KENT'S CAVERN, a large limestone cave near Torquay, England, which has yielded some of the earliest evidence of man's co-existence with extinct animals. The Rev. J. McEnery, who investigated the upper deposits (1825-29), was perhaps the first man to proclaim this fact. In 1840 Godwin Austin con firmed McEnery's view; the continuous excavations (1865 8o) carried on by Wm. Pengelly on behalf of the British Associ ation completed the proof. The following are the main strata in the cave, in descending order : (I) A superficial deposit of black mould, confined to an area near the main entrances, and contain ing objects of the Roman, early iron, and bronze ages. Most in teresting are sherds of La Tene pottery with incised curvilinear designs in the style of the Glastonbury lake village ware. (2) A floor of granular stalagmite, up to three ft. thick, incorporating remains of the Neolithic period, and also such bones of the ex tinct cave fauna as lay upon the surface of the more ancient stratum of cave earth. (3) A local deposit of burnt bones, char coal and ashes (the Black Band), confined to an area adjacent to the northern entrance, and from two to six in. thick. In this prehistoric hearth, and in the cave earth immediately beneath it, three harpoons were found, two of which approximate, in their trapezoidal barbs, to the harpoons found on sites of the Mag leinose culture in Northern Europe. Associated with these were flint implements apparently of a very late Aurignacian type. (4) A deposit of unstratified, light-red cave earth, of unknown depth near the entrances, but thinning out towards the interior of the cave. This deposit yielded rich finds of mammoth, rhinoceros, cave bear, and other fauna of the Late Pleistocene period, with hyena and horse predominating, in association with flint imple ments of the Proto-Solutrian, Aurignacian, and Mousterian pe riods. (5) A floor of crystalline stalagmite, up to I2ft. thick, rest ing on (6) a compact breccia composed of bones and occasional pebbles in a matrix of dark red grit derived from the neighbour ing hills. The bones were almost only those of the cave bear, associated incongruously with rude flint implements of Chellean type, sometimes lightly rolled, and presumably of earlier date than the bones. The breccia is of unknown thickness near the
west end of the cave, but thins out towards the entrances. Re mains of at least two additional stalagmite floors at different levels in the cave earth suggest that this latter deposit was laid down during three separate periods of erosion, interrupted by two intervals of calm, the entire process resulting in some confusion of the successive deposits of cave earth. Incorporated in the breccia are blocks of stalagmite indicating the former existence of a more ancient floor, formed upon the surface of a still older deposit. This may still exist somewhere in the cave, rock bot tom having been reached over only a small area. To one of these more ancient deposits the remains of the sabre-toothed tiger, dis covered in the cave earth, may originally have belonged. The human remains of Palaeolithic date consist of a brachycephalic skull from a fissure near the northern entrance; a portion of an upper jaw, with teeth, from the base of the granular stalagmite; and a fragment of an upper jaw, with three teeth, found ten feet deep in the cave earth. They are all of late Palaeolithic type. Excavations were resumed in 1926 by members of the Torquay Natural History Society, in conjunction with a committee of the British Association. Principal collections are at British Museum, Natural History Museum and Museum of the Natural History Society, Torquay.
(H. G. D.)