If you're lucky enough to live in the United Kingdom where you can enjoy all BBC Television, you may have seen the television special on the most amazing prehistoric mammal find in ages - a family of mammoths were discovered recently in England! Near a busy road in Britain’s Cotswolds, Sally and Neville Hollingworth, a couple who spends part of their time hunting fossils, made an extraordinary find: The skeletons of five prehistoric mammoths that are about 220,000 years old. The mammoths are in a remarkable state of preservation, with Neanderthal tools.
Here's the story:
Five mammoths who got stuck in the mud on what was later to become the Wiltshire-Gloucestershire border will play a starring role in a Sir David Attenborough documentary this Christmas.
The discovery of the Ice Age beasts, in a quarry and gravel pit near the village of Latton, between Swindon and Cirencester, has astonished archaeologists as told in a programme called Attenborough and the Mammoths Graveyard, on BBC 1.
Five woolly mammoths were discovered in an extraordinary state of preservation in an area that’s now part of the Cotswold Water Park - a flat, gravelly plain from which the infant River Thames emerges.
The site, close to the main A419 dual carriageway, has been excavated by archaeologists for the past five years or more, and the site’s owners - Hills Waste - gave them more time when they realised what a gold mine for ancient fossils it is.
As well as the complete remains of two adults, two juveniles and an infant mammoth that roamed the Cotswolds around 200,000 years ago, they found tools and weapons used by Neanderthals, who would have lived there too and hunted the mammoths.
The palaeontologists and archaeologists from DigVentures also found giant elks, twice the size of the modern-day elk, with antlers 10ft wide, as well as tiny fossils of insects and plants that provide a perfect picture of what life was like there tens of thousands of years ago.
After the astonishing discoveries, there is hope that some kind of visitors centre can be built at the site one day, with other finds expected to go to the Bristol Museum.
The BBC documentary is being shown on December 30 on BBC1, and will follow Sir David Attenborough and evolutionary biologist Prof Ben Garrod visiting the site and talking about what has been found.
Lisa Westcott Wilkins, from DigVentures, told The Observer: “Exciting doesn’t cover it. Other mammoths have been found in the UK but not in this state of preservation. They’re in near-pristine condition. You can’t take it in.”
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