A History of Ancient Britain (2011–…): Season 1, Episode 1 - Age of Ice - full transcript

This is the story of how
Britain came to be.

Of how our land and its people
were forged over thousands
of years of ancient history.

This Britain is a strange
and alien world.

A world that contains
the hidden story of our
distant prehistoric past.

'From the enigmatic secrets
of our greatest monuments...'

It's fantastic after 14,000 years
to get a glimpse of the way at least
one individual was thinking.

'..to the magical worlds
inhabited by the first people
to make this land their home.

'Today, modern science
and new archaeology
are solving ancient mysteries,

'and revealing the seismic shifts
that created whole new ages.'

That is magic.

The first chapter
in our epic story -



a battle for survival
in a hostile and icy world.

This is the oldest complete human
skeleton ever found in Britain.

A world in which our land
was being shaped by nature's
most powerful forces

into the Britain we know today.

WIND HOWLS

In every corner of Britain there
are relics of a long-lost past.

The rich heritage of a remote
and distant history.

It's a history that goes
right back to the Romans...

..the very first people who
wrote down the names and places,

the dates and events
of life in Britain 2,000 years ago.

But the world I'm about to enter
will take us back even further back,
into a far more distant past.

ENGINE STARTS

In south Wales, a team
of archaeologists is searching

for traces of ancient people
who once lived here.



What they're looking for
are footprints,

from 8,000 years ago.

This is a world that only survives
in the remains of people
and objects...

..fragments preserved by chance
for thousands of years.

And these precious relics
give us glimpses of the people
who once lived here.

A people who survived,
often against extraordinary odds.

When I studied to become
an archaeologist,

it was the sheer challenge
of understanding this ancient world
that attracted me,

and the legacy that its
people left behind.

I've come to the coast
of south Wales

to try to see some of the most
intimate and poignant remains
in the whole of Britain.

Out there, beneath the waves,
are a few of the most fragile
and fleeting traces imaginable

of a group of hunters
who came here 8,000 years ago.

The added challenge out here,

as well as the tides,

you've also got to deal with
the fact that this fantastic
evidence is usually concealed

under feet of mud,
as these banks shift about.

So we've got a footprint there.

You can just see the big toe,
the heel emerging from the mud.

With the side of the foot,
the heel prominently marked,

the arch of the foot, then the big
toe and the rest of the toes.

So rather than being a depression,

the way they've been preserved

is gradually filling the print
with materials,

so they appear almost as a mould
of the original footprint? Yes.

That's one of the best things
I've ever seen.

I knew about them,
but until you see them

it just doesn't seem...possible.

What have we got here, then?

'The prints reveal men,
women and children,

'an entire group
of nomadic hunter-gatherers.'

That's not a fossil of that person
that day, that is the very day.

What's interesting here is that these
are very obviously part of a trail.

There's another print there,
rather poorly preserved.

That's the right foot
of the same person.

'These were people who relied
utterly on the natural resources

'of wild plants, and the animals
that lived alongside them.'

If you were offered the chance
to live this life...

would you fancy it?
Is it an easy life?

They were subject to the natural
hazards of the environment,
the bad seasons, the harsh winter,

the year when the fish
simply didn't turn up,

so there would have been times

when these communities were under
extreme pressure and difficulty.

8,000 years ago, right there.

When you delve into the distant
past, you soon realise

that what you're discovering again
and again are stories of survival.

Sometimes of evidence, like those
faint footprints in the mud.

Other times it's the stories
of people defying the odds
in a hostile world,

a world in which your very existence
as a hunter-gatherer

depends completely on your
understanding of and your connection
to the natural environment.

300 generations separate us from the
people who made those footprints,

most of whom lived
in a time before history,

the time I want to discover.

But human presence in Britain
goes back much, much further still.

Within the storerooms
of London's Natural History Museum

are the remains of someone who lived
a staggeringly long time ago.

So long ago that this human has even
been classed as a different species.

It's a real privilege to see these
and to be so close to them.

I can feel my hands starting
to shake just with being
in their vicinity.

These are the oldest
human remains ever found in Britain.

It's two pieces of the same shinbone
and two teeth.

They were dug up at a place
called Boxgrove in Sussex.

The two teeth have got
tiny scratches on them,

and it's thought they were caused
by the way this person ate meat.

The meat would be gripped
in the teeth,

and the other bit
slashed away at with a tool.

There's enough of the shinbone

to let us estimate that
the individual stood about
1.8m tall, weighing 14 stone.

It's always been known
as Boxgrove Man,

but from this there is no way
of determining the sex,

so it could be Boxgrove woman.

So, 14 stone
and looking like a boxer.

She'd have been quite a showstopper.

Heaven knows what her
boyfriend was like.

But perhaps most amazingly of all,

Boxgrove Man lived
half a million years ago.

Think of that. Half a million years.

'Chris Stringer is a world expert
on our ancient human ancestry.'

So what follows Boxgrove
in the human story?

Well, about 100,000 years later
at Swanscombe in Kent

we've got these human bones,
the back part of a skull,

beautifully preserved, but it has
one interesting feature here,

that depression is something
we find in all Neanderthals.

So we think Swanscombe could
be a very early member
of the Neanderthal line of evolution.

So there were Neanderthals
in Britain 400,000 years ago?

That's right. Very early ones,
and then for the next 300,000
or 400,000 years,

whenever we find people in Britain,
they are part of this evolving
Neanderthal lineage.

And it was tools like this
that they were making? Absolutely.

This is a hand axe, one of tens
of thousands that have been found
in the gravels at Swanscombe,

so these people were making these
tools, and probably using them
to butcher animal carcasses.

It's amazing, while on the one hand,
you're talking about a different
species of human, different from us,

yet the tools they made and used
fit so naturally into the hand.

There's a real link to the humanity
of these people, even if they are
a different species from us.

At what point, then, do we get
modern human beings like you and I?

Well, much later on. Modern humans
had been evolving in Africa

while the Neanderthals were evolving
in Europe and coming to Britain.

About 50,000 or 60,000 years ago,
those modern humans started
to come out of Africa,

and 40,000 years ago
they were in France,

and here's one of the stone tools
they were making there.

OK. So that's been made by hands
the same as ours? Absolutely.

Imagine living in a world
where there are different species
of people,

never mind different races
or nationalities.

There were several human species
on Earth,

we were just one of those experiments
going on on how to be human.

Between the distant age of our
strange pre-human ancestors

and the nomadic hunters who left
behind their preserved footprints,

the very first modern humans
came to Britain.

The earliest of all was found here,

on the Gower peninsula
in west Wales,

a discovery made over 200 years ago.

In 1823,
an ambitious young scientist,

the Reverend William Buckland,
came here on a mission.

He was in search of relics
of the biblical flood.

He'd heard that, bizarrely,
elephant bones had been found

in one of the caves that
pepper this wild coastline.

The thing is, the cave was towards
the bottom of a near-vertical cliff,

but Buckland couldn't wait,
and it seems from what we know,

that on 18th January 1823
he went right over the edge
of this cliff on a rope,

armed only with a pick
and a stout pair of boots.

And now I'm going to follow
in his footsteps.

Buckland didn't know it at the time,
but he was about to discover more
than some ancient animal bones.

This was going to be the
discovery of his life.

Entering the cave would have been
fantastically exciting for Buckland.

As soon as he crossed the threshold
he'd have fired up his lamp.

And then,
the good scientist that he was,

he'd have begun to make
a careful assessment
of everything he could see,

the whole scene, and all of that
he recorded in meticulous detail.

This is a book called Reliquiae
Diluvianae, "Relics Of The Flood",

and this volume is one of just
a couple of copies of the first
edition still in existence.

It contains within it
a depiction of the scene exactly
as Buckland saw it and then drew it.

Buckland has very helpfully drawn
the whole scene - there's the cave
itself from the outside,

there's the cliff wall,
and the man coming down on a rope
on the outside.

But more interestingly, he's made
what is effectively an excavation
plan of the floor of the cave.

Here are the elephant bones
and tusks that drew him
to this cave in the first place.

More intriguingly, he's also drawn
a full-size human skeleton,

and it's that human skeleton
that's secured this cave
its place in our history.

It was Buckland himself
who discovered it,

uncovering it from beneath
about six inches of earth,
right here where I'm crouched down.

What on earth was going on here?
And more importantly,
who on earth was it?

As it happened, Buckland originally
thought he'd found the remains
of a local prostitute

who had worked here
during Roman times,

and that when she'd eventually died
she'd been buried in there,
far away from civilised society.

The Red Lady of Paviland.

But Buckland was wrong,

because he'd actually stumbled upon
human remains from a far more
distant past.

Today the Red Lady
is kept at the Oxford University
Museum Of Natural History.

Although there's no skull, much of
the skeleton has survived, enough
for scientists to reveal its story.

Within a few decades
of Buckland's death,

people re-examined the skeleton.

They looked at the shape of the
pelvis, the shape of the long bones,

the shape of the articulation
surfaces.

Any anatomy student today
would recognise this as a skeleton
not of a young woman but a young man.

Forensic analysis also revealed
that the so-called Red Lady
died young, in his late 20s.

But most importantly,
his bones could also reveal
just how long ago he lived.

All the plants and animals on Earth
build themselves predominantly
out of carbon.

A tiny proportion of that carbon
is radioactive carbon, or carbon-14.

When an animal dies,
the amount of carbon-14 begins
slowly to decline and degrade away.

This process, called carbon dating,
used a tiny amount of bone
from the Red Lady.

Carbon atoms from the bone
gave scientists a date
for when he was alive -

an astonishing 33,000 years ago.

These are the remains of
the very first modern human
known to have inhabited our land.

33,000 years ago when the Red
Lady was alive, Britain was very
different to the one we know today.

Not an island, but a peninsula.

This was an age called
the Palaeolithic, the old Stone Age,

in which a few tens of thousands
of nomadic hunters

shared the whole of ancient Europe.

You have to imagine small bands of
hunters roaming through a landscape

much colder than today,
an open tundra.

These were people whose survival
depended utterly on following

the migrating herds of reindeer,
wild horse, and of course, mammoth.

It's the mammoth bones
that Buckland discovered,

the ones he thought were elephant,
that provide clues to the possible
life and death of the Red Lady.

These are the mammoth bones
that sparked Buckland's visit
to Paviland Cave in the first place.

And for 200 years

they'd seemed unaccounted for,
possibly lost.

We've rediscovered them,

and are now able to bring them back
together with the Red Lady
for the very first time.

Their existence means
that this sketch made by Buckland,

which has the human remains
and the mammoth skull and tusks side
by side, isn't based on fantasy.

The rediscovery
of the mammoth remains

means that we might be able
to see who the Red Lady was,
even how he died.

Perhaps we should imagine
a hunting party,

out on the vast plain
below Paviland Cave.

They bring a mammoth to bay,
but before they can dispatch it,
it kills one of their number.

So they take the body,
a young man, up to the cave.

Inside, they dig a grave,
and they lay him there.

This is a funeral ritual.

They also inter some of the remains
of the mammoth that killed him.

After all, this doesn't just
do honour to their companion,
but also to the beast.

Now the two spirits are united
in a shared death.

It's an extraordinarily
intimate human moment

from 33,000 years ago.

Here, on the furthest outreach
of Europe,

the Red Laddie's companions
said goodbye to him
for the last time and left.

But the story of the Red Lady
represents more than the burial
of an intrepid mammoth hunter.

Because the entire world
he lived in,

a way of life that had endured
for thousands upon thousands
of years, was coming to an end.

The cause was climate change,

on a massive scale.

Welcome to the world
of Ice Age Britain.

WIND HOWLS

30,000 years ago,

the land we call Britain,
along with the rest of the planet,
was cold, and getting colder.

Forget the chill of today's
British winters.

This was cold
on a completely different scale,

the frozen grip of the last Ice Age.

For any nomadic hunter
who ventured this far north,

life would have been unbelievably
tough, and ultimately impossible.

Eventually the glaciers, advancing
southwards all the while, turned
Britain into a frozen wilderness.

The Ice Age reached its peak
18,000 years ago,

all but wiping out the
entire population of western Europe.

Just a few groups of people
survived in pockets of refuge
far to the south.

For thousands of years,
almost the whole of our land
was utterly barren and desolate,

deserted not just by people,
but by all large animals.

It was so cold, not even
the mammoths could cope with it.

But then,
from around 14,000 years ago,

there was a period
of relative respite.

And here,
"relative" is an important word.

The conditions were still
unbelievably harsh,

but the ice had lifted just enough
to allow a few bands of hardy
hunters to return to Britain.

These people left behind
an exquisite object near to what's
now the city of Sheffield.

Inside this box, the oldest art
ever found in Britain.

Made 13,000 years ago,
it's tiny, and unique.

Its creator - an Ice Age hunter.

It's a fragment of horse bone
with an engraving of a horse
etched into it,

but it's infinitely more than that,

because what you've got
a snapshot of here

is a whole sequence of thoughts.

Someone selected the bone,

the surface of the bone
has been prepared

in the same way an artist
would prepare a canvas,

and it's been done
with fantastic skill.

The hairs of the mane
look like hackles

that are raised in fear
or excitement.

Although it's on this
slither of bone,

the legs are suggested,
and they're galloping legs.

Everything about it is alive.

The horse couldn't be more
active and more vibrant.

It's miraculous.

The horse's head was found here,
in a valley of caves near Sheffield.

And recent excavations have revealed
that it wasn't the only treasure
left behind by the Ice Age hunters.

'In 2003, archaeologist
Paul Bahn found the only cave art
ever discovered in Britain.'

It was this panel where we
found our major discovery.

Figures on ceilings
are very hard to understand

because you don't know from
which direction to look at them.

this is actually an engraved
and bas-relief ibis, a water bird.

You can see the great
beak sweeping around,
there's a mouth, there's the eye.

They've engraved the top
of the head, here's the neck,

and then this beautiful oval body,
which is probably natural, but they
have outlined it a little bit.

It's amazing that you hear sculptors
in the modern age

talk about seeing the block
and feeling that something
wants to be released from it,

and that's obviously
a very old idea,

that someone was in here and looked
at natural features and thought,

"an ibis wants to come
out of that rock."

I think so. One of the most
characteristic features of cave art
all over western Europe

is constant use of natural shapes
in the rock, and clearly
that's what's been done here.

'Meticulous searching revealed
traces of more engravings,

'all of them created within
just a few generations,
when the Ice Age briefly lifted.

'They depict animals important
to the people who came here.

'Some of them are not even
meant to be seen.'

You can see the old floor level here.

There's not much space between that
and the ceiling, they're crawling
at this point,

and with their little
flickering lamps held in their hands,

it's very difficult for them
to get this far into the caves.

'13,000 years ago
someone was driven to venture
into the darkest depths of this cave

'simply to make a drawing.'

I think they're a series
of long-necked birds,

but the important thing about this
panel is that it's so difficult
to reach, and it's in total darkness.

Yeah, what is the point of art
if no-one sees it?

Well, there's an important percentage
of cave art all over western Europe

which is deliberately placed
in these very hard-to-reach spots.

They're making them for something
else, something non-human to see,

maybe a god, a spirit,
an ancestor, the forces of nature.

I suppose they may not have seen
themselves as being quite as
separate and different from animals

as we do, they may have seen these
and themselves as all creatures
that roamed the same habitat.

I think they were very much
people of their environment,
of everything around them,

and I'm sure they felt
the animals were their kin,
their brothers, their sisters.

It's fantastic after 14,000 years
to get a glimpse of the way
at least one individual was thinking

that took the initiative to crawl
down here with a lamp and make that,

and then left for it never
to be seen again. That's a moment
in some individual's life.

Just a few hundred years after the
Creswell cave art, the ice was back,
and with a vengeance.

Britain once again became an
empty, desolate, frozen land.

The last wave of glacial conditions
came around 13,000 years ago,

a time geologists call
the Younger Dryas,

or more tellingly, the Big Freeze.

It's hard to imagine just how
hostile this climate became.

In Scotland 13,000 years ago, the
ground was buried under a blanket
of ice up to a kilometre thick.

Glaciers scoured the landscape,
shaping the very mountains
and the lochs we see today.

'For Ice Age expert Jim Hansom,
it's a landscape that tells a story
of colossal environmental power.'

So if we were standing here
at the very end of the Ice Age, what
would we have been looking out at?

11,000 years ago the glacier
terminus, the edge of the glacier,
would be at our feet.

The lake wouldn't be here,

and we would be looking at
a gradient of ice disappearing
off into the north.

As the glacier melted back,

then water was impounded
into this hollow,

and that's what
the Lake of Menteith is.

So everything we can see here
has been touched by the ice?

Oh, absolutely, ice is a major
moulder of the landscape.

That's one of the reasons why
this is a classic place to see
the elemental effect of ice

and what it can do to the landscape.

'Britain was being sculpted
on a geological scale.'

Behind us is the glacier basin
that's now occupied by the lake,

and the glacier's bulldozed
a whole series of mounds,

little hills that mark out
the edge of the glacier.

We call them moraines.

So there's so much force
that it's rippling the landscape
in front of it.

Exactly right, exactly right. A bit
like standing on a loose carpet, and
the carpet rucks up in front of you.

That's exactly the process,
so substantial force.

So all around the leading edge
of the glacier, then,

there would be these dumps
of material that have become
hillocks and humps?

That's correct. So there
would have been a nose of ice here
which has gone,

and it's left all the bulldozed
material that was on its nose.

That's correct. That's correct.

'The effect of the ice
was astounding.

'But when it finally melted
around 11,000 years ago,

'the power of ice
was replaced by the power of water.'

This is just extraordinary.
You could be dropped down here

and you would have no way of
knowing what part of the world
you were in. It's so other-worldly.

It's like Jurassic Park.
It's tremendous.

Now...did this river cut this gorge?

No, the river's far too small for the
gorge. We call it a misfit stream.

So when it comes to...
In terms of the last Ice Age,
what has happened to create this?

Well, during the last the last
Ice Age, as the glaciers retreat,

the melt water's got to go somewhere.
Right. That's a lot of ice.

That's half a kilometre of ice,
very close.

It can't go to the south because
there's rising hills,
the Campsie Fells.

It can't go to the west,
so it comes in this direction,
straight through this gorge.

That gives it great erosive power,

so the sheer elemental force of water
coming down through here
would've been tremendous.

It's like a Karcher high pressure
hose, but on a massive scale.

It is, eroding the valley.

It's hard to think of a more graphic
illustration of the raw power
of just rushing water.

Sheer power, sheer power.
We couldn't have been standing here
at this time 10,000 years ago.

The final retreat of the ice
ended the age of the Palaeolithic.

The remote world of the Red Lady
and the mammoths he hunted.

The icy world of the cave artists
of Creswell Crags.

Ever since the ice peaked
18,000 years ago, a new Britain
had gradually begun to appear.

Now, as the ice melted,

the coast and the Western Isles of
Scotland were taking on the form
we recognise today.

In the east, the Norwegian trench
had begun to open into what would
one day become the North Sea.

But despite the rising sea levels,
10,000 years ago in the south,

Britain remained firmly attached
to the continental mainland.

Gradual warming allowed the first
intrepid hunters to return to a new

and very different land, where
frozen tundra was giving way to the
first forests of birch and alder.

They brought a new culture,
new ways of surviving

and a whole new era in our history.

This new warmer world with its
different animals and plants

presented the people who came here
with a whole new set of challenges.

So much so that archaeologists
were moved to give this period
its own name, the Mesolithic.

The Middle Stone Age.

It was to this period
that I was particularly drawn
when I was a student of archaeology.

And it was to the islands off
the coast of Scotland that I came

as I was learning
the skills of excavation.

Now, more than 20 years later,
new finds in the Hebrides

are giving us a unique insight
into how people survived
in this newly-emerging land.

You've got very finely worked
flint blades here.

Look at those beautiful long blades
and you can see,

it's been very delicately chipped
around the edge.

And that had been used as barb
or a point,

or maybe a little blade of a knife,
some points maybe as drill bits.

It's the classic Mesolithic artefact.

These tiny little items
actually classify...

Unfortunately so, unfortunately so,
yeah, yes, indeed.

Steve Mithen's excavations
have uncovered

an entire Mesolithic fishing camp
from 9,000 years ago.

When we sieve the deposits very
finely, we find fish bones...

How are they catching the fish?

We do have one artefact that we found
here which is a tip of an antler
harpoon or a little fish spear.

Now, it's made from the tine
of a Red Deer antler.

We've only got the final tip of it.

We can see that has been worked and
smoothed down, so it's a rather
precious artefact.

The ice melted.

Bands of intrepid hunters
returned to the land.

From that day to this, our land
has been continuously occupied.

They were still hunters,
they were still nomadic,

but they were more settled
within the landscape.

A person might be born,
live and die in the same area.

That's a different relationship
to a place.

Compared to the Palaeolithic, in the
Mesolithic, the Middle Stone Age,
what we're beginning to see

is not just a continuity of people
that leads all the way to us today,

it's also about the first people
who you could say were born
and bred British.

Remarkably, the remains of one
of these people have survived.

One of a population of perhaps
just 1,000 or so who occupied
Britain around 9,000 years ago.

And I've come back to London's
Natural History Museum to meet him.

This is the skull of Cheddar Man.

His is the oldest complete human
skeleton ever found in Britain.

The rest of his bones are collected
here in these white boxes.

He lived over 9,000 years ago,

which means that either he or his
immediate ancestors were among

those very first re-colonisers of
the British Isles after
the last Ice Age.

I look at this skull

and I can even begin to imagine
his face, what he looked like...

..and it's a strange feeling.

Unlike the Red Lady
or the Cresswell artists,

this man didn't live
in an icy world.

By the time he was alive,
the open tundra

was giving way to forests
of birch and alder.

So instead of hunting mammoth
and reindeer in the snow,

he hunted Red Deer in the wild wood.

You can tell from the condition
of his teeth

that he grew up enjoying
a good diet,

but despite that, still in his 20s,
this man died.

Look at this...

This ugly, ragged crater
on his skull,

just to the right of his nose,

that's the result of bone infection.

The infection may have followed
an injury,

or it may have been disease that
started perhaps in his sinuses
and spread.

But in any case it would've been
debilitating,

it may have caused fever, it may
ultimately have caused his death.

So, despite the fact there was
plenty of meat around,

there was no guarantee
of a long, healthy life.

Little remains of the people
of the Mesolithic.

They lived lightly on the land,
close to nature

and discoveries like those on
the island of Coll are rare.

But there are other ways
to discover what their lives
must have been like.

We're going to need a quantity of
these skins, fresh off the animal.

Smelly, but warm.

John Lord
is a professional flint knapper,

who's been experimenting with
ancient technology for over
35 years.

He's agreed to give me a direct
taste of Mesolithic life.

Neil's going to be up against it.

He's going to start to think
about the Mesolithic people

when he starts to work on this stuff
and make a harpoon point and needles
and things out of the antler.

It really is laborious work.

The idea is to spend 24 hours
depending on ancient technology.

This can be used to make scrapers,
knife blades, arrow points.

It really is a little
Swiss army flint.

John is going to help me camp
right by the spot once occupied
by Coll's Mesolithic fish-trappers.

Look at that.
It's like watching a borrower
arrive from the sea in a button.

Shelters were light and portable,
a frame of branches, tied with rope
made from tree bark.

Over the top - fresh, raw deerskin.

I'm thinking they must have smelt
fairly ripe. Yeah, they smell.

If you want some time on your own,
work on a skin that's a bit ripe.
Nobody will come near you for weeks.

Oh, I'm getting a definite whiff
of it now.

Are you? Definite scent
of a butcher's shop...

..which is what I expect to
smell like in the morning.

Fire was vital
for warmth and cooking...

Oh, it's going red.

There you go, there you go...

..but also crucial
for tool-production.

Oh, yes, it's coming away.

This deer antler
will become a harpoon,

made in exactly the same way as
Steve Mithen's 9,000-year-old
fragment, found on this very spot.

Gosh, the hours
and hours of someone's time.
It is, it's just time.

But it's starting to look lovely.

There they are, finished.

What are the chances do you think
of this fine handmade weapon
collecting something?

Well, if there's any fish,
they're in trouble.

Unfortunately,
for all of John's skill, we can't
recreate generations of experience.

I haven't seen a fish
the whole time we've been here.

Instead, dinner has come
from the local butcher's.

That'll do us.

Of course, on Coll, they used
to hunt, in the main, hare.

But they're a protected species, so
here we are, saddled by the rabbit.

Just slide, yeah? Yeah.

Nothing would be wasted.

Animal parts
were as useful as their meat.

In the deer,
what we do is open up the spine

and pull out what's called the back
strap, it's a really strong sinew.

This is the back strap.

Each fibre has a tremendous strength
of its own, but this is the sort
of thing

that they used to sew
their clothes together.

It's like nylon or plastic.
It's got a shine on it.

Yes.

The sense of connection you get with
the past, to use a piece of flint

to make your tools, channel in your
mind, in exactly the same way
as people did in the past.

After an uncomfortable night,
I'm able to share one more thing

with the Mesolithic people
who once lived here.

The view of dawn over the island
of Mull in the distance.

Having spent 24 hours
preparing tools, making fire, there
are glimpses that you can have.

Handling, you know, fragments
of stone and long ago burnt wood
and hazelnut shell...

is two dimensional. But there is a
third dimension that is to be had
by doing the things that they did.

And the smells.

When we were doing the thing with
the... Putting the skins on the
branches to make that shelter,

that pervasive smell,
that animal smell,

the world must have been
imbued with that,

because they were working with
animal all the time for food and for
bone, for gut and for antler.

The smell of the burnt antler
is a smell like burnt human hair.

It's a very evocative smell.

And something as pungent
as a smell just knocks that,

rips that veil aside and their world
of 10,000 years ago is right there.

Archaeologist Steve Mithen
is discovering

just how sophisticated the lives
of these Mesolithic hunters were.

It turns out that his Coll
fishing camp was only a small part
of a much bigger picture.

Some of the artefacts that we
excavate have clearly been
brought to the island from elsewhere.

You don't get deer on this island
today, you didn't have them
here in the Mesolithic,

so that deer must have been
hunted on another island and the
artefact was brought over here.

These Mesolithic people, they
weren't having permanent villages
or permanent settlements.

The essence of their lifestyle
was moving from island to island
and to the mainland,

moving to where the particular
resources were.

Unlike Palaeolithic hunters,
these people didn't follow herds
over hundreds of miles,

but took all they needed
from their local environment.

They moved between
a network of islands...

Coll, Colonsay, Oronsay and to the
south, Islay, all had something
different to offer.

On Colonsay, Steve is discovering
the remains

of one of the most important
resources of Mesolithic Britain.

The shells of more than a third
of a million hazelnuts.

What they may have been doing
is gathering large quantities

in the autumn and then storing them
as a food through the winter.

If you roast them and crack them,
you can grind them down to a paste
and then it's quite an easy thing,

food, nutritious food
to carry away and take away.

On that scale, it almost sounds like
a processing plant.

Yeah, yeah, the scale of activity
here was just astonishing
when we discovered it.

It shows that they weren't just
living from day to day,
scrabbing out an existence.

It was a really carefully
planned activity.

But hazelnuts were only part of the
diet for these ancient hunters.

On the nearby island of Oronsay,
there's evidence that shellfish
were consumed...

..on a massive scale.

It's a remarkable island because
there's no less than five Mesolithic
shell mounds on the island.

We're standing on one of them now
and these are literally rubbish
dumps from coastal foraging.

You can see in the rabbit burrows.
Yeah.

You can see these shells
are eroding out by the edge
of the rabbit burrow here.

'Every one of these shells was
discarded by a Mesolithic hunter
around 9,000 years ago.'

This is the waste from
Mesolithic coastal foraging.

Limpet shells, periwinkles,
dog whelks

and amongst all that,
there'd be fish bones,

we've got seal bones,
all sorts of things.

Yet another island was home to red
deer, a key source of meat,
skins and antler.

We're just flying over the Rinns of
Islay at the moment and the Rinns

in recent times have been fantastic
territory for hunting Red Deer.

I think that's exactly what they
were doing in the Mesolithic.

So the antler tip that we've got
from the site at Fiskary Bay,

that could have come from
a deer on this island.

So the things they needed were
scattered all over the landscape,
the raw materials were...

Yeah, that's right. The various food
groups they wanted, the hazelnuts,

the rest of the vegetables,
the medicines

and it's a constant shopping trip,
going from shop to shop.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Steve's discoveries are revealing
a whole new way of living,

a systematic exploitation
of different resources

available on different islands.

The people who lived here
were moving season by season,

within a landscape
they must have known intimately.

How much of the whole picture
do you think you've glimpsed
in your decades here?

I think we've just got a small
fraction at the moment.

I hope over the next couple of
decades we'll get more pieces,

maybe the big pieces
like where the base camps are,
those aggregation sites.

I think we will find them eventually
and get a real more complete picture

of what that Mesolithic lifestyle
would have been like.

The world of Mesolithic Britain was
characterised by small communities

living very separate,
isolated lives.

It's estimated that at any one time,
the whole of Mesolithic Britain
may have been populated

by as few as 5,000 people,
as many as you'd find today
in just a handful of London streets.

Apart from the hunting party
or their extended family, they might
never see another living soul,

and that must have shaped the way
they saw themselves in their world.

From fragments of evidence,
it's possible to recreate something
of the way these people lived,

much harder to understand
is what they believed.

But there are some clues.

Here at the British Museum,
there's a relic

experts believe is nothing less
than a sign of Mesolithic religion.

The skull of a Red Deer that's
been carefully worked by hand.

This is an astonishing object.

It's 10,000 years old.

The feeling you get
from something of that age,

even before you touch it,
is tangible.

The thing you do notice right away
are these two holes.

You might think they represent
the eyes, but they don't.

They're to take a hide strap
made from animal skin,

because this is to be worn
as a head dress.

It's been suggested
from time to time

that this might have been worn
as part of a disguise,

but that seems highly unlikely.

Apart from anything else,
this is heavy,

the stumps of the antlers
would have snagged on branches

and made the work of hunting
even more difficult.

It seems much more likely

that this is part of a rite,
a ritual, a ceremony.

When the person wore this,

they became something else,
something more than a man.

If you imagine it being worn
on the head

along with maybe the full pelt
of the animal,

by donning this
and performing the ritual,

a transformation took place.

The person would believe

and be seen to be becoming
a Red Deer stag.

Or even more interestingly,

some sort of hybrid,
part man, part animal.

Mesolithic people
may have felt themselves to be

so much a part of nature,
living within it, enveloped by it

and dependent upon it, not just
in the practical everyday sense,

but in a profoundly magical
and spiritual way as well.

But as we know, nature can be
a very cruel mistress.

At the beginning of the Mesolithic,
after the big freeze,

Britain was still firmly attached
to mainland Europe.

But as sea-levels continued to rise,

that connection was reduced
to a narrow and marshy land-bridge.

Britain was becoming an island.

But its fate was sealed
by a sudden catastrophe

that devastated
its low lying coastal plains

and the communities
that depended on them.

The coast of north-east Scotland.

Here, at Montrose, there's evidence
of the greatest natural catastrophe
Britain has ever witnessed.

A force of nature
that ripped through the fragile
communities of Mesolithic Britain.

The event was discovered
by geologist David Smith.

It's behind this mud.
And the mud has come from where?

It's come down from the cliff above.

So if we clean this up now,
you'll see the section rather better.

'Behind the mud there should
be a bank of continuous clay.

'But here, there's something else.'

So what are we looking at then?

Well, we're looking
at a layer of sand.

That really fine stuff there? It is.

As far as you are concerned,
sand like that shouldn't be there?

Shouldn't be there. Not in that
amount and that extent.

Only one thing
could have been responsible.

A cataclysmic wave
that struck the north-east coast
of Britain around 6100 BC.

One of the greatest tsunamis
ever recorded on Earth.

The tide goes out very quickly.

And the next thing we'd notice

would be a slight wind
coming from offshore.

And the next thing after that
would be a noise,

a noise like an express train
as it got closer and closer.

The waves would have been
maybe as much as ten metres high.

If you were down there and caught
in it, is there any surviving it?

Could you let it take you
and swim away from it?

No, there is not way you could have
survived. The speed is just so great.

Anybody standing out on the mudflats
at that time

would well have been dismembered
by the power of the wave.

Gosh, so it just comes in so fast
it would just tear people apart?
Torn apart, yes, yes.

A giant landslide in Norway

is thought to have sent the great
wave charging towards Britain
from the north.

It hit the coastline with such force
that it continued 40km inland,
killing indiscriminately.

In a single moment,
the British landscape
had been reshaped, forever.

By 6100 BC, Britain was well on
its way to becoming an island.

Already narrow, possibly even
tidal channels were cutting us off
from the rest of continental Europe.

But what the great wave did was
seal our fate in the most
dramatic way possible

as those narrow sea channels
were ripped wide open.

Here at the other end of Britain,
the people who made those footprints
in these mudflats of south Wales

were in all likelihood blissfully
unaware of the great wave,

far less of the devastation
it had caused in the east.

They were the unknowing survivors

of perhaps the greatest natural
disaster ever to strike our land.

And it strikes me
that so much of the story of our
early prehistory is about survival,

whether it be the companions
of the Red Lady of Paviland,

out hunting the mammoth,

or the artist who etched the image
of a horse head into rib bone

while the Ice Age waxed and waned,

or the people who faced
and survived the tsunami.

8,000 years ago,

the people living in the land
that would become Britain

were living through a watershed
in our story.

Those footprints aren't just traces
of the people who made them,

they're also a snapshot of a moment,

THE moment when this land
became an island.

The people here
had become different,

they'd been made different.

At the same time, they'd been made
a wee bit special as well.

Next time, my journey continues.

The last hands to touch these before
mine, were those of a Neolithic
farmer 5,500 years ago.

As I discover a whole new age,
the age of ancestors.

Nothing like this had ever been seen
before in Britain.

When we left nature behind
and set out on the greatest
social experiment ever seen.

Surely a chap wouldn't be put
to work grinding grain!

The seismic revolution
that came with farming.

If you want to follow in the
footsteps of our ancestors,

go to the website...

..to find out how to connect
with ancient Britain in your area.

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