Paviland Cave

The stubby thumb of dry land that we call Gower hasn’t always been nibbled by waves on three sides. 33,000 years ago you could stand atop its clifftops and look out over grassy plains stretching 75 miles to the sea, where early hunter gatherers stalked herds of deer, mammoth and woolly rhino. We know they were here from a partial human skeleton coated in red ochre, discovered alongside stone tools, beads and ivory ornaments in a cave between Rhossili and Port Eynon in 1823.

The remains were unearthed by William Buckland, Oxford University’s first professor of geology, who was excavating mammoth bones in Goat’s Hole Cave

(also known as Paviland Cave) at the time. In his view, as a staunch creationist churchman, they could not possibly be older than the Great Flood. He also concluded they belonged to a Roman noblewomen, soon after known as the ‘Red Lady of Paviland’. But Buckland could not have been more wrong. Later analysis showed the ‘Red Lady’ was in fact a young male. And modern radiocarbon dating indicates he lived 31 millennia earlier than Professor B assumed. Now on display in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, his incredible discovery is the oldest known ceremonial burial in Western Europe.