The mammoth documentary -- at last, some decent science

 

‘Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard’ was first shown at 8 p.m. on December 30 on BBC One.

Five stars for the mammoth programme. At last, a documentary worthy of the BBC -- in contrast to those appalling programmes featuring MPP and his "astonishing discoveries" in West Wales. And not a single mention of Stonehenge...........

We watched it last night, and it was a delight to see David Attenborough at his best -- bowled over by the wonder of things, celebrating great discoveries, asking probing questions of the experts, and making his own assessments of the things he was looking at and examining through his own magnifying lens.  He was at the centre of the programme (well, Attenborough and mammoths had to be an unbeatable combination!) but that was fine, since he is such an affable guide to quite complex matters, and because he is a GOOD SCIENTIST.    He has an extraordinary ability to explain in very simple language the things we are looking at on the screen.    And his interpretations are always sensible and conservative -- no hyperbole and no mad speculations.  In this he was assisted by the archaeologists -- all of whom were at pains to point out that they still do not know the truth of what happened in that damp river valley 215,000 years ago, and that it may take ten years of painstaking research to work everything out.  So words of praise are due to Prof Ben Garrod, Lisa Westcott Wilkins and all the other archaeologists who have contributed to the research thus far.

As indicated in my earlier post, the most amazing things about the find of the "mammoth graveyard" are (a) its age, in MIS 7, before the Wolstonian glaciation, and (b) the association of Neanderthal implements with the bone assemblage, and with scratch marks on some bones, implying butchering of the animals and possibly hunting as well.

In the commentary David Attenborough referred to the "lost 100,000 years" during which the Wolstonian ice expanded and contracted maybe several times.  I have tried to highlight this gap in our knowledge of the Quaternary on a number of occasions -- let's hope that there will now be a renewed research effort targetted at working out precisely what went on and where the ice limits might have been.

There is vast press coverage.  This one is interesting:

https://www.historyextra.com/period/prehistoric/mammoth-graveyard-david-attenborough-documentary/