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Buckland’s time. The cliffs are of limestone and have been scoured and beaten by ice and
elements, wave and tide, until only the bare bones of the world remain. There is no hiding the age of the world at Paviland; her face is washed clean of all makeup and the sunlightis unforgiving, revealing every wrinkle of a long life. The several caves of Yellow Top were cut by waves when the sea level was nearly 30 feet higher than today; the mouth of
Goat’s Hole itself is shaped like a teardrop, lying lopsided towards the right.
    Everywhere on the approach the limestone is pitted and pocked, sculpted and carved into outlandish, otherworldly Henry Moore shapes. The possessive tides pull back just long enough to permit an
hour’s access to the base of the steep rock face that leads to the cave, so that any visit in Buckland’s footsteps is either short – or made half a day long by the inundation of
the lower slopes by deep and dangerous water. Inside Goat’s Hole Cave the world of the Reverend Buckland is intact. Behind, back in the daylight, the waves boom just as they did for him on
that January day in 1823, counting more of the seconds, more of the minutes that have passed since the place was transformed into somewhere eternally special. For students of early humankind in
Europe Paviland is a place of pilgrimage, made almost sacred by what it once contained – by what was laid there by people who knew an entirely different world.
    Although the atmosphere of Buckland’s time survives, many of the physical details he recorded within the cave sadly do not. It is hard to imagine how much pristine archaeology remained,
untouched and unnoticed, in places like Goat’s Hole Cave as late as the early nineteenth century. So much of the British landscape has since been picked clean by professional archaeologists
and trophy-hunters alike that it takes some imagination to picture a time when our more recent forebears seemingly paid scant attention to the evidence of ancient worlds lying all around them.
    As Buckland walked towards the rear portion of the cave, beyond the reach of the worst winter storms, he noted that everywhere the floor was covered with ‘a mass of diluvial loam of a
reddish-yellow colour, abundantly mixed with angular fragments of limestone and broken calcareous spar, and interspersed with recent sea-shells’. So far so familiar, but also abundant in the
mix were the teeth and bones of ‘elephant, rhinoceros, bear, hyena, wolf, fox, horse, ox, deer of two or three species, water-rats, sheep, birds and man’.
    Here then was a time capsule – where remnants of ancient pasts, times when other creatures altogether made this land their home – that had been left alone until antiquarians like
William Buckland finally disturbed their peace.
    Buckland knew previous visitors had recently collected quantities ofsupposed elephant bones and ivory, and it was close by the location of those enigmatic remains that he
opened his own trench. What he found, though it evidently moved him hardly at all, would eventually change the world.
    ‘In another part,’ he wrote, ‘I discovered beneath a shallow covering of six inches of earth nearly the entire left side of a human female skeleton.’ He was admirably
methodical as well as confident in his ability to identify all he saw. Scattered among the bones, and laid around them in the grave, he found two handfuls of periwinkle shells, each perforated with
a tiny hole so they could be strung together as a necklace. There were scores of fragments of cylindrical ivory rods, whittled down from tusks and as thick as a finger. There were other items of
ivory too: rings measuring a few inches across, pieces cut into ‘unmeaning forms’ and another the size and shape ‘of a human tongue’. He found as well ‘a short skewer
or chopstick, and made of the metacarpal bone of a wolf’.
    The rod fragments and rings, the shells and the wolf bone – all were stained a deep