Enigma Man a Stone Age Mystery Page #3

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And what was revealed

were layers and layers of ash.

This ash is as fine as you would say

if the fire was built only last week.

It's really quite incredible.

The preservation is just extraordinary

and you can see pieces of charcoal

and these are in fact

is actually burnt clay.

So it's soil that was on top of the fire.

It was so hot that it's baked it.

And when we look at the house

we actually find animal bones

and animal teeth.

And so they've actually come

in and they have cooked

particularly deer bones and then

they butch them on the side.

So these amazingly thick layers

of ash represent huge fires

that were being built up

in the cave over a period

about a thousand years.

It's probably the deepest

ash sequence or half

that's been found in China,

possibly one of the largest in the world.

The Red Deer Cave was

just beginning to reveal

fascinating glimpses in the

Stone Age life in China

and that it all went wrong.

My heart sunk when we found

what we thought was a bit of pottery.

Pottery is one of the most enduring

of manmade materials but it

is a very recent innovation.

I was hoping to find a site

that was tens of thousand years old.

Maybe a site that might tell

us about the earliest people

in the area but instead I

thought we'd found a site

that was only a few thousand years old.

We were feeling disappointed actually.

We thought maybe the site was just another

early farming site that maybe

in fact it wasn't going to be

the site that might give

us some real insights

of our understanding of human evolution.

But the mystery of the Red Deer Cave

was far from over.

Back at the museum, sacks

of fossils collected

from the original excavation

were pulled out of the coffins.

Until now they had been long forgotten.

We really had no idea just how many bones

there were, how rich the site was.

There were bags and bags of these fossils

that had been removed,

that were just waiting to be studied.

When Darren and Ji examined the bones,

they were shocked.

I've never seen a set of human remains

like this ever before.

Every bone that we looked at had

been modified in some ways.

Some had been cut.

Some had been burned and

others painted in ochre.

They've got these massive fires in the cave

and sometimes they throw on complete limbs,

entire body parts and other

times it was part body,

sometimes even just the bones themselves.

When you find evidence for

the burning of human bones,

you always think that there

are two possibilities.

One of those could be cremation

in some sort of ceremony

associated with burial or death.

The other of course is the

very real possibility

that human remains were actually caught.

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