"In January last year, deep inside the limestone rocks of the Yorkshire Dales, cave divers, Andrew Goddard and Phil Murphy, were exploring the narrow and boulder-choked passages of a little-known underground river." "When they surfaced in an uncharted chamber, they thought they were the first to set foot in these caves." "But they were soon to discover otherwise." "As the divers progressed deeper into the cave, wherever they looked, there were bones." "But how old were they?" "Even more remarkable, a set of bare human footprints in the soft clay floor of the cave." "By pure chance, the divers had stumbled upon an ancient burial site and one of the most important cave finds this century." "Those bones turned out to be 3,500 years old." "It's an amazing find, and means that the cave's probably a burial site belonging to our Bronze Age ancestors." "So, this morning, I'm on my way to meet the team who are going to explore the site." "That was quite a drive!" "Hello." "Hi, Phil Murphy." "Pleased to meet you." "Hi, Julian, Andrew Goddard." "Pleased to meet you." "So you're the two that found the cave?" "That's right." "Do you reckon we're going to find a way in?" "No problem!" "As an archaeologist, I've always been fascinated by how much you can tell about our past from a few scattered remains." "In this programme and the coming series," "I shall be joining in excavations of burials across the British Isles, and finding out more about our ancestors." "I'll be talking to specialists, trying to discover who these people were, and when and how they died." "Excellente." "At the end of each programme, with the help of experts in facial reconstruction, we'll come face-to-face with one of our ancestors." "Back in the Yorkshire Dales, the team was heading into the hills." "Their first task is to find an alternative way into the cave that doesn't involve dangerous water-filled tunnels." "Heading the team is one of Britain's leading cave archaeologists " "Andrew Chamberlain from Sheffield University." "Our prehistoric ancestors couldn't have potholed into the cave, so there must have been another entrance." "Could one of these depressions on the hillside be the way in?" "There are several of these in the neighbourhood." "We don't want to dig the wrong one." "This is why we're using the radio location device, to try and find exactly where we are." "Andy and Phil have volunteered to dive back into the cave with a small radio transmitter." "We hope this will guide us to a suitable spot on the hillside where we can find a way into the cave." "On the surface, Bob's location device can pinpoint the exact location of the divers, even if they're deep underground." "The divers have to work their way through 120 metres of narrow, water-filled passages before they re-emerge into air." "From here, they climb up a steep, rocky slope up into the burial cave." "TRANSMITTER BEEPS" "That's right, then it dips off..." "BEEPING CONTINUES" "..and it comes back." "So, that's the spot?" "That's the spot - they're directly below that, yes." "Andy and Phil are now deep in the cave." "They think they've found the original entrance, but it's now completely choked with huge boulders." "OK, Bob." "What do you want us to do next?" "You can move three metres south." "Bob wants the divers to move towards one of the depressions in the hillside." "It looks quite shallow." "HE-L-L-OO!" "They can hear us!" "They can...?" "!" "What, they can hear us?" "Hello-o!" "Can you hear him?" "Yes, I can hear him." "Hello?" "Sounds like I can hear Julian up there." "Not very loud, but I can definitely hear him." "Can you hear me?" "THEY HOWL" "HE LAUGHS" "What's going on, Julian?" "Um, well, the cave's called the Wolves' Den, isn't it?" "They're howling like wolves down there!" "So I think that means they've found the place!" "OK, lads." "That's it." "You can come out." "We'll see you on the surface." "This was amazing luck." "Andy and Phil had found a shaft that led almost up to the surface." "So all we have to do now is clear the rocks blocking the entrance." "For that job, Andrew and his team needed some heavy equipment." "There are lots of caves in the area, some of which contained human burials, but many were excavated over a century ago and very little survives today." "That's why this cave, inaccessible until now, could be so special." "GENERATOR WHIRRS" "Now we've got the generator rigged up, we can see how far this hole really does go." "JULIAN LAUGHS Can you tell us that, Julian?" "Um..." "It's a bit deeper than we thought!" "The floor of the cave is about nine metres down - that's nearly 30 feet from where we're standing at the moment." "And I reckon..." "Hang on, put that tape there again." "There's only about two or three feet of clay and rock that we're standing on!" "Yes." "There's not much to go and a long way to the bottom of the cave!" "But it's incredible." "While the team carried on digging," "I went off to find where Bronze Age people in this area lived." "I found some clues in the next valley, where tumbled stone walls marked the remains of a prehistoric settlement." "This may not look much, but it's the remains of a prehistoric hut." "I'm sitting on what remains of the back wall, level floor in front of me, and there is the entrance, pointing out to the valley bottom." "It was probably a small farmstead, with pens for sheep and cattle." "Perhaps home to two or three families." "And in this wonderfully sheltered spot, they would have been able to have grown their crops of wheat and barley." "Back at the site, they'd got a grip on the last rock blocking the entrance." "But it was vital this boulder didn't crash onto the cave floor, destroying any remains that lay below." "More tension!" "More tension!" "Steady." "Steady." "MOTOR REVS" "THEY CHEER AND APPLAUD" "After three intense days of digging and heaving great rocks around, the entrance was finally clear." "Oh!" "Very snug!" "Lower me away!" "Right." "As an archaeologist, I've spent a fair bit of my working life digging in holes in the ground." "But this will be the first time I've gone underground in search of ancient remains." "I felt an enormous sense of anticipation and excitement as I climbed down the flimsy wire ladder." "Andrew had gone ahead, and helped me to land on a platform the team had built at the top of the steep rocky slope." "Now, don't step backwards." "No." "Good God, that's the...?" "It's scree." "This is the scree running down to the flooded passage, which is where the cavers initially came up into this cave." "I see what they mean about it being steep!" "And I can see bones on the..." "'When we turned away from the slope the divers had clambered up, 'we saw human bones laid out in front of us.'" "Everywhere you look, there's more bone!" "I mean, there's some under here." "'They looked so fresh and remarkably well-preserved.'" "Is this how they were left 3,500 years ago?" "I think so, yes." "Yes." "I've never..." "In all the years I've been an archaeologist," "I never believed that I could come and see something like this!" "I'm sort of genuinely quite speechless!" "Underneath the platform, there's one..." "Crikey, yes." "..right under here." "Are these all human?" "These are all human." "OK, so what's that bone, Andrew?" "That's a humerus." "Right." "So there's a humerus there." "That's another arm bone." "That's a radius." "Then that's a tibia." "Yep." "What about that one under there?" "Another tibia." "So these are long bones from both the arm and the leg... that are all stacked up in a neat little pile." "That's right." "If you look at this bone here, we have another human humerus - it's missing its head." "You can see the epiphysis is missing." "It's the end of the bone." "It's not fused, the person died before the age at which that fuses, which is in the late teenage years." "So we can be sure this is a separate individual from this one here." "So there's the remains of more than one person buried in here." "Right." "Hang on, that must be human." "That's right." "It's very recognisable as a human jaw." "Two left premolars and the first molar is very worn, which is typical of the jaws of the early population." "The team are mapping the entire cave." "In a small space near the boulder slope are parts of three individuals - a woman, a man and a child aged about 15." "The floor of the cave has partly collapsed, taking some of their bones tumbling down the slope towards the underground river." "The wolf bones litter every part of the cave floor." "Animal-bone specialist Roz Cord was very excited by the evidence that wolves had been using the cave as a den." "It's quite remarkable." "There's a few passages there, and they have wolves in them." "Not live ones." "No, not live ones!" "We have canid bones." "And it looks like it's typical denning activity." "What do you mean?" "Denning activity is when they go into a cave, a hole underground where they can have their cubs without being disturbed." "There's adult wolves down there and there's juvenile wolves down there." "You can see the remains of their dinners scattered all about." "What were they eating?" "They were eating roe deer." "Somebody said there's a whole deer carcass down there." "There is." "Indeed, there is a deer carcass down there." "It's a small deer, and it's mixed up with some other bones." "Is that wolves' dinner as well?" "Yes." "It's a wolf's dinner as well." "The adults are bringing in animals for the juveniles and themselves to eat." "You can see, along the passages, as the small cubs have taken bones and they've dragged them along the passages." "All the bones are piled up in the corners where the wolves have been walking through, trampling through." "How amazing." "It's quite fascinating." "Even more extraordinary are the human footprints in the midst of the wolf bones." "They're impressed in the soft mud of the cave floor." "But some are sealed below layers of limestone, which have taken thousands of years to form - so we know they're prehistoric." "In fact, they're only ancient human footprints ever found in a cave in the British Isles." "I still find it difficult to grasp that somebody could have come in here, thousands of years ago, and left a footprint in the mud that we can still see all this time afterwards!" "It's extraordinary." "It brings you so close to the person, doesn't it, to see that there, especially as it's so small!" "I'll get a close-up of the good one." "Bill Sellars arrived to examine the footprints." "If you do it at the same height, we can collage the whole track together, which would be really nice." "We've got a track with several sets of prints." "We've got three really clear ones and we've got some others that are obscured by the flow-stem covering." "What we're trying to do is get a photograph of the whole track so that we can recreate how whoever it was walked." "On the last day of the excavation," "Phil volunteers to go down the boulder slope." "He wants to find the human bones he spotted when he first came into the cave." "But it's a hazardous operation." "This is going to involve a lot of rock falling down I think." "STONES RATTLE Oops!" "There goes some." "ROCKS CLATTER DOWN" "As far as possible, Andrew wants to leave the cave as it was found." "The only bones he feels should be removed are those that have fallen down the steep boulder slope." "They simply wouldn't survive the next rock fall." "OK, just hold me there." "Well done!" "Well done!" "Have a look." "They're dead delicate." "I wonder if they're the juvenile." "I'll send it up to the surface." "We'll have a look at it there." "Be very gentle when you're pulling it up." "By the time we'd all climbed out of the cave, everyone was desperate to see what Phil had found." "It's very fragile, the bone." "From that boulder slope, he'd recovered part of an incredibly delicate skull." "It's not a very prominent brow ridge, but we need to know how old it is." "After a day that was spent mainly underground down the cave, it's a real relief to be out in the sunshine and also to have retrieved this very fragile fragment of one of the people buried in the cave." "I can't believe Phil was able to relocate it down that boulder slope and bring it out." "CHEERING" "Well done!" "Well done!" "As we plugged the cave entrance, all hints of our efforts were camouflaged - the burial chamber once again sealed, as it was when boulders blocked its original entrance thousands of years ago." "How much can we find out about a person from a few skull fragments?" "I went to see Richard Neeve at Manchester University - one of Britain's top specialists in facial reconstruction." "I have one of these boxes at home which I keep an electric drill in." "Is there anything down there?" "!" "JULIAN LAUGHS" "Ah!" "Oh, look at that!" "Isn't that nice?" "Female?" "Female." "'From its shape and proportions," "'Richard immediately identified the skull as female.'" "Your reaction's not as bad as I thought it'd be." "It depends what you want me to do with it." "I mean, if you want be to actually do anything with it, then my reaction might be very different!" "THEY BOTH LAUGH" "Now, what are you asking me about all this for?" "I sense some foreboding here." "'Was Richard able to rebuild her face?" "'" "The foreboding I have is that if you ask a face to be built from that, you can use that as the basis upon which you can base a face, but areas of it are inevitably going to be very subjective." "The loss of the lower jaw is one of the more important things when it comes to recreating a face which can be recognised." "That IS an important feature and without that, you don't get the overall vertical proportions of the face as such." "The first stage is to rebuild the skull using casts of the original fragments, a copy of a suitable jaw and clay." "A plaster cast is then made of the whole thing and this forms the foundation for the reconstruction." "But before Richard can get on with the next stage, he needs to know how old the woman was when she died." "I hate going to the dentist, but at least it's the lady from the cave who's got the appointment, not me!" "'Cardiff Dental Hospital's forensic orthodontist, David Whitaker, 'has developed a unique way of ageing individuals 'using a thin slice of tooth.'" "Well..." "Let's look at the maxilla - the upper jaw of this incredibly delicate piece of bone." "And we're going to take this tooth out to see if we can do an ageing on it." "From my point of view, it's a slightly hairy problem." "This very ancient material is SO fragile that it can suddenly shatter." "It's not like taking teeth..." "Ah!" "..out of living people." "Well, it looks excellent." "It's in amazingly good condition considering the age of a tooth like that." "Before the tooth can be cut, it's set into a block of resin." "Then it's mounted on what looks like a tiny bacon slicer." "What we're expecting to see under the microscope is something like this tooth that we've dealt with before." "What we're going to be looking for is this change here." "And from the age of about the mid-20s onwards, this transparent change starts here and spreads along the root of the tooth." "It produces this glass-like transparent appearance compared with the living healthy tooth." "We have this scale to actually measure how far that change has gone." "When the cutting was finished, our slice was one tenth of a millimetre thick." "I'll look under the microscope." "It looks pretty good." "It really is in super condition." "The enamel over the top of the tooth is beautiful." "By measuring how far the crystalline area has progressed along the tooth," "David can calculate the age of our Bronze Age ancestor." "On the bottom, we've got the number of millimetres that this process has progressed up the tooth." "So we'll just take this across from the regression line to the age line." "There we are." "It comes out at...48." "48!" "That's not a bad age for the Bronze Age." "I'm comfortable with that." "If that were a forensic tooth, I'd be very happy about that age, give or take six years either way." "Now we know her age, Richard can calculate the correct depths for facial muscles and soft tissue." "Richard's reconstructions are based on a sound understanding of anatomy and the way the human face ages." "Some people... ..say, "Why bother about the anatomy?" ""Why bother about this laborious process of building it up?"" "And the answer really to that is that... without it, one can't demonstrate how you've arrived at what you've arrived at." "You can't demonstrate that it isn't just imagination." "What we are doing now is, I suppose, a bit like wallpapering or plastering." "We're putting the final coat on which you see underneath." "One of the things when you're doing a young person is to get the surface very smooth." "Now, on this one, it doesn't matter because the skin surface, the skin texture is less than perfect." "It's lost that peachy bloom which you associate with young skin." "While Richard continued to work on the woman's head," "I went to see Bill in his lab at Edinburgh University to see what we could learn from the footprints." "First, he showed me how he can reconstruct the way people walk." "This is a reconstruction of a human walking." "It's a computer generation based on the actual physical properties of the leg bones." "You can make it walk through the footprints you've got." "So, can you do this with the footprints from the cave?" "I HOPE to be able to do this with those." "That sounds ominous." "It's not!" "It's just that the data we got from the cave is different." "Let me show you." "This is a photograph of the footprints." "I can't see much except one of the cavers' welly boots!" "The footprints are actually here and here." "But if I outline, they're clearer." "Oh, yes, I can see the toes there!" "They're lovely - you can see individual toes and a an impression of the ball of the foot." "And you can see a mark from the heel, well-preserved." "Can you do anything with the gait from these?" "I was hoping to." "We initially thought it was a trail of footprints, but you can see on is pointing this way and the other one's pointing in different directions." "The other thing I did was, if you actually move them around so that you can measure them..." "Oh, they're different sizes." "Different sizes." "Is that the real size?" "Yes, they're life-sized." "But they're not adult ones, are they?" "No." "Not at all." "This one's children's size 11 and this is children's size eight." "What age does that make them?" "Approximately, this is probably an eight-year-old and a five-year-old." "There were two children in the cave." "What were they doing?" "Running?" "If you look at this picture again, you can see very clear imprints of the heels." "So these are flat footprints." "You only get them from walking or standing." "They were walking slowly." "We think that children this age are likely to have been herding sheep up on the hills." "Maybe they wandered into the cave because it was raining or just wanted to look around." "It's an incredible thought." "They were probably told not to!" "Yes, absolutely!" "So some things don't change." "Nothing changes." "It's amazing to have a record of what these people were doing." "It's a direct record of their behaviour, rather than just an artefact." "In his studio, Richard was putting the final touches to the woman from the Wolf Den." "Are you going to show me then?" "I'm going to show you, yes." "Here you are." "I think it's fantastic to see this face!" "I'm amazed you managed to do so much with those tiny little fragments of bone." "When I saw them come out the cave, I wondered if we'd see a face." "It's not a face that I could have invented." "It's not one I could have made up out of my head." "It's one that's grown of its own accord." "I think those people that knew her could recognise her from this." "So I'm reasonably happy with it, yes." "We'd finally met our Bronze Age ancestor, and this is the landscape she knew as home." "When she died, she was taken on a final journey, from the place where she lived, across hills and rivers, to a very special place, perhaps one she knew during her life." "Bearing offerings for the next life, her grieving relatives laid her to rest deep in the cave." "Perhaps it wasn't nature that sealed the entrance." "Maybe their last task was to place the boulders that ensured her rest, safe from wolves that roamed the hills."