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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Now, certainly across Northern Europe, there were other areas that were believed to be abandoned by modern humans at the time, but of which have been demonstrated subsequently to have some limited evidence. So, it's possible that humans were making forays into Britain at that time, perhaps during the slightly warmer parts of the summer months. But we really don't have any good evidence.
We don't have any artefacts. And there is a putative human humorous from a site in South Wales that may date to this period. But certainly if people were around, they are in low numbers and they are not long-term residents. Music
It has to be lower than the ice sheets. I think you might have had some species that perhaps could tolerate being out on the open ice, so much further to the north, although we don't have evidence preserved. You might have got things like polar bear, for example, at the very highest latitudes. But really, for the herbivores, of course, they need something to eat. They need vegetation.
So they cannot survive out on an open ice sheet. They have to have vegetation. And in the case of something like a reindeer, that can be fairly short grasses and lichen that they might be feeding on. But it's not like having a herbivore. There's not a herbivore bonanza up on the ice sheet. You might have had polar bears that are predating on seals, for example.
in the way that they would do in high latitudes today. But really, everything is going to be south of that ice sheet limit.
So at the end of the last glacial maximum, we enter a period of abrupt warming. And this is referred to as the late glacial interstadial. It's about 14,500 years ago. And it marks the sort of first evidence towards a significant warming. albeit later interrupted, but a warming and really sort of, you know, the end of the last ice age. So that warming event is very abrupt.
Really, you're looking at rapid warming conditions in Northwest Europe. So the ice sheets begin to retreat. And really by, you know, sort of about 16,000 years ago, they are much, you know, they're much reduced up to the northern part of Britain.
We do because we can measure these things, for example, by going to the ice sheets in Greenland. Oh, wow. Yes. So you can extract ice cores from Greenland and they have annual records in them where they've got things like greenhouse gases trapped. So we're able to measure this and document this really, really accurately. closely. We can date those bands in the ice.
And so we do have a very good idea about just how quickly some of these transitions took place.
It's a great sort of archive, if you like. It's a great benchmark for understanding how climate change in this part of the Northern Hemisphere happened. And because Britain is, you know, really quite close in that part of the North Atlantic, we can actually see the major transitions as we come out of the last glacial maximum.
the rapid warming into the late glacial interstitial, and then some of the subsequent oscillations, the climatic fluctuations that we see, we can actually see that evidenced on land in Britain.
So at that time, you would see a retreat of some of the species that had been adapted to very cold conditions. So things like mammoths begin to contract their range back to Siberia. During the late glacial interstitial in Britain, you do get other species that are cold adapted that still hang on. So things like reindeer are still regularly present.
But because of the warming event that we see, we get other types of herbivores in particular coming in. At first, things like horse and then subsequently red deer. We get a real mix of species at that time though. For example, in the cave sites that we're working in in Somerset, we get both species that are today indicative of cold climate conditions. For example, things like collared lemmings.
Those are mixed in with other small mammal species that require more temperate but also some kind of vegetation cover as well. These might be things like wood mice, for example, or common shrews.
These are small mammals that we think are probably able to eke out an existence in some of these very deep limestone gorges, particularly where there are more shrubby habitats or even trees that are growing there.
there would have been sufficient shelter to support both the ones that needed more temperate conditions, but also up on the plateau, you've still got pretty exposed conditions and you would have been able to support things like reindeer up there as well.
Yes, and I think certainly back in the past, we used to wonder whether these were sort of jumbles in the fossil record, that there wasn't good resolution in these sites, that we didn't have the precision to say level by level exactly what was going on. But now, for example, with the types of sites that we're working on, we have got really good resolution.
So actually, we can see that within just a few centimetres of sediment, we can extract these animals that have rather different habitat preferences together. It really has an important lesson, I think, for how we understand fauna and responses to climate change at the present day, because it shows us how quickly animals can respond to these events.
And obviously, one of the challenges that they have today is the fact that we have changed the landscape. We've removed connectivity of habitats. But in the past, even very small animals could expand or contract their range according to changing environments, changing climates. They could do that really, really rapidly.
So animals such as, you know, many of these animals would be relatively more tolerant as mammals because mammals are warm-blooded and they would have had certain adaptations as well. They're certainly more tolerant than things like reptiles or amphibians that are obviously completely dependent on external temperatures.
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