Archaeologists find evidence of humans in mammoth graveyard
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Five years ago, amateur fossil hunters Sally and Neville Hollingworth asked for permission to dig in a freshly dug quarry near Swindon. The site, which was once the riverbed of the Thames, proved an archaeological goldmine. They discovered the leg bone of a mammoth dating back some 220,000 years, and called in the help of archaeologists from DigVentures to further excavate the site. They soon unearthed the remains of five Ice Age mammoths, all of which were remarkably well preserved.
Such was the magnitude of the discovery that Sir David Attenborough and evolutionary biologist Professor Ben Garrod produced a BBC documentary on it, which aired shortly after Christmas last year.
Archaeologists discovered two adult mammoths, two juveniles and an infant, all of which were typically found in Siberia rather than the Swindon suburbs.
Cerney Wick had once been a thriving habitat home to at least five mammoths, giant elks and tiny creatures like dung beetles and even seeds.
Much speculation remained over how the mammoths had died, since their remains were found in the exact spot where they died a quarter of a million years ago.
One of Sally and Neville’s discoveries, however, raised “intriguing questions” about how the mammoths might have perished.
Sir David told the documentary ‘Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard’ that the couple had found a stone tool — a hand axe — made by ancient humans.
He said: “Finding a stone tool near mammoth bones is extremely rare, but we don’t yet know if it was left by humans from a more recent time in history.”
The tool was sharp enough to cut things with, and Sally and Neville used it to cut their wedding cake.
Weeks of searching at the Cerney Wick site resulted in the discovery of further “telltale signs of humans”.
Dr Josh Hogue, a DigVentures archaeologist working at the site, said: “Hiding in this sand, we have a relatively large piece of mammoth bone sticking from the surface.
“We’ve started to pick out little bits of flint, so little bits of stone which have been worked by humans, and they are just 50 centimetres away from this mammoth leg bone.
“You can see that they’ve been taking little chips out of the edge to create a sharp cutting surface, which they could scrape along bones or along hides to remove fat.
“Something as simple as this starts to connect those dots. It starts to bring the human story together with the mammoths, and that’s really quite special.”
The presence of the tiny flint fragments alongside the bones suggests humans and mammoths roamed the site simultaneously.
The tool discovered by Sally and Neville may well have been made by these same people.
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Evidence of neanderthals — an ancient lineage of humans — using spears and other weapons to hunt, raises the possibility that these mammoths were indeed hunted.
Archaeologists discovered scratch marks on the leg bones near the five flint tools, which suggests possible evidence of butchery.
Further laboratory research will confirm whether these were or were not cuts made by humans.
Prof Garrod said: “It’s like a really big ‘Who done it?’. Did they all die of a disease, was there a massive flood that came in, or were we hunting them?
“Having worked with elephants in the wild, I think possibly a juvenile — a very, very young one — might have got stuck in the mud.
“It panicked the group, things went really badly really quickly and we came along as scavengers and possibly found the world’s biggest buffet.
“I think we were opportunists.”
As the excavation came to a close, further analysis of the tools showed some of them were scrapers, which would have been used to remove skin and also to remove small pieces of meat from bones.
Prof Garrod said the scratch marks proved evidence of people using the animals for food, fuel and warmth too.
He added that these bones and tools are a “point in history where something happened”, painting an image of some of the large steppe mammoths in Britain and Neanderthals using tools to butcher the animals for meat.
Sally and Neville were invited to the site upon completion of the dig to be shown a VR perception of how the site would have looked 220,000 years ago.
Their finds gave archaeologists a rare glimpse of early Britain, when humans were fully immersed in the wild and living as part of nature.
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