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 been 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.[8]

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

  1. ↑ Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman, The Neandertals: changing the image of mankind, ISBN 0-394-58900-9, 1993
  2. ↑ Edward Battersby Bailey, Charles Lyell, 1963
  3. ↑ Stringer, C., Homo Britannicus: The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain, Penguin, London, 2006, ISBN 978-0-14-101813-3
  4. ↑ Malcolm Todd and Andrew Fleming, The South West to AD 1000, ISBN 0-582-49273-4, 1987
  5. ↑ A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Men among the mammoths: Victorian science and the discovery of human prehistory, ISBN 0-226-84991-0, 1993
  6. ↑ 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
  7. ↑ Rosemary Hill, God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain, ISBN 0-300-15161-6, 2009
  8. ↑ The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin, Christopher McGowan, 2002, p 62

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