Creswell Crags is a small limestone gorge in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, where several caves provided natural shelters for people over the last 50,000 years. Human occupation was not continuous, and at times hyaenas used the caves as dens. Other bones show that mammoth, woolly rhino, bison and horse often grazed and foraged in the local area.

The earliest evidence of people is of Neanderthals at the end of the Middle Palaeolithic. They left behind stone tools in four caves – Pin Hole, Robin Hood’s Cave, Mother Grundy’s Parlour and Church Hole. The stone tools – handaxes, scrapers, and sharp flakes, were mainly made from quartzite, but some were made from flint and clay-ironstone.

The next people to visit the gorge were probably modern humans about 35,000 years ago at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic. They made distinctive flint ‘leaf-points’ that would have been mounted onto spears.

Cold climate prevented continuous occupation, but as climate warmed towards the end of the last Ice Age about 12,500 years ago, humans returned to the gorge. The blade tools that they made are called ‘Creswellian’ after the area. Similar tools are found from other sites in Britain such as Gough’s Cave. It is probably these people who created the art at the site, which includes decorated bone and cave engravings.