The Ice Age at Droitwich Spa Heritage Centre

Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service and Museums Worcestershire are leading an exciting project to bring the Lost Landscapes of Worcestershire back to life, thanks to grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Arts Council England, the West Midlands Museum Development Fund, and the Council for British Archaeology West Midlands. This display is one of many events and exhibitions celebrating over half a million years of the area's prehistory, from the time our ancestors first arrived in the Midlands through to the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago.

This period shaped the West Midlands as we know it. 450,000 years ago, a colossal ice sheet hundreds of metres thick lay over the land. This glacier's retreat transformed the landscape, and set the course of the Rivers Severn and Avon. Over the next 400,000 years the climate swung repeatedly from warm periods in which hippos wallowed in the shallows of the Stour and Avon, to cold snaps in which woolly mammoth roamed grassy plains. Discoveries of stone tools tell us that small groups of human ancestors, moving across a land bridge with continental Europe, made their living here too. The story of Worcestershire's collections goes back to 1833. It spans the emergence of our understanding of the most remote of periods in human history. Extraordinary fossils and artefacts were collected from within Worcestershire, but also from key Ice Age sites across the world. They tell us about our perception of our place in deep time, and helped to shape our ideas about what it means to be human.