embroke Castle has been a seat of power for centuries. It was the birthplace of Henry Tudor, father of Henry VIII, and is one of the country’s best preserved medieval strongholds, containing a maze of passages, tunnels and stairways, as well as a vast gatehouse tower. Scientists have discovered that the fortress has also been concealing a startling secret.
The excavation’s leader, Dr Rob Dinnis of Aberdeen University, said: “We have already shown that preserved layers of bone, stone tools, DNA and other material going back at least 40,000 years lie underneath Pembroke Castle, while the hippopotamus remains we have found suggest we might push this back to 125,000 years. If so, this is the perfect source for studying the transition between Neanderthals and modern humans which probably occurred around 45,000 years ago in Britain.
“So they just walked out with wheelbarrows full of stuff and no one knows where they dumped it. It was a tragic waste of critical important material that we could still exploit today – if only we knew where it was discarded.” It is unclear why this replacement occurred but the discovery clearly demonstrates the power of modern genetic analysis which, using DNA from blood and excrement left behind by the occupants of a cave, it was possible to reveal population movements 100,000 years later. The hope for Wogan Cavern is that similar analysis will shine a light on the interplay of modern humans and Neanderthals in our prehistoric past – simply from the sediments in which they left their DNA.
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