Neanderthal cave mystery

During the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese VietCong guerrillas built a vast network of tunnels in the south of the country as part of the insurgency against the South Vietnamese government and their American allies. The tunnel network was a key base and shelter for the North Vietna ...  Show more

In 2000, contaminated drinking water in the small Canadian town of Walkerton triggered one of the country’s worst public health disasters.Heavy rainfall washed E. coli bacteria into the town’s water supply, but failures in testing and reporting meant residents continued to drink ...  Show more

Cheddar Man is the oldest almost complete skeleton of a Homo sapien ever found in Britain and, for this fantastic episode, Tristan spoke to the scientist who has drilled a (very small) hole in him. Dr Selina Brace is a biologist who works with ancient and degraded DNA. At the ...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ideas about the Stone Age people who created the extraordinary images found in caves around the world, from hand outlines to abstract symbols to the multicoloured paintings of prey animals at Chauvet and, as shown above, at Lascaux. In the 19th Cen ...  Show more

Roughly 40,000 years ago, Ice Age Britain was undergoing a transformation. 

The first modern humans, Homo sapiens, were arriving and beginning to settle in the British Isles. Their evolutionary predecessors, the Neanderthals, were on their way to extinc ...

Today's episode is from our brilliant sibling podcast The Ancients. Cheddar Man is the oldest almost complete skeleton of a Homo sapien ever found in Britain and, for this fantastic episode ...  Show more