The "Red Lady of Paviland", a fairly…
28557 BCE to 26830 BCE
The "Red Lady of Paviland", a fairly complete Upper Paleolithic-era human male skeleton dyed in red ocher buried in coastal south Wales, will be the first human fossil to have been found anywhere in the world.
The "lady" has since been identified as a man, probably no older than twenty-one.
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 in 1823 along with a mammoth's skull, which has since been lost, by the Reverend William Buckland, during an archaeological dig at Goat's Hole Cave, one of the limestone caves between Port Eynon and Rhossili, on the Gower Peninsula, south Wales.
Buckland believed the skeleton was female in large part because it was discovered with decorative items, including perforated seashell necklaces and jewelry thought to be of elephant ivory but now known to have been carved from a mammoth tusk.
Buckland believed the remains to be those of a Roman prostitute or witch dating to Roman Britain.
However, more recent analysis of the remains shows them to have been a young male, and radiocarbon dating shows the skeleton to date around twenty nine thousand years before present (BP).
Although now on the coast, at the time of the burial the cave would have been located approximately seventy miles inland, overlooking a plain.
When the remains were dated to some twenty-six thousand 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.
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 indicates that he lived at a warmer period.
Bone protein analysis indicates that the "lady" lived on a diet that consisted of between fifteen percent and twenty percent 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.