Uncovering the Ancient History of Stonehenge (Full Episode) | Lost Cities with Albert Lin

Travel through life knowing, knowing that somehow you're connected to a deeper story, to a longer human journey. A journey that would find its way here thousands of years ago at the dawn of civilization. Stonehenge represents a crowning achievement for our ancient ancestors. But why did they build it here? Why choose this place? I'm here to uncover the answer. Is Albert Lin. And I look at the world in a unique way. I use 21st century technologies to look back into our past. Check that out, I can actually fly through the secret ancient world. Lasers that scan deserts, strip away dense jungle canopy, and scour the oceans to uncover the hidden worlds beneath. We're wading into uncharted waters. Now I have the military helping me find lost cities. New discoveries in the most awe-inspiring places on earth. That's where pixels become reality. That fill the gaps in our story, who we are, where we came from, and the wonders we can achieve. Here we are in the 13th century. This is carved out of the earth, huh? This is the new golden age of exploration. We know their secrets. I'm a scientist, but some places can only be described as magical. It's so beautiful. I've dreamed of being here. There's very few places in the world that make you feel so humbled. These rocks, these crazy rocks, they tell a story of us. Doesn't matter where you came from, what time you were born in, they represent something so deep inside us. Imagination, belief, they symbolize what it means to be a human. 5,000 years ago, deep in the heart of southern England, settlers from mainland Europe built this magnificent structure. Building this monument cost time, labor, probably lives. But what was it about this place that made it so special? My hunt for answers begins just a mile or two away, where there are secrets that long predate Stonehenge to be found in the shadows of an old forest. This place is called Lickmead, and it's full of ancient history. There's a site of a thousand-year-old abbey just over there. And up this hill, there's the remains of a two- to three-thousand-year-old hill fortress. But the really ancient secrets are right over here. This spring-fed lagoon stays at a pretty constant temperature of 52 degrees, even in winter, when the weather is below freezing. It could easily function as a reliable watering hole throughout the year. But 8,000 years ago, people in Britain lived as hunter-gatherers, nomads who lived in small family groups, always on the move, foraging for food. All good stories start at the beginning. I'm on the hunt for evidence that people did visit this area 3,000 years before Stonehenge was built. Uncovering secrets from the prehistoric is almost impossible. But archaeologist David Jakes has made it his life's work to do just that. What is this? Well, this is an axe, probably used for clearing woodland. And this is a real prestige thing. This would be like a Series 7 BMW. An axe like that, really high status. Plus, ergonomically, it's lovely. It's for a right-handed person. Are you right-handed? I am, yeah. Right, well, just put that in your hands. Oh, look at that. Perfectly designed. Right, it is. It's like an ergonomic dream. And it's got real friction point at the base to help you give a really strong piece of purchase. It's not just the tools that are remarkable. It's the number that they've found. We've got tens of thousands of stone tools from a period of time where you hardly find five or six. Tens of thousands. Right, well, some of them are tiny, some of them are big, like these ones. The numbers that we've got here are the biggest by far in Western Europe. In terms of the amount of tools, in terms of the density, they're the biggest densities for the whole of Europe. What we have here is thousands and thousands of tools, all in a tiny little area. That means that they came here for some reason. Could this have been the blueprint of one of the very first cities? I've got to find out more. Prehistoric settlements were nearly always built next to water. It's a source of life. So if you follow the water, you find the life. The river here, it feels too small to sustain an entire hunter-gatherer city. But this is where technology can help. A satellite image of Blikmead shows an area dense with trees. Using an image created by LiDAR sensors, which shoot up to one million precision laser beams per second, can reveal what lies underneath. Here is where the river currently is. The LiDAR data shows it sits within a huge floodplain. This is awesome. It looks like, based off of this data, that there should have been a huge river that would have run right next to Blikmead. We know hunter-gatherers used boats for transportation. Rivers were like their highways. To get the full picture of what was going on here, you really need more evidence than just stone tools. If there was a lost city at Blikmead, it would have been built with timber that rotted away long ago. But if we follow the path of that ancient, huge river far enough, it could be a different story. The journey takes me 30 miles south and across what is now a shallow sea. This is the Isle of Wight, a small island just beyond the main shores of England. But I've come here for a very specific reason. There's an incredible sight just in the waters beneath these cliffs. Maritime archaeologist Gary Momber has been exploring these waters for 20 years. The English Channel is a notoriously difficult place to dive. Meticulous preparations are vital. Visibility isn't great, so be careful. We'll buddy up together, and I'll take you to the bottom of the shop line, see the seabed, and then I'll take you to the site. With powerful tides and cold water, conditions are treacherous. But at the bottom of this line lies a treasure trove from another age. Wow, it's so murky down here. You can hardly see more than a few feet. Is that a tree? There's a tree down here. Wow. 8,000 years ago, sea levels were lower and the seabed was dry land. The wood has survived underwater for millennia. This is incredible down here. The trees are all part of a preserved hunter-gatherer landscape. It's a struggle against the current to get to the main site. Wow, maybe some kind of structure. Oh man, it looks like layers of wood just poking out of the silt. It feels like you're sitting in an ancient ghost town, but underwater. We take some samples to get a better idea of what this is back on the boat. That's incredible. Looks like there's a whole platform down there. It's layered one piece on top of the other, almost like a dock. Unbelievable. Oh, it's cold down there and murky, but it's incredible. You know, you descend down this line and out of the darkness comes the ancient past. You can see here how this piece of wood could be locked in time in the ocean. How does that happen where it doesn't decay? Well, what's happened with this is that as the sea level has risen above it, it's covered it with this silt and it's taken away all the oxygen and it just preserved it in this sort of anaerobic, oxygen-free environment and it would have stayed there for many more thousand years. But recently, the old landscape is eroding away, which is how we found this. And what is that? This little piece? Yeah, what is that? That little piece, that stretches back. It was a little bit broken there and it's a peg that comes back over the next piece. It looks like it's just to help fix the thing in place. It's composite structures like this. It is of international significance. It's 8,000 years old. You don't just get this every day. Can you describe to me the scene that this would have existed within? This was next to a stream and we know it was a bit of a wetland, so it could have been a nice support, could have been a platform, could have been a pontoon. We don't know yet. We don't know because there's nothing else like it in the country. Wow. And it was somewhere where we found what we believed to be the oldest boat building site in the world, where they would have built a canoe, a log boat. So that's what they would have sailed. And from here, they could have sailed up the Hunter-Gatherer Highway, all the way to Blickmead. So I'm looking for the lost city of Stonehenge and I know now that boats were incredibly important to the Hunter-Gatherers. They used them for transportation. And this spring, it was right on the banks of a huge river at one point. Could have been a key destination, sort of a Hunter-Gatherer Highway. David Jakes has uncovered something that will tell us more. What is this? That's a dog's tooth. It's around 6,000 years old. This is a 6,000-year-old and this is a domestic dog. So it's been bred as a domestic dog to be people's pet. It would look like an Alsatian. So it's quite wolf-like, quite big. Yeah, I know. You're kidding me. This dog came a hell of a way to get to this area. So how can you tell where this came from? Well, the enamel on the tooth is the thing that gives us all the clues because it shows where this dog was drinking water when it was a puppy. And so we know that it was drinking water in a place that was quite a bit colder than where we are now. And the sort of places that that corresponds with may be places quite a distance to the north, maybe 300 miles north, possibly eastern England as well. So it's come a really long distance. Hunter-Gatherers and their dogs traveled hundreds of miles to come here. That suggests that Blickmead was a place of great importance for thousands of years before Stonehenge was even built. But it doesn't tell us why. To get actual answers about any connection to Stonehenge, we're going to have to get to the ground truth. So this team of archaeologists, they're going to excavate them. But first, they need to know where to look and that's where the tech comes in. So far, most of the Flint tools have been found in boggy ground near the Ground Penetrating Radar, or GPR, gives us a clearer picture of where to dig next. Pull it up here. Look at that. This is really exciting. So what we've got here is some sort of a surface, but look, it's going off either end of the chart. That's 30 feet long and still going on either side. The GPR data suggests a surface, a long flat structure from thousands of years ago, could be hidden deep underground. This is some kind of different material placed here is what you're thinking. Yes, yes. And it's giving a very high resistance signal, so it'd be something like stone. You're seeing a ghost of an important structure here that, you know, potentially people haven't seen with their eyes for thousands of years. Now, if this is a stone surface and if it's a hunter-gatherer surface, that would make it unique for the whole of Europe. The team get to work. This is right where the GPR was showing that signal, isn't it? Bang on. Absolutely bang on. The dig has uncovered a small section from a carpet of stones stretching out across 30 feet. David believes that each one of these stones was carefully and painstakingly placed here by hand thousands of years ago. But this is clearly a laid surface. If you're looking at the sides of the stones, these have been sorted and selected and chosen. So these have been put in deliberately. It's like a dream come true to pick up on something like this. I mean, as an archaeologist, you see something like this would be normally like a medieval street. But in fact, we've got hunter-gatherer material all over it. Look at this. Yeah. This is actually a blade, isn't it? It is. Would you like to really carefully trust you? Very, very, very delicately. Just see what it looks like on the other side. Oh yes, look, that's a lovely little knife blade. Wow, look at that. So you are the first person that will have held that in possibly 8,000 years. Run your finger along the edge. It's still razor sharp. It's not moved. This was created by another human being. Yeah, there's a person behind that, someone who made that. And it's not just this one blade. Hidden amongst the stones are hundreds of flint tools. What happened here? Why would they lay all of these little bits of flint down here like this? Well, it's a great question. I mean, why are you putting completely good brand new tools along with other stones? So these have been put in deliberately. I don't think it's all about the practical, that surface. If it was, we'd expect it to be maybe made of something like wood, which would be quicker to access, faster to lay down. And I think that the surface is a focal point for worship. If he's right, nothing like this has ever been discovered from the time of hunter-gatherers. A sacred surface that predates Stonehenge by 2,000 years. And significantly, the stones were placed to run alongside the water's edge. The hunter-gatherers might have thought this was a sacred place. Even the rocks seem magical. I pulled this flint out of the water earlier, and look what happened when it dried. It turned pink. It's a natural phenomenon caused by a rare species of algae that likes the constant temperature of the spring. The sacred surface and pink flints may have given this place a mystical quality, perhaps one that people would travel hundreds of miles to get to. To make sense of what we found, I'm headed north to a land where the sun never sleeps. I'm in Finnmark in northern Norway, deep in the Arctic Circle. The hunter-gatherers who lived here traveled by boat, and what they left behind was far more than flint tools. This landscape is littered with traces of our shared human story, but you have to know where to look. I'm on the trail of something that could unlock the mystery of the sacred stone surface found at Blikmead. It's past midnight, but I'm so far north that this time of year the sun literally never sets. I'm here in the middle of the night for a reason. Carved into the rock by ancient artists is an intimate record of hunter-gatherer life. This is incredible. At any other time of day, these carvings are almost invisible, but under the low midnight sun, they come to life. Experts have carefully colored some of the carvings to make them easier to interpret. If you look at this, you can actually see it as a landscape. You could try to envisage the whole thing as their lived world. Archaeologist Jan Magne has spent 10 years decoding this ancient enigma. Recent research shows that some of these panels have so many references to what could be geographical fixed points, like real points in the landscape. So when you then look at the whole panel in one, it looks like this could be sort of like a stone age Google Maps for the people living here. What are these dots? The dots are bear tracks. So you can actually... That's awesome. The bear comes out of the den in springtime, and you could follow it over to this area here, where they're actually hunting the bear. And this is a bear mother with two cubs. This is the coolest thing I've ever seen. It is. These 7,000-year-old carvings help us understand the spiritual significance of animals to our ancient ancestors. They didn't separate the real from the imaginary. They didn't separate the functional from the religious or the spiritual. It was all intertwined in one. If you look at these two reindeers, you can actually see reindeers here. These right here? Yeah, the reindeer here. You can actually see the reindeer is running and then turning into a human person, flying over the landscape, changing and shaping a little bit differently. And here you actually see how it's been shot by... By a hunter right there. So it shoots the human, then it falls over and dies here, becoming small again, turning into a reindeer. You're kidding me. This is their religion, basically. Yeah. Somehow it looks like we are all animals, and it looks like the origin of us is animal. And I don't think they separated much between human and animal when it comes to the worldview and the life of hunter-gatherers like this, because they're all intertwined. We take the shape of a bear. We take the shape of a reindeer. You have people transforming into different bears, and they become the animal. It's incredible. Where I'm standing right now, if you close your eyes, you can almost imagine a time 7,000 years ago where you would have seen hunter-gatherer settlements all around. And the amount of rock art found just around here is staggering. And what you see on those rocks is a window into how these people lived, even what they believed. And at the heart of it all are the reindeer they hunted and held sacred. But were animals also sacred to the people of Blikmead? The rock art in Norway shows that reindeer were central to the hunter-gatherer's spiritual beliefs. This is incredible. But a discovery made at Blikmead suggests that in Britain, animals also played a vital role. Look at this. So we've got some bones here. Actually, they're from pretty much where we're standing, about two meters below where we're standing. And these are from these super-sized cows called aurochs. They're about three times the size of a domestic cow now. Look at this. Yeah. And these things are running about 35 miles an hour, ferocious, you know, super bright. They can take you out like that if you're trying to hunt them. You have to be really clever to get them. So the group of people that are We know that one of these things, a male bull, would have fed 300 people. Is this a cut mark? This is something else. No, you've got it. That's a cut mark, and people have snapped the bone over like that. You're kidding me. This is actually from the hunter-gatherer? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they've got the marrow out there, and they may have just drunk that marrow back first. I want to find out more about the aurochs. They would have been right at the heart of the lives of the people of Blickmead. Look at the big bull right in the front. I don't want to get too close because we don't know how aggressive they are. Aurochs are extinct, but these are the next best thing. Heck, cattle. They were bred in an attempt to bring back the aurochs. And like them, they're wild, unpredictable, and dangerous. These are mighty creatures. But true aurochs were much larger. The biggest of them would have weighed as much as 3,000 pounds. That's nearly twice as much as a bison. To bring one down, hunter-gatherers would have had to use every trick in the book. Dijik Palmstra has devoted decades to studying and living the hunter-gatherer way of life. He knows that when it comes to hunting aurochs, their weapon of choice was not made of stone, but wood. This is elmwood? It's elmwood, yeah. You built this? I made this with stone tools, yeah. Wow, look at that. This bow is based off of your understanding of what the hunter-gatherer might have used. But I still can't imagine something like this taking down an aurochs. I mean, they're huge, right? So I think we have very little chance of killing one with one shot. The hunting techniques of hunter-gatherers may have been lost in the mists of time, but their art is full of clues. People were waiting, shot in the chest first. They started running, shot from the side, shot from the back again. So get as many arrows into an animal as you can, increasing, of course, blood loss, hemorrhage, and the animal dying pretty quickly. That was the plan. And if they didn't die, then you should trail them, find them, and shoot again. We know that hunter-gatherers killed aurochs, so their weapons must have been formidable. Making an arrow shows just how sophisticated these prehistoric people were. First, you have to find straight pieces of wood of the right size. Hazel is pretty hard wood, and it likes to grow straight. Then you have to scrape off the bark, straighten, and dry it. Chew some dried sinew to make a kind of sticky string. And then the really important bit. That's really sharp. I bet it will shave. Look at that. A shard of flint for an arrowhead. This is a razor. It's a razor blade, yeah. Flint blades like this have edges so thin that they're hundreds of times sharper than a steel scalpel. Then it's goose feathers for the arrow flights. And finally, a neat trick. Sometimes they placed extra flint blades along the shaft of the arrow. These are aurochs. This is ballistic gel. They use it for testing ammunition. Ballistic gel is designed to simulate animal muscle. It's the most reliable way to test if our arrow could penetrate deep enough to down an aurochs. Yeah, good shot. That's awesome. It's a devastating blow. Easily deep enough to hit a vital organ. And the flint blades on the side of the arrow, they've done their work too. That's incredible. Yeah. It slices all the way through. Yeah, that would be the micro hit on the side. That must do a lot of damage. Is that, I guess, how they would cut through the arteries, right? Yeah, yeah. It just caused massive bleeding, I think. The hunter-gatherers in Norway had reindeer. In Britain, they had aurochs. Was there something unique about the landscape around Stonehenge that brought them here? Every little chip on this flint was made with intention by another human being some 7,000 years ago. Rooted in these stones is this deep ancestral story of ours, our collective story, you know? People came here from all over this area to this watering hole to exchange ideas, to feast together, to build things together. And from that spawned the world that we know today. The excavation team have found hundreds of aurochs bones at Blikmead. This suggests that aurochs lived here in large numbers. But what's puzzling is aurochs were grazing animals who needed open fields. And in the time of the hunter-gatherers, England was covered in forest. Maybe there's something different about the landscape at Stonehenge. This is a mystery that technology can solve. But first, there's grunt work to be done. Dab it in. There we go. One, two, three. In it goes. All the way. That's it. Keep going. And now we rotate it. This is harder than it looks, but it's worth it because we're literally going back in time. Okay. Okay. Oh, look at that. Land gets covered over year after year. So a sample from 30 inches down should be around 8,000 years old. A microscope will uncover any clues this sample might contain. In most parts of the country, we find dense woodland. Professor Tony Brown is an expert at deciphering these samples. He's looking for traces of pollen. If this was woodland, we'd expect to find tree pollen. But that's not what Tony sees. This is ancient pollen. Yeah, so this is that pollen. That grain there is around about 8,000 years old, and it's a dandelion. And as you'll know, dandelions don't grow in woodlands. They grow in open areas, normally today, in areas that were grazed. And then Tony finds something even more compelling. What we have here are spores from fungi. So these are mushrooms that grow on the dung of animals, and in particular, on the dung of large herbivores. And we only have one type of herbivore here that's large enough to have these spores on it, and that's the aurochs. So aurochs did live here, along with the hunter-gatherers who feasted on them and held them sacred. It's clear now that Blycmede was an important place for the early humans that roamed Europe. Maybe even one of the first manifestations of a human city. Makes sense. A river for transport for fish, a landscape perfect for hunting big game. But what's still eluding me is a connection to the people that would later build Stonehenge. In the 1920s, archaeologists dug up a giant circular ditch that surrounds Stonehenge. And what they found could be the link I've been looking for. Stonehenge has been about 50 percent excavated, but from excavations about 100 years ago now, actually, in the ditch that goes around the outside of the stone circle, animal bones were found, and some of those have been identified as aurochs. Really? And some of them were actually placed deliberately in the ditch, and we think that might have been symbolic to the people that dug them. Augmented reality technology can help us visualize what this might have looked like. Look at that right there. It was an aurochs' skull. It's incredible. Followed around a jawbone right there. The aurochs' bones, placed on either side of the southern entrance to Stonehenge, seem to form a sacred gateway. It's clear the aurochs was an important symbol here. These massive ancient beasts could be the link I've been searching for between Stonehenge and Blickmead. Aurochs were sacred to the people who built Stonehenge, and the people of Blickmead, who preceded them by 3,000 years. I thought Blickmead had given up all of its secrets, but the dig has revealed something extraordinary. The archaeologists have painstakingly removed a section of the stone surface, and underneath was something never seen before. Okay, here we go, Albert. Wow, look at that. Those are hoof prints? They are, and this is from a massive aurochs. All the way down here, too. The huge power, the weight of these things. David believes the hand-laid stone surface was used to protect and preserve these 8,000-year-old hoof prints. It might well be that this is the equivalent of, let's say, a relic in a medieval cathedral. You put a relic of a saint in a cathedral, it actually literally gave the cathedral the quality of the saints. These things might be giving the whole surface the qualities of an aurochs. Certainly, as well as being the most powerful animals in the landscape, they may well have been religious totems. So it feels to me as though what we've got here is a sort of relic that people have been conscious of, and they've deliberately put the surface over it. This is the first time this unique find has ever been seen publicly. It's clear that the people of Blickmead, like those that built Stonehenge, held the aurochs sacred. But there's one last puzzle to solve. We know hunter-gatherers came here in large numbers, but what we haven't found is evidence that these nomadic people settled down. I'm back in northern Norway to hunt for the missing link. Up here in the Arctic Circle, the weather can change in a dime. It's one of the most extreme climates in the world. It doesn't seem like the kind of place a lot of people would live. But the amount of incredible rock art tells a different story. Hunter-gatherers must have lived here in large numbers. The harsh climate has kept this landscape undisturbed, preserving traces of a hunter-gatherer life. This is what I was looking for. It may not look like much, but this dip in the ground, it's actually really important. I've brought a 3D scanner to reveal what's going on here. The area, colored blue, is the foundation of the hunter-gatherer pit house from around 8,000 years ago. Based on the work of leading archaeologists, it could have looked something like this. Above the excavated pit floor would have sat a superstructure of wood covered in a thick layer of turf. The scans reveal another one, right next door. As I process more data, it appears there's at least two, maybe more. To survey a bigger area, I need a different perspective. You see, I can combine the aerial view with the 3D model that's created with the LiDAR scanner. And we can actually accentuate out just a little bit the signature of those ancient homes. It's almost like a neighborhood. House after house after house. Hunter-gatherers did build houses, and they built them next to each other. It's likely that the people at Blikmead built similar dwellings. Look at that. I've put together another augmented reality model using the Norway pit houses as a template. Based on the sheer number of flint tools found, there could have been hundreds of houses here. Perhaps Blikmead was one of Europe's first cities. I understand now why this place became so important. A perfect combination of resources encouraged generations to call this place home. The landscape provided hunter-gatherers flint to build tools, magical pink stones, as well as a reliable watering hole and a natural grazing area for the animals they probably held sacred, aurochs. When people from across the sea arrived and built Stonehenge, they may have been inspired by the same sacred landscape. But what we know for sure is that people lived here near Stonehenge thousands of years before the place was built. And what I've realized is just how much we share with them in our deepest instincts, you know, to provide for our families, to protect our loved ones, to leave our mark. The one truth to all of that is that no matter how many thousands of years separating us, we are all part of the human story.