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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These are things like aurochs, the ancestor of our domestic cattle. We had things like elk or moose, as it's known in North America. Red deer would have been abundant, roe deer, wild boar. These are the major sort of herbivore food stock, really, for the last hunter-gatherers that we find in Britain. And those are the Mesolithic peoples.
Yes, so some of those species have gone right the way through to the present day. So red deer, roe deer would be a case in point. Others, such as the last remaining carnivores, whether they happen to be brown bears, lynx or wolves, we hunted to extinction really sort of from the Middle Ages onwards.
Other things like elk disappear quite early on in the Holocene, again, probably hunted to extinction. And some of those smaller species as well. So the Arctic foxes have gone, but instead we have red fox. We have things like wildcat as well. And they're all distributed really all over Britain.
So things like wildcat, which today survive only up in the Scottish Highlands, their natural habitat, which we can see from the fossil evidence, is actually deciduous woodland. And so the fossil record is
can play a really important role here in helping to address modern conservation issues today by giving more detailed baseline information about where species should be distributed or where they should be reintroduced today. So one of the youngest specimens that we have from the Mendip Hills, from the excavations, is a beautiful complete skeleton of a wildcat.
and it was found in association with other evidence that indicates warm and wooded conditions. So this was really optimal habitat for them.
Technically by 11,700. That's when we would say, yep. I mean, it depends whether you count in radiocarbon years before the present, or, you know, some people look at it from a sort of, you know, BC or before the common era. So round about that, you know, 11,700 years before the present day, that would be when we consider the, you And we've got those warm and wooded conditions.
And then obviously, you know, some spectacular transitions further in the human journey, really. And the move from hunter-gatherers to settled peoples and agriculture, all of these things then kick off.
It's a really nice question to end on because this is one of the things that I think is so important and it's something that we're really trying to push and to work with modern ecologists. And so I've got a lot of great work that's starting with, for example, Natural England and other colleagues, particularly around some of these sort of joined up super national nature reserves that
where there are some really exciting developments that are in play, involving perhaps reintroduction of large herbivores to modify the landscape. The disappearance of many species is only just starting to be understood in terms of their legacy. The important things that elk and bison, for example, that they had in terms of
opening up the vegetation, in terms of fertilising the land with their dung, in terms of transporting seeds around, all sorts of things that we have lost in the way of ecological benefits.
We are understanding very well now how animals such as beavers, ecosystem engineers, the role that they can play in terms of helping to control completely cost-free flooding episodes by trapping water upstream and away from areas of human settlement. But there's a lot more to be done.
And really, the fossil record can give a really important insight, working hand in hand with ecologists in terms of understanding the range, the habitats, coexistence of different species and different behaviours in the past. We can provide a more nuanced insight.
insight into for example things like species distribution models where we think about where animals could and should be distributed especially in view of climate change in the future and the fossil record can help us make better informed decisions in terms of the conservation of those species so a really important role to play and some really exciting work to be done in the future.
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