Archive

  The cold and ice of the last glacial reached its worst about 21,000 years ago. Since then the earth has become warmer, allowing humans to return to Britain 15,000 years ago across Doggerland, the area now covered by the North Sea. But the impact of the Ice Age remains all around us. Today, about...

  Few areas of science generate as much controversy and debate as human evolution. The teapot sherd discovered during an excavation at Kilbury Drive, Worcester, shows a snippet of a scene in which apes dressed in human clothes are brawling in a tavern. It is an example of a popular Victorian ‘meme’: satirising the idea...

  There isn’t one Ice Age: there have been at least five. Some were millions of years ago and one even billions of years ago. The most recent, the one we all call ‘The Ice Age’, is known geologically as the Quaternary. It lasted from two and a half million years ago until about 12,000...

  Our species evolved in an Ice Age world. 99% of the span of human life in Britain falls within the Ice Age. There have been at least four human species in Britain over the last million years. For most of human history, there have been multiple human species living at the same time. Today,...

  The Ice Age was not always cold: hippos once wallowed in Worcestershire’s warm pools. Over the last 2.5 million years – a period we call ‘The Ice Age’ and known geologically as the Quaternary – the climate fluctuated between icy glacials and warmer interglacials. As temperatures rose species were able to expand into new...

  How can we visualise lost landscapes? We start with the evidence. Scientific dating techniques and geological deposit mapping help us to work out how the hills and rivers changed over time – this gives us the basic lie of the land. The bones of large mammals can then tell us which species inhabited the...

  As earth’s deep history and the evolution of species began to be debated and slowly accepted, researchers within Worcestershire started to investigate the particular history and geology of this region. Some of the first to do so were Hugh and Catherine Strickland. During the mid-19th century, they discovered the remains of ancient animals, including...

  The turn of the nineteenth century was an important point in our recognition and understanding of the Ice Age. The whole of the earth’s history had been understood to fit within the few thousand years described in the bible, but this was about to change. Eighteenth century scientists wrestled with problematic discoveries of elephant-like...

Emma Hancox, Sam Wilson and John France   This summer, as part of the Lost Landscapes project, we are exhibiting a copy of the first geology map of Great Britain, produced in 1815 by William Smith. A private donor is kindly lending us his copy of this rare map for the Ice Age exhibition in...

As Volunteers' Week draws to a close, here's an account of one of our young volunteer's work on our upcoming Ice Age exhibitions