Meet the Ancestors (1998) s02e03 Episode Script

A Dorset farmer noticed strange crop marks in a neighbour's field.
As the soil was peeled back, a prehistoric temple appeared.
At its centre - a mysterious burial.
What could be better than being out in the country on a lovely day? I'm on my way to see an excavation where they've dug up a burial dating from the time of Stonehenge.
Martin Green is a farmer, and an old friend of mine.
He's excavating the site, and he told me how he'd found the burial.
I started trowelling away, removing small, loose chalk, until I got down to this much larger, blocky chalk here.
Then I decided to lift this loose block here, and I looked in this hole underneath, and, wow, there's a skull in there! Does it look well preserved? It looks VERY well preserved.
How did you feel when you realised it was a burial? I felt like Howard Carter when he first peered into Tutankhamen's tomb.
It was quite a shock! You're not expecting to find such riches? No, I'm not, but it's a remarkable discovery, and totally unexpected.
Oh, my goodness, look what we've got.
A second skull! THEY LAUGH EXCITEDLY Might it be a family grave? It's possible.
We've got two individuals.
But are these just skulls, or are they parts of complete skeletons? We've yet to discover that.
From above, we get a clear idea of what the whole site looks like.
At the centre is a huge circular hollow.
In the bottom, the burial pit was hidden.
Surrounding it is an outer ring of large pits.
Back in the burial pit, Martin was in for another surprise.
Look, there's another one! Ha-ha! This is incredible! It looks as though there's going to be a ring of skulls around here.
We've got two over here, and two at this end.
And there are large blocks here, and I suspect they might be covering skulls as well.
It's quite remarkable.
This one here - you can see it is caved in a bit.
We're actually looking inside the skull, inside the brain case.
But it was becoming clear that the pit contained more than just skulls.
WOMAN: Cripes! Here they are! I've not seen anything like this before.
'By the time bone specialist Jackie McKinley arrived the next day,' Martin had uncovered four complete skeletons.
Jackie gave us the first clues about these people.
One was an adult woman.
Three were young children, perhaps hers.
They've still got some milk teeth.
There are still deciduous teeth.
And this is one of the permanent teeth - the first to erupt is the first molar.
And that's just about starting to erupt.
So, he's a bit younger than I thought at first.
It's very odd seeing graves emptied.
This seems a bit stranger, because we know so little of the circumstances in which the bodies were put in the pit.
The fact that it's three children I find quite disturbing, really.
When you see the first milk teeth, and things like that, it just brings it home, how old they were.
It makes you wonder how they died.
It's actually a very sad burial group.
Jackie has now calculated that the woman was about 30 years old, and of slender build.
The children were aged about ten, nine and five.
At this age, it's impossible to say whether they were girls or boys.
None of them showed any signs of how they'd died, though Jackie did find a small hole in the skull of the youngest child.
Can you see how it's just very slightly raised? It's bulged out a bit.
Just slightly.
If we look over here, at the X-ray, this is the area where that break in the bone was.
Can you see how that's got little bits of bone missing? There's a similar area up here as well.
It's quite faint, but it looks very similar to this bit here.
What causes that? The only thing I can think of is that this must be some form of tumour.
In the bone? Actually inside the bone - so it is a bone tumour.
But quite what type of tumour, I'm not sure yet.
And they all have a condition called cribra orbitalia.
This is something you get in the eye sockets.
Can you see in there? It's not easy to see! Just in the top of the orbit, there is pitting.
Oh, yes.
Can you see the little pits? All three of the juveniles have that condition.
It's believed to be due to iron deficiency anaemia.
There could be a number of causes for that.
One would be that the diet is just deficient in iron.
Mmm.
Another might be that the individuals were not being able to absorb the iron that was in the diet.
'Later that day, Paul Budd and Janet Montgomery arrived.
'They're from Bradford University, 'and they were curious about the lead levels in such ancient teeth.
' Where are these people going to have been getting lead from? They're Neolithic, so they hadn't got any metals.
That's right.
That's what makes them interesting.
We're exposed to high levels of lead, comparatively, these days.
It's estimated that the amount of lead in our atmosphere is perhaps as much as 100,000 times higher than natural levels.
Frightening, isn't it?! It's rather terrifying! These people would have been getting lead through their diet.
They lived on the chalklands, which is a low lead geology.
There were no metals around - this is pre-metallurgical.
We hope to establish what the natural level of exposure to lead is.
There's one question on everyone's mind - is this a family group? Was this woman the mother of these children? The answer might lie in DNA.
One of the few people in Britain who can help works here at UMIST in Manchester.
Christine Flaherty explained how.
We use a technique that lets you look at inherited bits of DNA.
If the mother has these, and we find them in the children, that will tell us whether these children are offspring of this woman.
One of the best places to find ancient DNA is inside teeth, protected by the hard enamel.
If any DNA has survived, the teeth will also tell us whether each child was a boy or a girl.
From Manchester, it was off to the Oxford radiocarbon dating lab, where Paul Pettitt had analysed bone from the Cranborne burials.
Were the burials really Neolithic? I hoped Paul was going to tell me.
What we have first is a range that is going to be the age of Cranborne Woman.
That is roughly 3,500BC to 3,100BC.
Within this range, what age is she most likely to be? All we can do is say that it's slightly more probable that her age range will be in certain areas within this.
This is the highest peak, and if I was a gambling man, I'd put my money on her real age being around 3,300BC to 3,400BC.
So, she's something between 5,300 and 5,400 years old.
She is.
Yeah.
So she's definitely Neolithic.
DEFINITELY Neolithic! When our woman from Cranborne lived, it was a time of change.
The crops and herds of the first farmers replaced a life of hunting and gathering wild foods.
'This was reflected in the bones, as Mike Richards had discovered.
' So, what were our group eating? We measured the nitrogen isotope.
This tells us about trophic level - the amount of plant versus meat or milk protein in the diet.
We measure the isotope values of herbivores from the same area, and the same time period, against carnivores, who eat meat.
We look at the human values, to give a scale.
Are they more like the herbivores or the carnivores, or in between? These are the Cranborne humans, and they're quite high on the scale, a lot more similar to carnivores than to herbivores.
I interpret that as having a great deal of meat or animal protein - meat or milk in their diet.
Modern people who eat meat would fall below the Cranborne levels: The final part of my journey took me to University College London, and facial reconstruction expert Robin Richards.
The facial rebuild starts with scanning the woman's skull.
The depths of overlying facial tissue are added by the computer.
It won't be possible for us to rebuild any of the children's faces, as the information about tissue depths has never been collected.
Do you almost decide what sort of a face you ought to put on? Yes.
I have a look at the skull, and you get some idea of the facial type.
Robin has chosen a set of tissue depths for a slender face, and the computer moulds the data around the skull.
This is the reconstructed face.
Strangely, this is just the sort of face that I was expecting.
Series illustrator Jane Brayne began to transform Robin's computer printout into a colour portrait.
It's been a few weeks since I've been to see Martin, but I expect, knowing him, he's found something else extraordinary.
The site has changed dramatically.
Next to where the burials were found was a huge hole in the chalk.
Martin? Julian! Where the? Hi! How far down is that? It's 6.
6 metres, or about 22 feet.
You're mad! THEY LAUGH Have you got to the bottom of it? Definitely.
Solid chalk down here.
Can I come down? Sure.
Use the ladder.
That's what I had in mind! Come on down! 'I couldn't believe how deep the shaft went.
'It was originally dug over 5,000 years ago.
But how did they do it?' What have you done here, Martin? Welcome to the shaft.
I can't get over the size of it! It's been dug right through this really rocky, solid chalk.
We've just removed the loose rubble, exposing the original sides.
You can actually see tool marks in the wall.
Here's a long groove, probably from an antler pick.
Down here are scallop-shaped marks, probably the marks of an axe, which was used to cut out the chalk.
Why do people go to the effort of building something like this? We think it's something to do with a "Mother Earth" worship.
They're trying to get deep into Mother Earth, and lay their deposits to increase the fertility of animals and crops, offerings to the gods, as it were.
You get a feeling down here Yes.
.
.
of being part of the Earth.
Looking up to the sky and the clouds - it's an amazing sensation.
The next day, I went to see Martin, where, in an old chicken shed, I found some clues about the people who lived here in the Stone Age.
Martin has a unique collection of tools and objects dating back thousands of years.
People lived in this area - what else is special about it? In this area, close to the farm, we get exotic items like these stone axes.
These rocks are from far away.
That one is from North Wales.
And this one? That's from Cornwall, and the other is from South Wales.
These must have been prized possessions.
Very much so.
We often find them in pits, where they've been carefully deposited.
This is the bone of a brown bear, which must have been quite rare.
It's been placed with axes and other items in pits.
So all these things - these axes and decorated pottery and fine flint tools and odd bones like bear bones - these are all found buried in pits.
That's right.
It's all close to the great monument called the Dorset Cursus.
It crosses this area, over a distance of six miles.
All these exotic materials are found either within it, or just outside.
So that's what's drawn all of these objects in? That's the focal point.
The big question is, what's the Cursus? The Cursus consists of two parallel banks about 100 metres apart.
It forms a great enclosed pathway.
And we know it's aligned on the midwinter solstice as well.
So, what was it for? I think it's like a grand avenue of the dead.
It's a pathway linking the ancestors into the annual cycle of nature.
So huge is the Cursus that it has to be seen from the air.
In the pale chalk field, the dark rectangular lines mark the north-east end of the Cursus.
The grassy mound is a burial mound of the same date.
Today, the Cursus can only be seen at certain times of the year.
It disappears into the distance, with a burial mound on the left.
The highlighted point on the Cursus is where the ancients would have viewed the midwinter solstice.
When it was first built, the Cursus would have looked quite different.
The chalk embankments on its edges would have cut two dramatic lines across the landscape.
The Cursus is over 10 kilometres long and 100 metres wide.
Its other end is also marked by a burial mound.
Now I felt that I understood the Cursus, I was intrigued to know how it fitted in with Martin's site.
Jane was going to reconstruct how it may have looked 5,000 years ago.
It's coming along, then? At least it gives a sense of the landscape.
It's not easy, drawing in the rain and the wind.
But it really does give a feel for the place.
On the distant hillside, the Cursus would have been visible to those who built this site.
We took Jane's unfinished painting to show Richard Bradley, an expert in prehistory at Reading University.
We were surprised when he told us that it wasn't really a burial site.
So, then, what is the primary function of this site? I think there are two functions interlinked.
One is communication.
You are making contact with.
let's call it the "Underworld".
That's common in many cultures.
But you're also making offerings.
You are placing things in those holes.
You're doing two things at once.
It's about communication with a world that is below our world, and possibly with another world which is physically above it.
But if this site isn't a burial ground, then what is it? Maybe it's to do with ceremony and ritual, or it could be a temple.
But there are still four people buried here, and you wonder why.
Perhaps they were victims of sacrifice, offerings to the gods.
I suspect that we'll never know.
There's still the lead and the DNA results to help solve the mystery.
At UMIST in Manchester, Christine had completed her DNA tests.
She first explained which of the children were boys, and which were girls.
Here we've got the sexing results.
We knew the adult was a female, around 30 years of age.
I found out that the oldest child was a girl.
She was the one around 10 years old.
The middle child - the nine-year-old - turned out to be a boy.
And the youngest child - the five-year-old - was another girl.
So there were two girls and a boy.
That's quite extraordinary.
Having worked out what sex they are, what I want to know is, are any of them hers? Is she the mother? Right.
We used something called STRs to look at kinship.
STRs are used now for DNA fingerprinting, for paternity testing, for use in forensic crime and things like this.
Here we've got the DNA kinship results for the burials.
Up here, we've got the adult, the woman.
Then we've got the older girl, the middle child - the boy - and the little girl.
This graph shows the DNA markers for each of them.
If any of the markers match, there's a good chance of kinship.
Here, the youngest child shares one of the markers with the adult.
So this little girl could certainly be the child of the woman.
The other two children don't share any of the markers with the woman.
The boy could not be her son, because neither of these match.
There's only one marker for the oldest girl, either because the other one didn't come out, or she's got two the same.
So it's ambiguous as to whether or not she'd be the woman's daughter.
But the boy and the oldest girl share the same marker, so they could possibly be siblings.
It's incredible.
'I'm surprised that only one of the children belonged to our woman.
'Why was she buried with the other two? How complicated could it get? 'At the British Geological Survey in Nottingham, 'I met Paul and Janet, who had the results of their analysis.
'First, the lead levels.
' You took some teeth as samples to look for lead levels.
What sort of levels did you find? We didn't find what we expected.
We expected them to be very, very much lower than the lead levels that you get in modern people.
They were at the low end of the distribution, but nowhere near as low as we expected.
These are the lead levels that Paul obtained from our burial group.
And these are from modern samples.
Some of the Neolithic levels are almost the same as modern ones.
This could have major implications in understanding lead pollution.
Where were Neolithic people getting the lead in their teeth from? We postulate that their lead is coming from their diet, essentially, and therefore, primarily, from their underlying geology.
It's coming from the geology to the soil to the food that they eat.
If more of our lead comes from geology than from the atmosphere, then perhaps we're not as polluted with lead as we thought.
But there was still more.
Using thin slices from the prehistoric teeth, Paul and Janet used a laser to extract lead and strontium isotopes.
Layers of enamel are laid down at different stages of a person's life.
Incredibly, the isotopes have geological signatures that can be linked to specific parts of the country, so it's possible to track people's movements.
This shows how the strontium isotope signatures change in the tooth enamel samples from the adult female and the juveniles.
Right.
This is the strontium isotope signature down the side.
This is the level that you would expect from the chalk - the signature you would expect - down here.
Yes.
The adult female has a different signature from the chalk geology.
It's a signature which corresponds to what we would find in the Mendips, which is about 80km to the north.
The isotope profiles connect to tell an extraordinary tale.
The woman was not born on the chalk, but in the Mendips.
As an adult, she moved 80km south to Cranborne, where she picked up two children and returned to the Mendips.
Here, she had a daughter, and some time later, they all returned to Cranborne, where they died, and were buried.
All this evidence has taken a long time to gather.
It's been months since I last saw Martin.
I now have the final landscape, and the portrait of Cranborne woman.
This is about as far as we can go with archaeology, isn't it?! Bringing back a face from the past! Superb! To me, she was always going to have this slender face, because the whole skeleton was very slender.
Very delicate.
We've found out far more about her than we ever expected.
Absolutely.
All about her children, and that she wandered from .
.
the Mendips to here.
That's extraordinary.
It's amazing.
And this is the place Ah, that's excellent.
It's got all of the elements that we know about from your excavation.
The big, central pit, and the hints that a shaft's being dug down here.
Then the individual pits round the outside.
There's maybe a family group responsible for each one, so that's why these paths come in.
One thing we can't be certain of is whether they were sacrificed.
Do you think they were? I think most likely they were.
The way that pit had been hidden away, and then back filled with chalk rubble, suggests to me that it was a sacred foundation burial, hidden away at the base, probably at the end of construction.
The landscape that this woman knew 5,000 years ago may seem idyllic - a peaceful scene in which everyone lived in harmony with nature.
People worked together to build structures like the temple and the Cursus, that leave their mark even today.
By digging chalk and hewing timber, the gods were kept pleased.
But the gods of Earth and sky, of this world and above, may have demanded offerings of food, valuables and perhaps of lives.
Did this woman and her band of children, in a remote time and in a strange place, make the ultimate sacrifice?