UK
Swindon couple unearth five 220,000-year-old ice-age mammoths at site near town
By Daniel Wood Facebook and Community Reporter
“Where these mammoths lie in the ground is exactly where they died a quarter of a million years ago – next to incredible things like stone tools and the snails they trampled underfoot.
“We have evidence of what the landscape was like. We know what plants were growing there. The little things are really revealing the context of these big, iconic giants. It’s a glimpse back in time. That’s incredibly important in terms of us understanding how climate change especially impacts environments, ecosystems and species.”
By Daniel Wood Facebook and Community Reporter
19th December, 2021
Sally and Neville Hollingworth with Sir David Attenborough
A Moredon couple has made one of the most extraordinary archeological finds in history when they discovered preserved fossils of mammoth in a quarry to the north of the town.
Neville and Sally Hollingworth, part-time fossil hunters, immediately realised the magnitude of their find and called in archeologists from DigVentures as reinforcements - who soon unearthed five ice-age mammoths in an extraordinary state of preservation.
The couple's find was so remarkable that David Attenborough and evolutionary biologist professor Ben Garrod will be presenting a BBC One documentary on it - Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard - which will air on December 30.
Sally and Neville Hollingworth with Sir David Attenborough
A Moredon couple has made one of the most extraordinary archeological finds in history when they discovered preserved fossils of mammoth in a quarry to the north of the town.
Neville and Sally Hollingworth, part-time fossil hunters, immediately realised the magnitude of their find and called in archeologists from DigVentures as reinforcements - who soon unearthed five ice-age mammoths in an extraordinary state of preservation.
The couple's find was so remarkable that David Attenborough and evolutionary biologist professor Ben Garrod will be presenting a BBC One documentary on it - Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard - which will air on December 30.
Neville and Sally Hollingworth
On top of the mammoths themselves - two adults, two juveniles and an infant that are thought to be 220,000 years old, they have also found giant elks, tiny creatures like dung beetles and snails and even seeds, pollen and plant fossils, as well as human tools like an axe.
Ben Garrod told the Observer: “This is one of the most important discoveries in British palaeontology.” While the odd mammoth bone often turns up, he said, finding such complete skeletons is “incredibly rare”.
On top of the mammoths themselves - two adults, two juveniles and an infant that are thought to be 220,000 years old, they have also found giant elks, tiny creatures like dung beetles and snails and even seeds, pollen and plant fossils, as well as human tools like an axe.
Ben Garrod told the Observer: “This is one of the most important discoveries in British palaeontology.” While the odd mammoth bone often turns up, he said, finding such complete skeletons is “incredibly rare”.
“Where these mammoths lie in the ground is exactly where they died a quarter of a million years ago – next to incredible things like stone tools and the snails they trampled underfoot.
“We have evidence of what the landscape was like. We know what plants were growing there. The little things are really revealing the context of these big, iconic giants. It’s a glimpse back in time. That’s incredibly important in terms of us understanding how climate change especially impacts environments, ecosystems and species.”
Sir David Attenborough and Professor Ben Garrod
Also talking to the Observer, Lisa Westcott Wilkins of DigVentures, an archaeology social enterprise, said: “Exciting doesn’t cover it. Other mammoths have been found in the UK but not in this state of preservation. They’re in near-pristine condition. You can’t take it in.”
She added: “Archaeological sites from this period are rare, and critical for understanding Neanderthal behaviour across Britain and Europe. Why did so many mammoths die here? Could Neanderthals have killed them? What can they tell us about life in ice-age Britain? The range of evidence at this site gives us a unique chance to address these questions.”
Sally and Neville had to hand the site over to DigVentures when the magnitude of what they found became apparent, they took part in the show alongside Sir David Attenborough but are yet to see it themselves and learn the outcome of their discovery.
The programme will look at clues left by the fossiles and see if they tell us anything about how our Neanderthal ancestors lived in the harsh conditions of ice-age Britain, a period of prehistory about which little is known.
Also talking to the Observer, Lisa Westcott Wilkins of DigVentures, an archaeology social enterprise, said: “Exciting doesn’t cover it. Other mammoths have been found in the UK but not in this state of preservation. They’re in near-pristine condition. You can’t take it in.”
She added: “Archaeological sites from this period are rare, and critical for understanding Neanderthal behaviour across Britain and Europe. Why did so many mammoths die here? Could Neanderthals have killed them? What can they tell us about life in ice-age Britain? The range of evidence at this site gives us a unique chance to address these questions.”
Sally and Neville had to hand the site over to DigVentures when the magnitude of what they found became apparent, they took part in the show alongside Sir David Attenborough but are yet to see it themselves and learn the outcome of their discovery.
The programme will look at clues left by the fossiles and see if they tell us anything about how our Neanderthal ancestors lived in the harsh conditions of ice-age Britain, a period of prehistory about which little is known.
Close inspection of excavated bones Picture: DigVentures
Garrod said there are a number of theories: “Was there a massive glacial flood that washed these poor animals down? By looking at the mud, it doesn’t look like there was. It’s very uniform all the way down.
"Were they hunted by people? Were Neanderthals crouching down in the rushes and chasing them into the water? Possibly. There is definitely an association between a wonderful hand-axe and other stone tools and these bones. Did they chance upon this bunch of dead mammoths and have a mammoth buffet?
“Or was it just really muddy? With elephants today, if a juvenile gets stuck, often the adults won’t leave the site. They’ll try and help them. This is very thick mud. I’ve grown up near the seaside, near estuaries; you don’t need to be very heavy to get stuck in mud very quickly.”
DigVentures is a team of archaeologists that also runs community outreach. After raising funds from Historic England they are coordinating the dig at the site and hope to continue excavations. The quarry is currently proected by natrual flooding.
Westcott Wilkins praised the Hills Group, the quarry owners, for their co-operation: “There are also early discussions about wanting to build a public outreach centre where we can display some of the finds.”
“People are whizzing by, not realising that feet underneath their car is this scene. It’s very surreal. We’re all still trying to get our heads around what we found.”
For ordinary people this find would be once in a lifetime, but for Neville and Sally it's just another day at the office.
Neville found a preserved ice-age mammoth skull in a gravel pit at Cotswold Water Park in 2004 - only the second to be discovered in Britain.
The pair also made an incredible discovery of rare marine fossils - called crinoids - during the second lockdown at a site also near Swindon. They were recently on Blue Peter because of it
Garrod said there are a number of theories: “Was there a massive glacial flood that washed these poor animals down? By looking at the mud, it doesn’t look like there was. It’s very uniform all the way down.
"Were they hunted by people? Were Neanderthals crouching down in the rushes and chasing them into the water? Possibly. There is definitely an association between a wonderful hand-axe and other stone tools and these bones. Did they chance upon this bunch of dead mammoths and have a mammoth buffet?
“Or was it just really muddy? With elephants today, if a juvenile gets stuck, often the adults won’t leave the site. They’ll try and help them. This is very thick mud. I’ve grown up near the seaside, near estuaries; you don’t need to be very heavy to get stuck in mud very quickly.”
DigVentures is a team of archaeologists that also runs community outreach. After raising funds from Historic England they are coordinating the dig at the site and hope to continue excavations. The quarry is currently proected by natrual flooding.
Westcott Wilkins praised the Hills Group, the quarry owners, for their co-operation: “There are also early discussions about wanting to build a public outreach centre where we can display some of the finds.”
“People are whizzing by, not realising that feet underneath their car is this scene. It’s very surreal. We’re all still trying to get our heads around what we found.”
For ordinary people this find would be once in a lifetime, but for Neville and Sally it's just another day at the office.
Neville found a preserved ice-age mammoth skull in a gravel pit at Cotswold Water Park in 2004 - only the second to be discovered in Britain.
The pair also made an incredible discovery of rare marine fossils - called crinoids - during the second lockdown at a site also near Swindon. They were recently on Blue Peter because of it
Five ice-age mammoths unearthed in Cotswolds after 220,000 years
David Attenborough will tell of ‘pristine’ skeletons found with other extinct species
David Attenborough will tell of ‘pristine’ skeletons found with other extinct species
Sir David Attenborough with some of the mammoth bones found in the gravel quarry near Swindon. Photograph: Julian Schwanitz/BBC/Windfall Films
Dalya Alberge
Sun 19 Dec 2021
Five ice-age mammoths in an extraordinary state of preservation have been discovered in the Cotswolds, to the astonishment of archaeologists and palaeontologists.
The extensive remains of two adults, two juveniles and an infant that roamed 200,000 years ago have been unearthed near Swindon, along with tools used by Neanderthals, who are likely to have hunted these 10-tonne beasts. More are expected to be found because only a fraction of the vast site, a gravel quarry, has been excavated.
Judging by the quality of the finds, the site is a goldmine. They range from other ice-age giants, such as elks – twice the size of their descendants today, with antlers 10ft across – to tiny creatures, notably dung beetles, which co-evolved with megafauna, using their droppings for food and shelter, and freshwater snails, just like those found today. Even seeds, pollen and plant fossils, including extinct varieties, have been preserved at this site.
Dalya Alberge
Sun 19 Dec 2021
Five ice-age mammoths in an extraordinary state of preservation have been discovered in the Cotswolds, to the astonishment of archaeologists and palaeontologists.
The extensive remains of two adults, two juveniles and an infant that roamed 200,000 years ago have been unearthed near Swindon, along with tools used by Neanderthals, who are likely to have hunted these 10-tonne beasts. More are expected to be found because only a fraction of the vast site, a gravel quarry, has been excavated.
Judging by the quality of the finds, the site is a goldmine. They range from other ice-age giants, such as elks – twice the size of their descendants today, with antlers 10ft across – to tiny creatures, notably dung beetles, which co-evolved with megafauna, using their droppings for food and shelter, and freshwater snails, just like those found today. Even seeds, pollen and plant fossils, including extinct varieties, have been preserved at this site.
An artist’s impression of the Steppe mammoth.
Photograph: Beth Zaiken/Reuters
All these will now offer new clues into how our Neanderthal ancestors lived in the harsh conditions of ice-age Britain, a period of prehistory about which little is known. The exceptional discoveries will be explored in a BBC One documentary, Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard, to be aired on 30 December, in which Sir David Attenborough and evolutionary biologist Professor Ben Garrod join archaeologists from DigVentures to film the excavation.
Garrod told the Observer: “This is one of the most important discoveries in British palaeontology.” While the odd mammoth bone often turns up, he said, finding such complete skeletons is “incredibly rare”. “Where these mammoths lie in the ground is exactly where they died a quarter of a million years ago – next to incredible things like stone tools and the snails they trampled underfoot.
“We have evidence of what the landscape was like. We know what plants were growing there. The little things are really revealing the context of these big, iconic giants. It’s a glimpse back in time. That’s incredibly important in terms of us understanding how climate change especially impacts environments, ecosystems and species.”
Lisa Westcott Wilkins of DigVentures, an archaeology social enterprise, said: “Exciting doesn’t cover it. Other mammoths have been found in the UK but not in this state of preservation. They’re in near-pristine condition. You can’t take it in.”
All these will now offer new clues into how our Neanderthal ancestors lived in the harsh conditions of ice-age Britain, a period of prehistory about which little is known. The exceptional discoveries will be explored in a BBC One documentary, Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard, to be aired on 30 December, in which Sir David Attenborough and evolutionary biologist Professor Ben Garrod join archaeologists from DigVentures to film the excavation.
Garrod told the Observer: “This is one of the most important discoveries in British palaeontology.” While the odd mammoth bone often turns up, he said, finding such complete skeletons is “incredibly rare”. “Where these mammoths lie in the ground is exactly where they died a quarter of a million years ago – next to incredible things like stone tools and the snails they trampled underfoot.
“We have evidence of what the landscape was like. We know what plants were growing there. The little things are really revealing the context of these big, iconic giants. It’s a glimpse back in time. That’s incredibly important in terms of us understanding how climate change especially impacts environments, ecosystems and species.”
Lisa Westcott Wilkins of DigVentures, an archaeology social enterprise, said: “Exciting doesn’t cover it. Other mammoths have been found in the UK but not in this state of preservation. They’re in near-pristine condition. You can’t take it in.”
Archaeologists excavating the mammoth bones. Photograph: DigVentures
She added: “Archaeological sites from this period are rare, and critical for understanding Neanderthal behaviour across Britain and Europe. Why did so many mammoths die here? Could Neanderthals have killed them? What can they tell us about life in ice-age Britain? The range of evidence at this site gives us a unique chance to address these questions.”
She added: “Archaeological sites from this period are rare, and critical for understanding Neanderthal behaviour across Britain and Europe. Why did so many mammoths die here? Could Neanderthals have killed them? What can they tell us about life in ice-age Britain? The range of evidence at this site gives us a unique chance to address these questions.”
The researchers believe that the mammoth remains and the artefacts date to around 220,000 years ago, when Britain was still occupied by Neanderthals during a warmer interglacial period known as MIS7. Falling temperatures had forced Neanderthals south, and this site was then a lush, fertile plain to which both animals and humans were drawn.
The earliest mammoths came from Africa about five million years ago. This particular species, the Steppe mammoth, was the largest of them, and lasted from about 1.8m years ago to about 200,000 years ago.
Garrod, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of East Anglia, said the species weighed up to 15 tonnes, twice or three times the weight of an African elephant: “This was the largest species of mammoth ever. By the time they were about to be gone, they had dropped down to 10 tonnes, which still sounds a lot. We think that was an adaptation to the change in environment, climate and resource availability. It was becoming colder at that time, resources were getting sparser, and it drove that shrinking of the species. On top of that, there would have been undoubtedly local pressure from hunting and competition from other species.”
Speculating on why so many animals died at this site, he added: “Was there a massive glacial flood that washed these poor animals down? By looking at the mud, it doesn’t look like there was. It’s very uniform all the way down. Were they hunted by people? Were Neanderthals crouching down in the rushes and chasing them into the water? Possibly. There is definitely an association between a wonderful hand-axe and other stone tools and these bones. Did they chance upon this bunch of dead mammoths and have a mammoth buffet?
Close inspection of the excavated bones, some of which have possible butchery marks.
“Or was it just really muddy? With elephants today, if a juvenile gets stuck, often the adults won’t leave the site. They’ll try and help them. This is very thick mud. I’ve grown up near the seaside, near estuaries; you don’t need to be very heavy to get stuck in mud very quickly.”
The excavations also revealed further evidence of Neanderthal activity on the site, including flint tools that would have been used for cleaning fresh hides. Some of the bones have possible butchery marks.
DigVentures is a team of archaeologists that specialises in public outreach. They were called in after a Neanderthal’s hand-axe was found with the initial discovery of mammoth remains by amateur fossil-hunters Sally and Neville Hollingworth.
DigVentures raised the funding from Historic England, dug the site and is coordinating the analysis and research. They hope to continue excavations once further funds have been raised. The site is now protected from fossil hunters by natural flooding.
Westcott Wilkins praised the Hills Group, the quarry owners, for allowing them as long as they need: “There are also early discussions about wanting to build a public outreach centre where we can display some of the finds.” Other finds are expected to go to the Bristol Museum.
She noted that the mammoths were barely five metres below ground level and close to a busy road: “People are whizzing by, not realising that feet underneath their car is this scene. It’s very surreal. We’re all still trying to get our heads around what we found.”
“Or was it just really muddy? With elephants today, if a juvenile gets stuck, often the adults won’t leave the site. They’ll try and help them. This is very thick mud. I’ve grown up near the seaside, near estuaries; you don’t need to be very heavy to get stuck in mud very quickly.”
The excavations also revealed further evidence of Neanderthal activity on the site, including flint tools that would have been used for cleaning fresh hides. Some of the bones have possible butchery marks.
DigVentures is a team of archaeologists that specialises in public outreach. They were called in after a Neanderthal’s hand-axe was found with the initial discovery of mammoth remains by amateur fossil-hunters Sally and Neville Hollingworth.
DigVentures raised the funding from Historic England, dug the site and is coordinating the analysis and research. They hope to continue excavations once further funds have been raised. The site is now protected from fossil hunters by natural flooding.
Westcott Wilkins praised the Hills Group, the quarry owners, for allowing them as long as they need: “There are also early discussions about wanting to build a public outreach centre where we can display some of the finds.” Other finds are expected to go to the Bristol Museum.
She noted that the mammoths were barely five metres below ground level and close to a busy road: “People are whizzing by, not realising that feet underneath their car is this scene. It’s very surreal. We’re all still trying to get our heads around what we found.”
“Or was it just really muddy? With elephants today, if a juvenile gets stuck, often the adults won’t leave the site. They’ll try and help them. This is very thick mud. I’ve grown up near the seaside, near estuaries; you don’t need to be very heavy to get stuck in mud very quickly.”
The excavations also revealed further evidence of Neanderthal activity on the site, including flint tools that would have been used for cleaning fresh hides. Some of the bones have possible butchery marks.
DigVentures is a team of archaeologists that specialises in public outreach. They were called in after a Neanderthal’s hand-axe was found with the initial discovery of mammoth remains by amateur fossil-hunters Sally and Neville Hollingworth.
DigVentures raised the funding from Historic England, dug the site and is coordinating the analysis and research. They hope to continue excavations once further funds have been raised. The site is now protected from fossil hunters by natural flooding.
Westcott Wilkins praised the Hills Group, the quarry owners, for allowing them as long as they need: “There are also early discussions about wanting to build a public outreach centre where we can display some of the finds.” Other finds are expected to go to the Bristol Museum.
She noted that the mammoths were barely five metres below ground level and close to a busy road: “People are whizzing by, not realising that feet underneath their car is this scene. It’s very surreal. We’re all still trying to get our heads around what we found.”
“Or was it just really muddy? With elephants today, if a juvenile gets stuck, often the adults won’t leave the site. They’ll try and help them. This is very thick mud. I’ve grown up near the seaside, near estuaries; you don’t need to be very heavy to get stuck in mud very quickly.”
The excavations also revealed further evidence of Neanderthal activity on the site, including flint tools that would have been used for cleaning fresh hides. Some of the bones have possible butchery marks.
DigVentures is a team of archaeologists that specialises in public outreach. They were called in after a Neanderthal’s hand-axe was found with the initial discovery of mammoth remains by amateur fossil-hunters Sally and Neville Hollingworth.
DigVentures raised the funding from Historic England, dug the site and is coordinating the analysis and research. They hope to continue excavations once further funds have been raised. The site is now protected from fossil hunters by natural flooding.
Westcott Wilkins praised the Hills Group, the quarry owners, for allowing them as long as they need: “There are also early discussions about wanting to build a public outreach centre where we can display some of the finds.” Other finds are expected to go to the Bristol Museum.
She noted that the mammoths were barely five metres below ground level and close to a busy road: “People are whizzing by, not realising that feet underneath their car is this scene. It’s very surreal. We’re all still trying to get our heads around what we found.”
Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard: Why an Ice Age discovery near Swindon has excited archaeologists
James Rampton - Friday
If you were hoping to find the remains of Ice Age beasts, you might expect to travel to Siberia, not Swindon. But that is exactly where Sally and Neville Hollingworth, two amateur archaeologists from Wiltshire, made a spectacular find.
Exploring a quarry north of the town in 2017, they spotted something sticking up out of the ground. They were astonished to find it was the fossilised humerus – a leg bone – of a Steppe mammoth, a forerunner of the more famous woolly mammoth.
Further excavation of the site revealed three more mammoths, as well as a Steppe bison and a brown bear, all perfectly preserved in the prehistoric riverbed of the Thames.
Sally Hollingworth also disinterred a rare hand axe made of flint, lying beside the remains. As the dig progressed, more handmade tools were unearthed – suggesting there was a relationship between the animals and humans.
This story – and the discoveries still emerging from the site – is the subject of an absorbing new BBC documentary, Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard, airing after Christmas. In this one-off film, Sir David Attenborough, who has been a passionate fossil-hunter since he was a small boy, joins the excavation and investigates the importance of the finds.
Unlike most mammoth bones, which are “merely” tens of thousands of years old, experts using state-of-the-art soil-dating technology estimate the site discovered by the Hollingworths dates back 215,000 years. These are some the oldest mammoth remains ever unearthed in the UK.
The human-made implements could also be gamechangers for our understanding of the lives and capabilities of the Neanderthals, who were supplanted soon afterwards by our own species, Homo Sapiens.
Led by Professor Ben Garrod from the University of East Anglia, the excavation prompts – and helps to answer – many fundamental questions: Why were the mammoths at this particular place? How did they meet their ends? Could the Neanderthals have killed them or was there some kind of cataclysmic event?
The Hollingworths, who both have day jobs in an office and whose house is a wondrous small museum dedicated to fossils, feel a real connection with their discovery. They even used the hand-axe to cut their wedding cake – before, Attenborough jokes, eating “a mammoth meal.” (As archaeologists might say, the old ones are the best.)
Sally Hollingworth recollects her emotions when she first picked up the hand-axe. “I had the feeling that I was the first human to touch this stone tool in thousands of years.”
Attenborough agrees. “It’s a great thrill, this whole business, isn’t it?” he says. “The finds of this remarkable site have given us a rare glimpse of early Britain, a time when humans were fully immersed in the wild, living as part of Nature.”
Garrod is equally moved by the whole venture. Sitting in the mud on the site with three colleagues, he exclaims: “Isn’t it wonderful to think that the last time someone sat exactly in this spot with a little group of people, and that stone tool in their hands as a mammoth was lying there, was 200,000 years ago? We are talking about it now hundreds of thousands of years later. It’s quite poignant, isn’t it?”
Lisa Wescott Wilkins, an archaeologist whose company DigVentures is excavating the site, reinforces the significance of the discovery by describing her own joy when she first visited the quarry north of Swindon two years ago.
“I can remember the feeling of stepping onto the site for the first time very, very clearly because it’s something that I had never expected to experience in my career as an archaeologist,” she tells i. “Just seeing a mammoth tusk in the ground, and knowing what had been found close to it, and feeling the potential of the site – it was heart-stopping. I’m still buzzing really!”
Wescott Wilkins’ excitement was heightened when she and three colleagues helped lift an exceedingly heavy one-and-a-half-metre long mammoth tusk from the site. “If someone asks me how much it weighs, I’ll just have to say, ‘Well, it’s four-people’s worth!’”
The archaeologist is particularly pleased by the discovery of the flint hand-axe, “because what that might be showing is the actual interaction of the Neanderthals with the mammoths. We have bones that look to the naked eye like they’ve got cut marks on them. If they do, that is a smoking gun for this time period. It means the mammoths could have been either hunted or scavenged.
“The bones are in such amazing condition. They haven’t been knocked around. They are exactly where they fell. Also, the tools are still so sharp, you could use them today. So this is really indicating that an episode happened here. Such evidence has never been found before. My heart speeds up even thinking about it!”
Wescott Wilkins adds that “archaeology is so exciting because it gives you that sense of touching something that is bigger than yourself, and that really applies to this site. It’s very, very special. As an archaeologist, you can never know everything – and what fires me up about this site are all the amazing new things I’m learning. That is a fantastic reason to get out of bed every morning.”
Although prehistoric, this site also tells a very pertinent, up-to-the-minute story about climate change. The Neanderthals had to adapt rapidly as temperatures dropped steeply during the Ice Age.
“The Neanderthals were having to deal with changes in the landscape that were beyond their control,” says Wescott Wilkins. “Weather events would have affected the environment and the amount of food that they could find.
“All that was happening around them and they had to cope with it. Looking at the impact of climate change on this Neanderthal population, it’s definitely a cautionary tale about how far it can change the way we live.”
Attenborough echoes those sentiments: “It is thought that Neanderthals may have been around for some 400,000 years. Their survival relied on their instinctive understanding of the natural world. Whether our own species can thrive for quite as long remains to be seen.”
But we leave the last word to the woman without whom none of these extraordinary advances in our understanding of prehistory would have been possible. How would Sally Hollingworth sum up this venture? “It’s like a time travel through the gravel.”
Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard, BBC1, Thursday 30 December, 8pm
James Rampton - Friday
If you were hoping to find the remains of Ice Age beasts, you might expect to travel to Siberia, not Swindon. But that is exactly where Sally and Neville Hollingworth, two amateur archaeologists from Wiltshire, made a spectacular find.
Exploring a quarry north of the town in 2017, they spotted something sticking up out of the ground. They were astonished to find it was the fossilised humerus – a leg bone – of a Steppe mammoth, a forerunner of the more famous woolly mammoth.
Further excavation of the site revealed three more mammoths, as well as a Steppe bison and a brown bear, all perfectly preserved in the prehistoric riverbed of the Thames.
Sally Hollingworth also disinterred a rare hand axe made of flint, lying beside the remains. As the dig progressed, more handmade tools were unearthed – suggesting there was a relationship between the animals and humans.
This story – and the discoveries still emerging from the site – is the subject of an absorbing new BBC documentary, Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard, airing after Christmas. In this one-off film, Sir David Attenborough, who has been a passionate fossil-hunter since he was a small boy, joins the excavation and investigates the importance of the finds.
Unlike most mammoth bones, which are “merely” tens of thousands of years old, experts using state-of-the-art soil-dating technology estimate the site discovered by the Hollingworths dates back 215,000 years. These are some the oldest mammoth remains ever unearthed in the UK.
The human-made implements could also be gamechangers for our understanding of the lives and capabilities of the Neanderthals, who were supplanted soon afterwards by our own species, Homo Sapiens.
Led by Professor Ben Garrod from the University of East Anglia, the excavation prompts – and helps to answer – many fundamental questions: Why were the mammoths at this particular place? How did they meet their ends? Could the Neanderthals have killed them or was there some kind of cataclysmic event?
The Hollingworths, who both have day jobs in an office and whose house is a wondrous small museum dedicated to fossils, feel a real connection with their discovery. They even used the hand-axe to cut their wedding cake – before, Attenborough jokes, eating “a mammoth meal.” (As archaeologists might say, the old ones are the best.)
Sally Hollingworth recollects her emotions when she first picked up the hand-axe. “I had the feeling that I was the first human to touch this stone tool in thousands of years.”
Attenborough agrees. “It’s a great thrill, this whole business, isn’t it?” he says. “The finds of this remarkable site have given us a rare glimpse of early Britain, a time when humans were fully immersed in the wild, living as part of Nature.”
Garrod is equally moved by the whole venture. Sitting in the mud on the site with three colleagues, he exclaims: “Isn’t it wonderful to think that the last time someone sat exactly in this spot with a little group of people, and that stone tool in their hands as a mammoth was lying there, was 200,000 years ago? We are talking about it now hundreds of thousands of years later. It’s quite poignant, isn’t it?”
Lisa Wescott Wilkins, an archaeologist whose company DigVentures is excavating the site, reinforces the significance of the discovery by describing her own joy when she first visited the quarry north of Swindon two years ago.
“I can remember the feeling of stepping onto the site for the first time very, very clearly because it’s something that I had never expected to experience in my career as an archaeologist,” she tells i. “Just seeing a mammoth tusk in the ground, and knowing what had been found close to it, and feeling the potential of the site – it was heart-stopping. I’m still buzzing really!”
Wescott Wilkins’ excitement was heightened when she and three colleagues helped lift an exceedingly heavy one-and-a-half-metre long mammoth tusk from the site. “If someone asks me how much it weighs, I’ll just have to say, ‘Well, it’s four-people’s worth!’”
The archaeologist is particularly pleased by the discovery of the flint hand-axe, “because what that might be showing is the actual interaction of the Neanderthals with the mammoths. We have bones that look to the naked eye like they’ve got cut marks on them. If they do, that is a smoking gun for this time period. It means the mammoths could have been either hunted or scavenged.
“The bones are in such amazing condition. They haven’t been knocked around. They are exactly where they fell. Also, the tools are still so sharp, you could use them today. So this is really indicating that an episode happened here. Such evidence has never been found before. My heart speeds up even thinking about it!”
Wescott Wilkins adds that “archaeology is so exciting because it gives you that sense of touching something that is bigger than yourself, and that really applies to this site. It’s very, very special. As an archaeologist, you can never know everything – and what fires me up about this site are all the amazing new things I’m learning. That is a fantastic reason to get out of bed every morning.”
Although prehistoric, this site also tells a very pertinent, up-to-the-minute story about climate change. The Neanderthals had to adapt rapidly as temperatures dropped steeply during the Ice Age.
“The Neanderthals were having to deal with changes in the landscape that were beyond their control,” says Wescott Wilkins. “Weather events would have affected the environment and the amount of food that they could find.
“All that was happening around them and they had to cope with it. Looking at the impact of climate change on this Neanderthal population, it’s definitely a cautionary tale about how far it can change the way we live.”
Attenborough echoes those sentiments: “It is thought that Neanderthals may have been around for some 400,000 years. Their survival relied on their instinctive understanding of the natural world. Whether our own species can thrive for quite as long remains to be seen.”
But we leave the last word to the woman without whom none of these extraordinary advances in our understanding of prehistory would have been possible. How would Sally Hollingworth sum up this venture? “It’s like a time travel through the gravel.”
Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard, BBC1, Thursday 30 December, 8pm
.png)
