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5min chapter
Ice Age Britain: Finding the First Homo sapiens
The Ancients
Excavations, Ice Age Landscape, and Wogan Cavern
This chapter delves into the significance of contextual excavations in caves to understand ice age artifacts, animal bones, and stone tools in Britain, focusing on the landscape, environmental conditions, and appeal of Wogan cavern to early Homo sapiens 40,000 years ago.
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Speaker 2
Yeah absolutely and that is one thing that's often lacking from a lot of earlier
Speaker 3
cave excavations so a lot of British caves were dug out by antiquarians and what's missing from their excavations is really that context they were picking and choosing the kind of choice artifacts or animal bones so basically the ones that answered their specific research questions. We have very different research questions nowadays and context is key to understanding this.
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Speaker 2
It's very exciting to see that the team have already reached these Paleolithic levels. And it does bode well for the future that they will uncover even more artifacts, animal bones, stone tools, evidence of burning and so on.
Speaker 4
Because this trench is a minuscule of fraction of
Speaker 2
the entire cavern in its size after all. And if this trench is already showing signs of ice age activity there must almost certainly be more still waiting to be unearthed.
Speaker 4
Evidently early humans did once use this cavern. So what
Speaker 2
did the environment surrounding Wogan cavern look like back in the ice age? Why was this cavern today in western Wales so appealing
Speaker 4
to early homo sapiens
Speaker 2
and potentially the anodols too? So Rob we're outside Wogan cavern now and now we have this huge stone wall in front of us but back
Speaker 1
in Paleolithic times this was the entrance to the cave. This was the entrance to the cave and it was a big entrance to the cave. So the wall you see here this was put up at the beginning of the 13th century but prior to that we know from our excavations it will have been an open cave for people to go in and use for a long long time at least back to 40,000 years ago. Well let's say
Speaker 2
40,000 years ago you're looking out from that cave into the area around. Do we have any idea what the landscape would have
Speaker 1
looked like? We do and we do in terms of the type of animals and more generally what the landscapes will have looked like. As you go back in time of course it's similar to this and then you're back into the ice age and that's when things become different. So just based on the evidence that we found we know that around about that 30,000, 40,000 year period you've got a cold type of landscape and it's actually cold and arid conditions. You have large herbivores we've got lots of reindeer bone we've got a note at the moment no hint of the things that were hunting them but we know from other sites that hyena were hunting things like that. So you've got these big ice age beasts but then we've got evidence from the small mammals as well. We've actually got a nice assemblage of lemming from the ice age from here as well. So it's a much colder environment than today.
Speaker 2
And there's such thing as a silly question but why caves for these early homo sapiens in Britain some 40,000 years ago? What was so appealing about a massive cavern like Wogankavan?
Speaker 1
Well I think that's the key. I think actually that Wogankavan is different from the other caves we have because it's a really really big space. We know from the better archaeology we have elsewhere in Europe that although people didn't routinely live in caves they built structures in the landscape including in the mouth of caves they did actually use those spaces. The other caves we have in Britain as a rule they tend to be quite small.
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