John MacEnery
Father John MacEnery (27 November 1797–18 February 1841) was a Roman Catholic priest from Limerick, Ireland [1][2] and early archaeologist[3] who came to Devon as Chaplain to the Cary family at Torre Abbey in 1822.[4] In 1825, 1826 and 1829,[5] he investigated the prehistoric remains at Kent's Cavern in Devon,[6] having being shown the cave by Thomas Northmore.[7]
MacEnery concluded that the palaeolithic flint tools he found in the same contexts as the bones of extinct prehistoric mammals meant that early humans and the creatures such as mammoths co-existed.
His contemporaries had great difficulty reconciling his findings to their pre-Darwinian, creationist view of the earth's history. MacEnery left Torquay and his cave research in 1830. He never published and it was left to William Pengelly to publicise and explore his findings in 1859, years after MacEnery's death at age 43.
References
- ^ Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman, The Neandertals: changing the image of mankind, ISBN 0394589009, 1993
- ^ Edward Battersby Bailey, Charles Lyell, 1963
- ^ Stringer, C., Homo Britannicus: The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain, Penguin, London, 2006, ISBN 978-0-141-01813-3
- ^ Malcolm Todd and Andrew Fleming, The South West to AD 1000, ISBN 0582492734, 1987
- ^ A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Men among the mammoths: Victorian science and the discovery of human prehistory, ISBN 0226849910, 1993
- ^ E. M. M Alexander, Father John MacEnery: scientist or charlatan?, Devonshire Association Report and Transactions, ed. H.H. Wilker, 96, 113-46, ISSN 03097994, 1964
- ^ Rosemary Hill, God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain, ISBN 0300151616, 2009
External links
| Persondata |
| Name |
Macenery, John |
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| Short description |
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| Date of birth |
1796 |
| Place of birth |
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| Date of death |
1841 |
| Place of death |
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