DISCOVERY OF PRE-NEOLITHIC MAN 47 
We cannot begin a brief survey of how the very ancient 
world of Palaeolithic man has been revealed to us more 
profitably than by taking our stand on the south coast of 
Wales, where we studied Neolithic man of the submerged- 
forest period. To the west of Aberavon and Swansea, 
the peninsula of Gower juts southwards, exposing its 
limestone cliffs, 100 feet high, on the shore of the Bristol 
Channel. The Paviland cave opens on the seaward face 
of the cliffs, 30 feet above the tide, but not beyond the 
reach of the waves in time of storm. In the latter part 
of the eighteenth century news of the discovery of extinct 
forms of animals — elephant, rhinoceros, bear, lion, and 
hyena — in the strata of caves in South Germany had 
spread abroad, and the antiquarians of South Wales were 
led to seek for and to find similar remains in the floor of 
the Paviland cave. This discovery brought Dean Buck- 
land, then reader of Geology in the University of Oxford, 
hot-foot to South Wales in 1822. The Dean found 
abundance of the bones of these extinct animals in the 
strata of the floor ; he also discovered the skeleton ^ of a 
tall man, coloured red with ochre, buried side by side 
with the bones of extinct animals. Curiously shaped 
flint implements, with ornaments and implements worked 
in bone and in ivory, lay in the same stratum. The Dean 
was able to explain the occurrence of a human skeleton 
side by side with the bones of extinct animals in a manner 
satisfactory both to himself and the men of his time. 
The animals were pre-diluvian ; they had been swept 
within the Paviland cave by the great flood through which 
the ark rode in safety. The human remains were post- 
diluvian ; they had been buried there by people who had 
settled in Britain after the universal deluge. It was then 
an article of faith that man did not exist in Western 
Europe before the flood. 
About the same time a Roman Catholic priest, the 
Rev. J. MacEnery, stationed near Torquay, became in- 
terested in caves. In 1825, in one of the wooded dales 
' See Professor SoUas's Huxley Lecture,/^/////. Roy. Anthrop. liislil., 
1913, vol. xliii. p. I. 
