Posted on 04/30/2011 1:07:33 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Paviland cave, on the Gower peninsula in South Wales, is a crucial site for tracing the origins of human life in Britain. It was in here, in 1823, that William Buckland, the first professor of geology at Oxford University, excavated the remains of a body that had been smeared with red ochre (naturally occurring iron oxide) and buried with a selection of periwinkle shells and ivory rods. Buckland initially thought the body was that of a customs officer, killed by smugglers. Then he decided it was a Roman prostitute... This misidentification gave the headless skeleton its name -- "the Red Lady of Paviland" -- and it is still called the Red Lady, even though we now know two things Buckland didn't: the remains are those of a young man, probably in his late 20s, and they were buried 34,000 years ago. The Red Lady is the oldest anatomically modern human skeleton found in Britain, and Paviland is the site of the oldest ceremonial burial in western Europe...
I ask Higham what we can deduce about the Red Lady. "This person probably had some kind of an accident. He's a healthy person, not very old, doesn't show any major signs of illness or disease. My guess is there was a hunting party, they were hunting in the environs of the site, there was an accident and the person was buried there." The cave, in Higham's view, was not a pagan cathedral but a convenient spot to leave a companion who had met an untimely end, and he says there is no evidence of subsequent pilgrimages, other perhaps than by doting druids and misguided journalists. His prosaic conclusion is unlikely to play well in the more poetic corners of Wales.
(Excerpt) Read more at pasthorizons.com ...
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That doesn’t look like an easy place to get to much less bury somebody unless it was a special burial.
34,000 years ago....the sea level would have been hundreds of feet lower. What are today the British Isles would have been connected to the European continent, the English Channel a flattish, grassy landscape with grazing mammoth.
I wonder how difficult it would have been to put a body in that cave?
Quite right — the sealevel was considerably lower when the guy died. More info in the non-quoted parts of the original.
At first blush, you seem to be linking to this thread and not your duplicate.
Don’t make us face palm you. ;-)
Did they found his SUV that caused the seas to rise? /s
They were burning as much fuel as they could because their shaman told them it would reverse global cooling.
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