In 1822 Daniel Davies and the Rev John Davies found animal bones, including the tusk of a mammoth. The Talbot family of Penrice Castle was informed and found "bones of elephants" on 27 December 1822. William Buckland, Professor of Geology at Oxford University arrived on 18 January 1823 and spent a week at Goat's Hole, in which his famous discovery took place. Later that year, writing about his find in his book Reliquiae Diluvianae, Buckland stated: When the creationist Buckland discovered the skeleton in 1823, his treatise misjudged both its age and sex. Buckland believed that human remains could not be older than the BiblicalGreat Flood, and thus wildly underestimated its true age, believing the remains to date to the Roman era. Buckland believed the skeleton was female largely because it was discovered with decorative items, including perforated seashell necklaces and jewellery thought to be of elephant ivory but now known to be carved from the tusk of a mammoth. These decorative items, combined with the skeleton's red dye, caused Buckland to mistakenly speculate that the remains belonged to a Romanprostitute or witch.
Findings
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. However, before radiocarbon dating was invented in the 1950s, there was no existing scientific method for the determination of the age of any prehistoric remains. Early carbon dating has historically tended to give results which were underestimations of the age of samples, as radiocarbon dating techniques have developed and become more accurate, the age of the Red Lady of Paviland has gradually been pushed back. In the 1960s Kenneth Oakley published a radiocarbon determination of 18,460 ± 340 BP. Results published in 1989 and 1995 suggest that the individual from the cave lived about 26,000 years ago, during the later periods of the Upper Paleolithic. A 2007 examination by Thomas Higham of Oxford University and Roger Jacobi of the British Museum suggested a dating of 29,000 years ago. A recalibration of the results in 2009 suggest an age of 33,000 years. Although now on the coast, at the time of the burial the cave would have been located approximately 110 km 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 during a warmer period. Boneprotein analysis indicates that he lived on a diet 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. When the skeleton was discovered, Wales lacked a museum to house it, so it was moved to Oxford University, where Buckland was a professor. In December 2007 it was loaned for a year to the National Museum Cardiff. Subsequent excavations yielded more than 4,000 flints, teeth and bones, needles and bracelets, which are on exhibit at Swansea Museum and the National Museum in Cardiff.
Analysis of the evidence from the two excavations at Long Hole Cave on the Gower Peninsula, including sediment and pollen as well as the lithic evidence, has identified Long Hole as an Aurignacian site contemporary with and related to the site at Paviland, evidence of the first modern humans in Britain.
