Britain's First Homo Sapiens

What was it like to share Britain with Neanderthals and cave hyenas 40,000 years ago? Tristan Hughes ventures deep underground to Kents Cavern, a glittering labyrinth affectionately known as Britain’s first home. He's joined by archaeological scientist Dr. Helen Fewlass on a live, groundbreaking excavation. Together they discover how cutting-edge science and ancient stone tools are rewriting the story of the first Homo sapiens. MORE: Britain's First Dog Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/britains-first-dog/id1520403988?i=1000758385575 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/69Edfr9FrG5C0dOUUX9ID3 Ice Age Britain: Finding the First Homo sapiens Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ice-age-britain-finding-the-first-homo-sapiens/id1520403988?i=1000645618843 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4u19HuMXM6JlicPr8FGok3 Presented by Tristan Hughes. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Want even MORE Ancients? Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS ad-free, early access podcasts AND exclusive subscriber-only Ancients episodes. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. The Arrival project is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the PI only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 3:07Speaker 00

  Hello. I am currently in a cave. But not just any cave. Welcome to Kent's Cavern in Torquay, affectionately known as Britain's first home. Now, walking around here geologically, it is extraordinary. This is a glittering underground labyrinth. I can see stalagmites pushing up with all their might from the ground and stalagmites hanging tight to the ceiling above. See what I did there? And archaeologically, this is the main reason why we're here, because it's iconic. It was right here that excavators unearthed the earliest evidence for modern humans, Homo sapiens, in Britain.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  A human jawbone dating back more than 40,000 years. Though, as you're going to hear, that date is slightly contentious. Welcome to a very special on-location episode of The Ancients. Today, we're stepping into an Ice Age world of Neanderthals, of saber-toothed cats, and of pioneer humans. A story shaped by famous 19th century digs and of cutting-edge modern science. And the discoveries here, well, they're not stopping. A brand-new excavation is underway right now to unlock even more of this cave's secrets, led by Dr Helen Fugas, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Now Helen, our dig is somewhere around here. I think I can hear digging. I think I can hear voices just up ahead. Let's go.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Helen?

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Good seeing you.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Hi. Nice to meet you, Tristan.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  What a place. I mean, walking down the cavern itself and then almost feeling special access into this secluded little area. I mean, what a place to work.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know, we've been very, very lucky. It's an incredibly special place to be, so we're having a good time so far.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  And it feels quite secluded. I mean, can you describe what we've got in front of us? Because I can see kind of reddish ground earth and then, I mean, it's quite a small space.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Yes, it is. We are down an area at the moment called the South Sally Port. And so we're in quite a small enclosed tunnel. We're walking on a very kind of compacted reddish clay soil.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  It's clay, isn't it?

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's very sticky. It can be difficult to get off. So we're walking on this red clay earth, which is what we're really interested in. And we're in this beautiful enclosed rocky sally port.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I see you've got lights up ahead and then you've got your colleagues hard at work around a trench. And what have we got so far in the dig? What can we see?

• 5:46Speaker 03

  So we are actually in the lowest point of the cave, in Kent's Cavern, which is a really large cavern system, but we're at the lowest point here. We can see that we're at the end of this kind of tunnel, which is pinching out right at the end. And we're excavating right down at the bottom. And we know that things and sediment and water has moved through the cave system and come down and settled here at the bottom of this port.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  And just one trench? You're all in on one trench in this dig?

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, we are. We have a really small excavation area relatively, but we tend to go for very targeted, very meticulous excavation areas. So we're excavating in just one square meter at the moment. We're right at the beginning of the dig, so this is just the first of many of our excavation areas. But we go for very targeted areas and we work in a specific place and we meticulously record everything so we can get a huge amount of data from just a very small area.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  But these small focus digs, I mean, they're even more exciting, aren't they Helen? Because they say you can really focus in and then explore the various sediments and the artifacts that you find within.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  Yes. We have a huge amount of methods which are available to us now to analyze all of the different types of things that we're excavating out of the trench. So we do very detailed analyses of the sediments themselves, but also all of the bones and things like little micromammal teeth and micromammal bones, which are absolutely tiny. And we can go through the sediments and find them and pull them out to much larger fauna. So things like hyena teeth, which we found quite a lot of. Yeah, and we're doing lots of very detailed analyses of these different areas of the trench and pretty much everything we're pulling out.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  So it sounds like you've only been here not too long, but already really, really successful, really, really exciting?

• 7:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're really excited so far. So we're in week four of the dig at the moment, but this is just our first field season. So we're going to be coming back here to the cave site over the next four or five years on the project that we're working on. And we've had really good success so far. So we knew this area was excavated for the last time about 157 years ago by William Penn Kelly.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Okay, not too long ago, yeah.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  No. And we know he excavated the top few foot of sediment in this area. And he actually, he found a lot of things when he was digging down here. So he called it the most fossiliferous place in the cave.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Never heard that word before. Wow.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  So he pulled out a lot of different fossils from different animals from down here and a lot of different stone tools as well. But we don't really think anyone's been down here and excavated systematically since. And so what we were hoping is that we could basically find where he left off and we could find the intact sediments that he left behind. And we did in our first week, which was very exciting for us.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  As you were saying in the answer, I couldn't help but get a raindrop on my arm, which feels a bit weird, assuming the depths of a cave. But actually, we shouldn't be surprised by that, should we?

• 8:32Speaker 03

  No. So the cave can be quite wet. So we were a little bit worried the cave would be very, very wet, but we've actually been quite lucky so far and it's not been too bad. But you will get dripped on a little bit. And it's a little bit slippery on the foot as you get in.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  As long as we're not worried about flooding happening whilst I'm here.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  No, not now.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Well, so Helen, first of all, why is this cave, why is Kent's Cavern so important in our Ice Age story?

• 8:56Speaker 03

  So Kent's Cavern is one of the most important Paleolithic sites that we have here in the UK. We don't have many of them, and so each one that we do have is very important. But Kent's Cavern has an incredible history of human occupation, which spreads back over the past half a million years. And but it also has a really incredible research history stretching back over the past few centuries. So lots of different kind of generations of researchers coming in at different time periods and adding to the story and how we're understanding the prehistoric occupations of the cave.

• 9:25Speaker 00

  So this isn't just the story of one particular moment in our Ice Age, in our Ice Age story, like I might think of Paverland or somewhere like that. So this is where you've got archaeology stretching back, is it 500,000 years? That's insane.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  Yes, it's incredible. So at the deepest levels of the cave, we have a layer which we call the Bretcher layer. And it contains lots of extinct cave bear remains. But it also contains hand axes, which we think were made by a species called Homo hydablegensis, which is an extinct species of human. And we know that Hydablegensis was present in the UK around this time period. We have fossils in other sites like Foxgrove. And so we know that people were in this landscape and using this landscape half a million years ago.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  And is that why they have the, the popular nickname of this cavern as Britain's first home?

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, it is. So it's one of the very few sites where we actually have evidence of three different species of human in this landscape and using the cave system. So we have Hydablegensis half a million years ago. We then have the Neanderthals, and then we have some very early members of Homo sapiens. But we also have the cave being used over the past 50,000 years by different hunter gatherer groups, people in the Iron Age and the Romans and medieval period too.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  So you have Romans here alongside, you know, fossils from deep in the Ice Age. I love that.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's lots of historical activity happening in the cave as well.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  And what types of artifacts have been unearthed over, have been unearthed in many parts of this cavern over the last century and a half? Are we talking mainly bones or have we got tools as well? How much of a variety?

• 10:56Speaker 03

  So a huge variety. So we have lots and lots of different bones from animals. We also have lots of human remains from different periods. So we have more historical human remains. Some of the very last hunter gatherer groups to be living in the UK, we have their remains here as well. And we also have a fossil of one of the earliest Homo sapiens to be living in Britain as well.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Which we will get to. And when we generally colloquially say the Ice Age, just how huge a period of time are we talking?

• 11:24Speaker 03

  So we are interested in a very specific portion of the Ice Age. So we are interested in a period we call Marine Isotope Stage Three. So this is a period of time from about 60,000 years ago to about 27,000 years ago.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Right. And the Ice Age more generally, that could be, that's the Pleistocene, isn't it? So more than two and a half million years?

• 11:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  And the cave itself, I mean, how long has it been recognised that this place, this cavern, was an important prehistoric site? How far back can we go?

• 11:53Speaker 03

  So we know that a reverend called John McHenry, he was an Irish reverend, was here about 200 years ago. So in 1825, 1826, he was researching in the cavern. At this point, it would have been much fuller. So it would have been a bit of a squeeze to get into the cave. And we know that he was really interested in the association between the bones of extinct Ice Age animals and the stone tools that were in the cave as well. And he was really interested in the connection, the link between them.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  And moving on from him, when do we get this name? I'm going to butcher the surname, the pronunciation of it. Pengelly.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, William Pengelly. So he is a very important scientist in this story. So he first became interested in the cave in the mid 1800s. And he worked in the cave for many, many decades. And he was one of the first people to systematically excavate an archaeological site anywhere in the world. He started with some research over in Brixham Cavern, which is not too far from here, just over the bay. And then he wanted to use this very systematic approach to excavating a cave site here in Kent's Cavern. And he excavated for 15 years across the cave.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  But in the story of archaeology excavations across the world, I mean, he's quite a revolutionary figure, isn't he? How he approaches it, so much so that he's in your good books down to the present day.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  He is in my good books. So up until this point, we had people being interested in caves and the fauna and the fossils they could find in them. But most of the time, people would go into cave sites and they would, you know, dig some of the sediments up and they would keep what they were looking for. So they might find some incredible fossils or some stone tools. But they didn't necessarily record the context of those finds, where they exactly were coming from or their association to other things in the site. And a lot of the material would then have been thrown away. Whereas Pengelly was very systematic in his approach. So he excavated across the entire cave system. He came up with a brand new system, which he called his Prism System.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  And he excavated in very systematic prisms, which were one yard in length, one foot across and one foot down. So everything he found within one of these prisms, he gave a specific number. And so he recorded the spatial information for all of his finds. And 150 years later, we can go to the museum and we can find his numbers on the finds. And so we know exactly where they came from in the cave. And it was the first time anybody had ever done that in a cave.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  And all that data is there now at the Torquay Natural History Museum, so very close to here that you can go and have a look at today.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, at the Torquay Museum. So it's just 10 minutes down the road from the site. So it stayed local. And his information was incredibly important because we chose the area that we are excavating in for this field season based on his information. And so we have the location of some of his finds and that's why we put our trench where we did.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  All right, we'll get to these finds, absolutely. And since Pengelly, there have been excavations in various parts of this cavern happening for the past 150 years, some in your good books, others on the naughty list.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Yes, indeed. So we have after Pengelly's massive excavation, which was between 1865 and 1880. And we have another big campaign which happened in the 1920s to the 1940s. And it was carried out by a man called Ogilvy, who was leading the Torquay Natural History Society. And they excavated in lots of different areas inside the cave and took out some really vast volumes of sediment in certain areas. But they excavated some really incredible, really important sequences. And so these sort of two really important big campaigns that have happened in the past have been really important for informing what we're doing here. And other people have kind of excavated in other areas since, but.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  We don't need to name and shame, don't worry, we'll leave it there, we'll leave it there. But let's focus on that one discovery that does, for many people, still defines Kent's Cavern and is normally right at the forefront. And this is the time of Ogilvy, isn't it?

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  What is this discovery?

• 15:46Speaker 03

  So on the 14th of March, 1927, so nearly 100 years ago, the Torquay Natural History Society were excavating in an area called the Vestibule at the entrance of the cave. And they found a fragment of a human jaw, which we call KC4. So it's a little part of the jawbone with three teeth attached. And it turned out to be the oldest Homo sapiens fossil which we've ever found in Britain and even in northwestern Europe. So it's an incredibly important fossil internationally as well as in the UK.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  So that was found. And then the artifacts found alongside it or is it quite on its own?

• 16:21Speaker 03

  So it's found in one of the most important middle to upper Paleolithic sequences in the country. So this is an area where we have sediments which contain stone tools, which were made by Neanderthals. And then we see a transition and we start to see stone tools being made by Homo sapiens. So we get to see this kind of transition from one species to another and this technological transition as well.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  And middle to upper Paleolithic, so when are we talking about dates ranging down?

• 16:46Speaker 03

  So we're talking between roughly 40 and 50,000 years ago.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Right. So this, and this is something that's very interesting, like in the present day, isn't it? Exploring that, that overlap between Neanderthals and modern humans, including in Britain.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. So we know from genetic analyses that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals met and they interbred. And so many people living today have small amounts of Neanderthal DNA in their genomes. So we know that they met. And a really important question in Paleolithic archaeology is understanding where and when they met and what kind of influence they might have had on each other as well. So we know they met and biologically influenced each other, but potentially we're not sure what kind of cultural influences they had as well.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  And I guess also the other big question is what time period they would have met within that, right? And does that link us nicely into exploring the big question around the date of that earliest Homo sapien fossil in Britain?

• 17:42Speaker 03

  Yes. So we think Homo sapiens were arriving between 40 and 50,000 years ago. We know Neanderthals disappear around 40,000 years ago. And trying to understand the duration of that overlap is a really important question. So the age of KC4 has always been important for investigating this time period. The fossil was directly radiocarbon dated in the 1980s to about 35,000 years old, which made it the oldest Homo sapiens we have. But now we know that with radiocarbon dating, if you have any contamination on the fossil, it can make your dates incorrect. And we know that the fossil was covered in glue and we think actually, yeah, glue.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  So it's quite common that curators or excavators would try to preserve fossils, important fossils, by gluing them or adding consolidants to them to try to preserve them. But it means that with a lot of the modern methods that we use today, it introduces contamination. And so we actually think that 35,000 year old date is a bit too young and we think it's actually older.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Right. How much older?

• 18:49Speaker 03

  Well, that's a matter of speculation. So different teams have tried to work on this question. There was a team in 2011 that tried to date some of the artefacts that were found above KC4 and below KC4 and to try and bracket the age of the fossil and suggested an age of about 42,000 years old. But other researchers have claimed that that approach isn't appropriate for this time period and for this site in particular because of the excavation methods used by the Torquay Natural History Society. So we can't be exactly sure where those fossils come from. And so we shouldn't use this kind of associated date.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  So you mentioned how culturally you're looking for changes when you have the end of the Neanderthals and the beginning of Homo sapiens. What are these changes that you're looking for, at least for a long time, thought you were looking for?

• 19:39Speaker 03

  So, for a long time, this period has been mostly studied through the stone tools that were left behind. And so we know we have certain stone tools which were made by Neanderthals. And we can study the technological characteristics of the tools to try and determine how they were made and who made them. And we see a transition with the change from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens in the types of tools and the manufacturing techniques that were being used. And so we can, from the stone tools themselves, tell that there is a transition happening and that we're seeing a change between the groups occupying the area. And now we have modern techniques which we can use to also supplement this story. So we can try and understand that transition in higher resolution than just working with the stone tools themselves.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  So we can use that information, but we can also study that transition with lots of other approaches as well.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  And what new tools are associated with Homo sapiens coming in? What are you normally looking for?

• 20:31Speaker 03

  So, for a long time, the kind of marker of the first Homo sapiens in Europe was thought to be a culture that we call the Aurich nation, which are very specific stone tools. But they are also come along with other types of artefacts, so lots of bone artefacts as well. And we start to see the introduction of cave art during this time period and different types of jewellery and personal ornaments. And for a long time, it was thought that that was the marker of the first Homo sapiens to arrive in Europe. And but in the past ten, twenty years or so, we've started to have a very different picture of the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe. And we've started to understand that there are older assemblages in Europe, which we actually associate now with Homo sapiens as well.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  And so we actually think that Homo sapiens were arriving into Europe much earlier, probably in small groups, with different types of cultures and different types of stone tools and assemblages that they were producing.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  And what types of stone tools are we talking about? Especially when we're exploring your dig and the story of the Homo sapiens arriving in Britain.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, so our project is focusing on a very particular type of stone tool, which are known as leaf points, because they are beautifully leaf shaped.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  What's the longer name for them that I'm not going to dare try and pronounce or say?

• 21:46Speaker 03

  So they are known as the LRJ, which stands for the Linconvian, Rhenesian, Yerjrenovitsian.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  Well done.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  And these are stone tools which have been found in Paleolithic sites, all the way from the UK, across northern Europe, all the way over to Poland. And they are very consistent in terms of these tools across this very, very wide expanse of space, so fifteen hundred kilometres. And we have these tools popping up in sites all across that range.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  And have they also been found here?

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Yes. So the first leaf point ever found in Britain was actually found here at Kent's Cavern by John McHenry in about eighteen twenty five or twenty six. And then William Pengelly found about ten of these stone tools here in eighteen sixty eight, eighteen sixty nine. And this is actually the type site for the LRJ in Britain. So this is where we have a really large assemblage. And these collections were actually named after this site here because they were found and recognised here first.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  So with these types of, these leaf points that you have in the archaeological record, do we know what they're used for? Are these, are these hunting weapons?

• 22:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so they are interpreted as spear points, so they are very long, beautiful blades. And it's thought that they are, were used on the ends of spears and that the LRJ sites that we've found are kind of short term hunting camps and that people would have used for a short period of time as they were kind of moving around the landscape. So we know that we have around ten or so that were found here in Kent's Cavern. And but in most sites, we just have one or two of these stone tools. So they're actually quite tricky to study.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  So ten found in Kent's Cavern, what made you want to come back here and look for more?

• 23:27Speaker 03

  So for a long time, it was thought, or it was hypothesised, that these stone tools were made by the last Neanderthals to live in Europe and they were kind of a marker of the final Neanderthals. But we've recently been working on a site called Rannus in Germany, the R. And we went back to that site and we did, reopened a new excavation. So it was extensively excavated in the nineteen thirties. And we went and did a very small targeted excavation at that site as well. And we found the LRJ layers with the LRJ tools. And they were actually associated with the remains of Homo sapiens. So our species, Homo sapiens, rather than the Neanderthals. And when we dated them, they turned out to be much older than we thought that they would be.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  So we actually had evidence of Homo sapiens in Europe, north of the Alps, before forty five thousand years ago. And that's completely changed our understanding of these leaf point assemblages. But Rannus is just one data point in this very vast expanse of fifteen hundred kilometres. And so what we're trying to do with this project is to understand the LRJ on a much more broad level, a regional level. So we're returning to the L, which is here in Kent's Cavern. And we'll also be studying artefacts from the J over in Poland and some other sites in the UK as well, to try and understand if that same pattern with the LRJ being made by Homo sapiens at this much older time period is consistent across these other sites.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Right, so the pattern could, are you also prepared for the potential that actually you might find Neanderthal stuff alongside any more LRJ points you find, which might show regional variation, that actually Neanderthals were using these points in parts of Europe and Homo sapiens were also using them in other parts of Europe?

• 25:06Speaker 03

  It's a possibility. It's something that we are open to the possibility. It depends on what we find. I think the assumption is that the stone tools are so consistent. They were probably made by the same group of people across all of these different sites. So potentially the LRJ is evidence of these Homo sapiens using this very broad range. And all of these other sites, they were made by Homo sapiens as well. But we need to test that. It's just an assumption at the moment. And so what we need to do is go back to these sites, looking at them in very, very high level of detail to try and test those theories.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  And how has that testing gone so far with this particular trench we have just in front of us?

• 25:43Speaker 03

  So we decided to dig down here for the excavation because this is exactly where Pengelly found three of the LRJ points in eighteen sixty nine. So because of his incredible recording system, we could put our trench right where two of the leaf points were found in eighteen sixty nine. And we were, we came here with the goal of trying to find intact sediment. So layers which had not been disturbed by previous excavations. And we found them in the first week of the dig, so that was very exciting for us. And we found lots of fauna alongside them, so the remains of Ice Age animals, which we were expecting in these types of layers. And we've also found archaeology as well.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  Got to talk about the animals. We can't tease at the Ice Age animals that you found and not mention more. What types of animals are we talking?

• 26:28Speaker 03

  So we're in this beautiful red cave earth, this kind of sticky clay, which has a beautiful red colour. And we have found many of the sort of classic Ice Age fauna. So we have lots of cave hyenas, so lots of cave hyena teeth coming out.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Hold the phone. So this is the, I always love this fact. So at the time, that period in the Ice Age, when it's not all covered in ice and you have Homo sapiens arriving, one thirty, forty thousand years ago, that's a time where you have hyenas in Britain. That's so insane.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was a very different landscape to what we have today, so it would have been much colder. And the fauna we're talking about, kind of cave hyenas and lots of large herbivores. So we would have had things like woolly rhinoceros, woolly mammoths, wild horses, reindeer living in this landscape at the same time as well as the Homo sapiens.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  So are these tools that you found so far in that first week, are they leaf points?

• 27:19Speaker 03

  So, short answer is no. But the tools themselves need to be studied in much more detail. So we've just lifted them out of the ground. So our lithics expert will be, will be analysing them after the end of the dig to compare them to other assemblages across Europe to work out which they are most closely related to. But we haven't found a leaf point yet.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  But is the gut, do you think those early, your guts at the moment, do you think those early tools that you found, they were used by Homo sapiens here, you know, early Homo sapiens?

• 27:48Speaker 03

  It's early days at the moment, so we need to, we need to analyse them in more detail before we can say that. But we know that we're down in the right time period that we're interested in, in this MIS three time period with the right kind of Ice Age fauna.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  And finding animal bones next to them that we think could have been butchered by the humans or maybe living there at different times roughly all?

• 28:07Speaker 03

  So we need to, again, spend a bit more time analysing the fauna. And so we will be looking for evidence of cut marks and things like that. It's very likely that the cave hyenas themselves were using this area and it could have been a cave hyena den. And that the bones that we're finding are evidence of the cave hyenas bringing, scavenging animals and then bringing them into the caves themselves. So lots of them do look like they've been digested by hyena. We have quite specific patterns on the surfaces.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  That's, that's the next stage to look at what marks there might be on the surviving animal bones, right? Whether it was butchered by humans or said norde by hyena or something like that.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  And I just want to go back more to the kind of the general picture of the cave. And this is one of Britain's most important Ice Age sites. I want to ask a bit more about why, because today it feels in quite, dare I say, a more remote part of Britain, down in the South West in Torquay. How different was the landscape here, you know, more than thirty thousand years ago? That made it such an attractive place for humans to decide to, to set up shop, shall we say, as a hunting site and so on?

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Back in the time period that we're talking about, it actually would have been less remote than it is today, because in the time period we're interested in, the UK would have actually been attached to the continent and you would have been able to walk from Britain over to France. So the channel would have been above the sea level at that point in time. So the UK would have represented the most northwestern extent of Europe, but you could walk across from one place to the other. And so we see people using this landscape as an extension of the European continent, and that's what we think we're seeing with the L R J. It would have been a very different environment, but there would have been lots of animals, lots of large herbivores, which would have been really attractive for people who were hunter-gatherers, who were following animals who were migrating.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  And so it would have been a very rich landscape that they would have been able to exploit as well, even though it was much colder than it is today.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  And they're living in this cave, is it a hunting base, but more than just a hunting base, should we say?

• 30:04Speaker 03

  It's hard to say at the moment. We don't have any in-situ occupations in the cave at the moment, so evidence of, of things like hars, which would tell us that people were actually living in a specific location. It's likely they were probably living on the landscape, on the hill around, outside the cave. And some of the finds that we've accumulated in here have been washed into the cave from the hillside, which has given us a snapshot of the kind of people that were living in the landscape and the animals in the landscape in those time periods.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  I guess another fun thing is then trying to reconstruct where the entrance have been, how they have got down here, you know, why do these bones end up here? Why do these tools end up where you're digging? Is it natural, like through flood and water bringing it down? Or were humans actually down here tens of thousands of years ago?

• 30:46Speaker 03

  We think it's unlikely they were right down here in the south sali port. We're in the deepest point of the cave, and so it would have been very dark and quite inaccessible. But people might have been living, people tended to live at the entrances of caves where they would have had lots of light. And so finding entrances is a really, really important aspect of cave archaeology. It's where people tended to set up camp. We don't have any of those cave entrances located yet for Kent's Cavern, but we will be doing future work on that in the project.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  And that's very interesting, because if people have known about Kent's Caverns, you know, since before Pengelly, a hundred and fifty years ago, the fact, Helen, that, you know, you can still come here and dig up fresh soil, look for new artefacts, come to these places and still find amazing new stuff. It blows my mind that there's still so much more to find here.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think for a long time, people had assumed that Kent's Cavern had just been fully dug out and that all of the sediments here had been removed by previous excavation campaigns. But we're actually finding evidence that there are still pockets of intact sediment hidden away that we are able to come back to now and explore with the new techniques, which is really exciting for us, because it means we can capture all of that contextual data that go along with the archaeology and go along with the fossils, so that we can really reconstruct the landscape and the environment and the human occupation and behaviour in much greater detail.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  You are being very, very thorough. You are reviewing every single artefact, every bucket of soil that comes out of the ground, it's going through the works.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  It is, yeah. So every single bit of sediment that we're digging out is going through a sieve. And so we're wet sieving things to wash off all of the red clay and to find even the teeniest, tiniest fragments that have been left behind. And we're also taking samples of all the sediments themselves, so that those will all be studied in meticulous detail as well.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  And this is just the start for you. How many more years do you intend to dig here? How many more excavation seasons?

• 32:36Speaker 03

  This is, this is the first of about five or six. So we think we'll be digging here and coming back multiple times per year for about the next four or five years.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  And what do you really, really hope? What's on the Helen wishlist that you want to find?

• 32:48Speaker 03

  An L R J point would be nice. So a leave point would be lovely. But I'm also really interested in the human remains that have been found so far. So KC4 is one of the most important fossils that we have from this transitional period from any site across Europe, because they're just so rare. There are so few sites with human remains in them dating to this time period, because bone breaks down in the archaeological record. But we now have methods that we can do in the lab on the archaeological collections and on the faunal animal collections that we find. And we can actually find human remains in teeny tiny little fragments of bone that we can't actually recognise from their characteristics, that they belong to humans. But now we can analyse them in the lab and we can identify them as human.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  So potentially, more early Homo sapien bones have already been found here, they just were missed because they were so small.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So even, that's why we are, we are so careful with even the tiniest scraps of bone, the tiniest fragments, which don't look very important, but they could actually turn out to be the remains of some of the first Homo sapiens in the country. And if we find them, when we find them, we would be able to do DNA analysis on them and date them and get a much better understanding of those groups of people.

• 34:04Speaker 00

  Do you want even more ancient history? Well, on The Ancients, we release exclusive, original subscriber-only episodes every two weeks. From deep dive chats with our amazing experts to What If?, our exciting new format launching this Friday, where we explore some of ancient history's most intriguing counterfactuals. And every month, I sit down with my producer, Joseph, he's a good egg, to rummage through the ancients mailbag and answer your burning questions. So get involved, send us your questions and you might hear yours answered on the show. What's more, subscribers get early access to all of our podcasts, completely ad-free. To give you a taste, here's a clip from my most recent Q and A with producer Joseph.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  Now, a question from one of our people in the office downstairs.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  Which ancient leaders give you the biggest icks?

• 34:55Speaker 00

  Cassander, big ick guy. He murders about four or five members of Alexander the Great's family, his royal family.

• 35:02Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  He's, he's quite a big reason as to why Alexander's bloodline goes extinct.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  Well, that's some claim to fame, is it? And I can understand why that would mean he's an ick to you.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  Well, it's, it's like, the thing is, people would defend him because, you know, he's, he's quite an adept figure. At the same time, he's got a remarkable rise, that figure, Cassander, the son of Antipater. But what I do find fascinating is that there's a story that emerges that apparently he and Alexander didn't get on well, as well when Alexander was alive. And Cassander went to Alexander's court in Babylon, I think in that area. Cassander laughs at some of the Alexander's subjects, Persian subjects, bowing before him, doing this proskinesis, a sign of respect. Cassander laughs at it, he thinks it's an absolute joke. Alexander's furious, he pins him against a wall and shouts at him. So much so that apparently Cassander, whenever he saw a statue of Alexander going forwards, he shuddered. But Cassander evidently got the last laugh in the fact that he, he fights Alexander's

• 35:56Speaker 00

  mum, Olympias, in a civil war, which sees Olympias murdered by Cassander's cronies. He then takes control of Alexander's wife from Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Sogdi and wife Roxana, and Alexander's infant child, Alexander IV, keeps them in his custody for a few years before having them both killed.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  That's just, that's just mean. Surely, that's, surely, if you, if you know you're going to get rid of them, get rid of them when you capture them. Don't torture them with not knowing for years.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  It's always like when Alexander's son is becoming of age to actually, you know, there might be no, it's just like, we should make him the new ruler of Macedonia. Cassander's like, no, I've had too much of this now. I like being in the limelight. And then the other one, Alexander also has an illegitimate child called Hercules, who's like the last child of Alexander, who Cassander then bribes another general to hand over to him.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, being, being the last child of Alexander is, that's not a good title to have.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, poor Hercules, doesn't end well for him. Now to hear more from Joseph and I and find out the answers to even more listener questions, sign up to History Hit. Once you've finished listening to this episode, of course, you'll get exclusive Ancients episodes every fortnight, plus access to hundreds of original documentaries when you sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe or click the link in the show notes. That's historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalised AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

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• 40:28Speaker 00

  The work that Helen and the team are doing in Ken's cavern is extraordinary, building on the site's rich archaeological heritage stretching back to the 19th century. The potential unearthing of bone fragments from both early humans and ancient mammals could shed new light on the cave system's role as a shelter and home from the environment nearly 40,000 years ago. But, as Helen mentioned, the most astonishing finds from this year's dig are those three flaked leaf points, ancient stone tools used by early humans as spear points to cut, skin and hunt. They were uncovered beneath the cavern's clay-coloured sediment by John Bolton, the

• 41:12Speaker 00

  dig's lead excavator, and I caught up with him to learn more about the precise techniques the team uses to unearth these subterranean gems. So, this is it? This is the small square trench? Yeah, so we're in front of trench one here. It's a very small trench by normal archaeology standards, but we get so much information out of this small area. It's about one metre. One metre square, yeah. One metre square, yeah. And we subdivide it into 50-centimetre squares within that to get higher resolution. And we, once we hit intact sediments, we dig down in two-centimetre spits depth within those 50-centimetre squares, just to get the maximum resolution.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  And anything we don't notice, like very tiny, small finds of, whether it's bone or flint or whatever, that we don't plot in with our fancy laser measuring device, everything goes through to a wet sieve, all the sediments, and that's a 0.5 micron mesh in that. Gosh. The tiniest, tiniest little small mammal teeth don't go through. Everything we can then tie into our trench, so we know exactly where it comes from within the trench. And within that, we take samples afterwards to locate things for sediment DNA and micro morphology that tells us a little bit more about the, how the cave sediments have got into the

• 42:40Speaker 00

  cave. So, whether they've sludged down from different parts of the cave with water when the caves have been wetter, that gives us so much fine detail. Basically, it sounds like you're not missing much, if anything, and you're learning a lot at the same time. This is kind of where we come to with archaeology today. Yeah. You know, even the minuscule stuff, as you say, if it's missed with the naked eye, with the wet sieving afterwards, you know, having always made sure that every... Everything gets recovered. Everything recovered, and you know where exactly, even in this one small, you know, metre squared area, that particular, you know, lump of soil came from. Yeah. So you can say, even if you find it later, you know where you dug it up from and what layer. Yeah, precisely. Gosh. And at the moment, it's not like it is all kind of one layer within the trench.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  It's, you've almost kind of got steps, haven't you? So you've got this layer over there, should we focus on that one first of all? Because it looks a bit less even. Yeah. So, within the trench, we know from past records from Pengali, in the, this part of the cave, he records some disturbance by burrowing animals, badgers or foxes perhaps. And also, we've had later, more casual excavations, let's say. Okay, right, put it nicely, yeah. Which is quite ironic, really, because William Pengali, so long ago, in the 1860s, when he was down here, was, was so ahead of his time digging in his grid system.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  And then later, more recent excavations were not quite as precise and they were more treasure hunting. They also disturbed something. So you can see, within part of our trench, we have this, this sort of cut edge feature, which it could be burrowing animals or later disturbance by the casual treasure hunting people, or a mixture of the both. So we have that. And then we have our, our beautiful cave earth here, which is intact sediment. It's so interesting just looking at that now. It does look almost as if, well, I might think of like a cliff and coastal erosion, how you have that, that nice sediment that we're going to talk about now, and then all of a sudden, it dips.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a very, very sharp feature. Yeah. And so we have this nicer sediment here, that can we date to kind of Ice Age times, do you think? Yeah, it's a, like Helen was talking about, the Marine Ice Stope Stage III, which is that period of time between 16 and about 27,000 years, we have a distinct suite of animals, if you like, like your, your mammoth, your woolly rhino, your hyenas, cold-adapted species like that. And we're actually finding teeth and bone that fit very nicely in that. We've got quite a lot of hyena teeth. So the hyena of the time, the cave hyena, they are cold-adapted. We shouldn't be thinking of like the savannah from Africa. Yeah, and they were, they were slightly bigger as well, they're much more robust.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  So we've got quite lots of hyena, and also associated with that, you've got, because it was thought that this part of the cave was a hyena den. So you've got lots of small fragments of bone of what animals that they were eating. And also, very important, from this layer, we've got some stone tools. Right, so that's interesting. Yeah, as Helen was saying, a hyena den, and as you just said there, a hyena den, but also stone tools. So where were these found? These were found within this 50-centimetre sub-square over here. Okay, so this is a bit lower down this square we've got, right? Yeah, but most importantly, they were in the, this beautiful intact cave earth.

• 46:16Speaker 00

  So it's, it's not been disturbed by later burrowing or, or casual digging. So we've, we've got that information to tie that in with the bone. So this is, this is in situ soil kind of thing? So do we think that those tools have been there since they were maybe washed down here tens of thousands of years ago? That's, that's most likely. We don't know exactly where they've originated, when they were made, but it appears that they've came down to this part of the cave, whether it's through water disturbance and, and the sediments moving down from further up near the entrance. But yeah, they've been here for tens of thousands of years.

• 47:01Speaker 00

  Gosh. So talk us through how you found those tools. So they were quite a surprise, really. We, we were, although we hoped for, to find stone tools in this part of the cave, they're so rare. I mean, there, there haven't been any, any stone tools found in this cave since the, the Talking Natural History Society digs about, about 90-plus years ago. Wow. And to find it in such a small trench is very lucky. So they were, they were a bit of a surprise when we found them. Puts well for the future as well, doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, how, how much more of this do you aim to uncover? How much more? Because at the moment, it's about a foot and a half, maybe two foot deep at the moment? Yeah, perhaps 40 centimetres. 40 centimetres? I mean, how much more do you, do you hope to unearth over the coming, coming weeks?

• 47:46Speaker 00

  So we probably won't go much deeper than that, because we're sort of running out of time now. But we hope to take these further sub-squares down, because they're, they're not as deep. But there's still quite a lot of sediment left, which is in the intact cave earth that we've got high potential to find more stone tools. Because on this, so I'm just imagining now, so in the square, it's kind of like a quadrant, isn't it? Yeah. You've got one, one quarter of it, which is right down 40 centimetres, the next quarter, which is that, that cliff coastal erosion, you've got the nice sediment, and then that's burrowing, that disturbed soil. Yeah, so we've, we've got still a good, a good amount of nice intact sediment to, to remove and... Two quadrants worth kind of thing, yeah. Yeah. Wow. Gosh, well, it sounds like you've still got lots.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  And the last thing I've got to ask, because I also love, everything's smaller here, isn't it? Yeah. A smaller trowel, you've got a, a little, an even smaller tool to kind of fine-tune the edges as well, toothpick? Yeah, so, so where we find bone or stone tools, we immediately change to digging with wooden or plastic tools to prevent damage to them. So when you, so when you start noticing a bone, that's when it goes from trowel to one of those? Yeah. And then is it just seeing if there might be another one underneath, or just... Yeah, just clearing around them very gently. Right. Because we also, we take measurements for the, the way that the bones are, are sitting within that sediment.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  So we measure the, the compass bearing and the inclination of the angle, which tells us perhaps if there's a, a trend in directions of these things, how the, the sediment that they're laid down in got there. Got there. And then you've got these, these flags as well. Are these indicating where you might have found more little artefacts coming out of the ground? Yeah, the, the small flags indicate where we've got small finds, whether they're bone or tiny bits of teeth or stone tools. And we, we use that to put a unique indicator number on, so we can tie it into the archive and we record exactly where they've come from. Right. Any idea what those might be? I can just see a little bit kind of poking from the ground at the moment. You guys still need to take it all in.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  Those two are, they're hard to see at the moment, but they're very small splinters of bone. Splinters of bone, okay. Yeah, perhaps been through a hyena. Now, and John, Helen mentions you're using new techniques with this dig. What techniques are you using? So you see that small 10-centimetre square column that's going down through our, our section over there? Yes, just a little bit extra to the trench, yeah. Yeah, so for any extra information we need from precise areas to tie in with maybe where we've found a, a stone tool or bone, or changes in, in the, the sediments, we've taken this column down through for micro morphology, which gives us a better idea of slight changes

• 50:39Speaker 00

  that you might not be able to see by eye, but in the lab condition, of how the sediments may have been in place, which... Tells us how our finds have gotten to this point in the cave. And also from that column, we've taken very small samples for DNA. So from within the sediments, we'll be able to tell perhaps what different animals we've got in there that we can't see within the the large pieces of bone. And maybe if we've even got the the makers of our stone tools. When you mean DNA and stuff which isn't like material. But is that looking for traces of things like urine and that in the soil that has survived?

• 51:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, or maybe even just very, very tiny particles of bone. Right, okay, right. So there could be animal and human DNA in there that you can't see with the naked eye, that you can see lab research from from that little extra bit of the trench. Wow.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  And I can't help but also ask about these high tech lasers that I can see making a crisscross on the edge of the trench. Now, what is this? Yeah, so we use the the laser level there for getting our our spit depths. So you know, I was saying that we dig down in two centimeter spits to get our our depth resolution. With the laser, we just get a a perfect horizontal level surface that we can tie into our archive. And again, with the the Total Station, which is that funny device on the tripod in the corner. Making those beeping sounds. Makes a beep, yeah. It just likes to let us know it's still here. We can measure in all our our small finds, our boundaries between our layers

• 52:20Speaker 00

  with that machine to the the nearest couple of millimeters. So it's very, very precise. And then they can all be put on a computer and then looking at it and they can. Is it, could they was make 3D model of the trenches? Yeah, yeah, we have been using photogrammetry and to tie in with all our our measurements. And that gives us a complete 3D model of the the surfaces of the cave and where things have been found. So you're not only going to be able to know where exactly every artifact, big and small, was found in this particular trench. Not only are you going to be exploring DNA remnants in the sediment, animal and human. Not only are you then also going to be looking at whether the sediment was placed down here through flooding or how it ended up.

• 53:04Speaker 00

  You're also going to be able to create these amazing models to get a sense of, you know, this this whole area itself. You're going to have so much material for the even just for this one small trench. Yeah, it's a huge difference between our modern techniques and the earlier excavations where they've removed tons and tons of sediment. We we need to remove very minimal amounts. Well, John, you've got me convinced the small trenches are better than the bigger trenches. And it looks like you've still got lots more to do, so I'll leave you to it. Thank you.

• 53:38Speaker 00

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• 54:54Speaker 00

  John's explanation of the excavation process really underscores just how painstaking this work is. Each layer of sediment has to be carefully recorded, measured, washed and sieved to ensure that not even the smallest piece of bone is missed. It's a level of care that opens up incredible possibilities for what might still be hidden beneath the cave floor. After my archaeology lesson with John, I spoke to Helen once again about what the team hopes to uncover over the next five years of the project. Helen, it sounds so exciting already, even in that one small area, what you're already finding. What else do you hope to find in the in the last couple of weeks of this dig?

• 55:38Speaker 03

  So we're going to concentrate down here in the South Saddle Port for the rest of the season. And so we've got more to go, more to go through in the in our small square. We might come back to the South Saddle Port in future to extend the trench and to look over some of the other squares in this region. But we're hoping to in future seasons be working in a different area of the cave, which we call the North East Gallery.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  Right, so this is just the beginning over here, okay.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  Yes, it is. We're concentrating on two different areas. So we're working down here because this is where Pengelly found the leaf points. But we're also focusing on the North East Gallery, which is very close to the vestibule where the Torquay Natural History Society found the KC4 fossil and these Neanderthal and Upper Paleolithic stone tools. We have recently found evidence for a previously undiscovered entrance.

• 56:23Speaker 00

  Wow, okay.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  Which is very close to the vestibule, which is potentially the source of all of the artifacts and fossils which were found in the vestibule. So John and Rob did a really important excavation about 10 years ago and uncovered a new entrance which has intact sediments in situ. And so we're hoping to go back to the North East Gallery. We're going to be sieving through some of the spoil that was left behind by the Torquay Natural History Society and hopefully finding intact sediments, which may be the source of all of the material in the vestibule.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  So that soil that is still there, waiting to be excavated, waiting to be explored. Now, could you find more early Homo sapien bones and assorted dissemelges right there, right near that new entrance of the cave? That's exciting.

• 57:06Speaker 03

  Yes, potentially. We are, we are excited about the potential. So we have lots of methods we can use now to analyze the bone fragments that we find. So not only the morphologically identifiable fossils, so things which we can recognize as humans, that we have biomolecular techniques which we can use now. So where we can take these teeny tiny bone fragments into the lab, we take a very tiny sample from them and we can tell which species they came from. So we can say this fragment belonged to a hyena, this one belonged to a bear. But it also means we can find those teeny tiny fragments of humans which might have been left behind in the sediment.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  The DNA and so much more, I guess, because this is also a time where the DNA survives as well. So that's that, that's even more exciting, isn't it?

• 57:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're excited. So we know from the previous excavation in the North East Gallery by John and Rob, that sediment was, the sediment did preserve ancient DNA. And so they were able to recover DNA from some of these Ice Age animals. And so that bodes very well for us. And the cave environment's quite stable and it's quite cold. So that's really good for organic preservation and DNA preservation as well. So hopefully we'll be able to use a whole suite of different methods. And again, go for sort of targeted excavations in quite small areas, but be able to get a huge amount of data from them.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  But as we know, those small targeted excavations with all the techniques you guys have, all the analysis, it's a very good way forwards for doing it in this in a space like this.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  Yes, it is, yeah. And Kent's Cavern still has more secrets to reveal, we think.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Secrets to reveal, and that's going to be happening over the following years.

• 58:34Speaker 03

  Yes, so over the next four or five years.

• 58:36Speaker 00

  Well, hopefully we can come back and hear how you guys have been doing.

• 58:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, that would be great. We look forward to it.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  Brilliant. Just goes to me say Helen and John, thank you so much for letting us come down here today.

• 58:45Speaker 03

  No, thanks for coming.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Well, there you go. There was Dr Helen Foulas from the University of Bristol and John Bolton walking us through the amazing work going on at Kent's Cavern, helping us understand what life might have been like for Britain's earliest modern humans, the first Homo sapiens. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Now, if you want to learn more about humans and animals in Ice Age Britain, then do go and check out our previous episodes. We've done one on Britain's first dog, evidence from almost 15,000 years ago in Goff's Cave, Cheddar Gorge. And we've also done an episode about excavations that have been going on in recent years at Wogan Cavern beneath Pembroke Castle, a really exciting dig with Dr Rob Dennis and his team.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  And that episode where we were also there on location is called Ice Age Britain: Finding the First Homo sapiens. We'll put links to both of those episodes in the show notes. You can also become an Ancient subscriber to get ad free listening, early access and fortnightly subscriber episodes. Look out this Friday for the first installment in our epic new series, What If? Where I'll be joined by Friends of the Show to war game some of ancient history's most enticing counterfactuals. To listen, sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe or subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Patreon.

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