When Time Team Found Incredibly Rare 5000-Year-Old Stone Age Tools | Time Team | Odyssey

This channel is part of the History Hit Network. Stick around to find out more. Time team are hot on the trail of one of the very few places in Britain which shows evidence of human habitation dating from the early stone age. Surprisingly it's down there, in the grounds of a centre park's holiday village. See you by the pool. Welcome to Suffolk, lovely isn't it? This is what most of England would have looked like 400 millennia ago to the small stone age population who lived here. Lots of lush vegetation and plenty of animal life, including lions, rhinos and elephants. And contrary to what you see in the movies, definitely no dinosaurs. Time team have come here to centre parks in Elveden and Suffolk to try to find out more about the stone age people who lived and died here 400,000 years ago. And as usual, we've got just three days to do it. So where exactly are we now? Well we're still in the middle of the centre parks complex, but we're in an old clay pit, which was a brick making place in Victorian times. What's that got to do with the stone age? Well down the side of the clay pit there is a layer dating from the old stone age. How do we know it's stone age? Because it's got hand axes in it and it's got the flakes where they were making the hand axes. So is that all we're likely to find? Well it is, but it's a very important site and it dates to 400,000 years ago. So that'll be the oldest site we've ever dug, won't it? Yeah, and so it's a very, very unusual and rare site, very important site. If it's that rare a site, how come we're allowed to dig here? Because we're working with the British Museum archaeologists. Nick Ashton, he's a great friend of Phil's and he's been digging here for several years. Phil, you started without us! Well there's so much muck to get away from the front of the face, so we got a JCB in for that and now we're back hand digging and you can see we're straight onto in situ archaeology. So what have we got here, Nick? Effectively, we have a riverbank. You see this dark horizon here, this is an ancient land surface at the edge of the river. The river flowing in front of us, behind us here, through the middle of the pit. We have a chalk cliff on the far side which we can see in section. We think there's probably a chalk cliff the other side. So there would have been like a narrow gorge running through? Absolutely. With people living in it, Stone Age people? People living or at least napping flint, making flint tools on the edge of this river. How much do we know about these people, Nick? Well very little because we've got very few sites and very few finds off those sites. It's very rare to find something in this sort of situation, isn't it, where you've got a piece of the original ground surface to work on. It'd be great if we could find a skeleton, wouldn't it? I think there's a very, very remote chance, extremely remote. These are casts of three fragments of one skull that was found on one site and from another site we've got two teeth and a leg bone and these are a hundred thousand years older than the site we're on and that's the whole assemblage of human remains of this period from England. I mean, I'm afraid it'd be a dream come true, wouldn't it? With so little physical evidence remaining of these early humans, we can only guess at how they lived here along the riverbank over 400,000 years ago. History Hit is a streaming platform that is just for history fans with fantastic documentaries covering fascinating figures and moments in history from all over the world. Our extensive catalogue of documentaries covers everything from the rise of Hannibal Barker to the illustrious treasures of King Tut. So sign up today for broadcast quality documentaries uncovering the mysteries of the ancient world. We're committed to bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else. Sign up now for a free trial and Odyssey fans get 50% off their first three months. Just be sure to use the code ODYSSEY at checkout. With virtually no chance of finding any human remains in our excavations, one of Time Team's main tasks this weekend is to see if we can find any traces of plants and animals that lived alongside early humans. This could complete our picture of the prehistoric river valley habitat. We've got Andy and Simon here who are going to run the environmental part of the project, hopefully tell us from animals, beetles, pollen and so on, you know, what's going on. So Simon, what exactly are we going to be doing? In this trench we're going to cut back into the face using a machine, removing this spoil that's been tipped off the edge of the quarry and take the face back to in situ deposits. We know in this part of the site we're finding shells and there's a good chance we'll find animal bones as well. What kind of animals might we find? We're looking for voles, my favourite animal. Why are voles so exciting? Voles are really great animals, they're very important for us. We can find our way around the last two million years or so just using vole teeth. So if Simon and I can get enough vole teeth from these deposits here, we can confirm the age of this material. So you use them as datable evidence in the same way that Roman archaeologists use bits of pottery? It's exactly the same principle, yeah. You're going to have to shift an awful lot of soil to find the small bones of those. Yeah, we reckon, what, about a tonne? Yes. Yeah, what we're going to be doing, we'll take all this material from behind us, we're going to be putting it into the buckets, tipping in some hydrogen peroxide to fizz it up into a kind of goo and then in the morning we'll come back and hopefully we'll be able to tip that gloop through the sieve, hey presto, vole teeth. And then you'll tell us what the conditions were like, what the environment was like from the vole teeth? Yes. And that is incredible, isn't it, to be able to do that. We are short of manpower, aren't we? Where's Corenza? Well, you know I said that these sites were very, very rare? There is in fact another one five miles away at Barnham. The Barnham clay pit, like our main site at Elveden, has been the focus of previous British museum excavations. But this one hasn't been used for over five years, hence the jungle. All right, so is this your section? This is one of our main archaeological areas, yeah. All right, and this is your layer of plastic protecting your old excavation? Yeah, we put that down in 94 when we left. So what do you want us to do here over the next few days? Well, what we're going to do today is we're going to cut a section at the back wall there. So clean it up? Clean it up, compare it with what we've got at Elveden. And that'll give us the geological layers. Yeah, precisely, yeah. And then take another spit, another layer off of the cobbles, looking for artefacts. And other bones, again, to compare with the sort of thing we're getting the other site. Exactly, yeah. Well, it's a big job, isn't it? We need to get a move on. Yeah, we need to clear the foliage first, so Cameron. Here's a fleet you might want to have a look at, Phil. Have a look. Good God. That is in mint condition, isn't it? Certainly is. Isn't that a beautiful fleet? Look at the edge on it. God, it's razor sharp. Is that the way you normally get them, like that? Yep. In that condition? From the area we had last year on the land surface, they're all absolutely mint condition, just like that. Let's dig it out, because, I mean, the weather don't look like it's going to help us much. It's going to come on to rain. You see, the only difference between it now and when it was, well, dropped there 400,000 years is it's got just that slight staining on it from the minerals and the clay. Yeah, that's right. And other than that, well, yeah, you could have made it yesterday. Yeah. Glad I brought my waterproofs. Do I see it beginning to move? Yeah, it's ready to come out. Well, let's go for it. I mean, I've been waiting in anticipation for a minute. Go for it, Tim. Oh, look at that. What a gem. Look at that. Oh, look at that. It ain't broken, either. Look at that. Oh, yeah, just got that little bit of lip in, look. Yeah, yeah, nice and thin. Beautiful. And that really sort of characteristic profile. Profile, yeah. Dead ringer, absolutely typical of a hand-hatched thinning flake, isn't it? Yeah, you've got the surface of the hand. Yes, that's right. And it's just going down on the other side, so it achieves the aim of thinning the whole thing down. Yeah. What a cracker, eh? The hand axe was the single most important item made by early man. Crafted by striking or napping a flint nodule with a hammer stone, it was a hand-sized multipurpose tool. A hammer striking a flint leaves a scar, the bulb of percussion, and the concentric ripples show the angle of striking. Flake scars on the edge show where the tool was sharpened. The flint artefacts found in Elveden and at Barnham are very similar in age and appearance, so the two sites may once have been connected. Geophysics have been given the task of trying to find out if the same prehistoric river ran through both sites. John, we really do need to find out where this ancient river channel went, because it's our only way of linking the two sites, really. But it strikes me, from your point of view, it's going to be very difficult. I mean, it's not archaeology, is it? It's geology, really. You're actually going to try electrical imaging. All right, that does sound a bit different. Well, it could be six metres down that we're having to look, and what we've got to try and do is a transect across that river valley. So you've got all one straight line? All one straight line. We've got the buildings in the way, we've got the farm machinery in the way, so we're trying to find a line between those. Have you managed to do that? Yeah, if we go over here, I can show you the gear. And what we've got is this cable. Oh, yeah. That comes from the battery running the length of the field That's right. And every five metres, we've got these probes. Oh, right, yeah. So we're sending electric currents into the ground, and we use the first pair of probes to measure the resistance at that point. Right. Then we switch to the next set of probes. Which are further apart. Further apart, measure that point, and we do that all the way along the line. And so we're actually gradually building up a picture, a vertical section getting more deeply into the ground. Finding this ancient river, or paleo channel, is of immense importance to paleontologists. If geophysics can establish the route of the river, it could help to locate further Stone Age sites in the area. Stuart, meanwhile, is doing it the hard way, by walking the fields between Barnham and Elveden to see if there's any evidence of the paleo channel nearer the surface. At Elveden, it's all hands to the pumps, in an attempt to protect the trench and stop the site reverting to a prehistoric swamp. This looks like a rather ramshackle outfit. Absolutely. Safely covered, the digging goes on. But it takes an expert eye to tell whether the tiny fragments of flint are man-made or of natural origin. Different sort of archaeology for me, this, isn't it? Well, it's nice of you to increase your education, Mick. I think it's good for your education. I've come to the feet of the master. I don't know about that. Effectively, you've got something that is coming around here, but it's coming back all the way up there. Right. It shouldn't be doing that. No way that can be... No, no way that could be percussion. That ain't been hit off. Yeah, so it's probably frost. Yeah, yeah. And you don't disagree? I don't disagree. 20 metres along the cliff face, we've got a team of diggers hard at work, cleaning up one of the British Museum's earlier excavations. So what's going on in this trench then, Nick? I noticed it up on the bank, but we haven't had a good look at it yet. In effect, we've got the same river edge, but this time, instead of a river bank, we've actually got a beach, a cobble beach. So this is the same as the one down there? It's part of the same... Part of the same river bank. Right, right. But it's much more cobbly than clay. That's one of the interesting things, that they're actually using these cobbles to make some of the stone tools. So what we've got marked here then is every flake and blade that's been identified in the top of the cobbles. Yeah, all the white markers are marking flakes that have been mapped, possibly in this spot. What are we going to do? We're going to take this away then and look underneath it? What we'll do is record where the artefacts are, lift them, bag them, and then we're going to take off another seam of cobbles and see whether there are any more artefacts underneath. Because presumably it could have built up with cobbles and blades and it may be a certain depth. We think in this area the material's slightly moved, not very far, and so you've got one or two artefacts mixed in with the cobbles. Okay. The laborious process of trying to extract 60 buckets of clay to find traces of preserved organic material carries on, despite the weather. So Simon, what's the chance of getting mammal teeth, small mammal teeth from here? Very good, I think. We're finding fragments of shell, quite large fragments of shell, probably freshwater mussel. A freshwater mussel shell in the clay is a good indicator that the organic evidence may not have been destroyed by the passage of 400,000 years. What it means is that there's bone in there? There will be bone in this, this'll be exciting. Dig! With only another 48 buckets to go, Andy begins to add hydrogen peroxide to the samples. Overnight, the chemicals should dissolve the clay and reveal any organic material if the rain doesn't dilute it too much. Carenza! With everyone else on flood alert, guess who's been promoted to tea boy? Carenza! Yeah, I've got you. Look what I've got. Oh, wonderful. Wow, that will cheer everyone up, actually. It's a bit sort of wet and gloomy and depressing. It's taken forever to find you. It's taken forever to get on this afternoon, to be quite honest. Tees up. But you've got on really well, haven't you? Actually, bearing in mind the weather, we have done, I think. We've been cleaning up the sort of vertical section there, which will tell us about the geological layers that we compare to Elveden. You can see it's all sort of got gungy and silty underneath it. It's been covered up like this for five years. So if we start to clean it up, reveal, these are the cobbles that the old, the side of the old riverbed, basically. And this is where they were sitting, getting the flint and working it into tools. So we'll clean all that back and then carry on down. If we look at what we've got here, we've got a bit of the cobble band that we've never exposed before at the back there. And hopefully we will get these fresh in-situ artefacts that haven't been moved, possibly even refitting. And they'll be sitting on top of the cobble band. They'll be sitting on top of the cobble band and then when we take our spit out from the main area here, we'll get the stuff that's been reworked over time and possibly slid down cracks and they might be a little bit more rolled and abraded. At Elveden, it's still pouring, but Phil's taken the opportunity to practise the finer points of flintknapping. Victor also braves the elements to capture Phil and fellow craftsman John Lord as they use Stone Age tools in an attempt to make a prehistoric hand axe. Hiya. Hello, Tony. Just about finished it? It's coming along. I mean, I've got a bit more thinning to do down here and then that'll be ready for use. So what would they have used that for? Just about any purpose you could think of. I mean, the great thing that everybody compares it to is the Swiss army knife, you know. You name it, they used it for it. They're good butchery tools and I also processed some ox bone with them recently. How about cutting? It's all done in a few minutes. Yeah, cuts excellently. That's quite efficient, isn't it? You wouldn't have thought so. Gonna make a spear tomorrow. We're also gonna try and light fire with the crent and spark from the flint. Well, let's hope that the rain's eased off by that time, at least to give you a fighting chance. I'll see you later. Okay, cheers, Tony. Bye, Tony. How did we get on down there today, Mick? Oh, I think pretty well. Despite the weather, you know, we've done a lot of cleaning and both sites are ready to be taken apart now. And tomorrow? Well, the main thing we thought was to join the two together. Then that'll give us a really nice long section running right up the side of the river. Excellent. And then we're gonna go down where the buried soil is because that's where the hand axes have been found and we're gonna go in that area. Here's John and Corenza, hopefully with the geophysics results. Well, it's nice and colourful. These are from Barnham, yeah? That's Barnham. And this is a transect right across the valley looking for the small channel. And this is where the big channel is. And within it, I think we've actually got two or three smaller braided channels. So it's like we've got a load of little channels with little islands in between them. And you're gonna do the same thing tomorrow on this side? At this end and see if we get the same sort of picture. So join us after the break. Hopefully, we'll find out more about Stone Age Man tomorrow. And hopefully, we might even find a tool even better than the one that Phil made for us today. It's day two and for the moment, the sun's shining. So we've made an early start, an extended trench one to try and see if the prehistoric cobble beach we found yesterday continues along the face of the clay pit. In their environmental trench, Andy and Simon finally managed to extract their 60 buckets of samples, but things aren't looking too good. Not going there very well, is it? No, we've got a problem. Yeah. We're not gonna find anything in there. Oh, God, look at that. It's like Play-Doh. Maybe peroxide's just not breaking it down. You're gonna need a wick. We haven't got a wick, Simon. We haven't got a wick. What do you reckon? We've got one day. We could try, as it's very chalky, we could try something like weak acetic acid, pickling vinegar, something like that. Five miles away at Barnum, Corenza and her team are carefully cleaning the mud from their prehistoric cobbled beach and extending into the face of the clay pit. John and Phil are testing the efficiency and sharpness of the flint hand axe, the first stage in making a prehistoric spear. See, the amazing thing looking at that, John, is that if I found that, I wouldn't actually think it was a tool. You'd think it was an unfinished piece, maybe a piece of flint that somebody had a few flakes off of, wanted either to use the flakes or just gave up on the tool. But seeing you use it, it's a really efficient tool. Oh, got ice going. It's definitely going, yeah. After successfully finding a river channel at Barnum yesterday, John needs to get his bearings at Elveden for the second part of the geophysics survey. Well, I brought you here because there's a very good view over the clay pit. I've learned a bit simpler here. Well, I'll show you what we know and then you can see what you think. You see over by the tent around there, where we're digging? That's where Phil is. And the riverbank is sort of back 10 metres or so to the left of that. And then this clay pit actually occupies the river valley. And then the other side is about sort of 10 metres or so back behind that big excavation where the sampling's going on. So it's about 50 metres wide and they reckon it's going roughly in that sort of direction through, you know, almost into the sun. I mean, that's where we've been working about five miles away. Towards Barnham, in that direction over there. The question is whether you can find it, you see. Yes. It's just a question if we can get 125 metres through this. Well, perhaps along the paths? Yeah, well... That's probably the obvious place. See if we can find a way through. Hundreds of metres of cable are needed for the electrical imaging survey but John's hampered by Centre Park's natural landscaping and man-made barriers. Let's try again. That's okay, Sue. Guys, cup of tea? Yeah. Hey, Phil, this has changed a bit, hasn't it? Gosh, you're telling me. I mean, I've only just got here myself but when I went away last night there was a tree standing here. I don't know what Nick's been up to but he's certainly got excited about it. What's going on, Nick? We seem to have two levels of human activity. Two? Yeah, total surprise. How long have you been digging here? Five years. And this is the first time that you've discovered two separate layers? Absolutely. This is important, isn't it? It is, yeah, yeah. It really is. I bet you're glad you invited time to this, aren't you? How do you know that there are two different layers of... Down here we have the Cobble Beach layer. That's the one that appears over in our trench over there, is it? Yep, yep. I've got artefacts over there. Lo and behold. Artefacts here. Hey, that's a cracking piece, isn't it? Look at that. That's not just an arbitrary piece of stone, is it? No way. I was making flakes exactly the same as that when I was making the hand axe yesterday. And what have you got on top of that? On top of that, we've got this orange sediment here, which is material that's washed in down the edges. Yeah. Okay? And above that, we've got the land surface that we were looking at yesterday, again, with different artefacts. We've got to see this thing in plan. We've got to see whether there are any more tools distributed across the surface. So the obvious thing to do is to chop back down. Looking at that, it's going to be devilish hard going, but we've got to do it. Do you think we can do that by the end of the day? I think if you give me a pick, we probably will. Oh, there's one right down here. Corenza and her Barnum team are making good progress in cleaning back the Cobble Beach layer. Yeah, that's a nice flake, Corenza. That's the top of the bulb of percussion, isn't it, where it's been struck? Yeah, and you can see the ripples coming down where the fracture force has gone through the flint. I mean, we've got, well, but nearly 10 finds out of this trench, haven't we now? Are you happy with that? It's more than we expected, really, in terms of the fact that all we've done at the moment is just clean up after removing the plastic. We haven't taken off our spit. And we've got some really nice things. This is a particularly good one, Corenza. We've got these facets here, which, while in a cobble band, there's always a possibility that this has just been caused naturally, but this does look like it might have been reworked just to maybe sharpen the edge. Just to sharpen it up, sort of. So you've been using it to cut or something. It's got blunt like that, and you just knock another chip off, knock another chip off like that and go sharp fresh. Yeah. I mean, these have all been, they're all in the cobbles, aren't they? These are the ones that have been rolled about in the river. I mean, this one I've just found that's quite sort of knocked about at the edges. Yeah, the edges have been damaged quite a bit, and there's lots of natural chips around them. Corenza to Tony. Tony, we're getting some really exciting finds from this trench now. I'd really like you to come and have a look at it and Phil as well, if he's there. Yeah, I'll bring him over straight away. Could you possibly bring an intact, a whole hand axe as well? It'd be really quite useful to have that if you've got one. Over. That's fine. I'll see you in quarter of an hour. Bye. Okay. I'm going to Barnum. It's raining again. It's also pretty wet in the environmental trench, where Anne is sieving the samples in an attempt to separate any organic remains from the wet clay. Despite the addition of pickling vinegar to break the clay down even further, it's still very lumpy, and they've now got just over a day left to find those elusive vole teeth. But before the samples can be sorted and analysed, they have to be left to dry in the sun. It's just around this corner here. Good Lord, it's like a jungle, isn't it? Well, that's a bit tidier than when I last saw it. It's higher. It's like Elveden revisited, with this sort of cobbled surface. And are these all the finds on it? Yeah, we've had a really good run of finds, actually. And this is where we had, I think, the find we're most excited about, isn't it? This is our big find. Phil, did you bring a hand axe? Yeah. We were wondering what you've been wanting to ask me to bring that over. Sneak it into the trench and pretend we just found it. Oh, you've got one. What do you think of those? Good Lord. There's no question that's part of a hand axe, isn't it? You've got flaking on that edge. And then flaking again across there. I mean, that is broken. But I guess it's going to fit in. Yeah, that is a pretty good fit, isn't it? Yes, it is, isn't it? That's just remarkably close. What about that bit then? This here is sloppy napping. I mean, it's up and across and down. I mean, this sort of right angle, there's no way you're going to... That's pretty awful. But it is defence. I mean, you've got a big thermal fracture in there. That's a natural flaw in the flint. He probably didn't even know it was there. And as he's napping away at this end, banging away at it, and the vibrations gradually build up and build up, that bit drops off. End result, you swear. This is bad, bad raw material. And this is bad luck. Because, I mean, this is what we call end shock. And you can bet your life on it. When he's working at this end, this is the end that flows off. And I don't suppose there's a flint napper in Christendom who hasn't had this at some stage or another. I mean, you... Yeah. Happens to me all the time. I've got my own bit of end shock. The consensus at the other trench is that they need your labour up there and that we ought to close this one down. What do you think? Yeah, I could live with that. We could certainly do with some extra help over there. I mean, there are areas of cobbles that really do need... This is not a bad point to stop, is it? I mean, we've cleaned up this area. That area's cleaned up. We've done most of the recording. So you really need to pull people off this trench. So you're almost in a point where you can lift and... Lift and leave. And put it to bed. Yeah. We'll see you later. All right, we'll see you over there. John Lord's making good use of basic flint tools in making us a prehistoric spear. First, the side branches are stripped away, then the bark. Then the most important part, the business end, honed to a seriously sharp point using only a thin but razor-sharp flake of flint. Victor's included in his painting all the known elements of the river valley. But what about its inhabitants? So how were the people who lived on our riverbank 400,000 years ago related to us? We're not really sure about that, Tony. They might be a little evolutionary offshoot. They might be our direct ancestors. What's important, though, from our point of view, is to know roughly what they look like. What we really need is a face. This is what we laughingly call modern man. If we can superimpose on that something that might be mixed skull... This is a modern skull. You can see a lot of the features that characterize modern humans. It's got a high cranial vault, as it's called, smallish face, and the most important feature here a pointy chin. If we go back to, say, a late Neanderthal, late Neanderthals have got a big cranial vault, but it's flatter and wider, and it's got this bun on the back. Very big face, and it's got a very strong jaw, but there's no pointy chin. What does Neanderthal mean? They were first found in the Neander Valley in Germany. It just characterizes a particular skull shape. But they were actually probably quite smart. They were probably as bright as us. There's no reason why they shouldn't be. If we go back a stage further to the Steinheim skull, here we've got a decent face to go on, and we can use this to try and reconstruct what our people here might have looked like. But it hasn't got a jaw. No jaw with this one, but we do have fossil jaws, which tell us that these Neanderthal characters were still present about 400,000 years ago. Yeah. So this is what Mick would look like if he had the skull of someone who was living 400,000 years ago. That's a pretty close approximation to it. It's marginally better looking than the modern Mick, isn't it? Fortunately, Mick was concentrating on what Stuart was saying. This business of whether the sites are connected by river channel. Yeah. I've got some ideas. Ah. Over to the east of the Barnum Pit, I've got something really interesting. I've got a brown stripe across a field. Oh, yeah. I think it's a really significant brown stripe because when you look at it, it's a whole load of flint nodules ploughed out through the plough soil. I think that might be a continuation of the river channel in that direction. Right. Now, it'd be really nice to prove if we could run a geophysical line across there to see whether they get the same results. If we can demonstrate the linearity of the channel there and down here, I think that will give us fairly conclusive proof that in the Pleistocene period, we have a whole set of either a single channel or a number of channels all flowing in this direction. And if we're arguing about what to do tomorrow, I'll raise that then. You can lend some support there, can't you? Yeah, that's a good idea, yeah. I mean, if that turns out to be prehistoric, that'd be wonderful. This tea's not very good, is it? With the Barnum site closed down, Corenza and her team arrive at our main trench at Elveden, ready, willing, and possibly able to find that elusive hand axe. What are we going to get them to do, Nick? Well, we've cut this long section going around there, which links this Cobble Beach horizon, which you can see there. You can trace it right the way through that section, and I want you to remove the block of clay from over there down to the beach level. Okay. So if you start digging maybe from that end, and we'll come from this end. We'll meet in the middle. And of course, there is the extra. You've got to find us a hand axe. Don't laugh, don't laugh. Because what was it, a couple of three years ago? Two or three years ago. Just underneath here, Nick found two hand axes. So they are there. We found those couple of bits yesterday, so let's hope the winning streak... Well, you've got your eye in, haven't you? So far, winning streak. Go on, get yourself on. End of day two, and tomorrow we're going to pour all our resources into that trench there, because we've got just one more day in which to find a complete 400,000-year-old hand axe. But before we go tonight, we've got one more task. Get our dinner. Well, if Phil doesn't improve his Stone Age talent soon, I think we're going to be very hungry tonight. Join us after the break. I did try. Not hard enough. Can I have another go? Yes. We've lost the spear. Tony? Yeah? Got a minute. Come here and have a look at this. It's the beginning of day three, and already Phil looks like he's up to something. We've got our first complete tool. Look, you see it's been a flake that's been struck off there. But not only that, somebody's actually taken a hammer stone and they've trimmed it around there. You see these each an individual flake scar where the hammer has landed and made this concave notch. Now, these are ideal tools for making spears. Anything that needs whittling. See, the beauty of them is that they won't actually slip out of the diameter of the piece of wood or bone that you're scraping. Wonderfully efficient tools. And then when they're blunt, you maybe make another notch and you can use it again. So that might have been used on something like the spear that we made yesterday. Unfortunately, Phil's skill with a spear wasn't up to the standards of early hunters, and I had to make a trip to the local butchers to get tonight's dinner. Once again demonstrating the versatility of flint tools, John made short work of the haunch of venison. Using a combination of sharp flakes and a hand axe, he easily skinned and disjointed the meat. Yesterday, the geophysics survey proved the existence of a prehistoric river channel emerging from the Elveden site and heading towards Barnum. Useful information for archaeologists as they may be able to find other sites of human habitation in this long lost river valley. But John's got one last job, to investigate the mysterious brown stripe that Stuart's discovered in a field near the Barnum clay pit. You know where the entrance to the farm is, don't you, John? I have been doing something the past few days, you know. You see where the pig houses are? Oh, it's not in a pig field. We're going over there. It's just beyond the pig field. Why, don't you like pigs? I'm vegetarian, but nothing to do with it. We've had to do several surveys in pig fields and they're diabolical with all the crisscrossing wires. Yeah. Absolute nightmare. So I'm glad it's not actually in there. Do they chew the wires then? Well, they wouldn't chew the wires in this system because they'd soon know about it. Instant bacon, would it be? Bacon tonight, yeah. See this ridge here, John? You see how you've got this brown staining? It's actually on the brow of the ridge. That's right, that's that clay band being ploughed out and then down below it is where all the flint's been ploughed. Look at this size of this. There's whole concentrations of flint nodules this size. That's what all this stuff is here. The ploughing's gone backwards and forwards and dragged it all out. This should be the same edge of the channel that's been found in the pit. So if we do a transect across this line and then we should get the profile if it's still surviving to any extent. Hopefully, yes. If we get chalk over that side, that might define the edge of it. This clay should be right on the edge of it with the flints being ploughed out. So hopefully, the channel's that side of us. Right. As the environmental trench is being closed down, Andy makes a disturbing discovery. They may have taken all their samples from too high in the clay at a level where all the ancient organic material may have been destroyed by natural acids present in the groundwater. This is where we took our samples from yesterday. This is where we took our 60 buckets out and we've actually processed 45 of those and reduced it down to a residue and we're going to sort that and see what we can find in it. Oh, so there is still hope? It doesn't look very rich. Then there's no way we're going to get them out of this orange stuff. What do you reckon, Solomon? I don't think so. Everything above here, this top part of the section, has been completely devoid of any remains. Wow. That's a bit of a disappointment really, isn't it? Particularly 60 buckets of... You don't know how gutted I am, mate. You do not know. To try and clarify once and for all the position, depth and age of these ancient river deposits, Andy decides to open a last-minute trench. Andy, it's a bit late to be starting something new, isn't it? Well, we know that, but what we want to do is try and find the bottom layer in this site. The earliest deposit in which we're going to get any organic remains. And how much earlier would that be than the stone tools that we're finding up there? Probably about 20,000 years earlier, we reckon. It'll be the earliest part of the warm phase in which people were living in this area. So it's about 420,000 years ago? About that, yeah. And how much further down do you reckon you're going to have to dig? We reckon four metres. And Simon here is going to do it with his pole. He's going after it with an auger and it's going to be hard work. With our full complement of diggers hard at work on our main trench, the prehistoric layers in the section are now clearly visible. This is a lot cleaner and looking very colourful now, isn't it? Yes, I think it's a lot clearer. It shows the cobbled beach down here. And you've got this land surface up there, these two layers we were talking about yesterday. Now you've extended it, we can trace that all the way around, can't we? We can, you can follow the cobbled beach right the way through here. Right to the corner here, where Katie is, yeah. And it goes all the way around now, we've joined the two trenches together then. You can trace it through, right through to where Karenza's team are working. Oh, and you're getting lots of finds from here as well. Yeah, we've just had a really nice find here, that little scraper, I think. There's another tool from the site which is nice and it's different to that sort of spear sharpening thing that you had earlier. So that would have been used something like that? Well, probably more like this. Scraping along, probably used for cleaning the, you know, hattie gunge from the inside of deer hides. Is this the sort of density you'd expect from this sort of layer? Well, I'm hoping once we get really down onto the cobbles, it's actually going to be, you know, much richer. The other thing is we're getting some really nice little pieces, tiny little flakes, look at that. I mean, they're very sharp, they've not gone very far, so obviously whatever they're doing, these are tiny little chippings that you get in the flint chopping process and if the artifacts have moved, then you'd expect them to be completely washed away, but we're getting those, which means, you know, we've probably got napping very near to this spot. So you're in the right place again, it looks like. I hope so. It's obviously going to get very exciting in the next couple of hours. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes up. That's great. With our venison dinner expertly butchered and ready to be cooked, all that remains is for Phil and John to light the fire. Are you sweating yet? I am sweating now, really. Using only prehistoric methods, of course. Striking a flint against a large piece of iron pyrite to make a spark is Boy Scout stuff. Sadly, we didn't have a Boy Scout. Nothing's happening at all, is there? Wow. Well, are we going to persist with this? I think I might be able to produce... Okay, let's go with that. Look at that. Come on. Yes! That should keep the cave bears at bay tonight. After almost two hours, the auger has hit pay dirt six metres below the Elveden site, the most ancient level that could still provide clues to the prehistoric environment. Tony, I think we're there. Why do you say that? Look at this. Look at the colour of that mud. This is the black goo that we were looking for. This is the organic mud that underlies this entire site. What does it comprise of, that black goo? It's a very organic clay. Clay with probably quite a lot of plant debris in it. And there it is. When you say organic matter, what kind of stuff? Well, imagine your village pond with all the leaves going into it. That kind of smelly goo that you get around the edge of a pond. This is what it becomes with time. So 420,000 years ago, we had this black goo covering what's now Suffolk. Yeah. And then what happened? And then you got the development of a proper drainage system. After a glaciation, the land is left in a very uneven condition with lots of little lakes and bogs all over the place. And then people who were probably migrating across continental Europe would come to the area that's now Britain and they'd live along the riverbanks, just as they are on our site here today. The black goo represents our oldest deposits and the flint tools our youngest. Andy and Simon's experiment should help us fill the dating gaps between. Oh, it's got a big fish tooth. It's definitely a potential, Andy. Something new, a new species. Oh, wow. Hey. You're getting some good results out of it. Yeah, look at this. Wow. It's a tench, is it? It's tench, it's tooth for fish. And it's the biggest thing we've found so far. Wow. It's not that big on reality, is it? I'm afraid it's that thing there. It's really rather small. Is that all you've got from those 45 buckets of soil you said? You like to rub these things in, don't you? I was just wondering if you haven't got the trace and trace of it elsewhere. That's it so far. And we've got a group of other fish as well. So if we move along and look at these. We've got a pike. This pointed tooth here is a pike tooth. This is an amphibian bone. Oh, yeah. A frog or a toad. And this small group of bones here, these are rodent bones, including two fragments of teeth. These are really exciting. This is the stuff that we've been after. This is what I've gathered. It's the rolls or whatever. They're going to give you the crucial dating evidence. Is that right? Now, have you got that from them? We haven't got well-preserved enough material to be able to identify these two species. But this tells us that they're out there in those deposits. So you just have to do another 45 buckets and you'll be there. Things are looking bad, Simon. I'm not going to. Do you think that this is contemporary with the human occupation here? Almost certainly. And what we found in the sample is a tiny flint chip. Oh, you couldn't have hoped for that, could you? I tell you what, we've had flakes very, very similar to that from our trench. So some of these tiny little waste flakes, same sort of flint, very fresh, very sharp. In the process of attempting to confirm Stuart's theory about the mysterious brown stripe in the Barnum field, Mick seems to have made some new friends. They know I won't eat them, you see. That's no good for me. Oh, you must be the farmer then. Hello, I'm Mick. I'm David. Hello. I was looking for you because I gather you have found some archaeological stuff. I've got one or two bits and pieces here. Oh, that's nice, isn't it? Look at that. That's part of a hand axe, isn't it? It's going to have the other part like that. So... It's two thirds, apparently. Yeah. So the archaeologists don't look like they could tell me anything. No, no, I think that's probably right. That's probably right. They wouldn't tell me anything. We were interested here because of this ridge in the field. We saw it on the maps and the air photos. And so Stuart, I don't know if you've met Stuart, but he thought this may be one of these old rivers. And I think Mark was... Let's give him a shout. Mark? Yeah? That's what we're looking for. Something like that. Is that from here? Yeah, David's just got it out of his pocket. Oh, that's enormous. It would have been quite a hefty one as well, yeah. But you haven't got anything like that from here? Well, no, all I've got over there is a lot of naturally broken flint. A lot of flint that's been broken by the plough. There's nothing of this sort of what we come to expect from the Barnum Cobble Band, which is this very characteristic sort of orangey or yellowy staining. There's a lot of these. Every pocket something comes out of. That's another nice scraper, isn't it? Lovely, that is. The nice thing about these two things, David, is that here you've got an artifact which is 400,000 years old. And here you've got an artifact which is, say, 4,000 years old. So you've got humans living and working on this site for all of that time. It's fantastic. Although no more flint tools were found in the field, geophysics confirmed that the Brown Stripe was once part of another prehistoric river channel. Back in the incident room, Stuart brings Nick Ashton up to date. I know you've been stuck in a clay pit for three days, but I thought you would like to try and find out more information about the potential connection in a river channel between Elveden and Barnum. Yeah, I would love to find out what's been happening. On here, I've plotted out where all the Paleolithic finds are. There's Barnum, there's Elveden. All these circles are where there's been Paleolithic finds. The important and the exciting thing about this is how they're all in that west to east trend. There's a line there, a line there, and a line there. These triangles are chalk pits, trending east-west. Now, if you'd have asked me before we started work to some extent with this information, was there a potential river channel between the two? I would have said it was going to follow the line of this clay band down here. With the work that John and the geophysics team have done, they've proved that a channel is coming in that southeast direction directly along that line of pits, and also to the east of Barnum, where they've taken two transects, they've also demonstrated that there is a channel going that way. Now, if you put that information on top of this, what that seems to indicate is you've got a west-east trend for a river pattern, in effect. Three parallel rivers. That's right, possibly with connections between them. So I think we can demonstrate there's a channel along that line between there and there, and there's a channel along that line at Barnum in that direction. So we've got it between there and there. The only bit we can't actually prove is that small bit in the middle. So what the evidence is indicating is that we've actually got three river channels, of which yours is the middle one, running in this west-to-east direction. So that's completely different to the present drainage pattern. That's right, which is south-north. Do you believe it? It's the most convincing evidence, obviously. Yeah, I think I do. It's almost the end of day three, and it looks like our Stone Age chef has successfully completed his cookery tasks. And back on the main site, we've almost completed our weekend's work. The hundreds of artefacts we've uncovered may just look like pieces of flint to you and I, but they encapsulate five minutes of someone's time as they sat on a riverbank and made a handaxe. And we've found them exactly where they fell almost half a million years ago. Ten to seven and they're still hard at it. These stone tools may not look much, but when you think how incredibly old they are, finding them has been the archaeological equivalent of finding a needle in a 500,000-year-old haystack that's been beaten up by a whole procession of glaciers. Holding these in my hands is really amazing. These are some of the oldest things that we've ever found on Time Team. Not bad for just three days in the old Stone Age. Not only that, it looks as though Phil's got his dinner as well. What's it like? Delicious. Can you cut me a bit?