Families of the Stone Age Stories from the Dark Earth: Meet the Ancestors Revisited

Right across Britain,

archaeologists are unearthing the relics of ancient lives.

But so much of modern archaeology is what happens after excavation.

Today, forensic analysis and cutting-edge science,

as well as brand-new finds, are overturning what we once thought

about entire eras of our ancient history.

I'm Julian Richards and over the years, I've been lucky enough

to have taken part in some of our most important digs.

You've not?

A lead coffin?!

Now, I'm going back to some of my favourites to discover

the very latest stories of our most ancient ancestors.

The Neolithic, the new Stone Age, is an ancient and mysterious time.

An era that in Britain began more than 6,000 years ago.

It marked a change from hunting and gathering to farming.

And gave rise to some of the greatest monuments of our ancient past.

But for all these highly visible monuments,

new discoveries from this time, especially burials, are rare.

So when they do turn up, archaeologists like me get very excited

because the tiniest of clues, the smallest bit of evidence,

can change our understanding of an entire age.

Two discoveries made over a decade ago

were windows into this remarkable time.

One dig in Dorset unearthed remains so well preserved

that we were able to reveal the lives of an entire Stone Age family.

Now, more than a decade after the dig,

neuroscience is helping us to understand their world

in unprecedented detail.

They can start talking about who she would have known,

what politics was going on in the area when she was alive.

A second burial in the far north, on Orkney,

presented a far greater challenge.

Here, only decayed fragments of bone had survived.

But now, a brand-new study of ancient human remains found right across Orkney

has changed how we think people were treating their dead.

These are just a couple of the more unusual things that we found.

-So has that been drilled?

-Quite possibly.

What's clear from both these burials is that archaeology doesn't end

when we put away our travels.

In fact, it's just the beginning.

Over the last 10 years, how we view the position of these sites

and the history of the Neolithic has changed quite radically.

And the key has been new science.

Put quite simply,

there's been a revolution in our understanding of Neolithic Britain.

The counties of Wiltshire and Dorset

are fabulously rich in Neolithic monuments.

This landscape is unique in the world.

And this is where I both live and study.

But having worked here for over 30 years,

I know that any new burials from this time are rare.

So when, in 1997, a new site came up in Dorset, I was pretty excited.

But what I didn't know at the time was that this discovery

was going to influence archaeology for the whole of the next decade.

Let me take you back nearly 16 years to the burial of an ancient family.

One of my most special digs.

Back in 1997, I got to the excavations when they were well under way.

The site was discovered by Martin Green,

a local farmer turned archaeologist.

I started trowelling away, removing small, loose chalk

until I got down to this level and this is much larger, blocky chalk

that you can see there now.

And then I decided to lift this loose block here

and it revealed a hole underneath and I looked in there

and, "Wow! There's a skill in there."

-Does it look pretty well preserved?

-It looks very well preserved.

-Do you think this might be a family grave?

-It's possible.

We've obviously got two individuals here but the question at this

stage is, are these just skulls or are they parts of complete skeletons?

We are yet to discover that.

At the centre of the site was a huge circular hollow

in which the burials were hidden.

Surrounding it was an outer ring of large pits.

And the wider setting made it even more fascinating.

From the air, I could see that the burial site lay right on the edge

of an important Neolithic monument, the Dorset Cursus,

a strange, elongated earthwork that runs for six miles

right across the landscape.

Today, the Cursus can only just been made out, stretching into the

distance, barely visible against the backdrop of ploughed fields.

But in the Neolithic, it would have looked quite different.

The chalk embankments that marked out its edges,

cutting white lines across the landscape.

A new discovery within sight of this enigmatic construction

was a very significant find.

And this one was wonderfully well preserved.

As more chalk was removed,

it became obvious that the pit contained more than just skulls.

-Cripes!

-Well, here they are. I mean, this is...

I've never seen anything like this before.

-They are crammed in, aren't they?

-Yes.

By the time bone specialist Jackie McKinlay arrived,

Martin had uncovered four complete skeletons.

One was an adult woman. But three were young children.

They've still got some of their milk teeth.

These are still deciduous teeth along here.

This is one of the permanent teeth.

The first one to erupt is the first permanent molar.

That's just about starting to erupt there.

So he's a bit younger than I thought at first. Yeah.

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 turned out to be three children,

I find quite disturbing really.

When you see the first milk teeth

and things like that, it really brings it home how old they were.

It makes you wonder how they died.

Samples of bone were taken to the Oxford radiocarbon dating lab,

where Paul Petitt was able to determine

just when these people lived.

What we have first is a range that is going to be the age Cranborne Woman

and that age is roughly 3,500 to 3,100 BC.

Within this range, what age is she most likely to be?

I suppose if I was a gambling man, I would put my money on her real age

being somewhere around 3,300 to 3,400 BC.

-So she's something between 5,300 5,400 years old.

-She is.

-So she's definitely Neolithic.

-Definitely Neolithic.

Radiocarbon dating revealed that these people

lived in the early Neolithic.

An era that gave rise to some of the greatest monuments of our ancient past.

Today, nearly 16 years after the discovery of Cranborne Woman and the three children,

they still remain in the care of farmer Martin Green.

Martin has his own private museum, housed in an old chicken shed

just a couple of miles from the burial site.

-Hello, Martin.

-Hi, Julian.

-Rubber gloves. How unpleasant!

I know you found some amazing stuff on your farm but do you think

this was one of the most exciting sites that you ever found?

By far the most exciting.

When I first saw the site from an aerial photograph, it was a Eureka moment, really.

I thought, this is an extraordinary Neolithic site of some kind.

-Have you got all of the burials here then?

-Yes, they are all here.

-They're boxes just behind us on these shelves.

-Right.

That was the thing that really got to me about this burial group

was the fact that we had these tiny bones of children in the pit.

That's right. It is a very poignant discovery.

There is part of the skull

and I think in here there are some of the teeth, the milk teeth in fact.

We know that in a subsistence farming economy like in the Neolithic,

there were going to be a lot of infants deaths,

but to actually find them like this is very poignant.

So you look after all these burials here.

How do you feel about having them here, having them close to you?

Obviously, it's quite a responsibility but I'm a farmer.

I have farmed here all my life. My family did before me.

These Neolithic people were farmers.

So I think it is a way of understanding the landscape

and how people I've used it over thousands of years.

I think it's a continuation of telling that story.

The excavation site has been returned to agriculture.

But of course, without the human remains that our ancestors intended to rest here.

Well, according to the GPS,

I am right in the middle of the site now.

Nothing to see.

It's all rather featureless but then one field in Dorset

can look very much like another field in Dorset.

There is no trace of the drama of the dig

and certainly nothing to suggest that this was once a family grave.

I know some people really get quite uneasy about the whole idea of digging up human remains.

I don't have a problem with it, personally,

provided it's done with great care and respect.

What I do feel very strongly about is that once we've excavated these remains,

then we ought to be able to keep them.

We ought to be able to look after them

so that we can study them in the future

because science is developing all the time and there are things we can do now

that we couldn't do 10 years ago and it's always going to develop.

If we rebury those remains,

then we've actually denied ourselves the opportunity of doing that.

We've actually denied the possibility of those ancestors telling their story.

Back in 1997, with the remains conserved,

bone expert Jackie McKinlay was able to assess them properly.

And then we've got the other two juveniles.

This is the youngest one, which was the one that was curled up on its back.

The woman was about 30-years-old.

And the children aged about 10, nine and five,

all shared the same medical condition.

There is a condition called cribra orbitalia.

Now, 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, there is pitting.

-Oh, yes.

Can you see the little pits that are in there?

All three of the juveniles have that condition.

That is believed to be due to iron deficiency, anaemia.

But this was not something that would have killed them.

So with no hint of how they died, attention turned to their identity.

Christine Flaherty extracted ancient DNA to determine

the sex of the children and to investigate if they were related.

So here I've got the sexing results. Now, we knew the adult was a female.

She was around 30 years of age.

I found out that the oldest child was a girl.

She was 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.

Now, having worked out what sex they are,

what I want to know is are any of them hers? Is she the mother?

OK, here we've got the DNA kinship results for the burials.

Up here, we've got the adult, the woman.

Next, we've got the oldest child, the girl.

The middle child is the boy.

And the youngest child, who is the little girl.

This graph shows the DNA markers for each of them

and if any of the markers match, there's a good chance of kinship.

So here we see that the youngest child, the little girl,

shares one of the markers with the adult.

So this little girl could certainly be the child of the woman.

Now, the other two children don't share any of the markers with the woman

and certainly the boy could not be her son

because neither of these match either of her markers.

But it's interesting because the boy and the oldest girl

share the same marker and they could possibly be siblings.

That's incredible.

What had emerged was completely unexpected.

It appeared that only one of the children belonged to the woman.

The other two might have been related to each other

but not to our mother or her daughter.

By scanning the skull of Cranborne Woman,

facial reconstruction experts were able to show us

what the leader of this unusual family might have looked like.

Here at last, was our mysterious woman.

But in 1997,

all our discoveries had only lead to more intriguing questions.

Just what was she doing with the three children?

And how did they all come to be buried

in one of Britain's most sacred places...

..next, to the Dorset Cursus?

Without carbon dating or DNA analysis,

we would still have been making guesses about our group's identity.

But there was one more scientific technique we wanted to use.

A technique that was back then brand-new and largely untested,

but that had the potential to uncover the story

of how our group came together.

As an archaeologist, I am staggered by what we can discover today

that we wouldn't have thought was possible a generation ago.

But to me, one particular analytical technique

has got a very special place - isotope analysis.

Because it's a technique that make the ancestors promoted

and in some ways pioneered.

It has since gone on to be hugely important in discovering

the movement and migration of ancient peoples.

Isotope analysis begins with thin slices of teeth.

Within the enamel,

there's an atomic signature that can be linked to specific parts

of the country, allowing us to track a person's movements over time.

So which tooth are you going to take?

In 1997, the scientist we turned to was a PhD student called Janet Montgomery.

There was nobody in Britain that had done this before.

The lab where I did it had done it on rocks, for example, metals,

which was what you would use strontium and lead to provenance.

You could do with that but they had never done teeth,

so we had to develop the method and get it to work.

When you started though, did you know where you were going

to get the samples from that you needed to carry out this analysis?

It was actually difficult.

I approached several places and requested samples

and I was turned down because they said we don't believe this works.

Prove it works and come back and show us some data and evidence

and we might think again. So I was a bit stuck, really.

I was having difficulty.

But then you came along with Meet The Ancestors, with samples.

At last, in 1997, Janet was able to test her new technique.

This is a level you would expect from the chalk.

-The signature you would expect from the chalk down here.

-Yes.

Now, the adult female has a very different signature

from the chalk geology.

It's a signature which corresponds to what we would find in the Mendips,

which is about 80 kilometres to the north.

The isotope analysis revealed a surprising series of journeys.

Our woman had not been born on the Dorset chalk, but in the Mendips.

As an adult, she moved 80 kilometres south to Cranborne,

where she picked up two children, neither hers,

and returned to the Mendips.

Here, she had a daughter of her own and later all four of them

returned to Cranborne, where they died and were buried together.

Janet's work had an immediate impact.

As soon as it went out on the television, I had people

e-mailing me, ringing up, saying,

"Would you like to do this on my site or my cemetery?"

So then it was fine.

I had a choice of sites.

-I feel quite proud.

-You should.

Meet The Ancestors was an important part of this.

Now, it has become a fairly routine application in a lot

of archaeology case studies and on the television.

But yes, Meet The Ancestors was instrumental in helping me

get the technique established in Britain.

At last, we had a clear picture.

From their origin in the Mendips, our woman,

the group's leader, travelled more than once to what would

become her final resting place, next to the Dorset Cursus.

But it wasn't only people who were drawn to this place.

Back in 1997, Martin showed me a collection of objects

from all over the country.

This area here, close to the farm,

we get exotic items, like these stone axes for instance.

These are made of rocks which have been imported a considerable distance.

That one, for instance, is from North Wales.

-What about this one?

-That one is from Cornwall.

The other one is from South Wales.

These must have been prized possessions for somebody,

-if the rocks have been brought all that distance.

-Very much so, yes.

We often find them in pits in the ground where they have been very deposited with other objects.

-Decorated pottery and fine flint tools.

-That's right.

It's all close to this great monument which we know is the Dorset Cursus,

which we can see on this plan.

It crosses this area for a distance of six miles and all these exotic

materials are found very close to it, either within it or just outside.

-So that's the magnet, is it? That's what's drawn all of these objects?

-Yes, that is the focal point.

Ever since that dig nearly 16 years ago, I've been intrigued.

What sort of a world did this woman live in?

And to what extent was her burial connected with that massive

Neolithic earthwork that we call the Dorset Cursus?

It's always been clear to me that to understand more about her,

we need to get to grips with this place.

And the challenge has always been that Cursus monuments are amongst

the most enigmatic structures in the whole of prehistory.

Environmental archaeologist, Mike Allen, has spent years taking

hundreds of soil samples from sites around the Dorset Curses.

The results of his analysis have shattered what we used to believe about the ancient landscape

and perhaps the function of the Cursus itself.

The key to all of this groundbreaking work is the humble snail.

What we are trying to do is, amongst all this mess of small chalk pieces,

is to tease out the hundreds of thousands of fragments of shell

and amongst them there are elements that are identifiable and quantifiable.

And by looking at them carefully, their shape and their morphology

and the way they curl and twist,

we can actually identify them to species.

Then we can quantify them and count them.

Each individual snail lives in a different habitat.

Some of them like moist conditions.

Some like loose leaf litter where they can burrow into it and they might have food in there.

Some are more tolerant of open and very dry conditions

and their shell stops them from drying out.

So we can actually start teasing out what type of environment they might have lived in.

Hundreds of thousands of ancient snail shells later,

Mike is able to reach a remarkable conclusion about our burial site.

A decade ago, we thought the landscape in the Neolithic

was one of dense, heavy woodland.

Now, we understand that actually the woodland never really existed there.

It was always a natural open landscape.

Admittedly, there would have been trees in it but it wasn't a dense woodland.

Because it was an open landscape, it encouraged animals,

fresh fruits and berries, and that's why people came to it.

People found it as a magical landscape, a special place.

That's why Cranborne site is where it is.

The Neolithic landscape we had imagined almost 16 years ago has now changed.

And with it, the site of our burial, right next to the Dorset Cursus.

Previously, we'd assumed it was a monument crashing across the landscape,

crashing across an open landscape and was perhaps a processional way.

Looking at the snails from a number of different points on there,

it now looks like one side of it faced an open landscape

and the west side faced a more wooded landscape.

So perhaps it wasn't a processional way but more of a boundary

between a dark wooded landscape and an open, natural landscape.

An open, grazed and lived in landscape.

So we might almost be seeing it as a boundary between life and death.

Between a lived in landscape and a landscape of death

and a landscape of the ancestors.

This is the Dorset Cursus today.

Its old earthworks barely visible

after more than 5,000 years of erosion.

But it still staggers me the scale of this monument

because it extends way beyond the horizon up there to the north

and then stretches across this lovely rolling landscape

way beyond the horizon to the south.

But of course, it wouldn't have looked like this when it was first built

and the clue is down here in this chalk pit.

Chalk, it's white.

So when it was first built, these banks and ditches would have gleamed,

luminous streaks across the landscape,

and of course, highly visible from our burial site,

which is only a few hundred yards in that direction.

Way back, nearly 16 years ago, when we excavated Cranborne Woman,

we knew that there had to be some connection

to this great Neolithic monument.

But what the Cursus looked like, the landscape that it ran through,

the very environment that was inhabited by Cranborne Woman

and her rather unusual family, frustratingly,

all this remained almost a complete unknown.

But today, thanks to a meticulous study

of vast numbers of tiny snail shells like these,

we are beginning to paint a vivid picture of this landscape over 5,000 years ago.

On one side there was dark, forbidding woodland.

On the other, there was open space.

It had always been an open landscape.

So maybe the Cursus acted as a boundary

between a dark and dangerous world and one that was lighter and safer.

And as well as snails, the very latest scientific work

is tying our Cranborne group even more closely to this great monument.

Not just in distance but also in time.

This is Hambledon Hill,

just a few miles from the Dorset Cursus and our burial site.

During the Neolithic,

it was one of the most significant settlements in the area.

-Hi, Julian.

-Hello, Alex. How nice to see you.

-Nice to see you too.

For Alex Bayliss, from English Heritage,

new carbon dating techniques can now paint a detailed

picture of how our Cranborne group fitted in,

not just to a landscape, but to a society.

Now, look, when we looked at that burial,

the Neolithic chronology was reasonable, wasn't it? Or was it?

It was in the phase of the splodge.

It was really rather vague.

If you think of Cranborne Lady,

she's got a radiocarbon date of between 3,500 and 3,100 BC.

So that's an era of 400 years.

So it was very vague.

The whole of the chronology of the Neolithic was like that.

So what's changed now then? What's changed over the last 10 years?

Well, we have got much more precision.

We have got new mathematical techniques that allow us to

put the radiocarbon dating together with the archaeological information.

So if you have the radiocarbon on its own, it's really vague.

But if you can refine it with the archaeological information,

A is earlier than B, something like that,

then you can get much more precision and I can start

talking about what happened in Cranborne Lady's lifetime.

Hambledon Hill lies 12 miles west of our burial site.

Years of excavations have unearthed evidence that the people

who lived here in the Neolithic built huge defences,

seemingly, to protect themselves against the people from Cranborne.

That rampart, it's all facing this way,

it's all about dominating, keeping out the folks over there,

keeping out Cranbourne Lady.

Cranborne Lady has a 35% chance

of having witnessed this construction event.

But it's not very friendly towards the people from Cranborne, is it?

-No. She probably didn't build it.

-A barrier across here.

-Having closed off Hambledon, they now build the Dorset Cursus.

-Right.

So our woman from Cranborne, she knows about the Dorset Cursus.

Probably. She has a 45% chance of having witnessed

the construction of the Dorset Cursus.

-That's fascinating.

-This is her world.

That precision. I'm very impressed with all this.

This level of accuracy offers a completely new perspective

to an age before writing.

-The 'pre' might have to come out of prehistory.

-Oh, no.

-I still like being a pre-historian.

-Oh, well.

-You'll let me be one, will you?

-For a few more years.

-That's very kind of you!

Up until quite recently, our woman and the children

had actually lain buried in a chalk field in Dorset for thousands of years

and there are some who would argue they should still be there

or at least if they were excavated that they should have been reburied.

But just think what these rare remains have given us -

insights into the lives they lead, glimpses into their ancient world.

16 years ago, the stunning preservation of the Cranborne remains

allowed us to use cutting-edge science

to tell a story of a woman and three small children.

Their lives, their relationships and even details of their travels.

But in the time since the dig, science has discovered

far more about the environment of the Dorset Cursus.

And incredibly,

how Cranborne Woman might even have been involved in its construction.

But Wiltshire and Dorset don't contain

the only famous Neolithic landscapes in Britain.

In the far north,

Orkney is home to a dazzling array of Stone Age monuments.

And in 1998, I was called out to a site where a local dairy farmer

had stumbled across an untouched Neolithic tomb

just outside the main town of Kirkwall.

The discovery of a new sealed burial site was big news.

And the team of archaeologists were joined by experts from across the country.

Even two members of the Strathclyde Police forensic team.

What's the tent for?

We're used to using this type of tent at outdoor crime scenes.

It protects the body and the surroundings from the elements

and I think in this area it's going to be very important

to protect the tomb as soon as it's open.

With the tent in place, it was finally time to take the covers off the tomb.

Lean it up against that.

But unlike the Dorset dig,

this was one excavation that didn't go smoothly.

Oh, no!

An archaeologist's worst nightmare.

Modern soil and water contaminating the once sealed chamber.

It was going to take a bit of ingenuity to see past the blockage.

But fortunately, I'd come prepared.

As I manoeuvred the camera into the tomb,

Jennette and lead archaeologist, Beverly Ballin Smith,

watched for any signs of human remains.

The tomb had laid undisturbed

ever since it was sealed over 5,000 years ago.

There's a bone! There's a human bone!

In fact, there was more than one,

as we all found out that evening when Beverley showed us

what had excited her so much.

You can clearly see we've got one skull here.

It's got a little dent in the top, hasn't it? And the brow ridges.

We've got a second skull which seems to be lying on its side

because there is an eye socket. We've got a nose bone.

It looks to be in good condition but we can't tell really here

whether that's a male or female skeleton or skull.

No, not from here. It's not lying as a skeleton, is it?

-Or two skeletons. It's a collection of bones.

-Yes.

The camera had also revealed the structure of the tomb.

There were still some dark recesses we hadn't seen

but we knew that the tomb was circular

and divided into three compartments.

One had bone in, one was empty

and the third, full of soil from the collapse, was an unknown quantity.

Every time I return to Orkney, I get a real buzz of excitement.

Just like home in Dorset,

the Neolithic is written all over its landscape.

This is a World Heritage Site and the preservation of Neolithic

monuments in such an unspoiled setting is simply stunning.

The Stones of Stenness,

the Ring of Brodgar

and Maeshowe.

All breathtaking relics of our distant past.

This is though the first time in over 15 years

that I've been back to the dig site, to the Crantit tomb.

So there's a special air of anticipation.

Coming back here really does bring back the excitement of that original

discovery but actually, it still doesn't look like very much, does it?

This is the thing. When you compare it to all the other monuments in Orkney,

their are great standing stones and everything you can see, this is hidden.

But I think that is why it was so exciting

because of the promise of what might lie under the ground.

What we hoped for in here were remains that had been hidden away

and buried for thousands of years.

But actually, getting to those remains

proved a bit more difficult than we thought.

A few days into the dig,

and the archaeologists were still struggling.

Don't stand there.

If the slab fell in, it would crush any bones beneath it.

The tomb needed shoring up to prevent it collapsing completely.

Sometimes, stones are resin, that's all.

Fortunately, Joffy Hill, one of the diggers, was also a builder.

There is a wonderful structure of a wooden tape. What is it doing?

This is insurance.

If it decides to suddenly collapse,

we will catch it before it goes down on what is our primary deposit.

The skulls on the bottom.

Wooden supports in place,

it was time to get those precious bones out.

-Feet first.

-Feet first.

Overalls weren't just to keep clothes clean

but were intended to prevent any further contamination of the ancient bones.

With the rickety structure holding up the tomb, Beverly went in.

I suppose this is the moment we've all been waiting for.

We're getting our first glimpse of the bones as they come out of the tomb.

It has to be said, from what I've seen so far, they are not in very good condition.

Each fragment was examined and recorded.

The left lambdoid... Well, both lambdoid sutures.

Compared to the incredibly preserved Dorset remains,

these had suffered badly in the soil.

-Very close to each other.

-This is just like sponge cake.

In fact, it's worse. It's worse than sponge cake.

The remaining bones were literally falling to bits

as soon as they were touched.

The larger pieces, two skulls,

were so soft that Beverly had to make every move slowly and gently.

I think I would have the shovel back once Julie has processed.

-How do you feel now they're out?

-I want to find out a bit more now.

I'm keen.

It would seem that the skulls were placed on top of the pile of bones.

Or in this case, slightly to one side.

But why two skulls and only, what would appear to me

to be only one lot of bones, I don't know?

Today, more than 15 years after the dig,

the Crantit remains are kept in the Orkney Museum.

Sometimes, it can be quite an emotional moment

coming face-to-face with remains that you helped dig up years ago

and that awareness that it's people, your ancestors from the past.

But it's quite difficult to do it

when all that's left of an individual is this.

This is a person.

This is a person's life but it's just a few fragments of bone

that were squashed into the floor of the tomb.

Our sense of disappointment was increased by the fact that

the best preserved bone of all

was this skull.

The bones of the face,

which are really what gives somebody that sense of being human

and provide the clues to the person, they're all gone.

They are fragile bones and they've disappeared completely.

So that was the best that we can expect from the tomb.

That was the best that came out of it.

So, as I say, that just compounded

our sense of disappointment, I suppose.

Our two Neolithic burials could not have been more contrasting.

The perfectly preserved skeletons from Cranborne.

And the soft, unpromising fragments of bone from Orkney.

While science had revealed the lives of the Dorset burials,

and given us an entirely new picture of Neolithic life in the South,

on Orkney, it seemed that scientists would need to draw on every

ounce of ingenuity to be able to say anything at all about these remains.

But even in this case, with such terrible bone preservation,

science has been able to paint a detailed picture of the people

who were buried in that tomb.

Over the last decade, this study and others like it

have changed our thinking about the way the dead were treated,

not only at Crantit, but right the way across Neolithic Orkney.

In 1998, just a few weeks after the excavation, bone specialist

Julia Roberts took her first proper look at the Orkney remains.

That has been compressed by the wet soil.

The fragments of four separate skulls revealed,

like Cranborne, a mixed group of adults and children.

Fortunately, we have some teeth.

We've got these two developing first and second molars here.

We can tell they are developing crowns, not just teeth,

where the root has rotted away.

The actual surface of the crown hasn't developed properly yet.

This gives us an age of somewhere between four and six years.

-Four to six?

-Yes. So it's quite young.

We've also got here... This is actually a wisdom tooth.

This is likely to go with the other individual,

giving it an age of probably around 15.

This is the best preserved of all of them.

How much can you tell about that?

Judging from the bit of skull that we have here,

the top of the skull and forehead looks quite female in shape.

Many of the remains were missing, including most of the larger bones.

We've got the left hand and foot, left kneecap, right leg,

left pelvis and right arm.

So we've actually got bits from all over the body.

We also have part of the pelvis.

The fragment of pelvis confirmed we were dealing with a woman

and the teeth suggested her age.

We have got some of the teeth surviving,

although they are in very poor condition and also they've got wear on the bottom.

They've got quite heavy wear, so that suggests that she was probably aged over 30.

So in the one chamber, you've got an adult woman,

an adolescent child and a child of about four to six years old.

Yes. That seems to be the case.

-You wonder whether it's her children, don't you?

-It's a possibility.

As they were buried in the same chamber.

DNA analysis proved impossible on such decayed bone.

But science was able to tell

whether the two had ever contained more than these four bodies.

Chemist John Duncan analysed tiny samples of soil from the tomb floor

in order to determine how much bone had rotted away.

You've got a nice range of colours here, John, anyway!

-These are the samples from the tomb at Crantit, are they?

-Yes. They are from the floor, the soil.

-I've been looking at chemical composition.

-What does the dark blue and the lighter blue mean?

The darker the colour, the more phosphorus in the soil.

Bone contains a lot of phosphate so if there is highly phosphate

values in the soil, we can say that bone has been placed there.

As expected, the dark colour indicates a high amount of phosphate,

which this back row are from beneath where we found the bone during the excavation.

The light blue, not much bone.

-So would you expect that the high levels were going to be where the ball was?

-Yes.

We did expect that and that is what we found.

What about that chamber at the back where there weren't any bones at all? What has that shown up?

From the samples, there were no bones present.

-So you think that was a completely empty chamber?

-Yes.

That's really interesting, isn't it?

And what about the other chamber where the soil had collapsed in on it?

-The floor of the tomb still showed that there was no other bone present.

-Right.

-So they really are just restricted to those two side chambers.

-Yes.

Nothing in the passage, nothing in the middle and nothing at the back.

No.

Even more surprising, these results also showed that natural decay

couldn't account for all of the missing bone.

It still seems incredible that our bone expert was able to tell

so much about these bones, that this for example was

part of the pelvis of a woman and that these teeth were children's

and even down to the fact that we can tell what age the children were.

But John's phosphate analysis had provided us with even more information.

What it told us was that we couldn't explain away the missing bones

by suggesting they had all simply rotted away.

Of course, we knew that the skeletons were incomplete

but now we knew that either some bones had been taken out of the tomb

or that those people weren't whole when they were put in.

We had a real mystery on our hands.

5,000 years is a huge span of time.

The sophisticated planning of Neolithic tombs in Orkney

bears testament to the existence of a complex system of beliefs.

But at times, understanding those beliefs seems almost impossible.

When we find evidence of ancient people, it's very natural

to speculate about how they might have lived their lives,

and if we have their burials, on what they might have believed in.

But this is where it gets a little bit tricky for archaeologists

because given the nature of the scientific evidence that we are working with,

how much can we say with certainty and how much is speculation?

No more than informed guesswork.

How much could future archaeologists say about our lives today

by looking at our remains thousands of years in the future?

If you look at a Christian churchyard,

there are some things that are immediately obvious.

All the graves face in the same direction.

They are in nice, orderly rows. There's a neatness here.

All things that point to a unified system of belief

and the hope perhaps that the dead would be allowed to rest in peace.

But life and death in the Neolithic were very different.

Things changed quite radically,

not only from place to place, but also through time.

Ever since 1998, the missing skulls

and long bones from the Crantit tomb have intrigued me.

In the years since the dig, however, archaeologists Rebecca Crozier and Dave Lawrence

have carried out major re-examinations

of the remains found at two other important Orkney tombs -

Quanterness and the Tomb of the Eagles.

Between 2006 and 2008, they set out to determine

whether excarnation was taking place -

the practice of leaving the dead out to decay before burial.

Now, I've brought Rebecca and Dave to Crantit to see whether this

could explain why so many bones were missing from our tomb.

The remains in here, if you remember, were really fragmentary.

I think if I was back in Dorset one explanation for there being

so little in here would probably be something to do with excarnation.

You take a corpse and lay it out somewhere,

maybe on a platform, and the elements,

which you've got plenty of up here, and carrion birds and things come and carry bits off

and then eventually the body has turned into a nice clean skeleton

and you take the bones and place them into a tomb.

But I'm not sure you think that this is what's going on here. Is that right, Dave?

The Tomb of the Eagles is one of these iconic sites

because it produced such a huge quantity of human remains

and it was always said that excarnation had been

practised on that site because the bones exhibited

signs of weathering from exposure to the elements, just as you've said.

But it turns out that almost all these signs of weathering

are actually pathological legions from the diseases that these people had.

Variously - cancer, periodontal disease

or even trauma where they've had blows to the head.

All these things were misinterpreted when the first study was done as signs of weathering.

That was used to support this idea of excarnation.

-So there isn't any evidence for that at all?

-There is no evidence for it whatsoever.

That whole idea of excarnation for that site is totally undermined.

And Rebecca, you have looked at Quanterness, which is another big assemblage.

Is there any evidence for this right of excarnation?

Again, if something has been excarnated, you expect

just to find long bones and skulls because those are the easy ones.

-They are the big, recognisable bits.

-Yes.

They are the easy ones to recover and it's quite obvious

and we know of sites where that happens in the other parts of the world.

But at Quanterness, what you find is a huge number of very small bones like your fingertips

and that strongly suggests that bodies were complete inside the tomb.

I suppose if you left the body out and it rotted away, then those are

the tiny bones that would be missing if you collected the bigger bits.

That's really interesting

because I remember that even though the bones here were very badly preserved,

we did have one or two of those tiny bones.

The fact they are in the tomb would strongly suggest that's where they started.

So it now seems likely that the remains were complete

when they were placed in the tomb,

which left one last possibility -

that some of the bones had been taken away.

And Rebecca has found startling new evidence that the dead might

not have been left in peace.

These are just a couple of the more unusual things that we've found.

So, this is an ulna.

This is a left ulna bone, so it's your forearm.

That's not a natural hole.

That's not a natural hole, no.

So has that been drilled?

Quite possibly. I'll show you another one.

So you might think one in 10,500.

This is from your chest bone.

So your sternum.

And this is another drill hole.

So this one is actually the same size as the one I just showed you.

Right.

OK, so that's just it very close up.

So they're drilling holes in human bones.

Some people suggested, you know, this could be excavation damage,

so when we look at it under the microscope, you can

see the colouration in the bone is all the same,

which suggests it's all weathered down in the same way.

New damage would show up as white and be very obvious.

So I've also done some experimental work with pig bones,

which I rotted down, in my garden.

-As you do.

-As you do.

And I drilled it with a replica flint tool

and it produces the most amazing drill hole

very, very quickly and it's actually quite easy to do.

Why they were doing that or what that means, I don't know, but

it certainly suggests people have been in there and modified bone.

The way the Neolithic people treated their dead,

it's all a bit strange, isn't it?

It's a very far cry from the way we treat the dead today,

because it's all very sanitised today, isn't it?

Somebody dies and they're taken away and they're removed from us,

whereas these people seem to have had the dead in amongst them as part

of their community and to have been doing

some very strange things with them.

Not something that would be attractive to us now

and not something that we can even really relate to at the moment,

just because we're so distant from everything.

The new evidence suggests that people might have removed

bones for ritual use.

It's almost impossible to imagine what it must have been like

to climb into these cramped tombs

and commune with the ancestors in this way.

Especially since the dead remained a powerful

force in the world of the living.

The Orkney story is still developing.

In fact, despite the wealth of monuments here,

still more are being discovered.

Up here in Orkney, the Holy Grail is to find a tomb that is

so well preserved that it can provide us with all of the tiny,

little details about life and death in the Neolithic.

It looks as if that might finally have happened.

In 2010, Hamish Mowatt discovered a 5,000-year-old Neolithic

burial site in his car park.

It's come to be known as the Banks Tomb.

So I basically just dug a hole and found that there was a space,

six foot wide. Pushed the wire in and it was six foot wide, six foot long.

And then I pushed the wire down and it was three foot deep.

So when I pulled the stones and rocks out,

I could shine the torch in and I could see the rock face,

straight rock face, just like concrete, it was.

Cut straight as a die.

Then I got the camera shoved in this hole and then

when I panned the camera down into the water,

I could see that there was a white object with two little holes,

which I presumed was a human skull looking at me.

So, when I looked again - I briefly looked away from the monitor

at that point, because I was quite,

-"Am I seeing..."

-Not what you expected.

You know, "Is this what I think it is?" And I looked again,

it was in about ten, 12 inches of water and the water was murky,

so you couldn't really see the object, but it was white.

So I got a little pump that afternoon,

pumped the water out, got the camera in again.

And yes, there was a human skull.

What's the condition of the bone like?

They're not broken or nothing, they're black in colour,

but they're really pristine condition.

In 2011, the first chamber yielded human remains.

And with the damp conditions inside the tomb,

the hope was that soft tissue might have survived.

Unfortunately, only bones were discovered.

But there are still another five chambers to be explored.

So the Banks Tomb could be the one that ends debate on Neolithic

burial ritual once and for all.

Or, it might just present us with yet more mysteries.

One thing is certain -

science will play a major part in unlocking

whatever secrets it does hold.

It's tantalising to think what science will give us,

because, like all Neolithic sites,

the revelations will continue long after the dig is over.

Those remains that have been recovered

so far are just beginning to be analysed.

Each ounce of soil is sieved with painstaking care,

because the smallest fragments

can yield the most significant clues.

We've seen that the tiniest bones can unravel

the mysteries of burial practice,

that teeth can tell us the story of an individual's life

and that fragments of snail shell can

transform our understanding of entire landscapes.

Exploring the Neolithic can be incredibly challenging,

trying to understand the lives and beliefs of such a remote time,

but when the results do come, then the rewards can be fantastic.

We still excavate the same remains - the flints, the bones,

the pottery - that archaeologists have dug up for centuries.

But today, science has opened up

so many new windows into the Neolithic world.

So much has changed in the last ten years.

That's why it's been so fascinating to return to these two burial sites,

because, through them, we've been able to paint a far more

vivid picture of life and death in the Neolithic,

of a world where these two weren't as separate as they are today,

where the ancestors were a constant presence.

And just think how much will have changed

if I come back in another ten years.

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