Ancestors

And then there is burial. A ritual which seems to encapsulate a familiar concept of life and death, the need to mark an ending, to achieve closure by folding the dead into the bosom of the earth. Other funerary rituals speak similarly of that acknowledgement and marking of a life that has ended. Fire sends the cremated body up in smoke, becoming pa

In 1908, a Neanderthal skeleton was discovered during excavations of a cave in the Bouffia Bonneval, in La Chapelle-aux-Saints in southern France. The skeleton was fairly complete – the skull, most of the spine, some ribs, the long bones of the arms and legs, and some of the hand and foot bones, were there. The skull is ‘classic’ Neanderthal, with

Across large geographic expanses, and through time, these Palaeolithic people were doing things in many different ways – from the types of stone tools they made to the way they treated the bodies of the dead. And it’s that variability – which surely represents the ability to create culture, to innovate, to think and behave in ways which seem human

Pooja explains that in her part of the project, she’ll be looking at the metagenome. Samples of ancient bone don’t just contain the DNA of the human they once belonged to, but also genetic material from any pathogens that the human might have been carrying around with them. She would be looking for genetic traces of systematic infections, like TB,

In historical times, people who died suddenly or were murdered could be buried in strange ways – prone, or with rocks on their chests, or mutilated – to prevent them ‘coming back’.

But the numbers and proportions of bones found in the tombs suggest that some purposeful movement of certain elements was going on. And some arrangements seem very deliberate – such as the finger bones stuck into the nasal aperture of the skull from Belas Knap in Wiltshire, or the careful arrangement of skulls around the edge of a chamber at Lanhil

Among those fragmentary remains, bits of skull are disproportionately represented. And although the skull cups from Gough’s Cave are unusual – they are not unique. There are at least three other sites where crania seem to have been modified for use as cups. Most are from France, dating from very close to the peak of the last Ice Age, but some appea

Around half a million years ago, things do start to change, with a shift in stone-tool technology that sees the one-size-fits-all hand-axe replaced by tool-kits with a range of different forms and functions.

Gough’s Cave provides us with some of the earliest evidence we have for human recolonisation of Britain after the peak of the Ice Age – these hunters were among the first people to return to these lands after the ice sheets shrank and melted. And they seem to have mainly used this cave as a camp while hunting wild horses. But the human presence at