As Ice Age Britain thawed, temperatures surged, sea levels rose, and humans and animals faced a fight for survival. But this shift was anything but simple.In this final episode of our Ice Age miniseries, Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Danielle Schreve to uncover the turbulent end of the last Ice Age in Britain. Discover how mammals like Siberian lemmings and Saiga antelope roamed this icy landscape, how the Younger Dryas cold snap 13,000 years ago reshaped Britain's prehistoric environment, and how early humans adapted to survive it. With echoes for today’s climate challenges, this is a story of resilience on the fringes of the Ice Age world.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on
Chapter 1: What is the end of Ice Age Britain?
The end of Ice Age Britain. A time of rapidly changing temperatures, of ice sheets melting, sea levels rising, and humans adapting to a more expansive and warmer Britain. A Britain that became cut off from the rest of Europe, that became an island. But these changes didn't happen overnight, and it wasn't a simple straight-line case of things going from cold to warm either.
The Ice Age took thousands of years to end in Britain and had a massive impact both on the animals and humans that then called Britain their home. Extreme temperature switches that forced them either to adapt, leave or die. It's an extraordinary story, starring various animals ranging from Siberian lemmings to saiga antelope, and of course, humans.
So what sorts of animals lived in Britain during these last fluctuating throes of the Ice Age? Why did the climate suddenly get much colder again roughly 13,000 years ago, the so-called Younger Dryas Period? And how were humans affected by all of this change? It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.
Today we're releasing the final episode of our Ice Age miniseries this February, and boy, what an episode this is. The end of the Ice Age in Britain. Joining me to explain what we know, I was delighted to interview the paleobiologist Professor Danielle Shreve from the University of Bristol.
Danielle studies animal remains, particularly mammals, to understand how they responded to these abrupt changes in climate that define the end of the Ice Age. And what lessons we can learn from this when tackling climate change today. She's an expert on the end of the Ice Age in Britain and how this tumultuous period affected life on this edge of the Ice Age world. Enjoy.
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Chapter 2: How did the Ice Age impact animals in Britain?
Danielle, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
Thank you very much. It's great to be here.
Let's talk about the end of the Ice Age in Britain. And I know it's quite a massive statement to start, but it feels like this is a time when Britain's world, it completely transformed.
Absolutely. I think some of the changes that were witnessed, whether it's to do with the landscape, the environment, the fauna, they're just some of the most remarkable changes that Britain has ever witnessed.
And just first of all, do we know how much time we can roughly talk about if we're exploring the end of the Ice Age? Should we be thinking in thousands of years?
Definitely, thousands of years. So I think probably a sensible starting point is probably the period that we would call the last glacial maximum. So from about 26,000 years ago until really the early parts of the current warm stage or interglacial that we're in now.
Yeah, that's more than 10,000 years in total, isn't it? And it's absolutely extraordinary. But before we delve into that, and you mentioned the last glacial maximum, archaeological material that you have to study to learn more about this important period, do you have quite a lot of information surviving for what actually happened at the end of the Ice Age?
We do. So I think it's important to make a difference between archaeological material, which would be that related exclusively to humans, so things like human artefacts, whether that's stone tools or other types of evidence, and the sort of paleobiological evidence that we might have. So things like fossils of animal bones, plant remains, shells, that kind of thing.
So, we have lots of different types of evidence that are available to us, and sometimes that comes in the form of the sediments themselves, because the deposits of sands and gravels and all sorts of things that we might actually dig into, we can understand a story of how climate changed from those.
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Chapter 3: What evidence do we have of early human presence?
Slight tangent straight away, but I remember doing an interview a few months back where they were analysing deep sea cores, kind of taking up information from the sediment beneath the sea to get a sense of climate and the ecological world. And in that case, it was more than a million years ago.
I'm guessing whether it's a million years or 10,000 or 20,000 years ago, is that one of the ways that you can learn more about the whole landscape and environment at that time?
Definitely. So one of the things we try to do is to reconstruct that landscape. So to understand, for example, the changing coastline of Britain. Britain is in quite an extraordinary position, really, at the edge of the North Atlantic. So it's very sensitive to climate change. And we can get at that evidence for change through doing things like coring,
into deposits that might be, for example, buried below the sea now, but also on land as well, and actually looking at those cores of sediment through time and extracting as much information from them as possible.
Does this all belong to the field of study that I know is very close to your heart, the name paleoecology?
Yes. So, paleoecology or paleoecology really deals with the ecology of the past. So, the paleo bit just means the old part. So, in the same way that an ecologist today would look at the habitats, the behaviour, all aspects of the ecology of the animals that they might study today, this is what I'm trying to do in the past.
And sometimes it's easy or relatively easy because the animals that I study are still around today or very close relatives. In other cases where you've got animals that are extinct today, we have to draw on different lines of evidence in order to try and reconstruct something of their life ways.
And I must also ask about the word fauna. Now, what does this word entail? How big a term is it when studying paleoecology and so on?
So fauna is animal life. And by that, anything could come into fauna, whether it's, for example, vertebrates. So that might be fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals. But it could also include all sorts of invertebrates as well. So particularly things like beetles, snail shells, that kind of thing as well. So it covers a very broad range of different types of material.
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Chapter 4: How do cave sites contribute to our understanding?
I know it's archaeology, but can human remains and human interactions with these fauna, can they help in that puzzle too?
They can indeed. So I guess it's a moot point whether you want to include humans as part of the fauna. I think for much of the past, the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age, humans are doing something interesting in the landscape. They are certainly doing unusual things like making stone tools, but they're very much part of a wider fauna.
They're responding to the same kind of climatic and environmental trends that other species are. Luckily, they do leave behind useful things like stone tools, so we are able to derive an enormous amount of information from that in terms of their behaviour.
Remains of the actual early humans themselves are very rare in the UK, but we do have other types of evidence, for example, things like cut marked bones and broken bones, which tell us about butchery and hunting practices as well.
Talking about something that seems to have been important for early humans at that time and for these animals, a particular type of site, cave sites. Daniel, for deriving more information about the end of the Ice Age, how important are cave sites for finding that information and piecing together more of this puzzle?
So cave sites are often really good places to target for this type of information. They can be very rich resources of information. Often, of course, we have caves that form in limestone areas across the UK. So things like the southwest of England, the Peak District, South Wales, for example, North Wales. These are all really good places for finding material in caves.
And you can often get a buildup of quite long sequences through time as well. And that's because caves act as large repositories or archives for material coming in. And sometimes it might be washed in by a river or a mudflow. But a lot of times you get cave sediments building up over time and containing the remains of animals that were either living in the cave or
so things like carnivores, for example, or which were brought in as remains of prey. And that can build up over long periods. So caves are great generally for preserving animal remains in the form of bones or teeth. They're also very good for preserving mollusk and shell.
But they are not so good at preserving things like pollen or what we call plant macrofossils, so bits of plant, whether it's bits of leaf or twig or seed, for example. And that's just because limestone tends – I mean, it's a very calcareous environment.
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Chapter 5: What was the Last Glacial Maximum like in Britain?
A lot of them were dug out.
Yes, they liked to dig to find the big stuff, didn't they?
They certainly did. They were very keen on finding things like specimens for their cabinet of curiosities. They would go out. In some cases, there were rather systematic excavations done. In other cases, people were literally going along and looking for souvenirs.
All of this happened at a very exciting time, and in fact, Britain and places like the Mendip Hills played a crucial part in that move away from the teachings of the church and understanding about evolution, the discovery of the bones of extinct animals, and then later in association with human tools as well. This was really the first insights into the antiquity of humans.
So the Mendip Hills have always been a great place to work. And the research that we've been doing in this particular cave site has generated some fantastic information. We have a sequence that goes back over 50,000 years now. And it's one of the most important sites, certainly in Britain and in Northwest Europe.
And I mean, how rich a site is this? Are we talking about hundreds of mammal bones or are we talking a bit more than that?
We're talking about hundreds of mammal bones. Now they're not all complete. It's important to say that because at some levels within the cave, we have things like spotted hyenas that have been denning there and they're crunching up the bones. So we collect all of the fragments because even the very broken bits tell us something about the origins of what we call an assemblage.
So that collection of bits of bone and they tell us what those animals were up to. But at this particular cave site in Ebba Gorge, we have, for example, in some of the upper layers, we have got hundreds of thousands of bits of small mammal. So these might be things like bats, mice, voles, shrews, lemmings.
They've been brought in by birds of prey that have been hunting over the landscape, that have swallowed this material down. They come back to the cave to roost, and then they regurgitate the undigested bits as pellets. Eventually, thousands of years later, those have started to turn into fossils, and that's when we can come along and collect them.
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Chapter 6: When did the ice sheets start to recede?
Now, certainly across Northern Europe, there were other areas that were believed to be abandoned by modern humans at the time, but of which have been demonstrated subsequently to have some limited evidence. So, it's possible that humans were making forays into Britain at that time, perhaps during the slightly warmer parts of the summer months. But we really don't have any good evidence.
We don't have any artefacts. And there is a putative human humorous from a site in South Wales that may date to this period. But certainly if people were around, they are in low numbers and they are not long-term residents. Music
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Hallo ihr Mäuse, wir sind Janni und Alina vom Podcast Wine Wednesday.
Und wir spielen am 12.06. im Kino am Olympiasee. Sagt man am Olympiasee? Oder im Olympiasee?
Nee, du paddeln wieder drin rum, oder was?
Oh, das wäre geil, so eine Tretbotshow. Und wir spielen am 12.06. am Kino im Olympiasee. Im Kino am Olympiasee. And we play on the 12th of June in the cinema at Olympiasee in cooperation with our partner Backmarket, a live show, our very first Open Air.
The cool thing is, we are allowed to give you, viewers, an 800 Euro voucher for Backmarket. So it's not only worth it to come because of our beautiful faces. Tickets are available at www.kinoamlympiasee.de.
Enjoy coffee enjoyment at a new level
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Chapter 7: How fast did climate change occur after the last glacial maximum?
And so we do have a very good idea about just how quickly some of these transitions took place.
Wow. So you can do that today. You can go and get ice cores from Greenland and that's almost undisturbed natural resources that can tell you the speed of the changing climate and I guess give you more of a sense, an environmental record of what happened at that time.
It's a great sort of archive, if you like. It's a great benchmark for understanding how climate change in this part of the Northern Hemisphere happened. And because Britain is, you know, really quite close in that part of the North Atlantic, we can actually see the major transitions as we come out of the last glacial maximum.
the rapid warming into the late glacial interstitial, and then some of the subsequent oscillations, the climatic fluctuations that we see, we can actually see that evidenced on land in Britain.
Let's focus first of all on that first great warming period, Danielle. If it is pretty rapid that it happens, how does this affect those animals that had adapted to survive on that far edge of the hospitable world?
So at that time, you would see a retreat of some of the species that had been adapted to very cold conditions. So things like mammoths begin to contract their range back to Siberia. During the late glacial interstitial in Britain, you do get other species that are cold adapted that still hang on. So things like reindeer are still regularly present.
But because of the warming event that we see, we get other types of herbivores in particular coming in. At first, things like horse and then subsequently red deer. We get a real mix of species at that time though. For example, in the cave sites that we're working in in Somerset, we get both species that are today indicative of cold climate conditions. For example, things like collared lemmings.
Those are mixed in with other small mammal species that require more temperate but also some kind of vegetation cover as well. These might be things like wood mice, for example, or common shrews.
These are small mammals that we think are probably able to eke out an existence in some of these very deep limestone gorges, particularly where there are more shrubby habitats or even trees that are growing there.
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