William Buckland - The Red Lady of Paviland

The Red Lady of Paviland

On 18th January 1823 Buckland climbed down to Paviland Cave, where he discovered the Red Lady of Paviland, so-called as Buckland originally thought it to a local prostitute, in Wales, which remains the oldest anatomically modern human found in the United Kingdom. Although he found the skeleton in Paviland Cave in the same strata as the bones of extinct mammals (including mammoth), Buckland shared the view of Georges Cuvier that no humans had coexisted with any extinct animals, and he attributed the skeleton's presence there to a grave having been dug in historical times, possibly by the same people who had constructed some nearby pre-Roman fortifications, into the older layers. Carbon-data tests have since dated the skeleton, now known to be male as from circa 33,000 years before present (BP).