STEPPE BACK IN TIME

The latest excavations at a 'mammoth graveyard' first unveiled in a David Attenborough documentary have yielded remarkable new discoveries, including teeth and tusks from creatures who roamed our country 200,000 years ago

- Simon de Bruxelles

IT WAS the Cotswolds, but not as we know it. Two hundred thousand years ago the SUVs that today clog country lanes would have been dwarfed by steppe mammoths and elephants up to four metres tall, each weighing more than four Land Rover Defenders.

A shallow but powerful river polished pebbles that are now quarried in the Cotswold Water Park. In one of the bends where the river flowed less swiftly, the carcasses of mammoths that had died in or near the water were swept into great mounds.

The plentiful supply of fresh meat attracted scavengers like hyenas. It also drew our not yet human ancestors who occupied the Cotswolds long before Homo sapiens arrived to hike up the price of property in one of England's most desirable regions.

The steppe-like grasslands would have been home to dozens of different creatures, many of them fierce and all of them hungry. Some like the mammoths grazed or browsed contentedly on vegetation.

Others like cave bears, wolves and hyenas would devour anything they could find, making life hazardous and occasionally short for early humans.

For the past three weeks one of the largest excavations of recent years has been taking place in a former quarry in Gloucestershire revealing mammoth teeth and tusks.

The site is believed to date back to around 220,000 years ago-.

Some 180 archaeologists and experts in disciplines from palaeontology to entomology from more than 20 institutions have spent the past three weeks painstakingly excavating an area the size of two football pitches searching for clues to the landscape and inhabitants of Britain during a long balmy period between ice ages around a quarter of a million years ago.