torbay hotels
 |
 |
 |
 |
torbay hotels, bed breakfast torbay devon, bed breakfast torquay, guesthouse torbay devon, hotels devon, west country bed breakfast, guest house accommodation, hotels torbay, english riviera holiday hotel,
Kents Cavern is a cave system in Torquay, Devon, England. It is notable for its archaeological and geological features. The caves are a geological Site of Special Scientific Interest (since 1952) and a Scheduled Ancient Monument (since 1957), and are open to the public.
The caverns and passages at the site were created around 2 million years ago by water action, and have been occupied by one of at least eight separate, discontinuous native populations to have inhabited the British Isles. The specimens discovered here are representative of the era's people (the other representative populations are Pakefield, Boxgrove, Swanscombe, Pontnewydd, Kent’s Cavern/Paviland, Gough's Cave and the present descendants of Celtic lineage).
A prehistoric maxilla (upper jawbone) fragment was discovered in the cavern during a 1927 excavation by the Torquay Natural History Society, and named Kents Cavern 4. It is thought to be between 37,000 and 40,000 years old, and although previously it was thought to only be 31,000 years old, it has been recently re-dated. Whether this specimen belongs to Homo sapiens, as originally described, or Homo neanderthalensis as may now be possible, remains a mystery. The specimen is on display at the Torquay Museum.
Maxilla Kent's Cavern 4, then the Gravettian Paviland 1 and Eel Point represents the oldest anatomically modern human known from Britain
Kents Cavern is first recorded as Kents Hole Close on a 1659 deed when the land was leased to John Black. The earliest evidence of exploration of the caves in historic times are the inscriptions "William Petre 1571" and "Robert Hedges 1688" engraved on stalagmites, and the first recorded excavation was that of Thomas Northmore in 1824. Northmore's work attracted the attention of Dean Buckland, the first Reader in Geology at the University of Oxford, who sent a party including John MacEnery to explore the caves in an attempt to find evidence that Mithras was once worshipped in the area. MacEnery, the Roman Catholic chaplain at Torre Abbey, conducted systematic excavations between 1824 and 1829.When MacEnery reported to the British Association the discovery of flint tools below the stalagmites on the cave floor, his work was derided as contrary to Bishop James Ussher's Biblical chronology dating the Creation to 4004 BC.
In September 1845 the recently created Torquay Natural History Society requested permission from Sir Lawrence Palk to explore the caves in order to obtain fossils and artifacts for the planned Torquay Museum, and as a result Edward Vivian and William Pengelly were allowed to conduct excavations between 1846 and 1858. Vivian reported to the Geological Society in 1847, but at the time it was generally believed that early humans had entered the caves long after the formation of the cave structures examined. This changed when in the Autumn of 1859, following the work of Pengelly at the Brixham Cavern and of Jacques de Perthes in France, the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, and the British Association agreed that the excavations had established the antiquity of humanity.
In 1865 the British Association created a committee, led by Pengelly, to fully explore the cave system over the course of fifteen years. It was Pengelly's party that discovered Robert Hedges' stalagmite inscription, and from the stalagmite's growth since that time deduced that human-created artifacts found under the formation could be half a million years old. Pengelly plotted the position of every bone, flint, and other artifact he discovered during the excavations, and afterwards continued working with the Torquay Natural History Society until his death at his home less than 2 km from the caves in 1892.