Red Lady of Paviland

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Red Lady of Paviland is a fairly complete Upper Paleolithic-era human male skeleton dyed in red ochre discovered in 1823 by Rev. William Buckland in one of the Paviland limestone caves of the Gower Peninsula in south Wales.

When Buckland first discovered the skeleton, he misjudged both its age and its sex. Buckland, a devout Christian, believed no human remains could have been older than the Biblical Great Flood, and thus wildly underestimated its true age, believing the remains to date back to the Roman era. Buckland believed the skeleton was female in large part because it was discovered with decorative items, including perforated seashell necklaces and ivory jewelry. These decorative items combined with the skeleton's red dye caused Buckland to mistakenly speculate that the remains belonged to a Roman prostitute or witch.

Later that year, writing about his find in his book Reliquiae Diluvianae (Evidence of the Flood), Buckland stated:

"[I found the skeleton] enveloped by a coating of a kind of ruddle ... which stained the earth, and in some parts extended itself to the distance of about half an inch [12 mm] around the surface of the bones ... Close to that part of the thigh bone where the pocket is usually worn surrounded also by ruddle [were] about two handfuls of the Nerita littoralis [periwinkle shells]. At another part of the skeleton, viz in contact with the ribs [were] forty or fifty fragments of ivory rods [also] some small fragments of rings made of the same ivory and found with the rods ... Both rods and rings, as well as the Nerite shells, were stained superficially with red, and lay in the same red substance that enveloped the bones."

The "lady" has since been identified as a man, probably no older than 21, who lived 29,000 years ago (26,350 ± 550 BP, OxA-1815) at the end of the Upper Paleolithic Period. 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.

Although now on the coast, at the time of the burial the cave would have been located approximately 70 miles inland, overlooking a plain. The ice sheet of the most recent glacial period, in the British Isles called the Devensian Glaciation, would have been advancing towards the site, and 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. 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; instead, it was housed at Oxford University, where Buckland was a professor. It remains there to this day, though a campaign is now underway to return it to Wales, where it may go on display at the Swansea National Waterfront Museum. 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 of Cardiff.