- 2 days ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:02Avebury, England. The largest stone circle in the world, 700 years older than Stonehenge.
00:09It's just that scale that really sets it apart from other monuments.
00:13This stone circle is just one part of a huge and strange sacred complex.
00:19It includes one of the largest Stone Age tombs in Great Britain,
00:23and the tallest prehistoric pyramid in all of Europe.
00:285,000 years after they were built, their true purpose remains a mystery.
00:34There's a temptation to think that we know everything there is to know, and we know absolutely nothing.
00:38Now, new discoveries could finally reveal the answers.
00:42There are bigger mysteries still to solve at Avebury than there are at Stonehenge.
00:47Can startling new evidence uncover why the pioneers who built these bizarre structures suddenly disappeared?
00:54To unearth the truth about this mysterious complex of monuments,
01:01we'll uproot their gigantic stones, expose ancient construction techniques,
01:08and blow apart their past to discover the secrets of these incredible Stone Age enigmas.
01:22Around 3000 BC, 300 years before work started on Egypt's pyramids,
01:29strange structures began to appear all over Britain.
01:34They were called henges, circular banks and ditches, and circles of stones or wood.
01:44Nothing like them had been seen here before or since.
01:51The most famous is Stonehenge.
01:54But 20 miles north stands an even more impressive Stone Age megastructure.
02:01Avebury.
02:04It's three times bigger, seven centuries older, and far more mysterious.
02:11Somewhere like Avebury always has surprises.
02:15I don't think we'll ever be able to say, we've solved it.
02:18And I think that's partly because it may never have had a single meaning.
02:25Today, this monument looks very different from how its ancient builders intended.
02:30Some of the stones are missing.
02:33A village sits in the middle, complete with a pub.
02:37But 5,000 years ago, this mysterious stone circle was part of an extraordinary sacred complex that dominated the landscape.
02:48In its prime, this earthen mound soared two stories high, above a 30-foot ditch carved out of the chalk
02:56landscape.
02:59Inside, 98 megalithic stones called sarsens once formed a majestic circular perimeter.
03:11At its heart, two inner circles, each bigger than Stonehenge, surrounding some of the largest stones still standing of any
03:21Neolithic monument.
03:23Why did an ancient population build this here?
03:29And what was it for?
03:34Some people have said it was a fortification.
03:37It's even been suggested that it could have been a place for human sacrifice.
03:42Aaron Watson has studied Stone Age monuments for some three decades.
03:48He believes pioneering technology can reveal the stone's true purpose.
03:53It's not about what you can see, but what you can hear.
03:58Aaron is convinced Avebury's builders carefully placed the stones to reflect sound.
04:05As I'm talking, I can hear the echoes of my voice being reflected from these very broad, flat stone surfaces
04:14around me.
04:16I think what they're trying to do here is create a spectacle against which people may have performed some kind
04:25of ritual or ceremony.
04:28Aaron can locate exactly where these rituals would have taken place to get the most from the stone's acoustic properties.
04:35It's where the largest stones in the entire circle were positioned.
04:41Inside the giant stone ring once stood the northern inner circle.
04:48Soaring upwards at the center, two 50-ton sarsens called the Cove.
04:55Twice as heavy as the stones of Stonehenge, angled at precisely 90 degrees to each other.
05:04In its prime, a third sarsen completed the structure, creating a strange open box-like design.
05:13The arrangement is clearly intentional.
05:17How did the cove manipulate sound for Stone Age rituals?
05:25If you imagine when you're in a room sometimes, you can hear your voice amplified a little bit.
05:31And perhaps that's the effect that was achieved here.
05:35To test his theory, Aaron conducts an impulse response test.
05:40This will compare the strength of a sound made inside the cove with the strength of the same sound made
05:47out in the open.
05:49He places a microphone connected to a digital recorder several feet from the cove.
05:56For the comparison to be valid, Aaron needs to replicate the same short, sharp sound again and again.
06:02A popping balloon is perfect.
06:06What I'm hoping is the balloon burst will reflect off this big stone here and be projected out towards the
06:15microphone position over there.
06:18First, Aaron bursts a balloon inside the cove.
06:24Next, Aaron bursts a balloon in an open part of the site.
06:32He analyzes the results.
06:36The burst in the open reveals that the balloon's sound energy is lost as it shoots off in all directions.
06:43But the balloon burst in the cove channels the sound energy towards Avery's outer stone ring.
06:49You've got this sudden peak. That's the balloon going off.
06:53And then there's a sense of denser concentration of lines here, which is the echoes ricocheting around other features in
07:01the environment here.
07:03The cove's giant sarsens form a Stone Age megaphone, boosting sounds made inside it.
07:11But Aaron believes it's just one component of a highly sophisticated stone sound system.
07:19He thinks the once complete stone circle around the cove created another powerful acoustic effect.
07:26But because stones are missing at Avebury, he can't test the theory here.
07:36Aaron journeys 500 miles north to the remote Scottish island of Orkney.
07:43Around the same age as Avebury, the Ring of Broadgar is a complete 4,500-year-old stone circle.
07:53It's the perfect place to conduct the test.
07:56I'm now standing at what I think is the sweet spot of the acoustics of the Ring of Broadgar.
08:02It's almost exactly the same diameter as the stone circle that surrounded the cove at Avebury.
08:13Aaron's theory is that a complete stone circle focuses sound towards its center and creates eerie echoes.
08:22Avebury's builders may have interpreted these strange sounds as supernatural.
08:28He bursts a balloon in the center of the circle to measure the strength and timing of the sound bouncing
08:34off the stones.
08:39The sound waves from that balloon burst have traveled out across the stone circle, reflected off these flat surfaces all
08:50at the same time, and returned to me, the listener at the center.
08:55Sounds that are made here travel back again in almost perfect unison, they're synchronized.
09:01This is a kind of Neolithic surround sound.
09:06What we might hear as an echo, they might hear as something very much more mysterious or supernatural.
09:13Maybe even these echoes are the voices of ancestors.
09:21Five thousand years ago, people arriving at Avebury would have walked through one of four entrances surrounding the circle.
09:32Some people were permitted inside the cove, where they may have attempted to contact the dead using chanting and drum
09:39rhythms.
09:42The stones reflected the sound within the circle, providing a unique magical experience to only those permitted inside.
09:54Within the cove itself, sounds were concentrated by the stones, making this the most intense experience of the entire monument.
10:06Engineering on this scale required many people coming together to place the mighty stones.
10:11But can experts find evidence of where this huge number of people lived, and what they were really like?
10:20And can DNA extracted from ancient human remains reveal why they suddenly disappeared?
10:40Avebury, England. The largest stone circle in the world.
10:47Constructed five thousand years ago as a ceremonial center.
10:51By a people with sophisticated knowledge of stone and sound engineering.
10:57The huge size of the individual rocks reveals that only a massive workforce could have built it.
11:03It was a huge effort to put up just one of these stones.
11:08This one, we think, probably weighs about 40 tons.
11:11You would need, we think from experiments, probably around 200 people.
11:16You would have had huge communities who were gathering here to put up these stones at any one time.
11:23But archaeologists can't find any evidence of the builders' houses and villages.
11:28So where did they live?
11:30Will finding their homes reveal who they were and why they built Avebury?
11:38Nick Snashall investigates this mystery.
11:41Somewhere out there in the landscape are the places where the people who constructed these sites were living.
11:47When we look at the settlements and the occupation, there are bigger mysteries still to solve at Avebury than there
11:52are at Stonehenge.
11:56To hunt for clues, Nick travels one mile northwest from Avebury to a Stone Age site called Windmill Hill.
12:06Excavations here reveal ancient animal bones and evidence of cereal crops that date to the time of Avebury's construction.
12:15Is this where the builders lived?
12:18It's an incredibly important site, both in terms of what it tells us about the first farmers and in the
12:25history of archaeology in this country.
12:29Early farmers tended to move around, living in temporary camps.
12:33But here at Windmill Hill, there's evidence they built permanent structures, possibly the very first in Britain.
12:42Nick pulls up a map of the area made using satellite LIDAR imaging.
12:48This technology reveals mysterious changes to the landscape in minute detail.
12:53You can see here we have three circuits of ditches with little banks behind them.
13:00And these ditches enclosed as space.
13:04Did the builders of Avebury settle down within these circular trenches?
13:09Nick examines the evidence.
13:12These enclosures seem to have been a gathering place, a neutral space for coming together.
13:17People would have come here in order to maybe meet their marriage partners, to exchange goods.
13:23It's probably not permanent, but it's the closest we seem to come.
13:29These temporary dwellings weren't the year-round homes of the builders who constructed Avebury's sacred monuments.
13:37The search is still on.
13:40But a recent discovery inside Avebury's stone circle might finally solve the mystery about where they lived.
13:49At the center of the southern inner circle once stood the tallest stone in Avebury.
13:55A huge rock named the obelisk, towering 20 feet high.
14:03But archaeologists discovered evidence of a unique feature.
14:07The only known example of a stone square in the British Isles.
14:14But there are even more surprises.
14:17Evidence of wooden foundations.
14:21A Neolithic timber building.
14:25Is this where some of the builders of Avebury lived?
14:32Mark Gillings leads the team that made this discovery.
14:36So I need to go seven meters north and one meter to the east.
14:41He believes the structure was once a home.
14:44But that it was far more significant to the people of Avebury than just a simple house.
14:50That's corner number one.
14:52Mark traces the structure's outline with cones plotted via GPS.
14:57It's a bit like a car sat-nav.
14:59It will tell me when I'm close.
15:02The structure measures 527 square feet.
15:06Easily large enough to accommodate a family.
15:09I think what we've got here is a house and an early Neolithic house at that.
15:15But it's possible this structure was far more than just a simple home.
15:20It could be Avebury's first house.
15:23The people who lived in it could be the site's founders.
15:26This house would have been significant.
15:29Even when the people living in the house had maybe gone, the house itself had fallen into disrepair.
15:33Its position was marked.
15:36The importance of this dwelling to the people of Avebury could explain why it was later enclosed inside a stone
15:43square.
15:44The square surrounding the structure is interesting because it's the first stage in what they did to memorialize the house.
15:52The structure could have been home to a handful of Avebury's earliest builders.
15:57Its discovery reveals a critical insight into how Avebury evolved.
16:04Avebury began as a simple settlement.
16:07The people here cleared dense woodland to create open spaces for farming and building materials for early houses.
16:15One of the first homes to be built at Avebury was surrounded by a stone square.
16:21A sign that it could have held special importance to the founding settlers.
16:26The site was later transformed.
16:29The house at its core replaced by a giant obelisk standing 20 feet tall.
16:35Over the centuries, the Neolithic builders continued to expand Avebury, adding increasingly ambitious stone circles to the landscape.
16:48Mark and his team believe there are other houses still out there waiting to be discovered.
16:54The search goes on.
16:56We look at an area like this, which today is just pasture.
17:00There are quite probably more houses here.
17:02So to find out whether there are more houses, we really need to dig more of Avebury using modern methods
17:07and modern techniques.
17:09Evidence of this wooden house shows that some of Britain's first ever farmers might have lived here.
17:15A tough people who would build a whole ceremonial complex, including this huge tomb.
17:23But this monument comes with a further mystery.
17:27Who removed the skulls from the human remains buried here?
17:32And why did the people of Avebury also build Europe's largest prehistoric pyramid?
17:52A sacred ritual complex of huge monuments built by a pioneering people who settled here 5,000 years ago.
18:04At its center is the largest stone circle in the world.
18:09But one mile away is a structure that's 600 years older.
18:15West Kennet Long Barrow.
18:18This is a purpose-built subterranean complex.
18:21Its walls and ceiling are made from colossal sandstone blocks.
18:26What was it for?
18:28And what does it reveal about Avebury's forefathers?
18:35Can the answers lie in solving the Long Barrow's grisly mystery?
18:43Beneath the earthen mound, a stone corridor stretches 40 feet.
18:51Branching off are five burial chambers, each up to 7 feet tall.
19:00Inside, archaeologists discover the jumbled remains of 46 people.
19:06Men, women, old and young.
19:11But many of the skeletons are incomplete.
19:15Why were some bones taken and others left behind?
19:27It's this tomb's mystery that fascinates archaeologist Josh Pollard.
19:32I think it's just that scale that really sets it apart from other monuments of its kind.
19:38To build a tomb like this, you need to understand how to move stones.
19:42Josh uses a laser distance measurer to investigate.
19:50In many ancient cultures, tombs were sealed forever.
19:53They were private places, for the dead only.
19:571.94 meters.
20:01Pretty wide for a tomb entrance.
20:04Josh thinks this structure's large opening and tall ceiling suggest whoever built it had very different ideas about their burial
20:11places.
20:13This has been built in such a way that it allowed people to actually go inside the tomb.
20:18Probably to actually gather inside the tomb.
20:22Ancestors were regarded as critical in looking after the lives of the living, ensuring the success of crops and animals.
20:29So people aren't putting an effort into building houses for themselves.
20:33What they're doing is putting effort into building stone houses for the dead.
20:38But if the people of Avebury revered their ancestors, why is there evidence of a strange burial practice?
20:46The removal of body parts?
20:50The answer could be locked inside these bones stored at Cambridge University's Duckworth Laboratory.
20:59Trish Byers investigates the skeleton's secrets.
21:06Carbon dating reveals that all those buried at West Kennet died within 30 years of each other.
21:13The evidence suggests that they were a community.
21:16Husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, working together, living together, and dying together at West Kennet.
21:24It's likely the 46 people knew each other.
21:28It's even possible they belonged to a single family or clan.
21:33Could this help explain why many of their skulls were removed from the tomb and never returned?
21:42These may have been actively used in ritual practices.
21:45Skulls are a very potent symbol of our humanity.
21:50Heads have a long history of being moved about among cultures and throughout time.
21:56We've got evidence that bones would have been taken out of monuments like this
22:00and they would have been circulated among the living, particularly skulls.
22:04So the dead would have been around people all the time.
22:11Bodies were laid to rest inside each chamber, one on top of the other.
22:16Exposed to the air, the flesh quickly rotted away, leaving a jumbled pile of bones.
22:22Evidence of feasting outside the tomb shows that the living descendants conducted special ceremonies,
22:29celebrating their ancestors.
22:32Bones may have been regularly removed from the tomb to perform elaborate sacred rituals before returning them.
22:40But some bones never came back to West Kennet and may have been moved to other sacred sites around Avebury
22:47to ensure the dead's continuing connection with the landscape they once knew.
22:55It's likely West Kennet Long Barrow was a vital and integrated part of Avebury.
23:01In this purpose-built ceremonial landscape, it's a house for the dead to complement the stone circle for the living.
23:12But the people here also built another gigantic monument close by.
23:18This is Silbury Hill.
23:20It's the largest prehistoric pyramid in Europe.
23:23It's also Avebury's greatest mystery.
23:27What exactly is it for?
23:30And did the people who built it die in the attempt?
23:44And did the people who built it die in the attempt?
23:46Avebury, England.
23:47The stone age center of spectacular monuments built by ingenious ancient engineers.
23:54Who crafted a sacred landscape dedicated to the worship of the living and the dead.
24:01As well as a gigantic stone circle and an ancient tomb.
24:06They also built the largest prehistoric pyramid in Europe.
24:12Silbury Hill.
24:14It's their greatest triumph.
24:17And their greatest puzzle.
24:19Why did they build it?
24:21And what was it for?
24:24Jim Leary is the latest in a long line of archaeologists on a quest for answers.
24:32Throughout modern history, people have assumed that there must be a burial in the middle of Silbury Hill.
24:39I mean, why else would you construct such a huge, magnificent monument?
24:46Over the years, both treasure hunters and archaeologists have dug into the mound.
24:52They have found nothing.
24:54And parts of the ancient pyramid have started to collapse.
24:58It looks like it will be here forever.
25:00Difficult to believe that only a few years ago, its position was rather more precarious.
25:06And a hole appeared on the summit.
25:08The legacy of centuries of people digging into it, assuming that this is a large burial mound.
25:14An English pyramid, if you like.
25:19It looks like this monster mound will never reveal when or why it was built.
25:26Then, a chance discovery blows the mystery wide open.
25:32In its prime, Silbury Hill was shaped into a spiral from a mound of compacted chalk.
25:39More than 13 stories high.
25:43After centuries of excavations, searching for hidden treasures, 21st century engineers are called in to repair the damage.
25:51Near the top, they make an extraordinary discovery.
25:56Parts of picks made from deer antler, tools the mound's builders left behind.
26:01For the first time, archaeologists can unlock Silbury Hill's mysteries and reveal when and why the people of Avebury Stone
26:10Circle built this huge monument.
26:14These antler picks are crucial because we can date them.
26:19We now know a huge amount about the date of this mound.
26:23When it was constructed, how long it was used for, and when the work on it finished.
26:29The picks date to 2400 BC.
26:34This reveals Silbury Hill was the last Stone Age monument built in the Avebury area.
26:41It's the final masterpiece in a grand ceremonial project, 1500 years in the making.
26:48But why, after centuries building in hard stone, did Avebury's people switch to a completely different material?
26:57Chalk.
27:02Jim believes the answer lies in a cultural shift in Avebury's society.
27:07The stone circle and the tomb were designed, built and finished by elite specialists.
27:15But, centuries later, they decided on a new approach when constructing Silbury Hill.
27:22It would be a project everybody could join in with.
27:27And light, soft chalk was the perfect building material.
27:31Building a mound like this is fundamentally different to moving a great big 100 tons stone.
27:39This is a communal effort.
27:41This is the community bringing basket loads of material and piling it up year on year.
27:47And eventually, we end up with a mound like this.
27:53Shifting Avebury stones to the Henge was a huge logistical and technical challenge.
27:58It took the coordination of hundreds of fit people.
28:03But Silbury Hill may have its roots in a more socially collaborative project.
28:08However big or small, each member of the community could bring their contribution to the growing mound.
28:15Silbury Hill became a social triumph.
28:17A gleaming white chalk pyramid built by the people for the people.
28:23It became a new part of an ancient sacred landscape.
28:26The culmination of a project that started over 1500 years earlier.
28:31And that dominates the landscape to this day.
28:37But crucial mysteries remain unsolved.
28:41If the tomb was a house of the dead.
28:44And the stones circle a ceremonial center for the living.
28:48What more did Silbury Hill add to the ritual landscape?
28:54And why was this precise location chosen?
28:58The reason we've just waded through such a hideous waterlogged field is to get to this and I promise you
29:04it's worthwhile.
29:06One thousand feet from Silbury Hill lies Swallowhead Spring.
29:11An ancient water source.
29:14That flows east into the river Thames.
29:17The most sacred river in the stone age British Isles.
29:21Jim believes it's the location of this spring that explains why the ancient people built not only Silbury Hill.
29:28But also Avebury Stone Circle and West Kennet Long Barrel.
29:35Water is key to humanity and this would not have been lost on our Neolithic ancestors.
29:40They would have seen this as a key resource.
29:43And you can well imagine all the ceremonies that would have gone on exactly in this spot around this area.
29:49All these amazing monuments that we see in this area, they are located here for one reason.
29:55The location of this spring.
29:58Jim thinks the mound's true purpose was as a colossal sacred monument to the life-giving properties of water.
30:06To the Neolithic people, Silbury Hill was a holy shrine rising up out of this water to the sky.
30:15The surrounding ditch will have filled with water, a sort of mirror reflecting Silbury Hill.
30:22Just as it extends upwards towards the heavens, it also appears to disappear down into the underworld.
30:30The community could have made their sacred icon even bigger.
30:35But around 2400 BC, work stopped.
30:41Not just here at Silbury, but across the greater Avebury area.
30:47Why did a people who valued huge monuments so much suddenly put down their tools?
30:53Did they choose to change their way of life?
30:57Or were they replaced?
31:12Avebury, England.
31:14Over 1500 years, a mysterious people built a succession of incredible monuments.
31:21A tomb dedicated to the worship of ancient ancestors.
31:27Circles of giant stones, some three times larger than at Stonehenge.
31:33And a huge pyramid, thirteen stories high.
31:37But then, around 2400 BC, work stopped.
31:44Why?
31:47A clue to solving this mystery lies in unraveling the fate of West Kennet Long Barrow.
31:54And decoding the meaning of a strange artifact found inside it.
32:01This tomb was designed to be open.
32:05To allow the living to visit their dead.
32:09But after 1000 years of use, something changed.
32:15The last bodies were laid to rest.
32:18And the tomb was filled up with chalk and rubble.
32:23In the Northwest Chamber, an unusual pot called a beaker was positioned upside down on top of the rubble.
32:32Does whoever placed this artifact, and sealed the tomb, hold the key to solving why Avebury's people stopped building?
32:46The beaker excavated from West Kennet Long Barrow is not unique.
32:51To date, at least 38 have been found in the Avebury area.
32:57All were placed in the ground from 2400 BC onwards.
33:02When work on Avebury's giant monument ceased.
33:07Wiltshire Museum curator David Dawson is on a quest to uncover the identity of who buried them.
33:15He uses 3D scanning to forensically examine this beaker for clues.
33:20It's the intricacy of the decoration.
33:23And also, it's such fine pottery.
33:26This was made not on a wheel, but made by hand.
33:31Coiling strips of clay, and then smoothing it out.
33:36David thinks the beaker wasn't made by the builders of Avebury.
33:40Its design suggests it was created by a completely different group of people.
33:46Whoever did this really had an understanding of geometry and mathematics and measuring.
33:53These pots appear about four and a half thousand years ago, and it seems to be quite sudden.
33:59So, was this a new group of people coming from abroad?
34:05If the beaker people were new arrivals to the area, did they just stop the people of Avebury building?
34:11Or did they replace them?
34:16The bones from tombs where beaker pots were found could provide the answers.
34:21At the Wessex Archeology Laboratory, osteoarchaeologist Jacqueline McKinley investigates.
34:28This is a young adult male, probably late teens, early twenties, who's one of about 34 individuals we excavated.
34:37He was buried in an ordinary earth-cut grave, curled up like he was asleep, together with a beaker.
34:47If these beaker people pushed out the builders of Avebury, analyzing the ancient DNA locked inside these bones will reveal
34:55who they were and where they came from.
34:59The advent of ancient DNA really does blow open our understanding.
35:06The bones themselves actually tell you about the person and how people moved around in general.
35:14Investigators send samples of bone from this and other skeletons to Harvard University for DNA analysis.
35:22The results stun the world of archaeology.
35:27The beaker people didn't come from the British Isles.
35:31They were originally from a place much further away.
35:35The steppe of Central Asia.
35:40This particular individual was one of about 19 I sampled from this site.
35:44All of those had that steppe ancestry.
35:50The DNA evidence reveals a large-scale Stone Age migration that brought new people and new ideas into Europe.
36:01And ultimately, all the way to Avebury.
36:06It had huge consequences for those who'd been living here.
36:12Four and a half thousand years ago, a group of nomadic pastoral farmers began migrating their livestock across Central Europe.
36:24Archaeologists have tracked this movement via their burial sites, which contain distinctive beaker-shaped pottery.
36:33Originating from the steppe of Central Asia, beaker people spread rapidly across the continent and mixed with the local population.
36:43New DNA evidence reveals that when the beakers first arrived in ancient Britain, the native farmers disappeared and the people
36:52from the steppe took over.
36:56The new arrivals culture pushed out the old ways of Avebury's monument builders.
37:02That might be why work on new construction projects ceased.
37:10But what happened to the original people of Avebury?
37:14Were they killed?
37:15Or did something else wipe them out?
37:31For 1500 years, a sophisticated society of ancient engineers constructed giant monuments around Avebury, England.
37:40Buildings ceased when new arrivals from Central Asia introduced their distinct beaker-based culture.
37:48But now DNA testing of ancient human remains from the time creates another mystery.
37:55Within 200 years of the Beaker people's arrival, the indigenous population around Avebury vanished.
38:04Why did they disappear?
38:09Analysis of the Avebury builders' bones reveals these people were dark-haired, short, and powerfully built.
38:15The new arrivals looked very different.
38:19When I estimated his stature, he was about six foot two.
38:24He would have looked like a giant of a man.
38:28We also know he had blonde hair and blue eyes.
38:34With fair skin and light-colored eyes, these new people have more similarity with the majority of modern Britons than
38:41the ancient indigenous population.
38:45What we have got is really exciting information that demonstrates this group hadn't been found in Britain prior to this
38:54period.
38:55It's a change that persisted for millennia.
38:59So, he really is probably our ancestor.
39:05A precious 4,000-year-old artifact could be a clue to the Avebury builders' strange disappearance.
39:12The people who brought beakers didn't just bring a new style of pottery.
39:16They also brought a new metal.
39:20Bronze.
39:21The fate of them was Okobおい when they got the mountains.
39:22The blue miners.
39:22When you knew, this would have been golden in color.
39:25And would have just blazed in the sunshine, totally unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.
39:32Bronze tools and weapons were technologically superior to those made of stone used by the Avebury builders.
39:40Did the newcomers wipe out the indigenous people with weapons like this?
39:46Archaeologist David Dawson believes they had a different use.
39:50Often, there's only one side of the blade has been sharpened.
39:53And that makes you wonder, was this really a weapon? Or was this used to kill animals?
39:59If the Avebury builders weren't killed by the new arrivals, what else could explain their disappearance?
40:07A new field of genetic research promises to unlock the answer from the DNA inside these bones.
40:15One of the things that can get trapped within the DNA is sometimes evidence for certain types of disease.
40:24Researchers in Germany used the technique to test the bones of a beaker person buried in Central Europe.
40:32They find bacteria called Yersinia pestis, better known as the plague.
40:40Did this deadly disease wipe the Avebury builders out?
40:46Improvements in DNA testing will soon reveal the truth.
40:49There may be more information to extract from the DNA from this individual, but it's a developing technique.
40:57This is so important, this kind of information, for how people were affected by different diseases,
41:02how those diseases were transmitted.
41:04So the chances and the opportunity are going to be there in the future to do that kind of work.
41:11The mystery lives on.
41:15Over 1500 years, a group of skilled ancient engineers built an incredible ritual complex deep in the English countryside.
41:25Stone circles, larger than Stonehenge, with extraordinary acoustic properties.
41:33A giant subterranean tomb to venerate the ancestors.
41:40And a huge chalk pyramid, all marking the site of a sacred spring.
41:46Their culture was replaced by a technologically superior one from Europe.
41:53But the monuments they left behind weren't forgotten.
41:56They still stand today.
41:59Testament to the vision and engineering prowess of this ancient, pioneering people.
42:06One of the mysteries certainly will be the best that there is still living at the age of Ma'am,
42:14The daher.
42:14You guys are all involved.
42:25I GUY legumes ourselves in ENGAGE exists in the world.
42:34Check it out with a fairy school mission.
Comments