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Documentary, Horizon - First Britons -HD 720p
Horizon - First Britons" is a BBC documentary that challenges the traditional view of early Britons as solely a brutal, hand-to-mouth hunter-gatherer society. Instead, it presents new archaeological and scientific evidence suggesting they were hardy, sophisticated people who adapted to extreme climate change and a devastating tsunami. The film explores new findings from sites like Blick Mead and research from projects like the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB).
A new portrait of early Britons: The documentary argues that evidence suggests a more complex and resilient culture than previously understood.
Evidence from new technologies: New technology allows scientists to reconstruct landscapes from the past, analyze ancient DNA from the seabed to link hunter-gatherer groups, and chemically analyze bones to determine their origins.
Key discoveries:
Excavations at Happisburgh have provided evidence of some of the oldest human occupation in Britain.
The site of Blick Mead shows evidence of a sophisticated society from the time of Stonehenge's construction, where hunter-gatherers lived for a significant period.
Research indicates at least 10 separate waves of human occupation, with groups being driven out and then returning due to extreme environmental changes.
Impact of the farming revolution: The film explores whether the hunter-gatherer way of life managed to survive beyond the arrival of farming, contrary to historical assumptions.
#First Britons #Documentary #Horizon
Horizon - First Britons" is a BBC documentary that challenges the traditional view of early Britons as solely a brutal, hand-to-mouth hunter-gatherer society. Instead, it presents new archaeological and scientific evidence suggesting they were hardy, sophisticated people who adapted to extreme climate change and a devastating tsunami. The film explores new findings from sites like Blick Mead and research from projects like the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB).
A new portrait of early Britons: The documentary argues that evidence suggests a more complex and resilient culture than previously understood.
Evidence from new technologies: New technology allows scientists to reconstruct landscapes from the past, analyze ancient DNA from the seabed to link hunter-gatherer groups, and chemically analyze bones to determine their origins.
Key discoveries:
Excavations at Happisburgh have provided evidence of some of the oldest human occupation in Britain.
The site of Blick Mead shows evidence of a sophisticated society from the time of Stonehenge's construction, where hunter-gatherers lived for a significant period.
Research indicates at least 10 separate waves of human occupation, with groups being driven out and then returning due to extreme environmental changes.
Impact of the farming revolution: The film explores whether the hunter-gatherer way of life managed to survive beyond the arrival of farming, contrary to historical assumptions.
#First Britons #Documentary #Horizon
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LearningTranscript
00:00Historians and archaeologists have long thought that the story of the earliest Britons was lost
00:12to the mists of time. The Stone Age settlers of ancient Britain had always been thought of
00:18as simple folk living a brutal hand-to-mouth existence, an itinerant people leaving almost
00:25no trace of their nomadic existence. But now, evidence is emerging that turns those assumptions
00:32upside down. Traditionally, the view of the hunter-gatherers has been that they've really
00:38just been sort of running through the landscape chasing after the latest big animal. But in fact
00:43what we have here is something much more complicated. Archaeological sites all over the UK and Northern
00:50Europe are producing evidence that paints these people in a very different light.
00:55It's become clear over time that people are thinking ahead and planning for the future.
01:00And that is really quite a sophisticated way to interact with the environment.
01:05And scientific technologies are bringing prehistory into sharp focus in a way unimaginable just
01:10a few decades ago.
01:12We produced a life story, a life history of what they were eating and what the climate
01:18was like. We could reach back into the past and reconstruct their childhoods.
01:24But perhaps the most surprising of all is a discovery in an ancient cave that completely confounds
01:30our preconceptions about who our ancestors actually were.
01:33When we got the isotope analysis results, our whole picture that we had before just crumbled
01:40in a second.
01:42Thanks to science, we now have an increasingly clear picture of prehistory and the sophisticated
01:49people who were the first Britons.
01:52For hundreds of years it's been thought that the people who erected Britain's ancient monuments
02:09like Stonehenge also founded its first civilization.
02:15It's an understandable assumption.
02:17These structures are, on the face of it, the earliest obvious record that anybody lived
02:21in Britain at all.
02:24But to understand what came before, you first have to realise that what is now Britain was
02:28then something else entirely.
02:37And to understand the people who first lived here, it's necessary to go to extraordinary
02:41lengths to find traces of their existence.
02:50Because the Britain they knew is often buried deep underground, or even under the sea.
03:00Several fathoms below the murky waters of the Solent lies an archaeological site like no
03:06other.
03:07A place that holds intriguing clues as to who the first Britons really were.
03:12Clues being investigated by Professor Vince Gaffney, an expert in submerged prehistoric landscapes.
03:18Here, about 11 metres below us, is a site which very few people know about and which is probably
03:27one of the most important in Britain, if not Europe.
03:33Since the end of the Ice Age, the sea has risen 120 metres, we've lost a stunning amount
03:40of the land surface of Europe.
03:42So if we want to find out about the societies, even on mainland Britain, we have to understand
03:49what's happening on the lands that have been lost to the sea.
03:53Because they probably were the heartland of the population at that time.
04:00Most of this underwater landscape can be found intact at Boldner Cliff, just off the Isle
04:05of Wight, where the ancient soil preserved under the silt and sand of the seabed is exactly
04:10as it was when hunter-gatherers walked across it 8,000 years ago.
04:15The extraordinary levels of preservation are possible because of the anaerobic or oxygen-free
04:21environment that exists in the mud under the sea.
04:25Down here, artefacts that would have rotted away on land are held in perfect condition
04:30in their silty time capsule.
04:32If you dug a contemporary site on land, the chances are you'd largely find stone artefacts,
04:40bone, the things that are durable and survive over time.
04:44Over this huge period of time, organics decay.
04:49On this site, the organics are preserved deep beneath the sea.
04:56Organic materials such as timber, string and even foods like hazelnuts have been pulled from
05:02the murk, surviving here in a way they couldn't possibly on land.
05:07But most importantly, so does DNA.
05:18In 2013, the Boldner Cliff team decided to analyse part of the ancient landscape to see
05:23what DNA preserved within it might tell them.
05:27Carefully sealed against contamination, the precious cargo was brought to the surface for
05:31analysis in the lab.
05:38The first results offered clues as to the nature of the environment that the hunter-gatherer
05:44clans had known 8,000 years ago, some 3,000 years before Stonehenge.
05:50There was a mixed woodland environment, oak, there was grasses.
05:55That is pretty much what you'd expect for a site of this period.
06:00But hidden in the sample were traces of something that the team weren't expecting.
06:05Evidence of something astounding.
06:07What did surprise us was evidence for wheat.
06:12By any standards, it shouldn't have been there.
06:17It shouldn't have been there because wheat is evidence of agriculture.
06:24And even the most conservative estimates place the introduction of farming in Britain some
06:292,000 years later.
06:31So the presence of wheat in the ancient landscapes beneath the Solent needs an explanation.
06:36It's almost certainly being imported, but it has to be coming from some distance.
06:47The nearest farming groups at 6,000 were potentially hundreds of miles away.
06:52However it actually arrives, it does give strong suggestions that Britain is not an isolated place.
06:59It's part of very complex networks which must have stretched a considerable way across continental Europe.
07:07And if that's the case, we have to start rethinking about how we imagine groups which we call simple.
07:14It's only occasionally an archaeologist find something that you think may be a complete game changer.
07:24The work at Buldner is up there at the top.
07:28It's an exceptional event to find something that really does challenge the way you think about an archaeological period fundamentally.
07:39This startling revelation from the deep describes a sophistication in our early ancestors that some archaeologists had not thought possible.
07:49It demands a comprehensive re-examination of who these people were, where they came from, and what impact they had on our early history.
07:58Their story starts at the end of the last ice age.
08:05As Britain woke from its long hibernation, the thick ice sheet that covered most of the north of the country started to melt.
08:14Further south, the thaw had begun in earnest.
08:18The recently uninhabitable polar desert now sprang to life.
08:24The sea levels, though rising, were far below where they are today, and Britain was not yet an island, simply a continuation of what is now France and the Netherlands.
08:39For hunter-gatherers from the east, new opportunities were opening up in Doggerland, a vast plain lying under what is now the North Sea.
08:49Archaeologist Hans Peters spends his time investigating this lost prehistoric world.
08:5615,000 years ago, temperatures would really rise quickly and permitted the development of vegetation.
09:07And then we really start to see a completely different landscape.
09:12You have an undulating landscape with rivers running through it, with lots of lakes that form because of the melting ice.
09:24As the world continued to warm, life flourished.
09:31Permafrost gave way to prairies and scrublands.
09:34Those are environments which become particularly attractive to lots of animals.
09:43The moment we've got animals in the landscape, we can also expect humans to be there.
09:52This period of history is called the Mesolithic, the Middle Stone Age.
09:59Hans has found unexpected clues about the Mesolithic people who lived in the lost world of Doggerland.
10:05Mesolithic people may use of a huge variety of materials.
10:11This is a bone harpoon of which we find quite a number these last years.
10:18And these are cut out of a piece of bone, a splinter of bone, which is shaped to a point and then foreseen with a couple of incisions of a small number of barbs.
10:33But there's also other tools like, for instance here, a fragment of a chisel made out of red deer antler.
10:42And even some ornaments where we have here a very small bead made out of a bird's bone.
10:53So finds like these tell us that these Mesolithic people used materials to produce tools, but also to make other objects out of it.
11:07Which were just there to maybe to show somebody's status of just for dressing up.
11:15Because people dressed up maybe just as we did.
11:25It's a far cry from the traditional view of the pre-farming people of the Mesolithic.
11:30A no frills, hand-to-mouth existence with no time for anything except feeding themselves.
11:36Here is evidence of a culture that made jewellery, that traded and manufactured as well as hunted.
11:44These people lived in Doggerland for 6,000 years.
11:48And as the ice receded further, they also made their way north and west into the new wooded hunting grounds of what would eventually become Britain.
11:57Once here, they set about demonstrating once again that they were far more than simple hunter-gatherers.
12:05It's a great idea.
12:07It's a great idea.
12:08It's a great idea.
12:09It's a great idea.
12:10It's a great idea.
12:11It's a great idea.
12:12Jim Innes is an environmental archaeologist.
12:28It's his job to work out how landscapes change over time.
12:3310,000 years ago, when the Mesolithic people arrived here, this bleak moor was dense woodland.
12:42Now, the trees are long gone, cleared so the story goes by the first farmers 6,000 years later.
12:50But Jim has discovered evidence of a different story, deep under the surface.
13:00We've got various layers here.
13:02We've got layers of peat, which run up to the surface.
13:07We've got inorganic layers that are composed of clay or silt, but then a very black, couple of centimeters thick deposit that's almost composed entirely of charcoal.
13:16The soil core is a way of looking back in time. The deeper you go, the further back you're looking. Jim's unexpected charcoal layer comes from a landscape that has lain undisturbed for more than 7,000 years.
13:31It is evidence of a Mesolithic fire.
13:35It could be from a natural fire, this charcoal. It depends on the intensity and the scale of the fire.
13:40The fact that it's so thick and composed almost entirely of charcoal suggests that you're dealing with really quite an intense event.
13:46An event like this, however intense, would, by itself, be evidence of nothing more than a fire that happened a long time ago.
13:58But Jim has discovered more than 20 areas across the moors where charcoal layers of the same period are also found.
14:05Such a large number of separate fires are unlikely to be coincidence.
14:10Jim is hoping that his sediment cores might produce further clues to help solve the mystery of the Mesolithic fires.
14:22Taking the sediment core really is just the first step.
14:25We take the sediment because it contains evidence that now allows us to reconstruct what happened in the past.
14:31It'll contain macrofossil remains that tell you what was growing on the bog itself, but more importantly, it contains pollen.
14:38The ancient pollen grains allow Jim to identify the long dead plants that once flourished in the landscape on which our forebears once walked.
14:53And the species of plants the pollen came from allows Jim to paint a detailed picture of the kind of landscape that existed after the fire sprang up, clearing small areas of woodland as they burned.
15:05For example, the pollen of melampyrum, cow wheat, is a good indicator of recently burned woodland.
15:12As a member of a field layer, melampyrum is very tolerant to burning and springs back very quickly.
15:19They will be supplanted by taller plants, things like heather, also perhaps things like bracken, that's a bracken spore.
15:26Jim argues that far from being natural phenomena, the mysterious Mesolithic fires on the moors were set on purpose, an intriguing possibility with important ramifications.
15:41But primarily, if you cause a clearing using fire, you do attract animals to that new clearing, because you get a sudden increase in the amount of grazing and browsing that's available, and also you can predict where the animals are going to be, so it's much easier perhaps to hunt them.
16:00And as time goes by, of course, new types of plants will come into the clearing, and these will produce nuts and berries, and a lot of the vegetable foods would be good for humans to eat, just the same as animals.
16:15If Jim is right about the Mesolithic fire starters, he'll have provided yet more evidence that the hunter-gatherer clans must have been much more complex and organised than anyone previously thought.
16:27And I think it does mean that people are thinking ahead in terms of a few generations perhaps, not just of a few years, and planning for the future.
16:38And that is really quite a sophisticated way to interact with the environment.
16:45Our ancient ancestors were anything but the passive inhabitants of the landscape, as was once thought.
16:51These were a sophisticated people who were able to manipulate their environment to benefit themselves.
16:57This, in a sense, is a foretaste of farming, 6,000 years before it was thought to appear here.
17:10Other long-held assumptions about the people of the Mid-Stone Age are also being reappraised.
17:15Not far from Stonehenge is a site called Blick Mead.
17:22In an area already famed for its mythical significance, Blick Mead is the location of an ancient spring with some magical properties of its own.
17:31I'm holding a flint nodule. There are lots of them all along the foreshore of this shallow edge of the spring.
17:42Now, look at this. There's a wonderful contrast between these two colours.
17:46Like this one, this flint nodule, when it was in the water, was a type of rusty red. It had that staining.
17:55But it's been taken out of the water for a couple of days and it has turned into this rather wonderful magenta pink.
18:02Archaeologist David Jakes has been investigating this area for 10 years.
18:11He feels that what we now understand to be the work of an algae called Hildenbrandia would have been a big draw for the people of the Mesolithic.
18:19People here have a colour range of sort of browns and greens and reds and whites and blacks and rather like the type of range that we see behind us.
18:33This transformative process, seen by us in just scientific terms, would have been seen by Mesolithic people as I think something quite magical.
18:42Whatever the Mesolithic people might have thought about the exotic pink stones, the spring itself might have provided other more practical reasons for hunters to gather here.
18:54The spring behind me is at a constant temperature between about 10 and 14 centigrade.
19:01And that's really significant because that means that we get extended growing seasons here.
19:06So you get vegetation coming in earlier and persisting later than in other places.
19:12And that's very important, you see, for animal grazing.
19:16And hunter-gatherers with good hunting strategies would have probably set situations up where they could take some of these animals down very near to where I am now.
19:25And, of course, that involves a type of proto-animal husbandry.
19:29It's a type of behaviour that later on looks very Neolithic.
19:31That sort of assertion demands evidence, but David and his team feel they have unearthed more than enough from the ground around here to support that and other new ideas about the Stone Age.
19:44Now, Blickmead is really important because, as a rule, people see the Mesolithic as having a really lightest footprint on prehistory.
19:57Here at Blickmead, we're getting an enormous array of artefacts, 32,000 pieces of work flint, over 1,000 pieces of animal bone, and the most amount of animal bone found in Great Britain from the period.
20:10Really revealing into the ways people are eating and thinking and what they're doing.
20:21These artefacts have allowed David and his team to understand Mesolithic daily life in astonishing detail.
20:27We've got tool types that cover activities, from piercing clothing to scraping animal skin, as well as the sort of typical hunter's kit that you see on many other Mesolithic sites.
20:40And the earth around the Blickmead spring holds evidence of hunting on a near industrial scale.
20:47We're finding that 61% of our bone assemblage comes from aurochs.
20:54And these are the most powerful animal in the landscape.
20:59We're talking twice the size of a modern cow, at least.
21:02We're talking a real heavy weight. Food here for at least 100 people, if you can get one down.
21:09Very hard to hunt. People have to be super bright and tactical and strategic.
21:13So they're taking every natural advantage they can get from landscapes like this to trap an animal and perhaps corral it into the water and kill it there.
21:21David finds the evidence for the surprising idea that the Mesolithic hunters may have routinely used this area to attract and snare large animals compelling.
21:37And on a site near the Blickmead spring head, his team has recently unearthed its most exciting discovery yet.
21:43Well, what we certainly have found is a man-made feature.
21:48We only have part of it actually against the edge of the trench here.
21:53The rest is going underneath.
21:55It is very exciting. We do certainly have the potential for the house.
22:02It's a thrilling moment for everybody.
22:04We've moved from the known in the Blickmead spring basin to the unknown.
22:08It's a serious piece of work.
22:09I mean, there's almost a type of revetment stone going down the side of it.
22:14By the look of the depth, I think we have to imagine that that would be, if it is a house, something that's been used long term.
22:22This appears to show a degree of permanence.
22:25A highly significant place in the lives of the Mesolithic people.
22:29Again, flying in the face of the conventional view of our ancient ancestors.
22:33Traditionally, the view of the hunter-gatherer has been that they've really just been sort of running through the landscape, chasing after the latest big animal.
22:42I mean, it does look much more like we're dealing with some type of semi-permanent settlement here.
22:47Although the magic pink stones from the Blickmead spring may well have drawn our Stone Age ancestors here, the reasons they stayed were probably far more practical, revealing yet again a level of sophistication previously not thought to appear until much later in history.
23:13Blickmead provides a really important reappraisal of Mesolithic community and culture.
23:21Certainly in this area, we can't talk any more about small dispersed groups and hunters marauding over the landscape.
23:29We have got families here, we've got extended networks, we've got people coming in from all over Britain.
23:37This isn't just a one-off visiting stage in post. This place has got a great deal of evidence for people being here again and again and again.
23:49The Mesolithic people that inhabited this land were clearly intelligent and adaptable, and evidence is mounting that shows them to have been a people who were active manipulators of the world around them, rather than a group who simply made the best of what they could find.
24:06Just off what is now the coast of South Wales is more evidence of Mesolithic adaptability.
24:24Martin Bell and his team are preparing to venture out across the mudflats to investigate a site that takes us closer than ever before to our ancient ancestors.
24:40It's a really exceptional site because it's waterlogged.
24:44It's a really exceptional site because it's waterlogged and that means that we've got a huge range of biological evidence.
24:49Pollen and beetles and bones and then the evidence of the sediments themselves and the ancient woodland.
24:55The sites are just revealed low tide on a spring tide, so we just have about an hour and a half down there in the bed of the estuary to make our discoveries and record the evidence and then the sea comes back in and covers the whole thing up.
25:14This place, like Doggerland to the east, used to be dry land. Here, as the tide ebbs, evidence of that past is spectacularly revealed.
25:26It started off with an oak woodland environment, great big tall climax woodland trees, and the first settlement here was under those conditions.
25:37And then as sea level rose, that woodland was drowned and the oak woodland gave way to a reed swamp, and still people visited the site probably at rather drier times of the year.
25:52And then after a relatively short period, less than a century I think, that reed swamp was covered by continuing sea level rise and you got the development of a salt marsh environment.
26:07Preserved in the sediment are tangible traces of the individual people who used to hunt and live here.
26:14Martin has discovered nothing less than Mesolithic footprints.
26:21We've got a footprint here with the heel, the arch of the foot and then broadening out here to the toes.
26:28Judging by the size, we think that it's probably somebody aged about ten perhaps.
26:39They may not look like much, but by analysing these remains the team have concluded that this was a vibrant and often visited place.
26:46And Martin has unearthed evidence of human habitation here in all its phases of descent into the sea, from forest to salt marsh.
26:54We've tended to see them as the sort of creatures of their environment, very much subject to the huge environmental changes of sea level and so on.
27:12Whereas I think what this evidence is beginning to show us is how well adapted they were to this environment.
27:20They were very much in touch with a landscape undergoing constant changes.
27:25But before these hardy, canny people could become the first Britons, they would have to endure a period of sudden and dramatic climate change that many would not survive.
27:38Cataclysmic events that would change the face of Northern Europe forever.
27:59Evidence of this can be found under the Yorkshire Dales in one of Britain's longest cave systems.
28:04It's here that Phil Hopley comes to study the Stone Age climate in the stalagmites of the White Scar Cave.
28:18We think that in this cave, these stalagmites have been growing continuously for about 11,000 years, since the end of the last ice age.
28:37Stalagmites are created by rainwater percolating through the roof of a limestone cave and dripping to the floor below.
28:47In the constant environment of the cave, the calcium carbonate from the rock dissolved into the water recrystallises, forming the otherworldly columns.
28:58In analysing the detailed chemical make-up of these mineral deposits, climate scientists can look back in time.
29:05In some ways we can view stalagmites as thermometers that tell us about the temperature in the past.
29:12The chemistry will tell us about a combination of the amount of rainfall and of the temperature in the cave at the time that the stalagmite was forming.
29:21And this is a cut section of the stalagmite that comes from just where we are sitting now.
29:30When we looked throughout the whole sample in detail, we saw that the chemistry that reflect climate was very constant throughout the whole time.
29:38Except for this centimetre or so, we saw a very different chemical signature.
29:43Preserved inside the stalagmite was evidence of a sudden and dramatic change in the climate.
29:50This showed us that the climate above the cave was a lot cooler than it had been previously and was a lot drier.
29:57The whole average annual temperature decreases by one or two degrees. That's a significant change.
30:04This event lasted about 150 years.
30:128,200 years ago, something happened that would change the landscape forever.
30:18A major event that would not only alter the lives of the people, but would also transform their environment.
30:26A lot of the plants were put under stress. There's evidence that trees struggle to survive.
30:34Perhaps there was less of a predictable environment present for humans to exploit.
30:41The stalagmite evidence showed there was a decrease in temperature that lasted for over a century.
30:47A really rapid change that would have challenged even the hardiest hunter-gatherers.
30:54And it wasn't just Europe's northwest outcrop that was affected by the so-called 8,200-year event.
31:01Not only if we found evidence for the 8,200-year event in the Yorkshire Dales,
31:09it's also clear that it affected much of northwest Europe, including Germany, Austria, and to the north, Greenland.
31:21For evidence as to what caused this dramatic cooling, we need to look to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
31:28During the Ice Age, North America had been covered by an enormous ice sheet two kilometers thick.
31:40It's thought that as the world began to warm, it melted and formed a giant lake,
31:47held in place by a rapidly thinning ice dam.
32:00Then, suddenly, it burst.
32:12Over 163,000 cubic kilometers of water thundered out into the North Atlantic.
32:24An enormous amount of fresh water was released into the North Atlantic.
32:29This was millions of cubic meters of water within a period of just a single year.
32:35And this led to a catastrophic flooding event where sea level across the globe rose by perhaps half a meter or maybe even more.
32:45And for people living in coastal areas, particularly the low-lying regions in the UK,
32:51they would have experienced this as a very marked flooding event that they weren't expecting.
33:00It caused more than regional flooding.
33:03A meter rise in sea level disrupted the world's climate.
33:11Britain is usually bathed in an ocean current called the Gulf Stream.
33:15It brings warm water from the tropics to the fringes of Northwest Europe, providing it with a latitude-defying temperate climate.
33:30Scientists believe the giant flood disrupted the Gulf Stream, plunging the whole North Atlantic region into freezing conditions.
33:38Our ancestors had been battered by rising sea levels, global warming, and plummeting icy temperatures.
33:51And then, just 50 years later, they were to face their toughest trial yet.
33:58For the flood may have led to one more devastating effect.
34:08Dr. Sue Dawson thinks it could be linked to an extraordinary event unique in British history.
34:29She's found an intriguing clue in the Montrose Basin on the east coast of Scotland.
34:43The Montrose Basin here encapsulates the time period of the first settlers,
34:48the time immediately after the Ice Age, when all of these rapid climate changes were happening.
34:53There's one particular geological feature that Sue's come to investigate.
35:05So, at this particular location, this is exactly what we're really interested in.
35:11You can see, at the background here, there's a distinctive band of sediment that's interrupting some darker organic sediments.
35:20And this is exactly the sort of thing that I'd be looking for, something unusual in this stratigraphy,
35:27which would need investigating further.
35:37To find out what this curious layer in the landscape is, and where it came from, Sue needs to analyse the sediment in the lab.
35:45This is a sample from the section that we saw on the coast, and this is the unit that we're particularly interested in.
35:56This unit here is composed of sand, quite a fine sand with some silt in it.
36:04We can see that by eye, we can feel that.
36:06Initially, when we first started to find these sand layers, we thought that they might just be a storm event,
36:20representing a period of storminess in the past.
36:23But we get many storms, and the thing that's unique about this particular sediment is there's just one key sediment in the stratigraphy,
36:34and we don't see that in a storm deposit.
36:36More evidence for this being something other than an ordinary storm blowing sand off the beach emerged when Sue looked further afield.
36:47The same sand layer was cropping up all the way along the Scottish coastline, and even reaching into northern England.
36:53There's one unique sediment deposit here in Shetland.
36:58There's one unique deposit here in Montrose.
37:02And finally, when we come to Fife, we see the same thing again.
37:06We see a clear deposit sandwiched within the peat deposits that make up this area.
37:12One of the things that's really interesting across all of the sites in Scotland is when we look at the ages of this event that appears in the stratigraphy,
37:23what we see is they date to exactly the same time.
37:27So it's something that's happened and been deposited instantaneously.
37:30The team knew they were dealing with something powerful enough to instantaneously deposit a sand layer up to five metres above sea level.
37:50An epic event that stretched for more than 370 miles along the British coastline.
37:58We've thought about what else could cause something like this, what else could come from a coastal environment and impact the land.
38:17A critical piece of the puzzle came from an unlikely place.
38:20Off the coast of Norway, marine geologists found evidence of a massive submarine landslide.
38:29The landslide happened at the same time as the sand deposits from the British coastline, prompting Sue's team to make a controversial connection.
38:36We've linked all of these different sand units and suggested that, you know, it could possibly be a tsunami.
38:47All the evidence seemed to fit.
38:50Constantly rising sea levels and the sudden massive flood from a meltwater lake in North America could well have triggered the landslide in Norway.
38:58And that landslide would have easily triggered a tsunami.
39:05The catastrophic tsunami fatally flooded Doggerland and may have finally put paid to the increasingly tenuous link between Europe and its northwestern outcrop.
39:19This and the continued rising sea level meant that for the first time Britain became a series of islands.
39:39Their inhabitants, the first true Britons.
39:44That, in a sense, is the end of the story of the misunderstood people of the Mesolithic.
39:50For 2,000 years the fledgling island nation flourished.
39:55Though now cut off from the rest of Europe, the hardy adaptable first Britons thrived.
40:01But then, 6,000 years ago, there was a dramatic and permanent change in the way our ancestors lived their lives.
40:14So dramatic, in fact, that it's been given a different historical name.
40:19This was the start of the new stone age in Britain.
40:22The Neolithic.
40:23It was during the Neolithic that pottery emerges.
40:30The time when people built monuments like Stonehenge.
40:33But above all else, it's the point at which people became farmers.
40:37How and why they became farmers is something that's not fully understood.
40:49But archaeologists who study the period think that this was a cultural shift as opposed to an evolutionary or geopolitical one.
40:57In other words, the world simply woke up to a really good idea.
41:01The simple but brilliant realization that if you could control your food supply, you would have an easier life.
41:09The farmers changed everything.
41:12Puny wild grasses became succulent farmed wheat.
41:16And enormous, dangerous wild cattle were exchanged for animals that were altogether easier to deal with.
41:22The idea of farming, the so-called Neolithic revolution, started in the Middle East and swept north and west across Europe.
41:33Eventually reaching the coast of what is now France, before finally coming to Britain.
41:38Then, 6,000 years ago, Britain joined the revolution.
41:43The first Britons wholeheartedly signed up for farming. Its adoption, total and irreversible.
41:52Even where you would think farming would present insurmountable problems of its own, it was still doggedly pursued.
41:59Janet Montgomery has uncovered evidence of exactly that in one of Britain's remotest outposts, the Shetland Islands.
42:135,000 years ago, they were at the frontier of the Neolithic world.
42:18Shetland's very difficult. Today it's difficult to farm there, it's difficult to grow crops.
42:23Most things won't grow there.
42:26So to go to Shetland with the intention of farming seems a very odd and difficult decision to make.
42:35Surviving by farming on Shetland 5,000 years ago was high risk.
42:41Failure could result in death.
42:43So there was very little options if your farming package failed.
42:47It's a long way to go for help and nothing much else other than the marine resources to supplement your diet.
42:56Undeterred, the Neolithic pioneers strove to establish farming on Shetland.
43:03And Janet has found evidence that they were eventually successful.
43:08She's been investigating the contents of a Neolithic burial chamber, or KIST.
43:13Specifically, she's been analysing Neolithic teeth.
43:18Archaeologists love teeth. They are a wonderful archive, basically, of information about the person when that tooth was forming.
43:29They record all sorts of things, the climate, where they were living, what they were eating.
43:34And so we can just take them and reach back into the past and reconstruct their lives.
43:40Yeah, they're wonderful.
43:41Teeth preserve evidence of whether a person's been eating a marine, terrestrial or freshwater diet.
43:49Well, everything you eat and drink are used to construct your body.
43:53And if we can measure those and find some way that they reflect some aspect of diet,
44:00then we can reconstruct what people were eating, how their diets changed seasonally maybe over several years.
44:07Janet and her team were able to read the chemical timeline preserved in the Neolithic dental record.
44:14It showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that these people in the burial KIST were farmers.
44:20But Janet discovered that the teeth also held a mystery.
44:25What we found was really surprising because there were several things.
44:31One, that the different people in the KIST clearly were doing different things.
44:36So some people were consuming terrestrial resources for the whole of their childhood.
44:43Some people had very short-term consumption, so maybe two years when they stopped consuming terrestrial foods and started consuming marine foods and then went back to eating terrestrial foods again.
44:57And when she looked at the teeth of some of the children buried in the KIST, she discovered something else.
45:03What we found there was that in all the children we looked at who had died in childhood,
45:09they were all consuming increased amounts of marine protein just before they died.
45:13Which suggests that this consumption of marine foods was only being done really as a last resort when they couldn't get enough food from terrestrial sources.
45:26For some reason, farming must have been interrupted in some sort of catastrophic way.
45:31A clue as to what that might have been lies in the remains of the Neolithic settlements on Shetland, where a thick layer of sand has been discovered.
45:42Not from a tsunami, but simply blown in from the beaches.
45:49Dry weather, followed by high winds, are known to sometimes deposit large quantities of sand inland.
45:55After they started farming, storm sands came in and would have completely inundated the fields.
46:04And obviously it's very difficult to remove several feet of sands, even today, but it would have been almost impossible in the Neolithic.
46:10You can imagine they would have been producing these fields, fertilising them, tending them, and then suddenly they've gone.
46:17They've been completely covered up with sand.
46:18And then, you know, you can't grow anything.
46:21And it would take a couple of years, perhaps, to start again and produce the fields to grow crops.
46:29The fact that numbers of children were discovered in the burial kist on Shetland may suggest that surviving by foraging was not sustainable.
46:38The record shows, after all, that people returned to farming as soon as they could.
46:43They were farming, farming failed, they had to do something else for two years, and then they went back and carried on farming.
46:53It looks very much like they were only doing that as a last resort, really, when farming failed and they had no other option but to eat marine foods.
47:02The idea of farming was too compelling to abandon. If the move from hunter-gatherer to farmer was a cultural one, it was complete.
47:16Even in the hostile environment of the Shetlands, farming was favoured over the old way of doing things.
47:21I don't know why, in the early Neolithic, it suddenly became the thing to do, but obviously there must have been some advantage to it because it spread right across Europe.
47:33The conventional view of how the transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic happened is that it was the idea of farming that was wholly beguiling.
47:44Indeed, the archaeological record shows that its take-up seems to have been dramatically quick and addictive.
47:53But intriguing questions remain. Why, for example, if wheat was being traded with the Mesolithic Britons of Baldner Cliff, didn't they simply plant it and farm it themselves?
48:03It's almost as though farming, when it arrived, was less a winning of hearts and minds and more a hostile takeover.
48:18On an unprepossessing hillside in western Germany is the entrance to a cave that contains startling new evidence that seems to support the idea that farming wasn't quite as popular with the hunter-gatherers as was once thought.
48:31Archaeologists have been coming here since 2004, when it was found to be the site of an ancient burial ground.
48:46You can hardly move in here. Just imagine that you are in here with several people and also carrying a body with you is hard to imagine.
49:02Paleo geneticist Ruth Bologino has used the raw material from this site in her research.
49:08It's quite amazing to see how the smallest places that don't look very impressive from the outside can hide and bear such a precious treasure as this cave does.
49:20So this is the place of the current excavation. For example, you can see a rib bone sticking out of the soil right here.
49:27Ruth is on the hunt for evidence hidden in the physical remains of the people buried here.
49:34Caves are very important for polygenetics because we have a temperature of 8 degrees in here all year round, so these are perfect conditions for good DNA preservation.
49:44Ruth uses the bones in this cave to trace what happened to the Mesolithic people in this area when farming arrived.
49:56So for example, I have a tibia here, which is a shin bone, and this is a nice example for a completely preserved adult bone, which is very rare in this cave because we usually have fragmented bones.
50:11This is one of the few bones that is very well preserved and not broken.
50:15I've got a vertebrae here from a child that is a bit fragile but nevertheless very well preserved.
50:25And, yeah, so you can see we've got all kinds of ages inside the cave.
50:33Back in the lab, Ruth can analyse the bones to discover a wealth of information about the people buried in the cave.
50:39Bones are what we would call a bio-archive and they contain a lot of information and, for example, we can determine the age of the bone with radiocarbon dating.
50:53Another analysis we would potentially do is isotope analysis and isotopes tell you a lot about the diet of the people and especially what they were eating over the last years before they died.
51:06Radiocarbon dating showed that the bones were from long after the Neolithic farming revolution, when it was thought the hunter-gatherer culture had been consigned to history.
51:18But the DNA revealed that half of the bones were unmistakably those of hunter-gatherers.
51:23From the DNA we could derive that we have got two groups here, the hunter-gatherers and the farmers, that shared the same burial place and so apparently they lived together and we could assume that we finally found this mixed population here.
51:38Ruth thought that she had found evidence of the two groups co-existing and assumed that both would be farming.
51:45The DNA from the burial chamber seemed to support the idea of co-existence, but the isotope analysis told a different story and contradicted the scientific paper she was about to publish.
51:59I already had a manuscript at hand that was just finished that was presenting the first case that we actually could show that these two cultures had mixed at the end of the Neolithic.
52:15And when we got the isotope analysis results, I just thought immediately I had to throw the manuscript away because our Neolithic group that was supposed to be the mixed population split up in two different groups.
52:32And one group was, as you would expect, living a farmer's life and mainly eating domesticated animals.
52:40And the surprise group had much more enriched values of nitrogen isotopes and that is a clear sign for a fresh water diet.
52:54So our whole picture that we had before just crumbled in a second.
53:00Ruth had discovered that there were people who farmed living alongside people who didn't.
53:05But it was the opposite of what she'd originally proposed.
53:09Perhaps the idea of agriculture was not so popular after all.
53:13Yeah, first I was a bit upset because it meant I had to throw away my manuscript.
53:18But then I thought that this is a very exciting find and something that we would not expect at all.
53:25And that was kind of against all the knowledge we had from the archaeological research.
53:35From the data we got, from the DNA and the isotope data we got, it was clear that we have two different societies here.
53:43But apparently they had different lifestyles and they did not marry each other.
53:47But further DNA analysis of the bones showed that that conclusion wasn't quite right either.
53:55So within the farming group we found three individuals, either themselves married from a hunter-gatherer into the farming society or their ancestors did.
54:05So at some stage we have a few women that did decide to leave their hunter-gatherer community and marry into the farmer's community.
54:18From ethnological data we know that this sometimes happens, that women from a hunter-gatherer background marry into a farming society.
54:28Whereas this cannot be observed or very rarely can be observed the other way around.
54:33Because marrying from a farmer society into a hunter society is usually seen as a social demotion.
54:43Ruth seems to have shown that in Germany at least, the Neolithic revolution was more of a slow burn.
54:50That the hunter-gatherers were not as convinced by agriculture as we'd previously thought.
54:54It seems they valued their culture and community as it was.
54:59The assimilation of immigrants with new ideas was not immediate.
55:12This kind of analysis might eventually shed light on what happened to the first Britons too.
55:17A study is underway investigating the DNA found in the UK's ancient burial grounds.
55:26But whatever that study eventually reveals, David Jakes believes that there is a good deal of evidence that the Mesolithic culture survived into the Neolithic and beyond.
55:35In effect, Stonehenge is built on the Mesolithic.
55:42The foundations to it are in the ditch.
55:45We have bones here that are redolan with Mesolithic meanings.
55:50They're just the sort of bones that we're getting actually in the Blickmead Spring.
55:54Wild deer, wild boar, they're put in strategic places.
55:58So this place is chock-a-block full of Mesolithic meaning and symbolism.
56:06People in the Neolithic would have needed a past just as much as we do.
56:11They wouldn't have wanted a blank slate.
56:13And so stories about ancestors and what they did would have made this place special and vivid.
56:18For David, the Mesolithic people were anything but the transient and irrelevant folk that history often imagines them to be.
56:27On the face of it, it looks like Mesolithic people were wiped out in some way at the advent of farming.
56:33I think it's much more likely that they did what they've been really good at in the past, which we've got very clear evidence for.
56:39They're really good at adapting and they're adapting around a new set of circumstances and situations.
56:50It's hard to imagine Britain as it would have been before cultivation and construction made it what it is today.
56:56But thanks to recent discoveries and modern scientific analysis, it's now far easier to understand the people that first lived on these islands.
57:10Well, I have a lot of respect for them. I think in many ways they're just like us. They're just as intelligent as we are.
57:16And I think their interaction with the landscape was on a very sophisticated level.
57:22What has emerged is an engaging portrait of a people with whom we have more in common than anyone previously thought.
57:30It's clear that they must have been far more complex, that they must have been part of large social webs, which finds like this begin to give us an insight into.
57:42Our ancestors then were a hardy, adaptable people facing and surviving incredible challenges.
57:48If we think how our Mesolithic ancestors coped with these widespread changes of rising sea levels, huge tsunamis, devastating communities.
57:59They adapted, they survived.
58:02It seems the people who first inhabited these islands, who hunted, gathered, feasted, made jewelry, traded, managed the landscape and flourished, were far less Stone Age than we once imagined.
58:15They were an ancient but culturally complex people who laid the foundations for the modern age.
58:22They were the first Britons.
58:25Coming up, they rewrote the rules of survival by taking on elephants.
58:35Africa's Lion King's return of the giant killers next on BBC Two, while BBC Four meets the great sage of Chinese history, Confucius genius of the ancient world.
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