"Historians and archaeologists have long thought that the story of the earliest Britons was lost to the mists of time." "The Stone Age settlers of ancient Britain had always been thought of as simple folk, living a brutal hand-to-mouth existence." "An itinerant people, leaving almost no trace of their nomadic existence." "But now, evidence is emerging that turns those assumptions upside down." "Traditionally, the view of the hunter-gatherer has been that they've really just been sort of running through the landscape, chasing after the latest big animal, but, in fact, what we have here is something much more complicated." "Archaeological sites all over the UK and northern Europe are producing evidence that paints these people in a very different light." "It's become clear over time that people are thinking ahead and planning for the future." "And that is really quite a sophisticated way to interact with the environment." "And scientific technologies are bringing prehistory into sharp focus, in a way unimaginable just a few decades ago." "We produced a life story, a life history of what they were eating and what the climate was like." "We could reach back into the past and reconstruct their childhoods." "But perhaps the most surprising of all is a discovery in an ancient cave that completely confounds our preconceptions about who our ancestors actually were." "When we got the isotope analysis results, our whole picture that we had before just crumbled in a second." "Thanks to science, we now have an increasingly clear picture of prehistory and the sophisticated people who were the first Britons." "For hundreds of years, it's been thought that the people who erected" "Britain's ancient monuments like Stonehenge also founded its first civilisation." "It's an understandable assumption." "These structures are, on the face of it, the earliest obvious record that anybody lived in Britain at all." "But to understand what came before, you first have to realise that what is NOW Britain was THEN something else entirely." "And to understand the people who first lived here, it's necessary to go to extraordinary lengths to find traces of their existence..." "..because the Britain they knew is often buried deep underground..." "..or even under the sea." "Several fathoms below the murky waters of the Solent lies an archaeological site like no other, a place that holds intriguing clues as to who the first Britons really were, clues being investigated by Professor Vince Gaffney, an expert in submerged prehistoric landscapes." "Here, about 11 metres below us, is a site which very few people know about and which is probably one of the most important in Britain, if not Europe." "Since the end of the ice age, the sea has risen 120 metres." "We've lost a stunning amount of the land surface of Europe, so if we want to find out about the societies, even on mainland Britain, we have to understand what's happening on the lands that have been lost to the sea, because they probably were" "the heartland of the population at that time." "Part of this underwater landscape can be found intact at Bouldnor Cliff, just off the Isle Of Wight, where the ancient soil preserved under the silt and sand of the seabed is exactly as it was when hunter-gatherers walked across it 8,000 years ago." "The extraordinary levels of preservation are possible because of the anaerobic - or oxygen-free - environment that exists in the mud under the sea." "Down here, artefacts that would have rotted away on land are held in perfect condition in their silty time capsule." "If you dug a contemporary site on land, the chances are you'd largely find stone artefacts, bone, the things that are durable and survive over time." "Over this huge period of time, organics decay." "On this site, the organics are preserved deep beneath the sea." "Organic materials such as timber, string, and even foods like hazelnuts have been pulled from the murk, surviving here in a way they couldn't possibly on land." "But most importantly, so does DNA." "In 2013, the Bouldnor Cliff team decided to analyse part of the ancient landscape to see what" "DNA preserved within it might tell them." "Carefully sealed against contamination, the precious cargo was brought to the surface for analysis in the lab." "The first results offered clues as to the nature of the environment that the hunter-gatherer clans had known 8,000 years ago, some 3,000 years before Stonehenge." "There was a mixed woodland environment - there were oak, there was grasses." "That is pretty much what you'd expect for a site of this period." "But hidden in the sample were traces of something that the team weren't expecting, evidence of something astounding." "What did surprise us was evidence for wheat." "By any standards, it shouldn't have been there." "It shouldn't have been there because wheat is evidence of agriculture, and even the most conservative estimates place the introduction of farming in Britain some 2,000 years later." "So, the presence of wheat in the ancient landscapes beneath the Solent needs an explanation." "It's almost certainly being imported, but it has to be coming from some distance." "The nearest farming groups at 6000 were potentially hundreds of miles away." "However it actually arrives, it does give strong suggestions that, you know, Britain is not an isolated place." "It's part of very complex networks which must have stretched a considerable way across continental Europe and, if that's the case, we have to start rethinking about how we imagine groups which we call "simple"." "It's only occasionally an archaeologist finds something that you think may be a complete game-changer." "The work at Bouldnor is up there at the top." "It's an exceptional event to find something that really does challenge the way you think about an archaeological period, fundamentally." "This startling revelation from the deep describes a sophistication in our early ancestors that some archaeologists had not thought possible." "It demands a comprehensive re-examination of who these people were, where they came from and what impact they had on our early history." "Their story starts at the end of the last ice age." "As Britain woke from its long hibernation, the thick ice sheet that covered most of the north of the country started to melt." "Further south, the thaw had begun in earnest." "The recently uninhabitable polar desert now sprang to life." "The sea levels, though rising, were far below where they are today and Britain was not yet an island, simply a continuation of what is now France and the Netherlands." "For hunter-gatherers from the east, new opportunities were opening up in Doggerland, a vast plain lying under what is now the North Sea." "Archaeologist Hans Peeters spends his time investigating this lost prehistoric world." "15,000 years ago, temperatures would really rise quickly and permitted the development of vegetation and then we really start to see a completely different landscape." "You have an undulating landscape with rivers running through it, with lots of lakes that form because of the melting ice." "As the world continued to warm, life flourished." "Permafrost gave way to prairies and scrublands." "Those are environments which become particularly attractive to lots of animals." "The moment we've got animals in a landscape, we can also expect humans to be there." "This period of history is called the Mesolithic, the Middle Stone Age." "Hans has found unexpected clues about the Mesolithic people who lived in the lost world of Doggerland." "Mesolithic people may use a huge variety of materials." "This is a bone harpoon, of which we find quite a number of these, these last years." "These are cut out of a piece of bone, a splinter of bone which is shaped to a point and then forced in with a couple of incisions, a small number of barbs." "But there's also other tools like, for instance, here a fragment of a chisel made out of a red deer antler, and even some ornaments where we have here a very small bead made out of a bird's bone." "So, finds like these tell us that these Mesolithic people used materials to produce tools but also to make other objects out of it, which were just there to, maybe to show somebody's status or just for dressing up because people dressed up" "maybe just as we did." "It's a far cry from the traditional view of the pre-farming people of the Mesolithic, a no-frills hand-to-mouth existence with no time for anything except feeding themselves." "Here is evidence of a culture that made jewellery, that traded and manufactured, as well as hunted." "These people lived in Doggerland for 6,000 years, and as the ice receded further, they also made their way north and west into the new wooded hunting grounds of what would eventually become Britain." "Once here, they set about demonstrating once again that they were far more than simple hunter-gatherers." "Jim Innes is an environmental archaeologist." "It's his job to work out how landscapes change over time." "10,000 years ago, when the Mesolithic people arrived here, this bleak moor was dense woodland." "Now the trees are long gone, cleared, so the story goes, by the first farmers 6,000 years later." "But Jim has discovered evidence of a different story deep under the surface." "We've got various layers here." "We've got layers of peat which run up to the surface." "We've got inorganic layers that are composed of clay or silt, but then a very black couple-of-centimetres-thick deposit that's almost composed entirely of charcoal." "The soil core is a way of looking back in time." "The deeper you go, the further back you're looking." "Jim's unexpected charcoal layer comes from a landscape that has lain undisturbed for more than 7,000 years." "It is evidence of a Mesolithic fire." "It could be from a natural fire, this charcoal." "It depends on the intensity and the scale of the fire." "The fact that it's so thick and composed almost entirely of charcoal suggests that you're dealing with really quite an intense event." "An event like this, however intense, would, by itself, be evidence of nothing more than a fire that happened a long time ago, but Jim has discovered more than 20 areas across the moors where charcoal layers of the same period are also found." "Such a large number of separate fires are unlikely to be coincidence." "Jim is hoping that his sediment cores might produce further clues to help solve the mystery of the Mesolithic fires." "Taking the sediment core really is just the first step." "We take the sediment because it contains evidence and that allows us to reconstruct what happened in the past." "It'll contain macro-fossil remains that tell you what was growing on the bog itself, but more importantly, it contains pollen." "The ancient pollen grains allow Jim to identify the long-dead plants that once flourished in the landscape on which our forebears once walked." "And the species of plants the pollen came from allows Jim to paint a detailed picture of the kind of landscape that existed after the fires sprang up, clearing small areas of woodland as they burned." "For example, the pollen of melampyrum, cow wheat, is a good indicator of recently burned woodland." "As a member of the field layer, melampyrum is very tolerant to burning and springs back very quickly." "They will be supplanted by taller plants, things like heather, also perhaps things like bracken." "That's a bracken spore." "Jim argues that far from being natural phenomena, the mysterious Mesolithic fires on the moors were set on purpose, an intriguing possibility with important ramifications." "But primarily, if you cause a clearing using fire, you do attract animals to that new clearing, because you get a sudden increase in the amount of grazing and browsing that's available and also you can predict" "where the animals are going to be, so it's much easier, perhaps, to hunt them." "And as time goes by, of course, new types of plant will come into the clearings, and these will produce nuts and berries, and a lot of the vegetable foods would be good for humans to eat," "just the same as animals." "If Jim is right about the Mesolithic fire-starters, he'll have provided yet more evidence that the hunter-gatherer clans must have been much more complex and organised than anyone previously thought." "And I think it does mean that people are thinking ahead in terms of a few generations, perhaps, not just of a few years, and planning for the future." "Then that is really quite a sophisticated way to interact with the environment." "Our ancient ancestors were anything but the passive inhabitors of the landscape as was once thought." "These were a sophisticated people who were able to manipulate their environment to benefit themselves." "This, in a sense, is a foretaste of farming, 6,000 years before it was thought to appear here." "Other long-held assumptions about the people of the Mid Stone Age are also being reappraised." "Not far from Stonehenge is a site called Blick Mead." "In an area already famed for its mythical significance," "Blick Mead is the location of an ancient spring with some magical properties of its own." "I'm holding a flint nodule." "There are lots of them all along the foreshore, the shallow edges of the spring." "Now, look at this." "It's a wonderful contrast between these two colours." "Like this one, this flint nodule when it was in the water, was a type of rusty red." "It had that staining, but it's been taken out of the water for a couple of days and it has turned into this rather wonderful magenta pink." "Archaeologist David Jacques has been investigating this area for ten years." "He feels that what we now understand to be the work of an algae called Hildenbrandia would have been a big draw for the people of the Mesolithic." "People here have a colour range of sort of browns and greens, and reds and whites and blacks, rather like the type of range that we see behind us." "This transformative process, seen by us in just scientific terms, would have been seen by Mesolithic people as, I think, something quite magical." "Whatever the Mesolithic people might have thought about the exotic pink stones, the spring itself might have provide other more practical reasons for hunters to gather here." "The spring behind me is at a constant temperature, between about ten and 14 centigrade, and that's really significant because that means that we get extended growing seasons here, so you get vegetation coming in earlier and persisting later than in other places." "And that's very important, you see, for animal grazing and hunter-gatherers with good hunting strategies would have probably set situations up where they could take some of these animals down, very near to where I am now." "And, of course, that involves a type of proto-animal husbandry." "It's the type of behaviour that later on looks very Neolithic." "That sort of assertion demands evidence, but David and his team feel they have unearthed more than enough from the ground around here to support that and other new ideas about the Stone Age." "Blick Mead is really important because, as a rule, people see the Mesolithic as having a really, the lightest footprint on prehistory." "Here at Blick Mead, we're getting an enormous array of artefacts, 32,000 pieces of worked flint, over a thousand pieces of animal bone, the most amount of animal bone found in Great Britain from the period, really revealing into" "the ways people are eating and thinking, and what they're doing." "These artefacts have allowed David and his team to understand Mesolithic daily life in astonishing detail." "We've got tool types that cover activities from piercing clothing, to scraping animal skin, as well as the sort of typical hunters' kit that you see on many other Mesolithic sites." "And the earth around the Blick Mead spring holds evidence of hunting on a near-industrial scale." "We're finding that 61% of our bone assemblage comes from aurochs." "And these are the most powerful animal on the landscape." "We're talking twice the size of a modern cow, at least." "We're talking a real heavyweight, food here for at least 100 people if you can get one down." "Very hard to hunt." "People have to be super bright and tactical and strategic, so they're taking every natural advantage they can get from landscapes like this to trap an animal and perhaps corral it into the water and kill it there." "David finds the evidence, for the surprising idea that the Mesolithic hunters may have routinely used this area to attract and snare large animals, compelling." "And, on a site near the Blick Mead spring head, his team has recently unearthed its most exciting discovery yet." "Well, what we certainly have found is a man-made feature." "We only have part of it actually against the edge of the trench here." "The rest is going underneath." "It is very exciting." "We do certainly have the potential for the house." "It's a thrilling moment for everybody." "We've moved from the known, in the Blick Mead spring basin, to the unknown." "It's a serious piece of work." "I mean, there's almost a type of revetement stone going down the side of it." "By the look of the depth, I think we have to imagine that that would be, if it is a house, something that's been used long-term." "This appears to show a degree of permanence, a highly significant place in the lives of the Mesolithic people, again flying in the face of the conventional view of our ancient ancestors." "Traditionally, the view of the hunter-gatherer has been that they've really just been sort of running through the landscape, chasing after the latest big animal." "I mean, it does look much more like we're dealing with some type of semi-permanent settlement here." "Although the magic pink stones from the Blick Mead spring may well have drawn our Stone Age ancestors here, the reasons they stayed were probably far more practical, revealing, yet again, a level of sophistication previously not thought to appear until much later in history." "Blick Mead provides a really important reappraisal of Mesolithic community and culture." "Certainly, in this area, we can't talk any more about small dispersed groups and hunters maraudering over the landscape." "We have got families here, we've got extended networks, we've got people coming in from all over different..." "All over Britain." "This isn't just a one-off visiting staging post." "This place has got a great deal of evidence for people being here again and again and again." "The Mesolithic people that inhabited this land were clearly intelligent and adaptable, and evidence is mounting that shows them to have been a people who were active manipulators of the world around them rather than a group who simply made the best of what they could find." "Just off what is now the coast of South Wales is more evidence of Mesolithic adaptability." "Ready?" "All set?" "Martin Bell and his team are preparing to venture out across the mud flats to investigate a site that takes us closer than ever before to our ancient ancestors." "It's a really exceptional site because it's water-logged and that means that we've got a huge range of biological evidence, pollen and beetles and bones, and then the evidence of the sediments themselves and the ancient woodland." "The sites are just revealed at low tide on a spring tide, so we just have about an hour and a half down there in the bed of the estuary to make our discoveries and record the evidence and then the sea comes back in" "and covers the whole thing up." "This place, like Doggerland to the east, used to be dry land." "Here as the tide ebbs, evidence of that past is spectacularly revealed." "It started off with an oak woodland environment, great big, tall, climax woodland trees, and the first settlement here was under those conditions." "And then, as sea level rose, that woodland was drowned and the oak woodland gave way to a reed swamp and still people visited the site, probably at rather drier times of the year." "And then, after a relatively short period, less than a century, I think, that reed swamp was covered by continuing sea-level rise and you got the development of a salt marsh environment." "Preserved in the sediment are tangible traces of the individual people who used to hunt and live here." "Martin has discovered nothing less than Mesolithic footprints." "We've got a footprint here with the heel, the arch of the foot and then broadening out here to the toes." "Judging by the size, we think that it's probably somebody aged about ten perhaps." "They may not look like much, but by analysing these remains, the team have concluded that this was a vibrant and often-visited place, and Martin has unearthed evidence of human habitation here in all its phases of descent into the sea, from forest to salt marsh." "We've tended to see them as the sort of creatures of their environment, very much subject to the huge environmental changes of sea level and so on, whereas I think what this evidence is beginning to show us" "is how well adapted they were to this environment." "They were very much in touch with a landscape undergoing constant changes." "But before these hardy, canny people could become the first Britons, they would have to endure a period of sudden and dramatic climate change that many would not survive." "Cataclysmic events that would change the face of northern Europe for ever." "Evidence of this can be found under the Yorkshire Dales in one of Britain's longest cave systems." "It's here that Phil Hopley comes to study the Stone Age climate in the stalagmites of the White Scar Cave." "We think that, in this cave, these stalagmites have been growing continuously for about 11,000 years, since the end of the last ice age." "Stalagmites are created by rain water percolating through the roof of a limestone cave and dripping to the floor below." "In the constant environment of the cave, the calcium carbonate from the rock, dissolved into the water, recrystallises forming the other-worldly columns." "In analysing the detailed chemical make-up of these mineral deposits, climate scientists can look back in time." "In some ways, we can view stalagmites as thermometers that tell us about the temperature in the past." "The chemistry will tell us about a combination of the amount of rainfall and of the temperature in the cave at the time that the stalagmite was forming." "And this is a cut section of the stalagmite that comes from just where we're sitting now." "When we looked throughout the whole sample in detail, we saw that the chemistry that reflects climate was very constant throughout the whole time except for this centimetre or so." "We saw a very different chemical signature." "Preserved inside the stalagmite was evidence of a sudden and dramatic change in the climate." "This showed us that the climate above the cave was a lot cooler than it had been previously and was a lot drier." "The whole average annual temperature decreases by one or two degrees." "That's a significant change." "This event lasted about 150 years." "8,200 years ago, something happened that would change the landscape for ever." "A major event that would not only alter the lives of the people, but would also transform their environment." "A lot of the plants were put under stress." "There's evidence that trees struggled to survive." "Perhaps there was less of a predictable environment present for humans to exploit." "The stalagmite evidence showed there was a decrease in temperature that lasted for over a century, a really rapid change that would have challenged even the hardiest hunter-gatherers." "And it wasn't just Europe's north-west outcrop that was affected by the so-called 8,200 year event." "Not only have we found evidence for the 8,200-year event in the Yorkshire Dales, it's also clear that it affected much of north-west Europe including Germany," "Austria and, to the north, Greenland." "For evidence as to what caused this dramatic cooling, we need to look to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean." "During the ice age, North America had been covered by an enormous ice sheet two kilometres thick." "It's thought that as the world began to warm, it melted and formed a giant lake..." "..held in place by a rapidly thinning ice dam." "Then, suddenly, it burst." "Over 163,000 cubic kilometres of water thundered out into the North Atlantic." "An enormous amount of fresh water was released into the North Atlantic." "This was millions of cubic metres of water within a period of just a single year, and this led to a catastrophic flooding event where sea level across the globe rose by perhaps half a metre or maybe even more." "And for people living in coastal areas, particularly the low-lying regions in the UK, they would have experienced this as a very marked flooding event that they weren't expecting." "It caused more than regional flooding." "A metre rise in sea level disrupted the world's climate." "Britain is usually bathed in an ocean current called the Gulf Stream." "It brings warm water from the tropics to the fringes of north-west Europe providing it with a latitude-defying temperature climate." "Scientists believe the giant flood disrupted the Gulf Stream, plunging the whole North Atlantic region into freezing conditions." "Our ancestors had been battered by rising sea levels, global warming and plummeting icy temperatures." "And then, just 50 years later, they were to face their toughest trial yet..." "..for the flood may have led to one more devastating effect." "Dr Sue Dawson thinks it could be linked to an extraordinary event, unique in British history." "She's found an intriguing clue in the Montrose Basin on the east coast of Scotland." "The Montrose Basin here encapsulates the time period of the first settlers, time immediately after the ice age, when all of these rapid climate changes were happening." "There's one particular geological feature that Sue's come to investigate." "So, at this particular location, this is exactly what we're really interested in." "Now, you can see, at the background here, there's a distinctive band of sediment that's interrupting some darker organic sediments and this is exactly the sort of thing that I'd be looking for, something unusual in the stratigraphy" "which would need investigating further." "To find out what this curious layer in the landscape is and where it came from, Sue needs to analyse the sediment in the lab." "This is a sample from the section that we saw on the coast and this is the unit that we're particularly interested in." "This unit here is composed of sand, in fact, quite a fine sand with some silt in it." "We can see that by eye, we can feel that." "Initially, when we first started to find these sand layers, we thought that they might just be a storm event, representing a period of storminess in the past." "But we get many storms and the thing that's unique about this particular sediment is there's just one key sediment in the stratigraphy, and we don't see that in a storm deposit." "More evidence for this being something other than an ordinary storm blowing sand off the beach emerged when Sue looked further afield." "The same sand layer was cropping up all the way along the Scottish coastline and even reaching into northern England." "There's one unique sediment deposit here in Shetland." "There's one unique deposit here in Montrose and finally when we come to Fife, we see the same thing again." "We see a clear deposit sandwiched within the peat deposits that make up this area." "One of the things that's really interesting across all of the sites in Scotland is when we look at the ages of this event that appears in the stratigraphy." "What we see is they date to exactly the same time." "So, it's something that's happened and been deposited instantaneously." "The team knew they were dealing with something powerful enough to instantaneously deposit a sand layer up to five metres above sea level." "An epic event that stretched for more than 370 miles along the British coastline." "We've thought about what else could cause something like this, what else could come from a coastal environment and impact the land?" "A critical piece of the puzzle came from an unlikely place." "Off the coast of Norway, marine geologists found evidence of a massive submarine landslide." "The landslide happened at the same time as the sand deposits from the British coastline, prompting Sue's team to make a controversial connection." "We've linked all of these different sand units and suggested that, you know, it could possibly be a tsunami." "All the evidence seemed to fit." "Constantly rising sea levels, and a sudden massive flood from a meltwater lake in North America could well have triggered the landslide in Norway, and that landslide would have easily triggered a tsunami." "The catastrophic tsunami fatally flooded Doggerland and may have finally put paid to the increasingly tenuous link between Europe and its north-western outcrop." "This, and the continued rising sea level, meant that, for the first time, Britain became a series of islands, their inhabitants the first true Britons." "That, in a sense, is the end of the story of the misunderstood people of the Mesolithic." "For 2,000 years, the fledging island nation flourished." "Though now cut off from the rest of Europe, the hardy adaptable first Britons thrived." "But then, 6,000 years ago, there was a dramatic and permanent change in the way our ancestors lived their lives." "So dramatic, in fact, that it's been given a different historical name." "This was the start of the New Stone Age in Britain, the Neolithic." "It was during the Neolithic that pottery emerges, the time when people built monuments like Stonehenge, but, above all else, it's the point at which people became farmers." "How and why they became farmers is something that's not fully understood, but archaeologists who study the period think that this was a cultural shift as opposed to an evolutionary or geopolitical one." "In other words, the world simply woke up to a really good idea." "The simple, but brilliant, realisation that if you could control your food supply, you would have an easier life." "The farmers changed everything." "Puny wild grasses became succulent farmed wheat and enormous dangerous wild cattle were exchanged for animals that were altogether easier to deal with." "The idea of farming, the so-called Neolithic revolution, started in the Middle East and swept north and west across Europe, eventually reaching the coast of what is now France before finally coming to Britain." "Then, 6,000 years ago, Britain joined the revolution." "The first Britons wholeheartedly signed up for farming, its adoption total and irreversible." "Even where you would think farming would present insurmountable problems of its own, it was still doggedly pursued." "Janet Montgomery has uncovered evidence of exactly that in one of Britain's remotest outposts, the Shetland Islands." "5,000 years ago they were at the frontier of the Neolithic world." "Shetland's very difficult." "You know, even today it's difficult to farm there, it's difficult to grow crops." "Most things won't grow there." "So, to go to Shetland with the intention of farming seems, seems a very odd and difficult decision to make." "Surviving by farming on Shetland 5,000 years ago was high-risk." "Failure could result in death." "So, there was very little options if, you know, if your farming package failed." "You know, it's a long way to go for help and nothing much else, other than marine resources, to supplement your diet." "Undeterred, the Neolithic pioneers strove to establish farming on Shetland." "And Janet has found evidence that they were eventually successful." "She's been investigating the contents of a Neolithic burial chamber, or kist." "Specifically, she's been analysing Neolithic teeth." "Archaeologists love teeth." "They are a wonderful archive, basically, of information about the people, the person, when that tooth was forming." "They record all sorts of things, the climate, where they were living, what they were eating." "And so, we can just take them and reach, it's like we reach back into the past and reconstruct their lives." "Yeah, they're wonderful." "Teeth preserve evidence of whether a person's been eating a marine, terrestrial or fresh water diet." "Well, everything you eat and drink are used to construct your body, and if we can measure those and find some way that they reflect some aspect of diet, then we can, we can reconstruct what people were eating," "how their diets changed, seasonally maybe, or over several years." "Janet and her team were able to read the chemical timeline preserved in the Neolithic dental record." "It showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that these people in the burial kist were farmers." "But Janet discovered that the teeth also held a mystery." "What we found was really surprising because there were several things." "One, that the different people in the kist clearly were doing different things, so some people were consuming terrestrial resources for the whole of their childhood." "Some people had very short-term consumption, so maybe two years when they stopped consuming terrestrial foods and started consuming marine foods, and then went back to eating terrestrial foods again." "And when she looked at the teeth of some of the children buried in the kist, she discovered something else." "What we found there was that in all the children we looked at who had died in childhood, they were all-consuming increased amounts of marine protein just before they died, which suggests that this consumption of marine foods was only being done really as a last resort" "when they couldn't get enough food from terrestrial sources." "For some reason, farming must have been interrupted in some sort of catastrophic way." "A clue as to what that might have been lies in the remains of the Neolithic settlements on Shetland, where a thick layer of sand has been discovered..." "..not from a tsunami, but simply blown in from the beaches." "Dry weather, followed by high winds, are known to sometimes deposit large quantities of sand inland." "After they started farming, storm sands came in and would have completely inundated the fields, and obviously it's very difficult to remove several feet of sands, even today, but it would have been almost impossible in the Neolithic." "You can imagine they would have been producing these fields, fertilising them, tending them and then suddenly they've gone." "They've been completely covered up with sand and then, you know, you can't, you can't grow anything and it would take a couple of years, perhaps, to start again and produce the fields to grow crops." "The fact that numbers of children were discovered in the burial kist on Shetland may suggest that surviving by foraging was not sustainable." "The record shows, after all, that people returned to farming as soon as they could." "They were farming." "Farming failed." "They had to do something else for two years, and then they went back and carried on farming." "It looks very much like they were only doing that as a last resort, really, when farming failed and they had no other option but to eat marine foods." "The idea of farming was too compelling to abandon." "If the move from hunter-gatherer to farmer was a cultural one, it was complete." "Even in the hostile environment of the Shetlands, farming was favoured over the old way of doing things." "I don't know why, in the early Neolithic, it suddenly became the thing to do, but obviously, there must have been some advantage to it because it spread right across Europe." "The conventional view of how the transition from Mesolithic to" "Neolithic happened is that it was the idea of farming that was wholly beguiling." "Indeed, the archaeological record shows that its take-up seems to have been dramatically quick and addictive, but intriguing questions remain." "Why, for example, if wheat was being traded with the Mesolithic Britons of" "Bouldnor Cliff, didn't they simply plant it and farm it themselves?" "It's almost as though farming, when it arrived, was less a winning of hearts and minds, and more a hostile take-over." "On an unprepossessing hillside in western Germany is the entrance to a cave that contains startling new evidence that seems to support the idea that farming wasn't quite as popular with the hunter-gatherers as was once thought." "Archaeologists have been coming here since 2004 when it was found to be the site of an ancient burial ground." "You can hardly move in here." "Just imagine that you are in here with several people, and also carrying a body with you is hard to imagine." "Paleogeneticist Ruth Bollogino has used the raw material from this site in her research." "It's quite amazing to see how the smallest places that don't look very impressive from the outside can hide and bear such a precious treasure as this cave does." "So, this is the place of the current excavation and, for example, you can see a rib bone sticking out of the soil right here." "Ruth is on the hunt for evidence hidden in the physical remains of the people buried here." "Caves are very important for paleogenetics because we have a temperature of eight degrees in here all year round so these are perfect conditions for good DNA preservation." "Ruth uses the bones in this cave to trace what happened to the Mesolithic people in this area when farming arrived." "So, for example, I have a tibia here, which is a shin bone, and this is a nice example for a completely preserved adult bone, which is very rare in this cave because we usually have fragmented bones." "This is one of the few bones that is very well preserved and not broken." "I've got a vertebra here from a child that is a bit fragile but nevertheless, very well preserved." "And, yes, so you can see we've got all kind of ages inside the cave." "Back in the lab, Ruth can analyse the bones to discover a wealth of information about the people buried in the cave." "Bones are what we'd call a bio-archive and they contain a lot of information and, for example, we can determine the age of the bone with radio carbon dating." "Another analysis we would potentially do is isotope analysis and isotopes tell you a lot about the diet of the people, and especially what they were eating over the last years before they died." "Radio carbon dating showed that the bones were from long after the Neolithic farming revolution, when it was thought the hunter-gatherer culture had been consigned to history, but the DNA revealed that half of the bones were unmistakably those of hunter-gatherers." "From the DNA, we could derive that we have got two groups here, the hunter-gatherers and the farmers, that shared the same burial place and so apparently, they lived together and we could assume that we finally found there's a mixed population here." "Ruth thought that she had found evidence of the two groups co-existing and assumed that both would be farming." "The DNA from the burial chamber seemed to support the idea of co-existence, but the isotope analysis told a different story and contradicted the scientific paper she was about to publish." "I already had a manuscript at hand, it was just finished, that was presenting the first claim so we actually could show that these two cultures had mixed at the end of the Neolithic, and when we got the isotope analysis results," "I just thought, I just knew immediately I had to throw the manuscript away because our Neolithic group, that was supposed to be the mixed population, split up into two different groups." "And one group was, as you would expect, living a farmer's life and mainly eating domesticated animals, and the surprise group was, had much more enriched values of nitrogen isotopes and that is a clear sign for a fresh water diet." "So, our whole picture that we had before just crumbled in a second." "Ruth had discovered that there were people who farmed living alongside people who didn't." "It was the opposite of what she'd originally proposed." "Perhaps the idea of agriculture was not so popular after all." "Yeah, at first I was a bit upset because it meant I had to throw away my manuscript, but then I thought that this is a very exciting find and something that we would not expect at all, and that was kind of," "it was against all the knowledge we had from the archaeological research." "From the data we got from the DNA, and the isotope data we got, it was clear that we have two different societies here, but apparently, they had different lifestyles and they did not marry each other." "But further DNA analysis of the bones showed that that conclusion wasn't quite right either." "So, within the farming group, we found three individuals, either themselves married from the hunter-gatherer into the farming society, or their ancestors did." "So, at some stage we have a few women that did decide to leave their hunter-gatherer community and marry into the farmers' community." "From ethnological data, we know that this sometimes happens, that women from a hunter-gatherer background marry into a farming society, whereas this cannot be observed, or very rarely can be observed, the other way around because marrying from a farmer society" "into a hunter society is usually seen as a social demotion." "Ruth seems to have shown that, in Germany at least, the Neolithic revolution was more of a slow burn, that the hunter-gatherers were not as convinced by agriculture as we'd previously thought." "It seems they valued their culture and community as it was." "The assimilation of immigrants with new ideas was not immediate." "This kind of analysis might eventually shed light on what happened to the first Britons, too." "A study is under way investigating the DNA found in the UK's ancient burial grounds." "But whatever that study eventually reveals," "David Jacques believes that there is a good deal of evidence that the Mesolithic culture survived into the Neolithic and beyond." "In effect, Stonehenge is built on the Mesolithic." "The foundations to it are in the ditch." "We have bones here that are redolent with Mesolithic meanings, that are just the sort of bones that we're getting actually in the Blick Mead spring." "Wild deer, wild boar, they're put in strategic places, so this place is chock-a-block full of Mesolithic meaning and symbolism." "People in the Neolithic would have needed a past just as much as we do." "They wouldn't have wanted a blank slate, and so stories about ancestors and what they did would have made this place special and vivid." "For David, the Mesolithic people were anything but the transient and irrelevant folk that history often imagines them to be." "On the face of it, it looks like Mesolithic people were wiped out in some way at the advent of farming." "I think it's much more likely that they did what they'd been really good at in the past, which we've got very clear evidence for." "They're really good at adapting and they're adapting around a new set of circumstances and situations." "It's hard to imagine Britain as it would have been before cultivation and construction made it what it is today." "But thanks to recent discoveries and modern scientific analysis, it's now far easier to understand the people that first lived on these islands." "Well, I have a lot of respect for them." "I think, in many ways, they're just like us." "They're just as intelligent as we are." "And I think their interaction with the landscape was on a very sophisticated level." "What has emerged is an engaging portrait of a people with whom we have more in common than anyone previously thought." "It's clear that they must have been far more complex, that they must have been part of large social webs, which finds like this begin to give us an insight into." "Our ancestors, then, were a hardy, adaptable people, facing and surviving incredible challenges." "If we think how our Mesolithic ancestors coped with these widespread changes of rising sea levels, huge tsunamis, devastating communities - they adapted, they survived." "It seems the people who first inhabited these islands, who hunted, gathered, feasted, made jewellery, traded, managed the landscape and flourished, were far less Stone Age than we once imagined." "They were an ancient, but culturally complex, people who laid the foundations for the modern age." "They were the first Britons."