After decades of fossil hunting in their spare time (he wooed her with two halves of an ancient beast’s vertebrae; they cut their wedding cake with a Neanderthal handaxe they had unearthed together), Sally and Neville Hollingworth made the discovery of a lifetime at the bottom of a quarry in Cerney Wick. It was a collection of mammoth bones of a size, state and number more usually found in Siberia than Swindon, left in the wake of the Thames’ ancient wanderings and dating from more than 200,000 years ago. While we wait impatiently for the 90-minute British romcom to be written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, starring Olivia Colman as Sally and Martin Freeman as Neville, as must surely come to pass, we have an equally endearing documentary about the fossil find itself.
Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard (BBC One) opens with Sir David visiting the Hollingworths at their neat suburban home. Every wall is lined with shelves and cases housing immaculately presented fossils they have found. The mammoth bones are on the kitchen table. Attenborough floats through in a trance of delight. “It’s a great thrill, isn’t it?” the world’s most revered naturalist murmurs reverently, as he lays hands on a giant ice age humerus. “The whole of this business.”
It is a stroke of genius to put such a documentary on at Christmas. Prehistory is the greatest story yet untold, and the sight of passionate experts gleaning more of it from fragments of snail shell, sediment samples, notches on preserved shin bones and scapulae, then putting new scraps of the tale together, sends a shiver down the secular spine. It is the closest we spiritually impoverished lot will come to religious awe, but I wouldn’t trade it.
Evolutionary biology professor Ben Garrod is the on-site missionary and co-presenter here, now that Attenborough at 95 is forced to take things a little easier. He does most of the interviews with the people pulling miracles from the mud then performing more of their own back in the lab. Generations of Siberians thought the buried remains they occasionally came across were evidence that huge, underground burrowing creatures once owned the tundra. Seventeenth-century Europeans thought theirs were evidence of giants or unicorns. Then in 1864 a piece of mammoth ivory was discovered in France with such a detailed engraving of the animal on it that it has been considered proof that humans lived alongside these elephant-like beasts and that unicorns, alas, didn’t really enter into it (nor giant burrowing creatures, which seems even more of a shame).
Now, of course, we have people who can test the radioactivity of quartz grains, pull apart layers of rock and sediment like tissue paper, and consult a secure facility full of prehistoric knapped flints to tell you what was happening when Britain wasn’t yet an island, glaciers were retreating across a tiny patch of Wiltshire and megafauna were still roaming the Earth.
As with most BBC documentaries involving natural history (and especially if they also involve Attenborough), it manages the graceful feat of sticking to the facts while still incorporating the sense of mystery that helps create the fascination. We are led to the answers of exactly what species of mammoth are resting at the bottom of the former river (steppe and woolly – I didn’t even know there were different kinds, although I know several 10-year-old boys who would howl at my ignorance), how so many animals came to die at the same place, and whether Neanderthal man could bring down large beasts from a distance or only at close quarters. We are led there via moments of marvelling at the skill needed to create weapons and tools out of stone, and the possibilities represented by a Levallois flake. Prof Garrod wonders, given his understanding of the behaviour of elephants, mammoths’ descendants, whether a juvenile had become stuck in the mud, the herd had panicked and nearby Neanderthals had taken advantage of the chance to avail themselves of weeks and weeks of food. Possibly. Maybe probably. Whatever the truth, it was a salutary reminder in these violently argumentative, polarised times that it’s OK to theorise. It’s OK to entertain options. It’s all right not to know.
A great thrill, anyway. The whole of this business.
