History and archaeology are popular as never before, and there can be no doubt that this is a result of television programmes. A book often accompanies a television series, but there is an onus on presenters, who enjoy such high-profile exposure on television, to ensure that they are certain of their facts and present them accurately. Oliver's book is somewhat cavalier with the evidence.

Although incomplete, the Red Lady of Paviland is Britain's most complete surviving remains of modern man from before the last Ice Age. He was discovered by William Buckland in January 1823, but it was not until the late nineteenth century that it was realized the Red Lady was a man, and exceedingly old. The misnomer has stuck for nearly two centuries, so is best left alone, despite Oliver's desire to rename him ‘Red Laddie’. Carbon-14 dating in the twentieth century has seen him age from c 18,000 to c 29,000–33,000 years ago.

On the basis of Buckland's report and a sketch of the excavations in the cave, Oliver offers an imaginative description of the last moments of the Red Lady. An attack on a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) that went wrong, the one ‘they loved best’ died, as did the mammoth, and both were buried together in the cave. To support his imaginative reconstruction, Oliver sought scientific evidence to back up his theory. However, there is a question mark over the reliability of Buckland's drawing and the story it purported to tell. It conflates at least two episodes of work in the cave, much of it undertaken in 1822 before Buckland saw the cave. Buckland showed a complete human skeleton lying near a complete mammoth skull, but the Red Lady was incomplete when Buckland excavated him. There may have been a mammoth skull present, but was it as complete as Buckland suggests? This seems doubtful. Less obvious are the complete mammoth teeth that are shown in the section through the cave soils; none survives, which leads us to ask if they ever existed. The point is generally missed that Buckland was a showman, someone keen to make a name for himself, and without a doubt the drawing was intended to maximize his discoveries.

Swansea Museum has pieces of seven teeth and part of a tusk of woolly mammoth from Paviland Cave in its collections. For the purposes of the BBC programme, these were tested using Carbon-14 dating to establish whether one might have been present at the same time as the Red Lady. Only two of the teeth provided a date; one to 40,900 ± 1300 bp, while the second dates to 29,940 ± 350 bp. Given the reservations of applying radiocarbon dates to material as old as this, and the statistical certainties of their being absolutely accurate, the second tooth might, but only just might, have come from an animal that might perhaps have been living at the same time as the Red Lady, who Oliver claims died c 33,000 years ago. This by any measure is highly equivocal.

So what, then, to make of Neil Oliver's story of the Red Lady and his mammoth? First it must be said that there is no evidence for the cause of the Red Lady's death. Such bones as remain provide no evidence of any trauma. Oliver tells us that he was ‘the first modern human being – someone exactly like us – who lived in this land we know as Britain’; this is clearly not so. The Red Lady was hunting and living on the Bristol Channel grasslands with other people, although we have no idea as to how many there were with him. The great depth of ice in the northern hemisphere meant that sea levels were greatly lower than they are today. Britain was linked to mainland Europe, the sea was 70 or 80 miles away from the present south coast of Wales, and it was possible to reach the present west coast of France with relative ease. The Red Lady was thus almost certainly a European, and lived among our earliest modern visitors. Archaeology has recently revealed that modern man came to southern Britain much earlier than the Red Lady, as has been shown by the dating of a fragment of bone and teeth from Torquay to c 40,000–44,000 years ago.

Had Oliver read more widely than his bibliography suggests, he would have known that the Red Lady may well have been special. The shells, beads and ivory buried with him, and his blanket of red ochre, reflect a wider European tradition; the association of these with ‘strange’ or ‘special’ young men remains an enigma that serious archaeologists still struggle to comprehend. This is a book to be enjoyed but needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. As a serious study of the prehistory of the British Isles it seems as relevant as Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall is to an understanding of Tudor England. There are many astute observations but …