Mystic Britain

This time we're dressing up.

So you'd tie these onto your face like that?

Yes.

I think this is a good way for me to do interviews.

Doing DIY...

I've never used anything

as brilliantly flintstone as this.

And downing drinks.

I don't mind the odd drop of reindeer urine,

but not with the mushrooms in it as well.

Ice age, shaman style.

Wow. Just shut the door behind you.

The British isles have a very long history.

People have been living here for tens of thousands of years.

And the further back you go, the more elusive and mysterious

the lives of those ancient Britons appear to be.

Stonehenge. What's the point?

It's a bit like Lego.

Oh.

Who were these ancient Britons?

What did they believe?

What was their world like?

Are you a fan of human sacrifice?

I don't practice it myself.

As a talk show host, I should know how to ask a good question.

Where are we going to, Mary-Ann?

Clive, we are off on an adventure.

But answers are not really my strong suit.

Mummies or not mummies?

It's a tricky one, isn't it?

So I've roped in someone

with more insight into the ancient world

than I'll ever have...

Anthropologist Mary-Ann Ochota.

Old bones, looking at the past,

you know everything, don't you?

I like to ask a lot of questions about the past.

Together we're going to unlock the mystic secrets

of the ancient Britons.

I've decided to harness the forces of evil.

Prepare to embrace the very odd indeed.

Right, I'm ready for all comers.

The charming seaside town of Scarborough

in north Yorkshire,

famous over the years

for its fair, fishing and golden sand.

Yes, that's the spirit.

But 11,000 years ago, the things that went on here

would have had George and Gladys running for the hills,

because it turns out that back then

this was a truly bizarre and utterly extraordinary place.

Just on the edge of Scarborough

is a marshy area known as Star Carr.

With a name like that

you might be picturing celebrities in Lamborghinis,

but no, you've got me.

Actually it's far more exciting than that.

This may look like a perfectly ordinary field

in north Yorkshire,

but in fact it's far from ordinary,

because beneath its surface

lies the key to unlocking a lost world,

a world which takes us back practically to the ice age.

Today it's rather chilly, but back then

this would have been as warm as you could hope for.

The ice age was barely over,

and the great glaciers of northern Europe

were still melting.

But around here things were slowly warming up,

if you count a summer's day of a balmy 55 degrees as warm.

Chief archaeologist professor Nicky Milner

has worked here in all weathers,

and she's discovered some unbelievably old items

in this field,

because there's something very special

about the ground at Star Carr.

There's a lot of peat here,

and peat helps organic materials preserve.

Yes, and what period of time, artifacts and things,

have you been finding, when are we talking about?

This is the Mesolithic period,

which means middle stone age.

Yes.

It's right at the end of the last ice age.

Right.

It's about 11,000 years ago,

just as Britain began to get a bit warmer.

Yeah, warmer would be nice.

11,000 years is an almost unimaginably long time ago.

If you traveled back in time, when you got to Stonehenge

you wouldn't even be halfway there.

There was no farming, no money,

they hadn't even got round to inventing the wheel,

and the WiFi was just awful.

To be honest, it doesn't sound

like a terribly attractive place to live,

unless you were a stone age man.

Apparently they loved it.

Stone age artifacts have been turning up at Star Carr

for 70 years,

and in 2003, Nicky's team of archaeologists

raised funding for a major dig here.

What they found was astonishing:

A treasure trove of ancient wonders

unlike anything found before.

Thousands of flint and bone tools, tiny beads,

mysterious wooden structures,

even evidence of the oldest house in Britain...

Astonishing items

that changed our view of stone age man forever.

And one particular find really stood out.

So, now what have we got here?

These look like, well, what are they, antlers? Bones?

What are they?

Uh, a bit of both.

They're bits of red deer skulls with antlers attached.

In one area of the site

there were a large number all found together...

Yeah.

But no others have been found across the country,

and they're very, very unusual.

So do you think they were put on the wall

like you would find in a country house hotel

or somewhere like that?

These deer we have killed.

Of course these are just perfect replicas,

the priceless originals are safely locked away

from the fumbling fingers of a clumsy TV presenter.

To me, these do look rather like hunting trophies,

but Nicky's experienced eye

sees something altogether more amazing.

An actual red deer skull is gonna have the bottom jaw,

part of it, and the nose part,

but this has all been worked down,

and it's had holes punched into it as well.

So what were they for, then?

Well, we think that they might have been used

as headdresses.

Shall I have a go?

- Yes. - Yeah?

Go on.

Oh, I don't know if that's a good idea or not.

- Yeah. - Yeah?

Just like that.

Hold on, this is the stone age we're talking about...

Grunting cave men surviving on berries

and fighting off sabretooth tigers.

Fancy headdresses sound, well,

a little too sophisticated for people like that.

And it's not just that they were, you know, killing deer

and then chopping them up and eating them

and these are just the bits left over.

No, we've done experiments,

and there's lots of different processes

that go on to make that,

and it's quite labor-intensive,

so it's certainly not by accident

that they're looking like this.

No, they're not just discarded bones

and heads and antlers.

No, there's something more, more to it going on.

33 of these have been found at the site.

They've all got holes in different places,

and, you know, sometimes it's been interpreted

that those might be eyeholes as opposed to tying on.

Eyeholes for me to wear or for, for somebody to wear?

What, like that?

That is quite scary, actually.

Is it scary?

Well, I don't know how scary it is.

So you'd tie these onto your face like that?

Yes.

I think this is a good way for me to do interviews.

I quite like this as an approach.

It's really unnerving.

Yeah.

Well, this is a first.

I've certainly annoyed interviewees before,

but I don't think I've actually terrified one.

And that's the point...

Clearly if I can get a reaction

out of a professor of archaeology,

a Mesolithic Briton wearing this thing

would have been making quite a statement.

But then I'm no anthropologist.

Mary-Ann, what do you make of all this?

Clive, I think the deer headdresses

are one of the most exciting ancient discoveries

in Britain for years.

I've come to the museum of archaeology and anthropology

in Cambridge, where the original finds are kept.

Because I want to see them first hand

to try and understand exactly what was going on.

This is one of the original antler headdresses

from Star Carr.

And up close it's extraordinary.

You can see just how much work has gone into creating this

and transforming it from the head of a red deer

into this human artifact.

Someone's drilled four holes,