Incredible New Discoveries From Britain’s Giant Mammoth Graveyard Shed Light On History
Bird’s eye view of excavations – site covers area the size of two football pitches (Image: Adam Gerrard)
It was the Cotswolds, but not as we know it. Two hundred thousand years ago the SUVs that today clog country lanes would have been dwarfed by steppe mammoths and elephants up to four metres tall, each weighing more than four Land Rover Defenders.
A shallow but powerful river polished pebbles that are now quarried in the Cotswold Water Park. In one of the bends where the river flowed less swiftly, the carcasses of mammoths that had died in or near the water were swept into great mounds.
The plentiful supply of fresh meat attracted scavengers like hyenas. It also drew our not yet human ancestors who occupied the Cotswolds long before Homo sapiens arrived to hike up the price of property in one of England’s most desirable regions.
The steppe-like grasslands would have been home to dozens of different creatures, many of them fierce and all of them hungry. Some like the mammoths grazed or browsed contentedly on vegetation.
Others like cave bears, wolves and hyenas would devour anything they could find, making life hazardous and occasionally short for early humans.
For the past three weeks one of the largest excavations of recent years has been taking place in a former quarry in Gloucestershire – revealing mammoth teeth and tusks.
The site is believed to date back to around 220,000 years ago.
Some 180 archaeologists and experts in disciplines from palaeontology to entomology from more than 20 institutions have spent the past three weeks painstakingly excavating an area the size of two football pitches searching for clues to the landscape and inhabitants of Britain during a long balmy period between ice ages around a quarter of a million years ago.
The dig near the village of Cerney Wick was organised by Neville and Sally Hollingworth whose 2017 discovery of a so-called mammoth graveyard was featured in a BBC documentary presented by Sir David Attenborough three years ago.
The original discoveries were some of the most significant Paleolithic finds in the UK.
Last month volunteers returned to continue the excavation. Among their more unexpected finds were the 160-million-year-old fossil skull of a prehistoric crocodile and bones of a marine reptile called a plesiosaur.
They came from a strata known as the Kellaways Formation that had itself been exposed by a swiftly flowing river that would later become known as the Thames.
Latest discoveries at a mammoth graveyard in GloucestershireOver the intervening millennia the river and its meanders have migrated so it now flows 10 miles further south leaving behind a jumble of ancient bones and fossils for experts to disentangle.
Nev and Sally attracted an army of volunteers to their dig. All gave their time for free and camped in a field beside the dig site. They also endured a mini-monsoon, which turned the site into a mud bath, as well as a heatwave.
Sally says: “We have Ice Age and Jurassic here. The Kellaways Formation has never been properly researched so this is a perfect opportunity. We are not just doing field work we are doing photogrammetry and 3D scanning and GPS logging so everyone is learning new and different skills.
“This is our vision, we wanted to make memories for the students that will help them in their careers.
“This is entirely voluntary, there’s no one being paid to be here. Hills have supported us by giving us permission to dig, draining the lake and providing toilets. I haven’t worked out final figures yet but I reckon it’s probably costing around £3,000. We were helped by friends and I have begged, borrowed and skip-dived to pay for this.”
The bed of the lake is 20ft below the previous ground level and looks like a lunar landscape, pockmarked with craters where trenches have been dug.
Diggers are sheltered by flimsy gazebos to stop them collapsing with sunstroke.
Amongst the bones were three flint axes to add to one found previously, proof that early humans shared the landscape with creatures much larger but not necessarily more dangerous than themselves.
Karl Lee, an expert flint knapper, described the pointed axes as beautiful but misnamed. Rather than being used as chopping implements their razor sharp edges would have been perfect for slicing through flesh.
“They wouldn’t have taken very long to make, no more than five to 10 minutes, but the knowledge and craftsmanship that went into producing them shows the person who made this really knew what they were doing,” he explains.
The technology of the handaxe barely changed in more than half a million years.
He continued: “If you want to cut up megafauna – big animals – with thick heavy muscles there is still nothing that would beat the handaxe as a hand-held butchery knife. The handaxe was the Volkswagen Beetle of the butchery world – it was a practical functional tool.”
Mr Lee said two distinct species of hominins occupied Britain at the time: Neanderthals or a separate lineage, Homo heidelbergensis. Their flint tools were so similar it is difficult to tell them apart.
Married amateur fossil hunters Sally and Nev Hollingworth lead the volunteers (Image: Adam Gerrard)
Dr Nev Hollingworth believes the site is one of the most remarkable in Britain.
Quarrying removed gravel and aggregate down the bed of the palaeo-river allowing access to deposits hidden beneath.
“The site drops down into the ancient river bed of the Thames and it’s full of sediment that was deposited by the river 214,000 years ago,” he explains. “The river channel cut into a bank made of rock that is crammed full of fossils living on the seafloor during the Jurassic period 167 million years ago.
“We have been really fortunate that we have been able to recover what we were looking for. People have found some incredible things.”
The tooth of a straight-tusked elephant was a surprise find as it was the first from the species found at the dig site.
Straight-tusked elephants were among the largest species of Ice Age mammals – even taller than the more numerous steppe mammoth.
It was among dozens of mammoth teeth laid out on a finds table where it was identified by Professor Adrian Lister of the Natural History Museum. Mammoths ground coarse grasses between four huge teeth that would be replaced six times during the course of an individual animal’s life.
When the final set had been ground down by the time it was typically aged about 60 the animal could no longer eat and would die.
The mammoth bones recovered during the dig represent the end of the long reign of the steppe mammoth when it was evolving into the animal we know as the woolly mammoth, smaller, stockier and better able to adapt to the vegetation and climate of an ice age thanks to its coat of dark brown hair.
One of the mammoth molars found during the dig was from an individual aged around 15 at the time of its premature death – raising the possibility that it had been the victim of hominin hunters who killed it for food.
In contrast, the straight-tusked elephant was in its 40s when it died.
Like the mammoth, Prof Lister could tell its age from the crenellations on its tooth. As significant as the bones found during the excavation are those that were not found.
Any animal that died in the open would quickly have been devoured by hyenas and other scavengers. Coprolites – fossilised dung – left by hyenas were found in significant quantities but none of their bones.
Hand axes found at the site in the latest dig (Image: Adam Gerrard)
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As the waste disposal and clean up crews of the interglacial, palaeontologist Nigel Larkin believes they have eaten the evidence, including any human ancestors.
He said: “There are certain things we are not finding. We have found horn cores from bison but there should be about 150 bones or more from each animal.
“All we have are a handful so what happened to the rest? Hyenas will devour an entire carcass including bones except in the case of bison horn cores which they leave because they don’t like them.
“They also leave teeth because they can break their own on them so where teeth are over represented we know there were hyenas on site even though we don’t find them.”
The excavations have also found evidence of hyenas, rhino, elk, deer and horses.
The one ancient mammal whose bones have so far eluded them despite leaving traces in the landscape are the hominins, prehistoric humans. The bones of the animals who ended up in the river were all pristine, suggesting they died nearby, possibly during seasonal flooding when the water would have been deeper and faster flowing.
This was an inter-glacial when the climate would have been very similar to today’s.
Steppe mammoths were larger and less hairy than their descendants, the woolly mammoths, who evolved when northern Europe was covered by ice.
Oliver Weeks, co-founder of a fossil preparation company from Sheffield, pointed out scratches on a leg bone from a primitive horse. They were the unmistakable signs of human butchery indicating it was de-fleshed with a flint scraper.
Self-styled ‘bug lady’ Sally-Ann Spence, an entomologist who studies dung beetles, runs the dig podcast interviewing the archaeologists and putting it online using the hashtag #Tuskforce. She said: “This is three weeks of living in tents in typical English weather. We’ve had hot weather, cold weather, winds that blew tents away and monsoon-style weather which left you constantly slipping in mud. There are toilets that if you can get near you won’t necessarily want to go into. It doesn’t suit everybody, you’ve got to be prepared to rough it and muck in.
“One of the handaxes was found by Joe, a student, who was still shaking the following day. He was only the second hominin to touch it.”
Truly, a steppe back in time.