earth,
14:38and lay there particular deposits to perhaps increase the fertility of the animals and the crops,
14:43make their offerings to the gods, as it were.
14:46I mean, you get this extraordinary feeling, don't you, down here?
14:49You do.
14:50Of being part of the Earth.
14:51And I mean, looking up and seeing the sky and the clouds above,
14:55I mean, it's an amazing sensation.
15:25The next day, I went to see Martin where, in an old chicken shed,
15:29I discovered some clues about the people who lived here in the Stone Age.
15:34Martin has a unique collection of tools and objects dating back thousands of years.
15:39But is there anything special about this area?
15:42I mean, apart from the fact that people are living here.
15:45Well, this area here, close to the farm, we get exotic items like these stone axes, for instance.
15:51These are made of rocks which have been imported a considerable distance.
15:54That one, for instance, is from North Wales.
15:57What about this one?
15:58That one's from Cornwall.
16:00And the other one's from South Wales.
16:02I mean, these must have been prized possession for somebody if the rock's been brought all that distance.
16:07Very much so, yes.
16:08And we quite often find them in pits in the ground
16:10where they've been very carefully deposited with other objects.
16:13This is a bone of a brown bear, which even in those days must have been quite a rare animal.
16:17And it's been deliberately placed with stone axes and other items in pits.
16:21So all these things, these axes and decorated pottery and fine flint tools
16:26and even odd bones like bear bones, these are all found buried in pits.
16:31That's right.
16:32And it's all close to this great monument, which we know as the Dorset Cursus,
16:36which we can see on this plan.
16:38It crosses this area for a distance of six miles.
16:40And all these exotic materials are found very close to it, either within it or just outside.
16:47So that's the magnet, is it?
16:48That's what's drawn all of these objects.
16:50Yeah, that is the focal point.
16:52Of course, the big question is, what's the Cursus, then?
16:56Well, the Cursus consists of these two parallel banks and ditches about 100 metres apart,
17:00and it forms a great enclosed pathway.
17:04We know it's aligned on the Midwinter Solstice as well.
17:08So what was it for?
17:10I think it's like a grand avenue of the dead.
17:13It's a great symbolic pathway linking the ancestors into the annual cycle of nature.
17:26So huge is the Cursus, but the only way to understand it is from the air.
17:35In the pale chalk field, the dark rectangular lines mark the northeast end of the Cursus,
17:41and the grassy mound in the bottom right-hand corner is a burial mound of the same date.
17:49Today, the Cursus can only be seen at certain times of the year.
17:53Here, it disappears into the distance, with a later burial mound on the left.
17:58The highlighted point is the place along the Cursus
18:00from where the ancients would have viewed the Midwinter Solstice.
18:07When it was first built, the Cursus would have looked quite different.
18:10The chalk embankments that marked out its edges would have cut two dramatic white lines across the landscape.
18:17The other end of this amazing construction, over 10 kilometres long and 100 metres wide,
18:23is also marked by a burial mound.
18:31Now I felt that I understood the Cursus, I was intrigued to know how it fitted in with Martin's site.
18:37At the dig, Jane had arrived, and she was going to reconstruct how it might have looked 5,000 years ago.
18:44Oh, I see it's coming along then.
18:46It's not too bad, at least it gives a sense of the landscape.
18:49It's not been easy, drawing in the rain and the wind, but at least it really does get a feel for the place.
18:58On the distant hillside, the Cursus would have been clearly visible to the people who built this site.
19:11Jane and I took her unfinished painting to show Richard Bradley, an expert in prehistory at Reading University.
19:17We were surprised when he told us that it wasn't really a burial site.
19:21So what is the primary function of this site then, if it's not for burial?
19:25I think there are two functions that are interlinked.
19:28One is communication.
19:30You are making contact with what's called the underworld, and that's common in many cultures.
19:38But you're also making offerings, you are placing things in those holes,
19:44so that you're doing those two things at once.
19:47It's about communication with a world that is below and separate from the one which we know,
19:53and possibly another world which is physically above it.
19:57Now there's something very odd going on here.
20:00Because if this site isn't a burial ground, then what is it?
20:03Maybe it's something to do with ceremony and ritual, some sort of a temple maybe.
20:07But there are still four people buried here, and you wonder why.
20:11Perhaps they were victims of sacrifice.
20:14I suspect that we'll never know.
20:16But there's still the lead, there's still the DNA results,
20:19and maybe they're going to tell us something about the mystery of the people that are buried here.
20:26At UMIST in Manchester, Christine had completed her DNA tests.
20:32She first explained which of the children were boys, and which were girls.
20:36So here we've got the sexing results.
20:38Now, we knew the adult was a female, she was around 30 years of age.
20:43I found out that the oldest child was a girl, she was the one around 10 years old.
20:50The middle child, the nine-year-old, turned out to be a boy.
20:55And the youngest child, the five-year-old, turned out to be a girl.
21:00The middle child, the nine-year-old, turned out to be a boy.
21:04And the youngest child, the five-year-old, was another girl.
21:09So there were two girls and a boy.
21:12That's quite extraordinary.
21:14Now, having worked out what sex they are, what I want to know is, are any of them hers?
21:20Is she the mother?
21:21Right. So we used something called STRs to look at kinship.
21:28And STRs are something that are used now for DNA fingerprinting, for paternity testing,
21:35for use in forensic crime testing, and things like this.
21:40Okay, here we've got the DNA kinship results for the burials.
21:44Up here we've got the adult, the woman.
21:47And next we've got the oldest child, the girl, the middle child, who's the boy,
21:53and the youngest child, who's the little girl.
21:55And this graph shows the DNA markers for each of them.
21:59And if any of the markers match, then there's a good chance of kinship.
22:03So here we see that the youngest child, the little girl, shares one of the markers with the adult.
22:09And so this little girl could certainly be the child of the woman.
22:15Now, the other two children don't share any of the markers with the woman.
22:19And certainly the boy could not be her son because neither of these match either of her markers.
22:26There's only one marker for the oldest girl,
22:28which could be either because the other marker didn't come out or she's got two of the same.
22:33So it's a bit ambiguous as to whether or not she would be the woman's daughter.
22:38But it's interesting because the boy and the oldest girl share the same marker,
22:43and so they could possibly be siblings.
22:45That's incredible.
22:47I'm surprised that only one of the children belonged to our woman.
22:50Why was she buried with two more that weren't hers?
22:54Surely the story couldn't get any more complicated.
23:00But at the British Geological Survey in Nottingham,
23:03I met a very excited Paul and Janet, who had the results of their analysis.
23:07First, the lead levels.
23:10You took some teeth as samples to look for lead levels.
23:14What sort of levels did you find in the prehistoric teeth?
23:17Well, the results were interesting, but not really what we expected.
23:20We expected them to be very, very much lower
23:23than the sort of lead levels that you get in modern people.
23:26And although they were a bit lower,
23:28towards the low end of the distribution of modern people, if you like,
23:32they were nowhere near as low as we thought that they would be.
23:35These are the lead levels that Paul obtained from the teeth of our burial group,
23:39and these are from modern samples.
23:42What's surprising is that some of the Neolithic levels
23:45are almost the same as modern ones,
23:47a result that could have major implications
23:49for our understanding of modern lead pollution.
23:52So where were people in the Neolithic getting this lead from
23:56that got into their teeth?
23:58Well, we postulate that their lead is coming from their diet, essentially,
24:03and therefore primarily from their underlying geology.
24:07So it's coming from the geology to the soil,
24:10to the food that they eat and so on.
24:13If more of our lead comes from geology than from the atmosphere,
24:16then perhaps we're not as polluted with lead as we thought.
24:22But there was still more.
24:24Using thin slices from the prehistoric teeth,
24:27Paul and Janet used a laser to take samples of lead and strontium isotopes.
24:35The laser cuts through layers of enamel and dentine
24:38down at different stages of a person's life.
24:41And incredibly, the isotopes have geological signatures
24:44that can be linked to specific parts of the country,
24:47so it's possible to track people's movements.
24:51This is a graph showing how the strontium isotope signatures
24:55change in the tooth enamel samples
24:57that we analysed from the adult female and the juveniles
25:01from the Cranbourne Chase site.
25:03This is the strontium isotope signature down the side here.
25:07And this is the level that you would expect from the chalk,
25:11the signature you would expect from the chalk down here.
25:14Yes.
25:15Now, the adult female has a very different signature
25:19from the chalk geology,
25:21and it's a signature which corresponds to what we find in the Mendix,
25:27which is about 80km to the north.
25:29Right.
25:31So the isotope profiles of the woman and the children
25:34connect to tell an extraordinary tale.
25:36The woman from Cranbourne was not born on the chalk,
25:39but in the Mendix.
25:41As an adult, she moved 80km south to Cranbourne,
25:44where she picked up two children, neither hers,
25:47and returned to the Mendix.
25:51Here, she had a daughter, and some time later,
25:54all four of them returned to Cranbourne,
25:56where they died and were buried.
26:03All this evidence has taken a long time to gather,
26:05and it's been months since I last saw Martin,
26:07but I can now reveal to him the final landscape
26:10and the portrait of a Cranbourne woman.
26:12Wow, this is about as far as we can go with archaeology, isn't it?
26:16I reckon so, yeah.
26:17Bringing back a face from the past, that's superb.
26:20I mean, to me, she was always going to have this very slender face,
26:24because the skull and the whole skeleton was just very slender, wasn't it?
26:28Yeah, very delicate, that's right.
26:30And I suppose in this case, we found out far more about her
26:33than we ever expected.
26:34Yes, absolutely.
26:35I mean, all these things about her children
26:37and the fact that she wandered from...
26:39Yeah, the Mendix to here.
26:41I mean, that's extraordinary, isn't it?
26:43It is, I know, it's amazing what's been found out about her.
26:46And this is the place.
26:49Ah, that's excellent.
26:52So it's got all of the elements that we know about from your excavation,
26:55hasn't it?
26:56You know, this sort of big central pit
26:58and the hints that the shaft's being dug down here,
27:01and then the individual pits around the outside.
27:04We tried to get in this idea that there's maybe a family group
27:07responsible for each one,
27:09so that's why these paths come in from different places.
27:13I mean, having found out so much about that group of people,
27:17I mean, the one thing that we can't be certain of
27:19is whether they were sacrificed or not,
27:21but do you think that they were?
27:23I think most likely they were.
27:24The way that pit had been hidden away into the side of the much bigger feature
27:28and then backfilled with chalk rubble suggests to me
27:31that it was a very sacred foundation burial,
27:34hidden away into the base of that feature
27:37probably at the end of the construction of the site, yes.
27:43The landscape that this wandering woman knew over 5,000 years ago
27:47may seem to us quite idyllic,
27:49a peaceful rural scene in which everyone lived in harmony with nature.
27:53People worked together in the fields
27:55and to build structures like the temple and the great cursus
27:58that still leave their mark on the landscape even today.
28:01By digging chalk and hewing timber, the gods were kept pleased.
28:05But there may have been a dark side to life.
28:08The gods of earth and sky, of this world and above
28:11may have demanded offerings and not just of valuables and food,
28:15perhaps of lives.
28:17Did this woman and her band of children,
28:19in this remote time and in this strange place,
28:22finally make the ultimate sacrifice?
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