. Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Geology. go THE PROBLEM OF MAN'S ANTIQUITY. Fig. 5. Goat's Hole, Paviland. After Buckland, 1823 The human skeleton is shown as lying in a cavity excavated into the deposits containing remains of mammoth (E, F). Paviland " as indicating that her kinsmen dug up the antediluvian elephant tusks from the floor of the cave and utilised this fossil ivory for making ornaments. Apparently it did not occur to Buckland that the human skeleton and the ivory might have been contemporaneous. Early discoveries of this kind indicating man's great antiqu
. Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Geology. go THE PROBLEM OF MAN'S ANTIQUITY. Fig. 5. Goat's Hole, Paviland. After Buckland, 1823 The human skeleton is shown as lying in a cavity excavated into the deposits containing remains of mammoth (E, F). Paviland " as indicating that her kinsmen dug up the antediluvian elephant tusks from the floor of the cave and utilised this fossil ivory for making ornaments. Apparently it did not occur to Buckland that the human skeleton and the ivory might have been contemporaneous. Early discoveries of this kind indicating man's great antiquity remained generally unaccepted for a quarter of a century or more. One of the least prejudiced pioneers in this field of investigation was a Catholic priest, Father J. McEnery, who began digging in Kent's Cavern, Torquay, in 1825 (following excavations carried out in the previous year by antiquarians seeking for evidence that the cave had been used as a Temple of Mithras). Already by 1829 McEnery had found flint implements associated with fossilized bones of rhinoceros and other antediluvian animals below an unbroken floor of stalagmite or dripstone in this cave. To the discoverer these finds demonstrated quite clearly that man had been coeval with animals that had since died out, in some very remote period of time. He did not convince many of those with whom he discussed the finds, but he patiently continued excavating for some fifteen years. While preparing an account of his work for publication he corresponded with Dean Buckland, who expressed the view that McEnery was surely misinterpreting the evidence. Most probably, the Dean argued, the Ancient British people had dug holes for ovens in the stalagmite floor of the cave, and their flint implements had worked down through these into the underlying antediluvian. Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced for readability - coloration and appearance of these il
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