Didn\u2019t the whole story start with a chance discovery by amateurs?<\/h4>\n
Back in 2017 Sally and Neville Hollingworth, who are amateur fossil hunters, came to a talk that I did. Not long afterwards they got in touch asking if they could send me some photos of a discovery they\u2019d made. Long story short, they sent me some photos of Sally lying next to a mammoth tusk.<\/p>\n
So I asked them, \u201cAre you in Siberia?\u201dAnd they said, \u201cNo, Swindon.\u201d That wasn\u2019t the answer I expected. I said quickly that I shouldn\u2019t really know about this because, obviously, whoever\u2019s in charge academically would have a fit. But they told me that no one knew it was there; it was just in a quarry, and they asked me if I wanted to be involved. I took the reins and helped put a team together with Lisa Westcott Wilkins from DigVentures and bunch of academics from institutes around the UK.<\/p>\n
How did Sir David Attenborough become involved?<\/h4>\n
I showed him a series of photos when we were at a conference together and it wasn\u2019t hard to hook him on such an amazing project. For me, to work with David on such a big project was always going to be amazing, but what is most lovely about this project is that it showcases the science.<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t do that enough in media, unfortunately. It\u2019s often just the end product that\u2019s shown. This shows the process going on behind the scenes, like those 10-minute \u2018How we filmed\u2026\u2019 shorts at the end of the big, glossy shows David usually does. This is really seeing who\u2019s involved, what they\u2019re doing, how the discoveries have been made.<\/p>\n
![\""Programme\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/4\/2021\/12\/23879012-low_res-attenborough-and-the-mammoth-graveyard-87f1d82.jpeg?quality=90&resize=620%2C349"\" "\\"\"Attenborough\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Swindon doesn\u2019t immediately strike me as a mammoth hotspot\u2026<\/h4>\n
If you go back a quarter of a million years, you would have had this diagonal cut across the country, from north Norfolk through Swindon and Oxford, right down to the south coast. North of that would\u2019ve been this huge icy tundra that wasn\u2019t especially hospitable. South of that would\u2019ve been this lush, quite productive zone where you had animals and people migrating backwards and forwards, up and down. You\u2019re talking about a whole range of different animals here: bear, bison, turtles. It would have been a hugely important migratory route a quarter of a million years ago.<\/p>\n
Read more about Sir David Attenborough:<\/strong><\/p>\n The mammoth group is a really interesting group. From fossil records we know that the group spans from about five million years ago, when they first evolved in Africa and then, like our species, spread out and ended up in North America, and across Europe and Asia. Then they diversified. There are about 10 known species from the woolly mammoth right through to steppe mammoths.<\/p>\n The mammoth group as a whole died out maybe as recently as 3,600 years ago. So we still had mammoths roaming the planet when Stonehenge was built. We think of these things as living hundreds of thousands of years ago, but they were around just a few generations ago.<\/p>\n The species that we have in Swindon are steppe mammoths, so steppe as in the Siberian steppes. These things were absolute monsters \u2013 the largest mammoths that ever existed. They reached up to about 15 tonnes, maybe even more, and had tusks over four and a half metres long. But the ones we\u2019ve got were right at the end of their range \u2013 this particular species came onto the scene about 1.8 million years ago and disappeared about 200,000 years ago.<\/p>\n Ours lived about 200,000 years ago. At that time, this very large species was becoming much smaller, thanks to selection pressure from environmental change, climate change, competition with other big herbivores, and predation from our species and other animals. These [later mammoths] are much more comparable to African\/Asian elephants, but we\u2019re still talking 8, 9, 10 tonnes potentially.<\/p>\n The really important thing about this site is that it\u2019s not just a bunch of mammoth bones \u2013 that would be cool in itself but, if you have that, there\u2019s no context. If I say to you, this is a piece of mammoth tusk, maybe you can do radioisotope analysis, but you can\u2019t tell me what the environment was really like for the animal it came from.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve got mammoth bones, mammoth tusks, hand-axes from Neanderthals, we\u2019ve got other species such as bears and Megalosaurus, even the mud \u2013 I\u2019ve been singing the praises of the mud for so long now. What we have is so well-preserved, we know exactly what the water flowed like, we know what the salinity was like, we know what the oxygen content of the environment was like, we\u2019ve even got freshwater snail shells so we know exactly \u2013 from the biggest to the smallest \u2013 what animals lived within that environment.<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve heard of the Mary Rose, the ship that sank off the south coast in the 1500s, that served as a snapshot of what life was like in Tudor Britain because so much of it was there; it wasn\u2019t just a cannon, or a cutlass, it was everything. It\u2019s the same thing here but from a quarter of a million years ago.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been looking at this site from a different perspective to what you would normally see in a palaeontology project. We\u2019ve made sure that we had a team of archaeologists led by Lisa and Brendon Wescott Wilkins. They run DigVentures, a commercial archaeology unit that\u2019s based on citizen science and is outward-facing and very collaborative. They use Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) scans and drones, as well as more classic techniques.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve also tried to look at environmental DNA \u2013 so taking water and mud samples to see what other animals urinated, defecated, bled to death or decomposed in the area. You might not find the animals themselves, but you might find that a Neanderthal had a wee nearby. We\u2019ve also been using ground-penetrating radar to look at the environment.<\/p>\n The frustrating but cool thing is that we\u2019ve barely scratched the surface. This is one of, if not the only example of what could turn out to be a herd of steppe mammoths found anywhere in the world. Just finding one mammoth is amazing, but we\u2019ve got a herd with babies in it, which is incredible. It doesn\u2019t get any better than that.<\/p>\n We also definitely have an association with Neanderthals here. This is one of the earliest examples, anywhere in the world, of Neanderthals interacting with mammoth remains. I can\u2019t definitively say yet what the link was between them. We don\u2019t know whether they found them dead, and then butchered them, or whether they killed them and then butchered them. But that [research] is all ongoing.<\/p>\n Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard<\/em> airs on BBC One at 20:00 on Thursday, 30 December, 2021.<\/p><\/body><\/html>\n By Jason Goodyer Published: Tuesday, 21 December 2021 at 12:00 am Sir David Attenborough\u2019s new show investigates the surprising discovery of a heard of mammoths in Swindon, at a site that was once the riverbed of the Thames. The fossils appear to be hundreds of thousands of years old, making them a very rare find. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":520,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"7"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2021\/12\/the-chance-discovery-that-uncovered-a-mammoth-graveyard-in-swindon-and-inspired-the-new-attenborough-show-scaled.jpg",2560,1707,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2021\/12\/the-chance-discovery-that-uncovered-a-mammoth-graveyard-in-swindon-and-inspired-the-new-attenborough-show-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2021\/12\/the-chance-discovery-that-uncovered-a-mammoth-graveyard-in-swindon-and-inspired-the-new-attenborough-show-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2021\/12\/the-chance-discovery-that-uncovered-a-mammoth-graveyard-in-swindon-and-inspired-the-new-attenborough-show-768x512.jpg",768,512,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2021\/12\/the-chance-discovery-that-uncovered-a-mammoth-graveyard-in-swindon-and-inspired-the-new-attenborough-show-1024x683.jpg",800,534,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2021\/12\/the-chance-discovery-that-uncovered-a-mammoth-graveyard-in-swindon-and-inspired-the-new-attenborough-show-1536x1024.jpg",1536,1024,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2021\/12\/the-chance-discovery-that-uncovered-a-mammoth-graveyard-in-swindon-and-inspired-the-new-attenborough-show-2048x1365.jpg",2048,1365,true]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Jason Goodyer Published: Tuesday, 21 December 2021 at 12:00 am Sir David Attenborough\u2019s new show investigates the surprising discovery of a heard of mammoths in Swindon, at a site that was once the riverbed of the Thames. The fossils appear to be hundreds of thousands of years old, making them a very rare find.…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/519"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}So, this is a mammoth graveyard. When we\u2019re talking about mammoths what exactly are we talking about?<\/h4>\n
![\""Presenter\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/4\/2021\/12\/Ben-Garrod-BBC-15eb5ee.jpg?quality=90&resize=480%2C639"\" "\\"\"Ben\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Which species do the Swindon mammoths belong to?<\/h4>\n
What work has been happening at the site since 2017?<\/h4>\n
What new approaches have you been taking?<\/h4>\n
What are your findings so far?<\/h4>\n
","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"