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

So mammals can often, because they can maintain their body against a temperature gradient, they can often survive in more marginal areas outside their sort of core range. But yes, the story there is very much one of move, adapt or die out. So we've already seen some species such as woolly rhino disappear from Britain about 35,000 years ago, but they live for another 20,000 years up in Siberia.

And so when we look at, for example, the extinction of species, we need to understand that it's different triggers in different parts of their range at different times. So species are not necessarily responding as communities here, but very much as individuals. And some of them, you know, the climate change is too quick for them to adapt, really.

So actually, although some of them may be able to switch to different food sources, often the way that they would sort of get out of difficulty is to change their range. So they would migrate to areas that were more favourable.

Humans are around during the late glacial interstitial and they come back just before the warming event. So they're really poised and ready to come back into Britain. And they seem to occupy areas of the southwest first and then move further north into the Midlands. And we're able to establish this because of very precise radiocarbon dating.

We know that when they come in at about 14,500 years ago or just before – They are primarily hunting horse, but also going after things like red deer as well. And then later on, they move to doing things like trapping mountain hare and exploiting those. So that's really interesting that there is a switch to smaller game.

And that's consistent with the disappearance of things like the megafauna, that people are having to adapt their diets as their own environment changes and they're having to switch to different food sources.

Indeed. So, Gough's Cave was a really spectacular site and probably supported a decent group of individuals for perhaps a couple of hundred years. And even though this site was dug, primarily excavated a long time ago during the Victorian period, There have been more recent excavations of remnants of the sediments that were preserved below overhangs on the side of the cave walls.

Those were carried out by colleagues from the Natural History Museum in the 1980s. One of the most astonishing things about Gough's cave is the abundance of actual human remains. So in fact, human remains generally, whether it's modern humans, whether it's Neanderthals or their forebears, are so incredibly rare in Britain.

And yet they make up approximately a quarter of all the material that came out of Gough's cave. And in fact, there are sort of anecdotes about, I think, 12 tea chests full of bones being removed from the cave and essentially destroyed because they were viewed as duplicates. And when you think about the amount of material that must have been lost,

So the Goff's Cave remains are very special, partly because there's good evidence of humans, but also because of the superb preservation of the material. And we can see the remains of animals, whether it's, for example, butchered horses. We see cut marks on horse teeth, on horse bones. We see exploitation of red deer. There's remains of carnivores, such as lynx.

that are present in the site and almost certainly exploited in the case of the lynx for its lovely pelt for the fur. We see exploitation of things like mountain hare and the modification of hare bones into little tools such as piercing, sort of all type tools. Really just a very sort of complete picture of what humans are doing.

And of course, one of the most notorious things there is that there is also evidence of breakage of bone for marrow extraction and butchery of the human remains themselves. So those humans are being treated in exactly the same way as any other butchered animal bone at the site.

It's Somerset, right in the Mendips. So it's partway up Cheddar Gorge. So a really well-known area that people can go and explore. And you can walk into the cave today. And it's a visitor attraction. And the Paleolithic or old Stone Age deposits are very close to the entrance of the cave, just sort of tucked away on the left-hand side as you come in.

Yes, I think just as we seem to be climbing out of the last ice age, we have a sudden reversal of conditions and a huge climatic deterioration. This is a period known as the Younger Dryas. It starts about 12,900 years ago and it finishes about 11,700 years ago. Pretty precise dates as well for Paleolithic times too. Pretty precise dates.

And again, we can get that chronology from the Greenland ice core, but also, of course, with the benefit of radiocarbon dating as well. So, we know quite a lot about this time period in terms of the effects on land of this sudden deterioration in climate. And Broadly speaking, that's caused by a mixture of factors.

So there is some evidence, for example, from Germany, from the Eifel region, that there is a period of intense volcanism, so volcanic activity that precipitates a cooling in climate. But also there are other things going on at this time.

So particularly in North America, you've got the decay of the big ice sheets, the Laurentide ice sheet, and pulses of very cold meltwater that are entering the North Atlantic. What they do is to disrupt the ocean circulation, and Britain is plunged back into the freezer once more.

Again, this would have been an abrupt reversal of fortune for a lot of the more temperate adapted species. Certainly, in the caves that we've been digging in Ebba Gorge, we can find, for example, evidence of reindeer. There's also evidence of arctic fox in there. There's several individuals, including a complete specimen that was curled up in a little niche at the back of the site.

So beautifully preserved. There's lots of crunched up bone in there as well. So you can imagine the arctic foxes running in and out of the cave. They are predating small mammals. So we get a variety of small mammal species that are present, but also things like birds as well. So species that we would find in the northern part of Britain today. So things like ptarmigan,

Again, those small species are on the move very rapidly. Within the cave site, we have remains of three species of lemming that today are not sympatric, by which I mean they don't live together today. So we have remains of Norway lemming, which come from Scandinavia. We have remains of collared lemming that today have a sort of circumpolar distribution in the Northern Hemisphere.

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