Professor Danielle Schreve
speaker
114 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Professor Danielle Schreve’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thank you very much. It's great to be here.
Absolutely. I think some of the changes that were witnessed, whether it's to do with the landscape, the environment, the fauna, they're just some of the most remarkable changes that Britain has ever witnessed.
Definitely, thousands of years. So I think probably a sensible starting point is probably the period that we would call the last glacial maximum. So from about 26,000 years ago until really the early parts of the current warm stage or interglacial that we're in now.
We do. So I think it's important to make a difference between archaeological material, which would be that related exclusively to humans, so things like human artefacts, whether that's stone tools or other types of evidence, and the sort of paleobiological evidence that we might have. So things like fossils of animal bones, plant remains, shells, that kind of thing.
So, we have lots of different types of evidence that are available to us, and sometimes that comes in the form of the sediments themselves, because the deposits of sands and gravels and all sorts of things that we might actually dig into, we can understand a story of how climate changed from those.
We can also look at the remains of animals and plants, and they tell us very clearly how things change in response to climate change, often very rapid and abrupt climate change. There's also different types of evidence out there as well. For example, things like sea level rise. We know that at times Britain was connected to the continental mainland.
And then as we come towards the end of the last ice age, the sea level rises and Britain becomes cut off. So actually, there's a whole host of different types of evidence out there.
Definitely. So one of the things we try to do is to reconstruct that landscape. So to understand, for example, the changing coastline of Britain. Britain is in quite an extraordinary position, really, at the edge of the North Atlantic. So it's very sensitive to climate change. And we can get at that evidence for change through doing things like coring,
into deposits that might be, for example, buried below the sea now, but also on land as well, and actually looking at those cores of sediment through time and extracting as much information from them as possible.
Yes. So, paleoecology or paleoecology really deals with the ecology of the past. So, the paleo bit just means the old part. So, in the same way that an ecologist today would look at the habitats, the behaviour, all aspects of the ecology of the animals that they might study today, this is what I'm trying to do in the past.
And sometimes it's easy or relatively easy because the animals that I study are still around today or very close relatives. In other cases where you've got animals that are extinct today, we have to draw on different lines of evidence in order to try and reconstruct something of their life ways.
So fauna is animal life. And by that, anything could come into fauna, whether it's, for example, vertebrates. So that might be fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals. But it could also include all sorts of invertebrates as well. So particularly things like beetles, snail shells, that kind of thing as well. So it covers a very broad range of different types of material.
Definitely. And one of the things that I am interested in is studying the fauna as a whole. So not just focusing in on sort of the biggest, most impressive species, although obviously things like the megafauna are really interesting and charismatic animals, but actually things like small mammals as well. They can tell you a phenomenal amount about the local environment, about climate.
Small things like beetles are really good for reconstructing climate events in the past and telling you about local vegetation. And some sites preserve some types of evidence better than others. So we need to go after all of them in order to try and reconstruct the best, most holistic picture that we can.
They can indeed. So I guess it's a moot point whether you want to include humans as part of the fauna. I think for much of the past, the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age, humans are doing something interesting in the landscape. They are certainly doing unusual things like making stone tools, but they're very much part of a wider fauna.
They're responding to the same kind of climatic and environmental trends that other species are. Luckily, they do leave behind useful things like stone tools, so we are able to derive an enormous amount of information from that in terms of their behaviour.
Remains of the actual early humans themselves are very rare in the UK, but we do have other types of evidence, for example, things like cut marked bones and broken bones, which tell us about butchery and hunting practices as well.
So cave sites are often really good places to target for this type of information. They can be very rich resources of information. Often, of course, we have caves that form in limestone areas across the UK. So things like the southwest of England, the Peak District, South Wales, for example, North Wales. These are all really good places for finding material in caves.
And you can often get a buildup of quite long sequences through time as well. And that's because caves act as large repositories or archives for material coming in. And sometimes it might be washed in by a river or a mudflow. But a lot of times you get cave sediments building up over time and containing the remains of animals that were either living in the cave or
so things like carnivores, for example, or which were brought in as remains of prey. And that can build up over long periods. So caves are great generally for preserving animal remains in the form of bones or teeth. They're also very good for preserving mollusk and shell.
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