Bringing Back the Bison

It's very striking, isn't it, when you see almost any area that has cave paintings, and we've seen the cave markings, not the paintings, but the etchings in Portugal.

Bison features so dominantly, don't they? They must have been absolutely everywhere in Europe in numbers we can hardly imagine.

It's the bison, it's the wild cattle, it's the wild horse and the other animals.

They're all incidental to these things because these were the animals that were super abundant.

They were there undertaking huge migrations.

They were your commissariat.

That's where your sinews came from, the dung you could burn, the meat, the hides.

horn, everything.

I mean, I can't remember the number of things that the First Nations people used, but it's well up in the hundreds.

And so there was virtually no part of a bison you couldn't use.

And of course, in Cresswell Crags, actually, cave painting is nothing like as prolific in Britain as it is in continental Europe.

But in Cresswell Crags, there's a bison there.

Where's Crystal Crags?

Crystal Crags is Derbyshire.

Ah.

And if you go and try and see it, terribly difficult.

And then, of course, the guides will take you in and they'll put an acetate over it and they'll just shine a torch underneath it and all of a sudden this thing just flickers out of the dark.

Wow.

And the last time I was there, the girl was saying that this might very well have been a worship thing, but you can't see it until somebody holds a pine faggot underneath it and you have watchers that are worshipping it and possibly singing, possibly dancing, maybe even following people who have horned helmets with bison on.

We don't know about that in Britain.

We definitely know That happened in continental Europe and in North America.