2.2 Upper Palaeolithic

A final ice age covered Britain between around 70,000 and 10,000 years ago with an extreme cold snap between 22,000 and 13,000 years ago which may have driven humans south out of Britain altogether, pushing them across the land bridge that had resurfaced at the beginning of the glaciation.

The environment during this ice age period would have been a largely treeless tundra, and the weather would have been more like that of present day Siberia. The picture of the reconstructed landscape of Creswell Crags 50.000 years ago includes a large herd of bison grazing the coarse dry steppe grassland, away from the water hole, as well as a group of male bison fending off a pack of hyaenas. In the gorge a family of young hyaena play in the mouth of a cave. A small herd of deer and a woolly rhinoceros drink from the stream but keep alert with hyaenas close by. At another cave a group of Neanderthals have camped and the smell of a fresh reindeer kill has attracted two of the spotted hyaenas.

Here we come to the people who could have inhabited these caves. Neanderthals must have used fire to warm the cave, to roast meat, to warn off the wild animals. The tools of that period such as handaxes and knives were made of clay-ironstone or flint. The dominant food species were the Wild Horse (Equus ferus) and Red Deer (Cervus elaphus) although other mammals ranging from hares to mammoth were also hunted.

But Neanderthal occupation of Britain was limited and 50,000 years ago the first signs of modern human (Homo sapiens) activity are already known. Their flint tools were more varied than those of earlier industries, employing finer blades and they made pendants, bracelets and ivory beads to ornament themselves.

The most famous example from this period is the burial of the Red Lady of Paviland in modern day Wales. It was a human skeleton dyed in red ochre. Despite the name, the skeleton is that of a young man who lived about 26,000 years ago. He is considered to be the oldest known ceremonial burial in Western Europe. The skeleton was found along with jewellery made from ivory and seashells, and a mammoth's skull.

As the climate was getting cooler about 28,000 years ago we could have found spotted hyaenas, woolly rhinoceroses, lions, raindeer, and mammoth. People were still there, attracted by the safety of the gorge. They were likely to look different now: decorated with shells and wearing well made stitched leather clothes, as well as braided hair. They could have come as far as Creswell Crags for hunting trips but by the winter they must have moved to other camps possibly to the south.

18.000 years ago Creswell Crags was likely to look frozen and empty, only an arctic hare could have pass searching for edible plants to eat on the plateau. This was a dry and bitterly cold environment. There were no people this far north, they were probably living as far south as Southwest France where food resources were more abundant.

About 12.000 ago the climate was warming up again. People restarted their seasonal visits: setting snares for arctic hare in winter, hunting reindeer and wild horse in summer. This period left more quite sophisticated tools, such as weapon tips made from mammoth ivory, bone needles.

Until recently it was believed that people visiting and using caves in Britian during the Ice Age were not decorating the caves with pictures of animals and other markings. This was despite having all the necessary tools and materials, ochre, manganese and charcoal. However, a team of archaeologists made a remarkable discovery at Creswell Crags in April 2003. They found the first and only example of rock art from the Ice Age. All of the pictures found were engraved into the rock and as far as is known colour was not applied to the figures. Close to the entrance in Church Hole, on a flat surface of rock, is this engraving of an ibex, a goat-like animal. Beneath the figure Ice Age hunters have engraved a series of vertical lines. There are some other pictures ranging from complete figures of animals to geometric shapes and individual vertical lines.