End of Ice Age Britain

As Ice Age Britain thawed, temperatures surged, sea levels rose, and humans and animals faced a fight for survival. But this shift was anything but simple. In this final episode of our Ice Age miniseries, Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Danielle Schreve to uncover the turbulent end of the last Ice Age in Britain. Discover how mammals like Siberian lemmings and Saiga antelope roamed this icy landscape, how the Younger Dryas cold snap 13,000 years ago reshaped Britain's prehistoric environment, and how early humans adapted to survive it. With echoes for today’s climate challenges, this is a story of resilience on the fringes of the Ice Age world. Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:44Tristan Hughes?

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• 2:18Tristan Hughes?

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• 3:10Tristan Hughes?

  The end of Ice Age Britain. A time of rapidly changing temperatures, of ice sheets melting, sea levels rising, and humans adapting to a more expansive and warmer Britain. A Britain that became cut off from the rest of Europe, that became an island. But these changes didn't happen overnight, and it wasn't a simple, straight-line case of things going from cold to warm either. The Ice Age took thousands of years to end in Britain and had a massive impact both on the animals and humans that then called Britain their home. Extreme temperature switches that forced them either to adapt, leave, or die. It's an extraordinary story,

• 3:51Tristan Hughes?

  starring various animals ranging from Siberian lemmings to saiga antelope, and of course, humans. So what sorts of animals lived in Britain during these last fluctuating throes of the Ice Age? Why did the climate suddenly get much colder again roughly 13,000 years ago, the so-called Younger Dryas Period? And how were humans affected by all of this change?

• 4:16Tristan Hughes?

  It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today, we're releasing the final episode of our Ice Age mini-series this February, and boy, what an episode this is: The End of the Ice Age in Britain. Joining me to explain what we know, I was delighted to interview the paleobiologist Professor Danielle Shreve from the University of Bristol. Danielle studies animal remains, particularly mammals, to understand how they responded to these abrupt changes in climate that defined the end of the Ice Age, and what lessons we can learn from this when tackling climate change today. She's an expert on the end of the Ice Age in Britain, and how this tumultuous period affected life on this edge of the Ice Age world. Enjoy.

• 5:04Tristan Hughes?

  Danielle, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Thank you very much. It's great to be here.

• 5:09Tristan Hughes?

  To talk about the end of the Ice Age in Britain, and I know it's quite a massive statement to start, but it feels like this is a time when Britain's world, it completely transformed.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I think some of the changes that were witnessed, whether it's to do with the landscape, the environment, the fauna, they're just some of the most remarkable changes that Britain has ever witnessed.

• 5:29Tristan Hughes?

  And just first of all, do we know how much time we can roughly talk about if we're exploring the end of the Ice Age? Should we be thinking in thousands of years?

• 5:38Speaker 03

  Definitely, thousands of years. So I think probably a sensible starting point is probably the period that we would call the last glacial maximum. So from about 26,000 years ago, until really the early parts of the current warm stage or interglacial that we're in now.

• 5:54Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, that's more than 10,000 years in total, isn't it? And it's absolutely extraordinary. But before we delve into that, and you mentioned the last glacial maximum, archaeological material that you have to study to learn more about this important period, do you have quite a lot of information surviving for what actually happened at the end of the Ice Age?

• 6:11Speaker 03

  We do. So I think it's important to make a difference between archaeological material, which would be that related exclusively to humans, so things like human artefacts. Whether that's stone tools or other types of evidence and the sort of paleobiological evidence that we might have, so things like fossils of animal bones, plant remains, shells, that kind of thing. So we have lots of different types of evidence that are available to us. And sometimes that comes in the form of the sediments themselves, because the deposits of sands and gravels and all sorts of things, you know, that we might actually dig into, we can understand a story of how climate changed from those. We can also look at

• 6:55Speaker 03

  the remains of animals and plants and they tell us very clearly how things change in response to climate change, often very rapid and abrupt climate change. And there's also different types of evidence out there as well. So for example, things like sea level rise. We know that at times Britain was connected to the continental mainland. And then as we come towards the end of the last ice age, the sea level rises and Britain becomes cut off. So actually, there's a whole host of different types of evidence out there.

• 7:25Tristan Hughes?

  Slight tangent straight away, but I remember doing an interview a few months back where they were analysing deep sea cores, kind of taking up information from the sediment beneath the sea to get a sense of climate and the ecological world. And in that case, it was more than a million years ago. I'm guessing whether it's a million years or 10,000 or 20,000 years ago, is that one of the ways that you can learn more about the whole landscape and environment at that time?

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Definitely. So one of the things we try to do is to reconstruct that landscape. So to understand, for example, the changing coastline of Britain. Britain is in quite an extraordinary position, really, at the edge of the North Atlantic. So it's very sensitive to climate change. And we can get at that evidence for change through doing things like coring into deposits that might be, for example, buried below the sea now, but also on land as well. And actually looking at those, those cores of sediment through time and extracting as much information from them as possible.

• 8:23Tristan Hughes?

  So does this all belong to the field of study that I know is very close to your heart, the name paleoecology?

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Yes, so paleoecology or paleoecology really deals with the ecology of the past. So the paleo bit just means the the old part. So in the same way that an ecologist today would look at the habitats, the behaviour, all aspects of the ecology of the animals that they might study today, this is what I'm trying to do in the past. And sometimes it's easy or relatively easy because the animals that I study are still around today or very close relatives. In other cases, where you've got animals that are extinct today, we have to draw on different lines of evidence in order to to try and reconstruct something of their life ways.

• 9:09Tristan Hughes?

  And I must also ask about the word fauna. Now, what does this word entail? How big a term is it when when studying paleoecology and so on?

• 9:19Speaker 03

  So fauna is animal life. And by that, anything could come into fauna, whether it's, for example, vertebrates. So that might be fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals. But it could also include all sorts of invertebrates as well. So particularly things like beetles, snail shells, that kind of thing as well. So it it covers a very broad range of different types of material.

• 9:44Tristan Hughes?

  So whereas megafauna is kind of related to the big beasts like mammoths, rhinos and so on, fauna is a more more wide reaching term for all different animals living in the past, is it?

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Definitely. And one of the things that I am interested in is studying the fauna as a whole. So not just focusing in on sort of the biggest, most impressive species, although obviously things like the megafauna are really interesting and charismatic animals, but actually things like small mammals as well, they can tell you a phenomenal amount about the local environment, about climate. Small things like beetles are really good for reconstructing climate events in the past, telling you about local vegetation. And some sites preserve some types of evidence better than others. So we need to go after all of them in order to to try and reconstruct the the best, most holistic picture that we can.

• 10:35Tristan Hughes?

  I know it's archaeology, but can human remains and human interactions with these fauna, can they help in that puzzle too?

• 10:41Speaker 03

  They can indeed. So I guess it's a moot point whether you want to include humans as part of the fauna. I think for much of the past, the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age, humans are doing something interesting in the landscape. They are certainly doing unusual things like making stone tools, but they're very much part of a wider fauna. They're responding to the same kind of climatic and environmental trends that other species are. Luckily, they do leave behind useful things like stone tools. So we are able to derive an enormous amount of information from that in terms of their behaviour. Remains of the actual early humans themselves are very rare in the UK, but we do have other

• 11:24Speaker 03

  types of evidence, for example, things like cup-marked bones and broken bones, which tell us about butchery and hunting practices as well.

• 11:32Tristan Hughes?

  And talking about something that seems to have been important for early humans at that time and for these animals, a particular type of site, cave sites. Danielle, for deriving more information about the end of the Ice Age, how important are cave sites for finding that information and piecing together more of this puzzle?

• 11:52Speaker 03

  So cave sites are often really good places to target for this type of information. They can be very rich resources of information. Often, of course, we have caves that form in limestone areas across the UK, so things like the south-west of England, the Peak District, South Wales, for example, North Wales. These are all really good places for finding material in caves. And you can often get a build-up of quite long sequences through time as well. And that's because caves act as large repositories or archives for material coming in. And sometimes it might be washed in by a river or a mud flow, but a lot of

• 12:35Speaker 03

  times you get cave sediments building up over time and containing the remains of animals that were either living in the cave, so things like carnivores, for example, or which were brought in as remains of prey. And that can build up over long periods. So caves are great generally for preserving animal remains in the form of bones or teeth. They're also very good for preserving mollusc and shell. But they are not so good at preserving things like pollen or what we call plant macrofossils. So bits of plant, whether it's bits of leaf or twig or seed, for example. And that's just because limestone tends, I mean, it's a very calcareous environment.

• 13:16Speaker 03

  So it's good at preserving things like bones and it's not good at preserving things like pollen, which needs a more acidic type of depositional environment.

• 13:25Tristan Hughes?

  Is limestone kind of alkaline and that's why preservation is better in limestone cave environments than other types of stone?

• 13:33Speaker 03

  Yes, it's very alkaline. So that's good for the preservation of bones and teeth. So we get different types of evidence from these caves, but they can often contain really detailed sequences that allow us to examine how animals and indeed people, on occasion, if we have evidence for archaeology in those caves, we can examine how at the fauna, how people have been responding to climate and environmental change.

• 13:57Tristan Hughes?

  Before we go through the, almost the main phases of those last, well, quite a few thousand years in the story of the end of the Ice Age, I feel it's important, first of all, to highlight your work at a particular site, because it feels like we'll explore examples from these sites and dot them throughout the interview today. So tell us about your work at Ebbe Gorge, where this is and what this is, why it's important to today's discussion.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  So this is work we've been doing for a number of years now, about 15 years. And it's based in previously unexplored cave site in the Mendip Hills in Somerset. So it was a wonderful opportunity to explore a site that had not had any previous excavation in it. So already that's quite rare because many cave sites have been discovered. They were discovered by Victorian antiquarians. A lot of them were dug out.

• 14:47Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, they liked to dig to find the big stuff, didn't they?

• 14:49Speaker 03

  They certainly did. So they were very keen on finding things like specimens for their cabinet of curiosities. So they would, they would go out. I mean, in some cases, there were very rather systematic excavations done. In other cases, people were literally going along and looking for souvenirs. And all of this happened at a very exciting time. And in fact, really sort of Britain and places like the Mendip Hills played a crucial part in that move away from the teachings of the church and understanding about evolution, the discovery of the bones of extinct animals, and then later in association with human tools as well. This was really the first insights into the antiquity of humans. So the Mendip Hills have always been a great place to to work.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  And the research that we've been doing in this particular cave site has generated some fantastic information. We have a sequence that goes back over 50,000 years now, and it's one of the most important sites, certainly in Britain and in North West Europe.

• 15:49Tristan Hughes?

  And I mean, how rich a site is this? Are we talking about hundreds of mammal bones? Or are we talking a bit more than that?

• 15:56Speaker 03

  We're talking about hundreds of mammal bones. Now, they're not all complete, it's important to say that, because at some levels within the cave, we have things like spotted hyenas that have been denning there and they're crunching up the bones. So we collect all of the fragments, because even the very broken bits tell us something about the origins of what we call an assemblage, so that collection of bits of bone, and they tell us what those animals were up to. But at this particular cave site in Ebergorge, we have, for example, in some of the upper layers, we have got hundreds of thousands of bits of small mammal. So these might be things like bats, mice, voles, shrews, lemmings, and they've been

• 16:40Speaker 03

  brought in by birds of prey that have been hunting over the landscape, that have swallowed this material down, they come back to the cave to roost, and then they regurgitate the undigested bits as pellets, and eventually, thousands of years later, those have started to turn into fossils, and that's when we can come along and collect them.

• 16:59Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's start going through the chronology, Danielle, and shall we go to maybe 25, 20,000 years ago? What does Britain look like at that time in this period that you've mentioned, this last glacial maximum?

• 17:13Speaker 03

  The last glacial maximum, Britain was a pretty chilly place, so subject to really savage cold. So as the name implies, the last glacial maximum witnesses the coldest point of the last ice age, which began about 100,000 years ago. And around about 26, 25,000 years ago, you get the expansion of ice sheets in Britain. They cover all of Scotland, they cover almost all of Wales, they cover most of northern England, and they just reach down into the northern coast of East Anglia. So if you can imagine a huge glacier, a huge ice sheet going pretty much all

• 17:53Speaker 03

  the way from East Yorkshire at an angle down to South Wales, that's the extent of the ice sheet and extending into the into the North Sea basin beyond. And in front of that ice sheet, there would have been really a polar desert, so permafrost conditions, very, very cold indeed. Britain is connected to continental Europe at that time because sea level was much lower. And that's because water is drawn off during the the build up of the ice sheets on land. There's evaporation of the water from the oceans and sea levels fall by about 120 metres globally. So that's more than enough to reconnect Britain to the continent. So there is a land bridge in

• 18:36Speaker 03

  the southern part of the North Sea basin. So it would be possible for species that were able to tolerate those conditions to move in and out, but it would have been a pretty inhospitable place.

• 18:47Tristan Hughes?

  I was going to say, almost kind of reinforcing literally what you just said there, Danielle, that even below, even south of that great ice sheet that you highlighted there, it's still quite, as you said, inhospitable, barren landscape. And so I'm guessing, is there a rich diversity of species able to adapt and live in that incredibly cold environment at that time?

• 19:07Speaker 03

  There's a surprising number of species, I would say. I mean, biodiversity is, of course, much lower than you would find in many warmer climate periods. But nevertheless, we still get some smaller species around. So we find, for example, evidence of mountain hare. We also have remains of cold-adapted species, such as woolly mammoth. We have also reindeer around, for example. But some of the most interesting remains that we've got are things like musk ox, which are obviously obligate cold species. They live today up in the high Arctic. And yet they were living around, for example, Northamptonshire. We've got a series of musk ox remains that are dated to about 20,000 years ago. So that

• 19:50Speaker 03

  is a really, really clear indication of just how different conditions were on the ground at that time.

• 19:56Tristan Hughes?

  Wow, basically Arctic conditions, isn't it? It's really, really interesting. Naturally, there were humans and early humans in Britain before that time. So many sites still at the Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens as well. But are humans there at that time when it gets much colder again in that last glacial maximum?

• 20:13Speaker 03

  There's no unequivocal evidence of humans being present. So it's a tricky one, because I think when you have certainly a period of very cold climate conditions, often it's hard for material to get preserved, because just the cold and the action of ice sheets, it's not conducive to the preservation of fossil material. Now, certainly across northern Europe, there were other areas that were believed to be abandoned by modern humans at the time, but of which have been demonstrated subsequently to have some limited evidence. So it's possible that humans were making forays into Britain at that time,

• 20:56Speaker 03

  perhaps during the slightly warmer parts of the summer months. But we really don't have any good evidence. We don't have any artefacts. And there is a putative human humerus from a site in South Wales that may date to this period. But certainly if people were around, they are in low numbers, and they are not long-term residents.

• 21:28Speaker 02

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• 22:42Tristan Hughes?

  It may well be that we don't know the answer for this, but could there have been any life north of the ice sheets in regards to animals during that last glacial maximum? Or was it all beneath the ice sheets?

• 22:54Speaker 03

  It has to be lower than the ice sheets. And I think, you know, you might have had some species that perhaps could tolerate being out on the open ice. So, much further to the north, although we don't have evidence preserved, you might have got things like polar bear, for example, at sort of the highest, the very highest latitudes. But really, for the herbivores, of course, they need something to eat. They need vegetation. So they cannot survive out on an open ice sheet. They have to have vegetation. And in the case of something like a reindeer, that can be, you know, sort of fairly short grasses and lichen that they might be feeding on. But it's not like having a herbivore, you know,

• 23:37Speaker 03

  there's not a herbivore bonanza up on the ice sheet. You might have had, you know, polar bears that are predating on seals, for example, in the way that they would do in high latitudes today. But really, everything is going to be south of that ice sheet limit.

• 23:51Tristan Hughes?

  So when does the ice sheet, when does it start to recede? And what's the story of the end of the last glacial maximum? What happens?

• 23:58Speaker 03

  So at the end of the last glacial maximum, we enter a period of abrupt warming. And this is referred to as the late glacial interstadial. It's about fourteen and a half thousand years ago. And it it marks the the sort of first evidence towards a significant warming, albeit later interrupted, but a warming and and really sort of, you know, the the end of the last ice age. So that warming event is is very abrupt. Really, you're you're looking at rapid warming conditions in northwest Europe. So the ice sheets begin to retreat. And really, by, you know, sort of about sixteen thousand years ago, they

• 24:40Speaker 03

  are much, you know, they're much reduced up to the the northern part of Britain.

• 24:45Tristan Hughes?

  And I mean, when talking about, you know, kind of rapid changes, I know when looking at paleolithic history, rapid can sometimes mean hundreds of years. Do we know roughly like how rapid we're talking about with the climate changing back then?

• 24:59Speaker 03

  We do, because we can measure these things, for example, by going to the ice sheets in Greenland.

• 25:05Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, wow.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  Yes. So you can extract ice cores from Greenland, and they have annual records in them where they've got things like greenhouse gases trapped. So we're able to measure this and document this really, really closely. We can date those, you know, those bands in the ice. And so we do have a very good idea about just how quickly some of these transitions took place.

• 25:30Tristan Hughes?

  Wow, so you can do that today. You can go and get ice cores from Greenland and that's almost undisturbed natural resources that can tell you the the speed of the change in climate and and I guess give you more of a sense, an environmental record of what happened at that time.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  It's a great sort of archive, if you like. It's a great benchmark for understanding how climate change in this part of the northern hemisphere happened. And because Britain is, you know, really quite close in that part of the North Atlantic, we can actually see the major transitions as we come out of the last glacial maximum, the rapid warming into the late glacial interstadial, and then some of the subsequent oscillations, the climatic fluctuations that we see. We can actually see that, we can see that evidenced on land in Britain.

• 26:19Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's focus first of all on that first great warming period, Danielle. I mean, if it is pretty rapid that it happens, how does this affect those animals that had adapted to survive on that kind of far, far edge of the hospitable world?

• 26:35Speaker 03

  So at that time, you would see a retreat of some of the species that had been adapted to very cold conditions. So things like mammoths begin to contract their range back to Siberia. During the late glacial interstadial in Britain, you do get other species that are cold adapted that still hang on. So things like reindeer are still regularly present. But because of the warming event that we see, we get other types of herbivores in particular coming in. So at first, things like horse and then subsequently red deer. We get a real mix of species at that time, though. So, for example, in the cave sites that we're working in in

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Somerset, we get both species that are today indicative of cold climate conditions. So, for example, things like collared lemmings. And those are mixed in with other small mammal species that require more temperate, but also some kind of vegetation cover as well. So these might be things like wood mice, for example, or common shrews. And these

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Are small mammals that we think are probably able to eke out an existence in some of these very deep limestone gorges. So particularly where there are more shrubby habitats or even trees that are growing there. There would have been sufficient shelter to support both the ones that needed more temperate conditions. But also up on the plateau, you've still got pretty exposed conditions. And you would have been able to support things like reindeer up there as well.

• 28:07Tristan Hughes?

  So from that cave site, so from that time period in southern Britain. You need to imagine collared lemmings alongside dormice. I mean, that's extraordinary. That's such extraordinary breadth and variety. I mean, kind of in the, in the environments, as you say, that they would have to live in. And yet they were able to live side by side at that time.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  Yes, and I think, you know, certainly back in the past, we used to wonder whether these were sort of, sort of jumbles in the fossil record, that there wasn't good resolution in these sites, that we didn't have the precision to say, level by level, exactly what was going on. But now, for example, with the types of sites that we're working on, we have got really good resolution. So actually, we can see that within just a few centimetres of sediment, we can extract these animals that have rather different habitat preferences together. It really has an important lesson, I think, for how we understand fauna and responses to climate change at the present day.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Because it shows us how quickly animals can respond to these events. And obviously, one of the challenges that they have today is the fact that we have changed their landscape. We've removed connectivity of habitats. But in the past, even very small animals could expand or contract their range according to changing environments, changing climates, they could do that really, really rapidly.

• 29:30Tristan Hughes?

  So it's interesting there. So for those animals that were already there before it gets warmer, is it very much a choice of adapt or move incredibly long distances away, like the woolly mammoths?

• 29:43Speaker 03

  So animals such as, you know, many of these, these animals would be relatively more tolerant as mammals because mammals are warm blooded and they would have had certain adaptations as well. They're certainly more tolerant than things like reptiles or amphibians that are obviously completely dependent on external temperatures. So mammals can often, because they can maintain their body against a temperature gradient, they can often survive in more marginal areas outside their sort of core range. But yes, the story there is very much one of move, adapt or die out. So we've already seen some species such as woolly rhino disappear from Britain about 35,000 years ago, but

• 30:25Speaker 03

  they live for another 20,000 years up in Siberia. And so when we look at, for example, the extinction of species, we need to understand that it's different triggers in different parts of their range at different times. So species are not necessarily responding as communities here, but very much as individuals. And some of them, you know, the climate change is too quick for them to adapt, really. So actually, although some of them may be able to switch to different food sources, often the way that they would sort of get out of difficulty is to change their range. So they would migrate to areas that were more favourable.

• 31:05Tristan Hughes?

  And how does this climate change? How does it affect humans? Do humans come back at this time?

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Humans are around during the late glacial interstadium and they come back just before the warming event. So they're really

• 31:16Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, interesting.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  poised and ready to come back into Britain. And they seem to occupy areas of the South West first and then move further north into the Midlands. And we're able to establish this because of very precise radiocarbon dating. We know that when they come in at about 14,500 years ago, or just before, they are primarily hunting horse, but also going after things like red deer as well. And then later on, they moved to doing things like trapping mountain hare and exploiting those. So that's really interesting that there is a switch to smaller game. And that's consistent with the disappearance of things like the megafauna, that people are having

• 32:02Speaker 03

  to adapt their diets as their own environment changes and they're having to switch to different food sources.

• 32:09Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, exactly. The days of humans hunting or scavenging off mammoths has long gone by that time in Britain, isn't it? It's really, really interesting. And I'm guessing, should we mention one of those key sites, which is Gough's Cave? This feels an important site to highlight for evidence of humans returning at this time.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  Indeed. So Gough's Cave was a really spectacular site and probably supported a decent group of individuals for perhaps a couple of hundred years. And even though this site was dug primarily excavated a long time ago during the Victorian period, there have been more recent excavation of remnants of the sediments that were preserved below overhangs on the side of the cave walls. And those were carried out by colleagues from the Natural History Museum in the 1980s. One of the most astonishing things about Gough's Cave is the abundance of actual human remains. So in fact, human remains generally, whether

• 33:05Speaker 03

  it's modern humans, whether it's Neanderthals or their forebears, are so incredibly rare in Britain, and yet they make up approximately a quarter of all the material that came out of Gough's Cave. And in fact, there are anecdotes about, I think, 12 tea chests full of bones being removed from the cave and essentially destroyed because they were viewed as duplicates. And when you think about the amount of material that must have been lost. So the Gough's Cave remains are very special, partly because there's good evidence of humans, but also because of the superb preservation of the material. And we can see the remains of animals,

• 33:49Speaker 03

  whether it's, for example, butchered horses. We see cut marks on horse teeth, on horse bones. We see exploitation of red deer. There's remains of carnivores such as lynx that are present in the site and almost certainly exploited in the case of the lynx for its lovely pelt, for the fur. We see exploitation of things like mountain hare and the modification of harebones into little tools such as piercing, sort of all type tools, really just a very sort of complete picture of what humans are doing. And of course, one of the most notorious

• 34:30Speaker 03

  things there is that there is also evidence of breakage of bone for marrow extraction and butchery of the human remains themselves. So those humans are being treated in exactly the same way as any other butchered animal bone at the site.

• 34:45Tristan Hughes?

  Goffs Cave, so is that southwest England as well? Is that Somerset or Wiltshire? It's near the Mendips, is it?

• 34:50Speaker 03

  It's Somerset, right in the Mendips. So it's partway up Cheddar Gorge, so a really well-known area that people can can go and explore. And you can walk into the cave today. And it's a, you know, it's a visitor attraction. And the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age deposits are very close to the the entrance of the cave, just sort of tucked away on the left-hand side as you come in.

• 35:12Tristan Hughes?

  So let's move on to the next stage. Danielle, it looks like things are getting warmer, humans are back, new species are in the fold in Britain. But as time goes on, what happens? Something very different happens.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  Yes, I think just as we seem to be climbing out of the last ice age, we have a sudden reversal of conditions and a huge climatic deterioration. This is a period known as the Younger Dryas. It starts about 12,900 years ago, and it finishes about 11,700 years ago.

• 35:46Tristan Hughes?

  Nice, pretty precise dates as well for Paleolithic times, too.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  Pretty precise dates. And again, we can get that chronology from the Greenland Ice Core, but also, of course, you know, with the benefit of radiocarbon dating as well. So we know quite a lot about this this time period in terms of the effects on land of this sudden deterioration in climate. And Broadly speaking, that's caused by a mixture of factors. So there is some evidence, for example, from Germany, from the Eifel region, that there is a period of intense volcanism, so volcanic activity, that precipitates a cooling in climate. But also, there are other things going on at this time. So particularly in North America, you've got the decay of

• 36:30Speaker 03

  the big ice sheets, the Laurentide ice sheet, and pulses of very cold meltwater that are entering the North Atlantic. And what they do is to disrupt the ocean's circulation, and Britain is plunged back into the freezer once more.

• 36:45Tristan Hughes?

  And how does this rather abrupt switch of climatic conditions, how does it affect the, I guess, the lifestyle, the world of Ice Age Britain at that time, and the animals, and I guess, humans as well, that were living in it?

• 36:57Speaker 03

  So again, this would have been an abrupt reversal of fortune for a lot of the more temperate-adapted species. And certainly in the caves that we've been digging in Ebergorge, we can find, for example, evidence of reindeer. There's also evidence of Arctic fox in there, so there's several individuals, including a complete specimen that was curled up in a little niche at the back of the site. So beautifully preserved. There's lots of crunched-up bone in there as well, so you can imagine the Arctic foxes running in and out of the cave. They are predating small mammals. So we get a variety of small mammal species that are

• 37:37Speaker 03

  present, but also things like birds as well. So species that we would find in the northern part of Britain today, so things like ptarmigan. And again, those small species are on the move very rapidly. So within the cave site, we have remains of three species of lemming that today are not simpatic, by which I mean, they don't live together today. So we have remains of Norway lemming, which come from Scandinavia. We have remains of collared lemming that today have a sort of circumpolar distribution in the northern hemisphere. And we have only the second record from Britain of a Siberian steppe lemming.

• 38:18Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  And all those three species congregate in the southwest of Britain during the Younger Dryas. So again, these things were expanding their range very rapidly.

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• 38:53Speaker 04

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• 39:50Tristan Hughes?

  I want to talk a bit more about lemming. So if you discover the remains of a lemming, is that one of the go-to signs that that was a cold climate time in Britain's Ice Age story?

• 40:00Speaker 03

  Yes, it certainly is for those particular species. There is another species called a wood lemming, though it inhabits more boreal forests today in Scandinavia. Traditionally, very difficult to separate from things like the Norway lemming, but through a mixture of ancient DNA and also very novel types of shape analysis on the teeth, we've been able to separate out the wood lemming species from the Norway lemming species. And because they both like different types of environment, that's been really important for us in terms of understanding the local vegetation. So if we have something like a Norway lemming, these are typical tundra species, they can tolerate sort of fairly boggy types of environment,

• 40:45Speaker 03

  they would feed on grasses and sedges, and we know that obviously they can tolerate snow cover, and they are a great indicator of local conditions on the ground.

• 40:55Tristan Hughes?

  And in regards to those conditions, do we think the temperatures during the Younger Dryas in Britain, do we think it was as cold as it had been in the last glacial maximum or not quite as cold, but still a shock to the system?

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Perhaps not quite as cold, but still a shock to the system. So you're looking at really a sort of, I guess, a decrease of perhaps four or five degrees centigrade in terms of air temperatures, certainly for the Younger Dryas across Europe. It's not the same globally, so the Younger Dryas is manifested differently in different parts of the world, but certainly that's what we would expect for North West Europe.

• 41:31Tristan Hughes?

  And is an alternate name for the Younger Dryas in Britain, is it the Loch Lomond Stadion or something like that? Do we need to say that name too?

• 41:37Speaker 03

  It is indeed. So we often use local stage names, which are particularly appropriate for Britain. So if you were to say the Loch Lomond Stadion, people would understand exactly what that was. And that also, it conjures up a very specific set of circumstances. So the presence of ice sheets up in Scotland, the kinds of cold climate animals that we've been describing just now. Whereas obviously, if the Younger Dryas is manifested differently in different parts of the world, then they would also have their own local stage names as well.

• 42:12Tristan Hughes?

  Right, so Scotland's covered in ice sheets again. Good for the skiing in Aviemore, but not much else at this period. I'd like to ask about one more particular type of animal before we move on to the next stage. And this was just a name that really caught my eye when doing some research for this topic, and it's the Saiga antelope. Danielle, what is this?

• 42:30Speaker 03

  So Saiga antelope are fantastic animals and they are a small bovid, a small antelope. They live today in really the sort of heartlands of dry Central and Eastern Asia, so particularly populations in Mongolia and Kazakhstan. Until recently, they have been critically endangered, but thank goodness their numbers are now on the rise again. And they are very well adapted to living in arid and, you know, pretty dusty environments. So if you happen to look them up and you see photos of them, you'll see that they have this fantastic nozzle-like nose and they can use it.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  To filter that dry, dusty air, cold air before it gets into the lungs. And although they are essentially Central Asian animals and always have been, in response to this sort of cold and arid pulse that we find in the Younger Dryas, they expand their range at the time. We find them over in Alaska and to the west, we find them over in Somerset. So there are radiocarbon dated remains from Goff's Cave and also from some other cave sites in Cheddar Gorge as well. So a fantastic but rare addition to the fauna in Britain at this time.

• 43:52Tristan Hughes?

  Now, I know that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but is there any evidence at all for humans at this period of time? Or do we just not have that surviving?

• 44:02Speaker 03

  No, again, we just don't have the sites. Certainly at the sites that we've been working on in Eber Gorge, we don't have evidence of artefacts, we don't have evidence of cut-marked remains, and we certainly don't have evidence of people themselves. So again, it's perfectly possible that people were making occasional forays into Britain, but we think that Britain was largely abandoned during this period.

• 44:28Tristan Hughes?

  Until, because the Younger Dryas does reach its end, is it right about 11,000 or so years ago, as you mentioned, what happens? What happens when this shock to the system, this reversal in temperatures, this cooling time, what happens when that ends? Is it a continuation of the warming again?

• 44:49Speaker 03

  So we're back on that warming trajectory. And again, there is rapid warming. And the early part of the current interglacial, the Holocene, is even warmer than at the present day. And then we sort of settle down to a period of relative climatic stability. But yes, the real end of the Ice Age, you start to see, really up in Scotland, you start to see the last of those glaciers, those ice sheets retracting and leaving behind what we call dead ice environments. So for example, lakes, you would have had the ice melting and creating a lot of lakes in areas of sort of deeper topography. You would have had a window of opportunity for animals and people to come back into Britain

• 45:34Speaker 03

  before sea level rises and cuts us off completely. So remember that land bridge that had existed for pretty much all of the last Ice Age? That is becoming smaller and smaller as that ice across the northern hemisphere melts and the water is returned to the ocean. That land bridge becomes more and more compressed and harder and harder to access. And so, yep, people and animals would have come back into Britain very rapidly. We see things like reindeer hanging on for a little while into the early part of the current warm stage, but eventually it becomes too warm and too wooded for them to survive and they go locally extinct.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  And instead, we see a whole suite of fauna that we would regard as native species coming into Britain in the early part of the warm stage. So these are things like aurochs, the ancestor of our domestic cattle. We have things like elk, or moose as it's known in North America. Red deer would have been abundant, roe deer, wild boar. These are the major sort of herbivore food stock really for the last hunter gatherers that we find in Britain, and those are the Mesolithic people.

• 46:50Tristan Hughes?

  So that's the Mesolithic people, and then you get amazing sites like Starcar, which we've done an episode about in the past, exploring kind of those human people right after the end of the Ice Age. But it's fascinating, isn't it, Danielle? For the animals involved, I'm guessing it was those who were able to adapt to that change in temperature to the warming period. Those are the animals, as you say, become the most recognisable in the British landscape, and for many of them, like red deer, down to the present day.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  Yes, so some of those species have gone right the way through to the present day. So red deer, roe deer would be a case in point. Others, such as the last remaining carnivores, whether they happen to be brown bears, lynx or wolves. We hunted to extinction, really sort of from the Middle Ages onwards. Other things like elk disappear quite early on in the Holocene. Again, probably hunted to extinction. And some of those smaller species as well, so the Arctic foxes have gone, but instead we have red fox. We have things like wildcat as well. And they're all distributed really all over Britain. So things like wildcat, which today survive only up in the Scottish Highlands.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Their natural habitat, which we can see from the fossil evidence, is actually deciduous woodland. And so the fossil record can play a really important role here in helping to address modern conservation issues today by giving more detailed baseline information about where species should be distributed or where they should be reintroduced today. So one of the youngest specimens that we have from the Mendip Hills, from the excavations, is a beautiful, complete skeleton of a wildcat. And it was found in association with other evidence that indicates warm and wooded conditions. So this was really optimal habitat for them.

• 48:40Tristan Hughes?

  It's such a fascinating journey. Thank you so much for talking us through this. Those 10,000 years ago, that's, it feels like by then it's kind of definitive end of the Ice Age. If you say the, the ice caps have receded from Scotland. Britain is now an island again, at least in the story of Britain. Is 10,000 a good number to say the Ice Age is now over?

• 48:58Speaker 03

  Technically by 11,700, that's when we would say, yep. I mean, it, it depends whether you count in radiocarbon years before the present or, you know, some people look at it from a sort of, you know, B.C. or before the Common Era. So round about that, you know, 11,700 years before the present day. That would be when we consider the, you know, the Ice Age to be finished. And we've got those warm and wooded conditions. And then obviously, you know, some spectacular transitions further in, in the human journey, really. And, and the move from hunter gatherers to settled peoples and agriculture, all of these things then kick off.

• 49:38Tristan Hughes?

  It's fascinating to think that actually. Those 15,000 years we've just covered is less time than between, let's say, the 10,000 B.C. or 11,700 years ago and today. So we've actually got more time than between the end of the Ice Age and where we're sitting now, recording this interview together. Lastly, Danielle, as you've kind of hinted at there, but I feel it would be nice to do this as a final remark, how important is studying the end of the Ice Age, the paleoecology, looking at the animal remains and the climate and the effect of humans as well? How important is all of that when exploring current issues like climate change today?

• 50:15Speaker 03

  It's a really nice question to end on because this is one of the things that I think is so important and it's something that we're really trying to push and to work with modern ecologists. And so I've got a lot of great work that's starting with, for example, Natural England and other colleagues, particularly around some of these, these sort of joined up super national nature reserves, where there are some really exciting developments that are, you know, in play involving perhaps reintroduction of large herbivores to modify the landscape. The disappearance of many species is only just starting to be understood in terms of their legacy. The important things that elk and bison, for example, that they,

• 51:00Speaker 03

  they had in terms of opening up the vegetation, in terms of fertilising the land with their dung, in terms of transporting seeds around, all sorts of things that we have lost in the way of ecological benefits. We are understanding very well now how animals such as beavers, ecosystem engineers, the role that they can play in terms of helping to control completely cost-free flooding episodes by trapping water upstream and away from areas of human settlement. But there's a lot more to be done and really the fossil record can give

• 51:40Speaker 03

  a really important insight, working hand in hand with ecologists in terms of understanding the range, the habitats, coexistence of different species and different behaviours in the past. We can provide a more nuanced Insight into, for example, things like species distribution models, where we think about where animals could and should be distributed, especially in view of climate change in the future. And the fossil record can help us make better informed decisions in terms of the conservation of those species. So a really important role to play and some really exciting work to be done in the future.

• 52:22Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely, indeed. Well, Danielle, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  Thank you, Tristan.

• 52:32Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Professor Danielle Trive talking you through the story of the end of Ice Age Britain. I hope you enjoy today's episode. As mentioned, if you want to find out what happens right after the end of the Ice Age in Britain, then you can search in the Ancients archive from an interview we did last year about Starcar, this incredible mesolithic site and one of the earliest sites we know of for humans post-Ice Age living in Britain, Starcar in Yorkshire. Search Starcar Ancients and you'll find that episode too. With this episode, we also bring to an end our special Ice Age mini series this February. I hope you've enjoyed it. Please let us know your thoughts. We love hearing your feedback for episodes like this, for special mini

• 53:17Tristan Hughes?

  series episodes like our Ice Age mini series. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Now, don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 53:50Speaker 02

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