The Monsters from Daylight Rock (1)

This is a photo of Daylight Rock, one of the key locations in unravelling the story of the Ice Age in Wales.  It's near the eastern end of Caldey Island, off the south Pembrokeshire coast.  This is where a piece of bone from a cave lion (pictured below) was found long ago, in a deep crevice (there is no actual cave here, unlike Nanna's Cave, Potter's Cave, Eel Point and Ogof-yr-Ychen).  There is quite an assemblage of bones from these Caldey sites:  woolly rhinoceros, cave hyaena, cave bear, horse, lion or tiger, mammoth, hippopotamus, brown bear, giant Irish deer, bison, wolf and reindeer.  This is a typical Ice Age cold-climate menagerie from the late Pleistocene -- and the radiocarbon dates confirm that some of the animals were alive on the island )which would not then have been an island) around 20,000 - 25,000 years ago.  One of the rhinoceros bones found by Brother James in Ogof-yr-Ychen was dated at 22,340 yrs BP, and other dates from South Wales caves seem to cluster around 22,000 - 28,000 yrs BP, with some outside this range also.  There is one older date for a reindeer bone which is around 30,000 yrs BP.

Then we have the human remains -- the bones of the "Red Lady of Paviland" now dated as c 26,000 yrs BP  and a human humerus from Eel Point dated to 24,470 yrs BP (Schulting et al, 2005).

While there has been much discussion of the accuracy of the radiocarbon dates for all these Ice Age samples, including errors introduced post-collection storage and down to groundwater and other types of ground contamination, and down to the nature of the diets consumed by the animals (including humans) that have been dated, not a lot of dabate has centred on the position of the Devensian ice front in the period we are talking about.  The peak of the Devensian glaciation (ie the time of most extensive ice) is assumed to have been somewhere around 23,000 - 20,000 BP in this area -- maybe the timing was different elsewhere.  That becomes very intriguing -- there is no obvious "break" in the sequence of C14 dates between 18,000 and 30,000 yrs BP.  Does that mean that the Devensian ice never reached Caldey Island, Paviland Cave or any of the other Pleistocene bone caves found in the Carboniferous limestone areas of South Wales?

To be continued.....

Quote:
"................. the majority of the abundant bone from the (Eel Point) site was sold by the quarrymen for manure, or simply dumped into the sea (Smith, 1860). Species noted as present by Smith, Laws and W. Boyd Dawkins include woolly rhinoceros, cave hyaena, cave bear, horse, lion or tiger, mammoth, hippopotamus, brown bear, giant Irish deer, bison, wolf and possibly reindeer. Investigations were renewed in 1950 by van Nedervelde and W. F. Grimes, but by then it seemed that quarrying had largely destroyed the cave (Lacaille and Grimes, 1955). However, persistent investigations by van Nedervelde led to the discovery in 1986 of sealed fissures containing more Pleistocene fauna (Davies, 1989; Davies and Smith, 1989). Pleistocene faunal remains and stone tools are well known from most of the Caldey Island sites, although the association between the two is far from certain. A deep, infilled swallet at Ogof-yr-Ychen was found to contain the bones of rhinoceros and hyaena together with many red deer antlers, as well as two struck adinole flakes and one chert flake (David, 1990: 22). Adinole is a raw material usually associated with Upper Palaeolithic tool assemblages in Wales. A radio-carbon determination of 22,340 G 620 BP (Birm- 340) was obtained on one of the rhinoceros bones (van Nedervelde et al., 1973)."

Source:  A Mid-Upper Palaeolithic human humerus from Eel Point, South Wales, UK
Rick J Schulting, Erik Trinkaus, Tom Higham, Robert Hedges, Michael Richards, Bernice Cardy
in Jnl of Human Evolution 2005