Dr. William Marsh

No.

Maybe it tells you more about me as a person, perhaps.

Yeah, I would say so.

So at around 20,000 years, which is when glaciation was at its peak, human and formal animal populations, plant populations couldn't inhabit these northern latitudes.

So I think it's like the whole of Denmark from like north of maybe Birmingham was all covered in ice sheets.

And for another 200, 300 miles south, we'd all been completely uninhabitable.

So human populations were restricted to these glacier refuges in two main glacier refuges in Europe at the time.

One was sort of the Italy-Balkans region, and one was in southern France and northern Spain.

And these individuals who we find at Gough's Cave are called the Magdalenian, and they stem from this refugia in southern France and northern Spain.

So essentially, as the ice sheets retreated, these groups of small hunter-gatherers, they are dependent on hunting terrestrial fauna, so wild horses, reindeer, things like that.

Their prey essentially would have been moving northwards and they would have been tracking the prey northwards.

And we see an increase of these Magdalenian sites across northern Europe, across Germany, across Poland, between about 18,000 and 15,000.

But the assemblage at Goff's Cave is one of the largest and one of the most rich in terms of not only human remains, but also artifacts and lithic technologies.

And we have this incredible funerary behavior of funerary cannibalism.

So rather than burying their dead, as we might do, or cremate their dead, they were eating their dead.

So we had sort of three main biomolecular methods is what we call them.

So the first is obviously ancient DNA, which is what Selena and I specialize in.

We also have perhaps the most important method, which is radiocarbon dating.

So this is measuring the isotopic value of carbon-14 in the collagen.

And essentially, once the individual is deposited,