Red Lady of Paviland - Findings

Findings

The "lady" has since been identified as a man, probably no older than 21. His are the oldest anatomically modern human remains found in the United Kingdom, as well as the oldest known ceremonial burial in Western Europe. The skeleton was found along with a mammoth's skull, which has since been lost. Scholars now believe he may have been a tribal chieftain. The next human remains found in Britain, of Cheddar Man, are much younger and separated by the period of the Ice Age.

By the time a second archaeological excavation was undertaken to Paviland Cave in 1912, it was recognized through comparison with other discoveries that had been made in Europe, that the remains were from the Palaeolithic - although before carbon dating was invented in the 1950s there was no way of determining the actual age of any pre-historic remains. Early carbon dating has tended to underestimate the age of samples and as radio carbon dating techniques have developed and become more and more accurate so the age of the Red Lady of Paviland has gradually been pushed back. In the 1960s Kenneth Oakley published a radiocarbon determination made on the actual bones of the 'Red Lady' at 18,460 ± 340 BP. Tests made in 1989 and 1995 suggested he lived about 26,000 years ago (26,350 ± 550 BP, OxA-1815) at the end of the Upper Paleolithic Period. In 2007 a new examination of the remains by Dr Thomas Higham of Oxford University and Dr Roger Jacobi of the British Museum suggested they were 29,000 years old.

In 2009 a recalibration of the test results suggested an age of 33,000 years. Although now on the coast, at the time of the burial the cave would have been located approximately 70 miles inland, overlooking a plain. When the remains were dated to some 26,000 years ago it was thought the Red Lady lived at a time when an ice sheet of the most recent glacial period, in the British Isles called the Devensian Glaciation, would have been advancing towards the site, and that consequently the weather would have been more like that of present day Siberia, with maximum temperatures of perhaps 10°C in summer, -20° in winter, and a tundra vegetation. The new dating however indicates he lived at a warmer period. Bone protein analysis indicates that the "lady" lived on a diet that consisted of between 15% and 20% fish, which, together with the distance from the sea, suggests that the people may have been semi-nomadic, or that the tribe transported the body from a coastal region for burial. Other food probably included mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros and reindeer.

When the skeleton was first found, Wales had no museum in which to keep it, so it was housed at Oxford University, where Buckland was a professor. In December 2007 it was loaned for a year to the National Museum Cardiff. Subsequent excavations of the area in which the skeleton was found have yielded more than 4,000 flints, teeth and bones, and needles and bracelets, which are on exhibit at Swansea Museum and the National Museum in Cardiff.