Kirkdale Cave
A Time Machine to a different era of
geological time in the heart of our ancestral home
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William Buckland and the Bone Caves
The
story of William Buckland’s amazing discovery, five hundred metres from our
ancestral home |
The geographic guide to Kirkdale cave
will help you to locate it.
The
discovery of Kirkdale Cave
In 1821, the
woodland clearing only 50 metres from Kirkdale minster, close to the ford
across the Hodge Beck, was part of a quarry. It was being worked for road stone
and quarry workers cut through the cave entrance. They spread stone chippings
on the road, not noticing small bones.
Kirkdale
Cave from Rev. George Young D.D, A Picture of Whitby and its environs,
1840.
The cave was
later found to have been covered by many inches depth of animal bones beneath a
layer of dried mud. The vicar of Kirkdale spotted the bones and reported his
find to the Reverend William Buckland, who was a professor of minerology and
geology at Oxford University.
Buckland
came to the site in 1822. The discovery at Kirkdale was made at the beginning
of a new age of Enlightenment and new approaches to stratigraphic dating were
being developed.
Some of the
fossils were sent to William Clift, the curator of the museum of the Royal
College of Surgeons, who identified some of the bones as the remains of hyenas
larger than any of the modern species. The analysis enabled Buckland to report
to the Royal Society in London the discovery of:
• Straight tusked elephant, rhinoceros,
hippopotamus, bison and giant bear finds from an earlier warmer period of the
earth’s history; and
• Mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, reindeer,
horse and sabre tooth tiger remains from the later cold spells.
Buckland had
begun his investigation believing that the fossils in the cave were diluvial.
He initially concluded that they had been deposited there by a deluge that had
washed them from far away, possibly the Biblical flood. On further analysis
Buckland realised that such an analysis made no sense.
The hyena
bones were abundant and evidenced that hyena had dragged animal parts into the
cave to eat them. The mouth of the cave is not larger than one metre in height,
so Buckland concluded that the varied animal remains were the prey of hyena,
dragged into the cave. He came to realise that the cave had never been open to
the surface through its roof, and that the only entrance was too small for the
carcasses of animals as large as elephants or hippos to have floated in. He
began to suspect that the animals had lived in the local area, and that the
hyenas had used the cave as a den and brought in remains of the various animals
they fed on. This hypothesis was supported by the fact that many of the bones
showed signs of having been gnawed prior to fossilisation, and by the presence
of objects which Buckland suspected to be fossilised hyena dung. Further
analysis, including comparison with the dung of modern spotted hyenas living in
menageries, confirmed the identification of the fossilised dung.
His
reconstruction of an ancient ecosystem from detailed analysis of fossil
evidence was admired at the time, and considered to be an example of how
geo-historical research should be done. The minute and painstaking accuracy of
his observation and description of the bones set new standards of scientific
method. The Kirkdale cave discoveries helped to inspire a landmark in the
development of geological study.
31 – Ox
tibia, Pleistocene, Kirkdale Cave
32 – Deer
tooth, Cervus sp, Pleistocene, Kirkdale Cave
33 – Cave
Earth, Pleistocene, Kirkdale Cave
34 – Red
deer antler, cervus elephus,
Pleistocene, Kirkdale Cave
35 –
Hyena tooth, Pleistocene, Kirkdale Cave
36 –
Hyena tooth, Pleistocene, Kirkdale Cave
37 = Bear
tibia, Ursus sp, Pleistocene, Kirkdale Cave
(Kirkdale
fossils displayed at the Scarborough Rotunda Museum)
Enlightenment
Realisation
A few days
before reading his formal paper about his Kirkdale conclusions, Buckland gave a
colourful account at a dinner held by the Geological Society: The hyaenas,
gentlemen, preferred the flesh of elephants, rhinoceros, deer, cows, horses,
etc., but sometimes, unable to procure these, and half starved, they used to
come out of the narrow entrance of their cave in the evening down to the
water's edge of a lake which must once have been there, and so helped
themselves to some of the innumerable water-rats in which the lake abounded.
In 1823 he
published his well received findings in his work Reliquiae
Diluvianae, or “Observations
on the Organic Remains contained in Caves, Fissures and Diluvial Gravel, and on
other Geological Phenomena, Attesting the Action of an Universal Deluge”.
In 1995, the
cave was extended from its original length of 175 metres to 436 metres by
Scarborough Caving Club. A survey was published in Descent
magazine.
All the
bones at Kirkdale were deposited across the cave floor. Later, on a single
occasion, a sediment of mud was introduced. This covered thousands of bone
remains. Perhaps this mud was carried in by a rush of water, which might have
been part of the glacial melt flooding through Newton Dale which caused the
ancient Lake Pickering to reach a depth of 250 metres. Thereafter a gradual
reduction in the depth of Lake Pickering followed over many years, as water
escaped through Kirkham Gorge, to flow towards the Humber Region.
Calcite
deposits overlying the bone-bearing sediments have been dated as 121,000 ± 4000
YBP using uranium-thorium dating. This dates the Kirkdale material to the
Ipswichian or Eemain Interglacial era. This was an
interglacial period which began about 130,000 YBP at the end of the Penultimate
Glacial Period and ended about 115,000 YBP at the beginning of the Last Glacial
Period. The climate then was warmer than it is today, with a higher global sea
level and smaller ice-sheets. During the Last Inter Glacial, polar temperatures
were about 3 to 5 °C higher than today. The global sea level was at least 6.6
metres above present levels and the global surface temperature was about 1 °C
warmer compared to the pre-industrial era.
The
specimens were an original part of the archaeology collection of the Yorkshire
Museum and it is said that "the scientific interest aroused founded the
Yorkshire Philosophical Society".
While
criticised by some, William Buckland's analysis of Kirkland Cave and other bone
caves was widely seen as a model for how careful analysis could be used to
reconstruct the Earth's past, and the Royal Society awarded William Buckland
the Copley Medal in 1822 for his Kirkdale paper. At the presentation the
society's president, Humphry Davy, said: By these inquiries, a distinct
epoch has, as it were, been established in the history of the revolutions of
our globe, a point fixed from which our researches may be pursued through the
immensity of ages, and the records of animate nature, as it were, carried back
to the time of the creation.
There is no
prehistoric evidence of human habitation from the Kirkdale excavations. There
have been local finds of later worked flint. It is possible that there was some
prehistoric ritual landscape in the area and this would be consistent with
later early religious use which often followed at prehistoric ritual sites.
The
discoveries in Kirkdale cave caused a sensation at the time. The fossilised
remains were embedded in a silty layer sandwiched between layers of stalagmite.
Later
discoveries by Buckland
The
energetic Buckland went on to explore twenty further caves in the next two
years, and even imported a hyena to Oxford to observe the habits of killing and
dismembering its prey in order to test his hypotheses.
Three years
after his Kirkdale discovery, William Buckland discovered the footprints of a
giant lizard which he called Megalosaurus, but which would later be
called dinosaurs.
William
Buckland also explored and interpreted the Bronze Age Ryedale Windy Pits.
A time
machine
This was before
the age of humans in Britian, but a place of very deep antiquity, and the very
place where our ancestors would later live, in a different period of geological
time.
A vast epoch
of time then passed before the first human settlers following the last great
Ice Age entered Britain across Doggerland, the
lowlands of what is now the North Sea, probably following animals such as
reindeer. The first people arrived in the area of the North Yorks Moors about
10,000 years ago. They were hunters, hunting wild animals across the moors and
in the forests. Relics of this early hunting, gathering and fishing community
have been found as a widespread scattering of flint tools and the barbed flint
flakes used in arrows and spears.
or
Explore the Kirkdale Cave portal to the
past
You will
find a chronology, together with source material on the Kirkdale page.