More about mammoths in the Thames Valley

I just spotted this new book on the mammoths and the Neanderthal inhabitants of the Thames Valley just to the west of Oxford.  (The beasties and the Neanderthal artefacts featured in the recent Attenborough TV programme were located further west still, just to the north of Swindon.)  The story is very similar, but this book -- freely available for download on the web -- reports on the accumulated finds and research work stretching back many years.  Most of the finds were collected in the period 1990 - 2000.

https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/access/content/group/stx/Katharine%20Scott%20-%20Stanton%20Harcourt_book.pdf 

This is a very attractive and well laid out book, with meticulous research responsibly laid out for scrutiny.  I haven't had a chance to read the whole book, but the context is very similar to that of the Thames terraces further upstream; the finds are for the most part from a layer of fine-grained river sediments near Stanton Harcourt, overlying Oxford Clay, and they in turn are overlain by the coarser gravels of the Thames terrace sequence.  So the bones and the artefacts are old -- once again dated to MIS 7, probably more than 200,000 years ago.  And once again, most of the mammoth bones are from the steppe mammoth -- albeit from animals smaller than the steppe mammoths that were roaming about earlier in the Ice Age.  Again it is assumed that the animals were stunted because of environmental stresses.  The fossil-bearing sediments (with many types of organic remains)  were covered by cold-climate gravels -- including fossil ice wedges -- dating from the MIS 6 glacial phase.

Here is a press release published just before Christmas:

http://www.bajrfed.co.uk/bajrpress/mammoths-and-neanderthals-in-the-thames-valley-excavations-at-stanton-harcourt-oxfordshire/

When I get a chance, I will look at this book in more detail -- there is much to absorb.......