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The “Red Lady of Paviland”
An ancient cave in Wales and the folly of history
In 1823, an Oxford professor entered Paviland Cave on the south coast of the Gower Peninsula in Wales. Inside, he found bones that were 33,000 years old from the Upper Paleolithic period.
The professor was William Buckland, a theologian and paleontologist and later Dean of Westminster. He called the skeleton the “Red Lady” because the bones were red and he assumed it had to therefore be the remains of a local prostitute from the Roman period of occupation in Britain. (I have yet to wrap my mind around his conclusion and I have known this story for many years.)
Instead, the skeleton was the remains of a male, and at the time, the oldest example of a modern human fossil. The bones remain the earliest evidence of a burial ceremony in Western Europe. They had been painted with red ochre as a gesture of honor to the dead. The Red Lady of Paviland was a real person, and given honorable care and respect.
Without carbon dating (developed in 1946), we might actually still believe Buckland’s assessment. History is filled with reports of mysteries unearthed and assigned value based on belief and prejudice and…
