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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And we have only the second record from Britain of a Siberian steppe lemming. And all those three species congregate in the southwest of Britain during the Younger Dryas. So again, these things were expanding their range very rapidly.
Yes, it certainly is for those particular species. There is another species called a wood lemming, though it inhabits more boreal forests today in Scandinavia.
Traditionally, very difficult to separate from things like the Norway lemming, but through a mixture of ancient DNA and also very novel types of shape analysis on the teeth, we've been able to separate out the wood lemming species from the Norway lemming species.
And because they both like different types of environment, that's been really important for us in terms of understanding the local vegetation. So if we have something like a Norway lemming, these are typical tundra species. They can tolerate sort of fairly boggy types of environment. They would feed on grasses and sedges.
And we know that obviously they can tolerate snow cover and they are a great indicator of local conditions on the ground.
perhaps not quite as cold, but still a shock to the system. So, you're looking at really a sort of, I guess, a decrease of perhaps four or five degrees centigrade in terms of air temperatures, certainly for the Younger Dryas across Europe. It's not the same globally.
So, the Younger Dryas is manifested differently in different parts of the world, but certainly that's what we would expect for Northwest Europe.
It is indeed. So we often use local stage names, which are particularly appropriate for Britain. So if you were to say the Loch Lomond Stadium, people would understand exactly what that was. And that also conjures up a very specific set of circumstances. So the presence of ice sheets up in Scotland, the kinds of cold climate animals that we've been describing just now,
Whereas, obviously, if the Younger Dryas is manifested differently in different parts of the world, then they would also have their own local stage names as well.
So, saiga antelope are fantastic animals and they are a small bovid, a small antelope. They live today in really the sort of heartlands of dry central and eastern Asia, so particularly populations in Mongolia and Kazakhstan. Until recently, they have been critically endangered, but thank goodness their numbers are now on the rise again.
They are very well adapted to living in arid and pretty dusty environments. If you happen to look them up and you see photos of them, you'll see that they have this fantastic nozzle-like nose. They can use it to filter that dry, dusty air, cold air before it gets into the lungs.
And although they are essentially Central Asian animals and always have been, in response to this sort of cold and arid pulse that we find in the Younger Dryas, they expand their range at the time. We find them over in Alaska and to the west, we find them over in Somerset. So there are radiocarbon-dated remains from Gough's cave and also from some other cave sites in Cheddar Gorge as well.
So a fantastic but rare addition to the fauna in Britain at this time.
No, again, we just don't have the sites. Certainly at the sites that we've been working on in Ebba Gorge, we don't have evidence of artefacts, we don't have evidence of cut-marked remains, and we certainly don't have evidence of people themselves.
So again, it's perfectly possible that people were making occasional forays into Britain, but we think that Britain was largely abandoned during this period.
So we're back on that warming trajectory. And again, there is rapid warming. And the early part of the current interglacial, the Holocene, is even warmer than at the present day. And then we sort of settle down to a period of relative climatic stability.
But yes, the real end of the ice age, you start to see really up in Scotland, you start to see the last of those glaciers, those ice sheets disappear. retracting and leaving behind what we call dead ice environments. So for example, lakes, you would have had the ice melting and creating a lot of lakes in areas of sort of deeper topography.
You would have had a window of opportunity for animals and people to come back into Britain before sea level rises and cuts us off completely. So, remember that land bridge that had existed for pretty much all of the last ice age? That is becoming smaller and smaller.
As that ice across the northern hemisphere melts and the water is returned to the ocean, that land bridge becomes more and more compressed and harder and harder to access. So, people and animals would have come back into Britain very rapidly.
We see things like reindeer hanging on for a little while into the early part of the current warm stage, but eventually it becomes too warm and too wooded for them to survive and they go locally extinct. Instead, we see a whole suite of fauna that we would regard as native species coming into Britain in the early part of the warm stage.
Showing 81–100 of 114 · page 5 of 6
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