The Oldest Human Fossils Ever Discovered Have Stories to Tell
The first fossil skeleton of a human ever discovered was found, in 1823, in southern Wales, ceremonially buried under six inches of soil in a limestone cave facing the sea. William Buckland, the Oxford geologist who unearthed it, didn’t know what he had come upon. Buckland had been busy exploring caves in England and Germany, noting the loamy soils and the animal bones they contained as indications of “the last great convulsion that has affected our planet’’—the Biblical flood, he meant. In Goat’s Hole Cave, in Wales, he found the bones of a hyena, a bear, a rhinoceros, an elephant (actually a mastodon), deer, rats, and birds, and roughly half of a human skeleton, which had been stained with red ochre and laid to rest with periwinkle shells and an assortment of ivory rods and broken armlets. At first, Buckland thought it was a man—perhaps a taxman killed by smugglers—but then he decided that it was a woman, maybe a fortune-teller, or a witch, or a prostitute from the days of the Roman occupation. He called her the Red Lady of Paviland. Whoever she’d been, Buckland wrote, she was “clearly postdiluvian,” a relatively recent deposit.
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