Dr. William Marsh

The carbon-14 is an radioactive isotope, so it begins to degrade.

So it has a half-life, I think it's of like 720 years or something like that.

So essentially, you can track the proportion of carbon-14 to carbon-13, and that tells you the

you can predict the age of an element.

And we did that for this mandible at Gough's Cave, and it came out as about 14,500 years old, which is very similar, or almost completely identical, let's say, to all the human remains, which had also been sampled for radiocarbon dating, and also some faunal remains.

So we have a very, very tight sort of age range from about 15.1,000 years ago to 14.2,000 years ago, where we know that these Magellanian groups were using Goskove.

And alongside, the third method is called dietary isotope analysis.

So this gives you an insight into what humans and dogs were eating based on their carbon and nitrogen values.

And we see examples, although Goscave is an exception in how large it is in terms of the amount of material which we have, lithics, faunal remains, human remains, you actually see other examples of these cannibalistic behaviours across the Magdalenian, across Europe.

So I think there's 13 sites where you see this cannibalism, six which have skull cups.

So it shows that Goff's Cave was obviously a unique site in itself, but also linked to a sort of wider population across continental Europe at the time.

Yeah, stone tools technology.

And these stone tools technologies would be sort of, although unique is probably not the right word, but

idiosyncratic of the Magdalenians.

So the Magdalenians would have their own sort of type of lithic or stone tool technologies compared to other hunter-gatherer groups, other hunter-gatherer cultures of the same period.

Yeah, it was pretty tricky, to be honest.

And what we had to do is essentially drill a hole in the bone, get some bone powder, extract the DNA from his bone powder, and then sequence this on very, very large and expensive DNA sequencing machines.

The thing about ancient DNA is that it's very, very fragmented.

So if I was to take a drop of your blood, Tristan, now, it would have more DNA in it than probably 500 samples at the Natural History Museum.

And not only would you have more of it, more of your own DNA, but also it would be very, very long compared to the ancient DNA in these samples.