History Cold Case

For decades experts have remained baffled by a jumble of human bones discovered in a unique series of caves on the North York Moors, known as the Windypits. One discovery in particular stands out - a tangle of bones that might belong to a family from two thousand years ago. The trail to uncover answers about what happened to these people leads to a dark world of ritual sacrifice and right back to the limits of British recorded history.

In 2008, construction workers just beyond York's city walls uncovered 113 bodies in a mass grave. The History Cold Case team spots an incredibly rare genetic peculiarity in two of the skeletons among the 113 and wonder whether they have stumbled on a pair of brothers, one of whom was severely disabled. The trail to find out who these two men could have been and how they ended up dead in a mass grave outside York opens up a new personalised vantage point on the events surrounding the English Civil War and also gives us a perspective on disability which can perhaps teach us something about so-called modern attitudes today.

When the remains of 17 people - men, women and 11 children, one as young as two years old - were discovered in a dry well shaft in Norwich city centre, the local community were keen for answers about who these people were and what happened to them. Thought to date from the early 1200s, this becomes a case of suspected medieval murder but the final reveal of the identity of these people is an even bigger shock to all involved.

In the sleepy commuter town of Baldock in Hertfordshire the History Cold Case team is called in to investigate the discovery of a skeleton dating from around 100AD, buried in a bizarre position, along with the remains of three babies. Is she Celt or Roman? Is she the earliest recorded mother of triplets in Britain and what can her story reveal about the bizarre attitudes to pregnancy and childbirth during the Roman occupation of Britain?