Professor Danielle Schreve

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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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The Ancients · End of Ice Age Britain · 23 Feb 2025 podcast

But they are not so good at preserving things like pollen or what we call plant macrofossils, so bits of plant, whether it's bits of leaf or twig or seed, for example. And that's just because limestone tends – I mean, it's a very calcareous environment.

So it's good at preserving things like bones, and it's not good at preserving things like pollen, which needs a more acidic type of depositional environment.

Yes, it's very alkaline. So that's good for the preservation of bones and teeth.

So we get different types of evidence from these caves, but they can often contain really detailed sequences that allow us to examine how animals and indeed people on occasion, if we have evidence for archaeology in those caves, we can examine how the fauna, how people have been responding to climate and environmental change.

So this is work we've been doing for a number of years now, about 15 years. And it's based in a previously unexplored cave site in the Mendip Hills in Somerset. So it was a wonderful opportunity to explore a site that had not had any previous excavation in it. So already that's quite rare because many cave sites have been discovered. They were discovered by Victorian antiquarians.

A lot of them were dug out.

They certainly did. They were very keen on finding things like specimens for their cabinet of curiosities. They would go out. In some cases, there were rather systematic excavations done. In other cases, people were literally going along and looking for souvenirs.

All of this happened at a very exciting time, and in fact, Britain and places like the Mendip Hills played a crucial part in that move away from the teachings of the church and understanding about evolution, the discovery of the bones of extinct animals, and then later in association with human tools as well. This was really the first insights into the antiquity of humans.

So the Mendip Hills have always been a great place to work. And the research that we've been doing in this particular cave site has generated some fantastic information. We have a sequence that goes back over 50,000 years now. And it's one of the most important sites, certainly in Britain and in Northwest Europe.

We're talking about hundreds of mammal bones. Now they're not all complete. It's important to say that because at some levels within the cave, we have things like spotted hyenas that have been denning there and they're crunching up the bones. So we collect all of the fragments because even the very broken bits tell us something about the origins of what we call an assemblage.

So that collection of bits of bone and they tell us what those animals were up to. But at this particular cave site in Ebba Gorge, we have, for example, in some of the upper layers, we have got hundreds of thousands of bits of small mammal. So these might be things like bats, mice, voles, shrews, lemmings.

They've been brought in by birds of prey that have been hunting over the landscape, that have swallowed this material down. They come back to the cave to roost, and then they regurgitate the undigested bits as pellets. Eventually, thousands of years later, those have started to turn into fossils, and that's when we can come along and collect them.

The Last Glacial Maximum, Britain, was a pretty chilly place, so subject to really savage cold. So as the name implies, the Last Glacial Maximum witnesses the coldest point of the last ice age, which began about 100,000 years ago. Around about 26,000-25,000 years ago, you get the expansion of ice sheets in Britain. They cover all of Scotland. They cover almost all of Wales.

They cover most of northern England. They just reached down into the northern coast of East Anglia. So if you can imagine a huge glacier, a huge ice sheet going pretty much all the way from East Yorkshire at an angle down to South Wales, that's the extent of the ice sheet and extending into the North Sea Basin beyond. And in front of that ice sheet, there would have been really a polar desert.

So permafrost conditions, very, very cold indeed. Britain is connected to continental Europe at that time because sea level was much lower. That's because water is drawn off during the buildup of the ice sheets on land. There's evaporation of the water from the oceans, and sea levels fall by about 120 meters globally. That's more than enough to reconnect Britain to the continent.

So there is a land bridge in the southern part of the North Sea Basin. So it would be possible for species that were able to tolerate those conditions to move in and out, but it would have been a pretty inhospitable place.

There's a surprising number of species, I would say. I mean, biodiversity is, of course, much lower than you would find in many warmer climate periods. But nevertheless, we still get some smaller species around. So we find, for example, evidence of mountain hare. We also have remains of cold adapted species such as woolly mammoth. We have also reindeer around, for example.

But some of the most interesting remains that we've got are things like muskox, which are obviously obligate cold species. They live today up in the high Arctic. And yet they were living around, for example, Northamptonshire. We've got a series of muskox remains that are dated to about 20,000 years ago.

So that is a really, really clear indication of just how different conditions were on the ground at that time. Wow.

There's no unequivocal evidence of humans being present. So it's a tricky one because I think when you have certainly a period of very cold climate conditions, often it's hard for material to get preserved because just the cold and the action of ice sheets, it's not conducive to the preservation of fossil material.

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