UEA professor joins Sir David Attenborough for TV documentary
Prof Ben Garrod will be on our TV screens next week!
A University of East Anglia professor is due to hit our TV screens next week, in a documentary with Sir David Attenborough.
Professor Ben Garrod will work with the veteran broadcaster and a team of investigators, at a mammoth graveyard.
It's for 'Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard,' which will air on BBC One on 30th December.
It explores whether Neanderthals might have killed the ice age beasts.
Four years ago a couple walking round a freshly dug gravel pit just outside Swindon noticed something unusual protruding from the mud.
It was the top of a huge fossilised leg bone of what turned out to be a mammoth. Sally and Neville Hollingworth, both keen amateur fossil hunters, had stumbled across the discovery of a lifetime - a mammoth graveyard in the old prehistoric riverbed of the Thames.
They returned to dig up more mammoth bones and tusks, but what made their finds even more exciting was Sally’s discovery of a stone ‘hand axe’ made by an early human.
Prof Garrod was the first person they contacted about their rare find. He said: “Unlike most mammoth discoveries that date back tens of thousands of years, Sally and Neville’s finds appear to be hundreds of thousands of years old - and it could offer an extremely rare glimpse of life deep in the Ice Ages.”
When Sir David Attenborough heard about their remarkable finds he was keen to see them for himself. Since he was a boy he has been smitten with the lure of hunting fossils. From the moment of arrival at Sally and Neville’s home in Swindon, it is hard to know who was more excited, David, or Sally and Neville.
Together with a team of archaeologists and palaeontologists, Sir David and Prof Garrod carefully excavated the quarry where the bones were found.
Prof Garrod said: “The site raised so many questions – why were the mammoths there, how did they die, and could ancient humans have killed them? Or was there some kind of catastrophic event?
“Together with Sir David, we met with leading experts in the fields of evolution, both human and mammoth to grasp a greater understanding of our relationship with this iconic ice-age giant.
“Laboratory dating of soil samples suggests the site dates back to around 215,000 years ago - a time deep in the Ice Ages that we know very little about.
“And as we found more stone tools lying side by side with more mammoth bones, we realised this could be a once-in-a-generation discovery, offering a unique window into prehistoric Britain.
"Standing in a quarry with Sir David Attenborough and a multidisciplinary team of experts as we excavated a whole herd of mammoths was up there with the best moments of my career so far," he added.
‘Attenborough And The Mammoth Graveyard’ is broadcast on BBC One on December 30, from 8pm-9pm.