CAVES OF GOWER IN GLAMORGANSHIRE, SOUTH WALES.
The ossiferous caves of the peninsula of Gower in Glamorganshire have been diligently explored of late years by Dr. Falconer and Lieutenant-Colonel E.R. Wood, who have thoroughly investigated the contents of many which were previously unknown. Among these Dr. Falconer's skilled eye has recognised the remains of almost every quadruped which he had elsewhere found fossil in British caves: in some places the Elephas primigenius, accompanied by its usual companion, the Rhinoceros tichorhinus, in others Elephas antiquus, associated with Rhinoceros hemitoechus, Falconer; the extinct animals being often embedded, as in the Belgian caves, in the same matrix with species now living in Europe, such as the common badger (Meles taxus), the common wolf, and the fox.
In a cavernous fissure called the Raven's Cliff, teeth of several individuals of Hippopotamus major, both young and old, were found; and this in a district where there is now scarce a rill of running water, much less a river in which such quadrupeds could swim. In one of the caves, called Spritsail Tor, bones of the elephants above named were observed, with a great many other quadrupeds of Recent and extinct species.
From one fissure, called Bosco's Den, no less than one thousand antlers of the reindeer, chiefly of the variety called Cervus Guettardi, were extracted by the persevering exertions of Colonel Wood, who estimated that several hundred more still remained in the bone-earth of the same rent.
They were mostly shed horns, and of young animals; and had been washed into the rent with other bones, and with angular fragments of limestone, and all enveloped in the same ochreous mud. Among the other bones, which were not numerous, were those of the cave-bear, wolf, fox, ox, stag, and field-mouse.
But the discovery of most importance, as bearing on the subject of the present work, is the occurrence in a newly-discovered cave, called Long Hole, by Colonel Wood, in 1861, of the remains of two species of rhinoceros, R. tichorhinus and R. hemitoechus, Falconer, in an undisturbed deposit, in the lower part of which were some well-shaped flint knives, evidently of human workmanship. It is clear from their position that Man was coeval with these two species. We have elsewhere independent proofs of his co-existence with every other species of the cave-fauna of Glamorganshire; but this is the first well-authenticated example of the occurrence of R. hemitoechus in connection with human implements.
In the fossil fauna of the valley of the Thames, Rhinoceros leptorhinus was mentioned as occurring at Gray's Thurrock with Elephas antiquus. Dr. Falconer, in a memoir which he is now preparing for the press on the European Pliocene and Pleistocene species of the genus Rhinoceros, has shown that, under the above name of R. leptorhinus, three distinct species have been confounded by Cuvier, Owen, and other palaeontologists:—
1. R. megarhinus, Christol, being the original and typical R. leptorhinus of Cuvier, founded on Cortesi's Monte Zago cranium, and the ONLY Pliocene, or Pleistocene European species, that had not a nasal septum.—Gray's Thurrock, etc.
2. R. hemitoechus, Falconer, in which the ossification of the septum dividing the nostrils is incomplete in the middle, besides other cranial and dental characters distinguishing it from R. tichorhinus, accompanies Elephas antiquus in most of the oldest British bone-caves, such as Kirkdale, Cefn, Durdham Down, Minchin Hole, and other Gower caverns—also found at Clacton, in Essex, and in Northamptonshire.
3. R. etruscus, Falconer, a comparatively slight and slender form, also with an incomplete bony septum,* occurs deep in the Val d'Arno deposits, and in the "Forest bed," and superimposed blue clays, with lignite, of the Norfolk coast, but nowhere as yet found in the ossiferous caves in Britain.
(* Falconer, "Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society"
volume 15 1859 page 602.)
Dr. Falconer announced in 1860 his opinion that the filling up of the Gower caves in South Wales took place after the deposition of the marine boulder clay,* an opinion in harmony with what we have since learnt from the section of the gravels near Bedford, given above (Figure 23), where a fauna corresponding to that of the Welsh caves characterises the ancient alluvium, and is shown to be clearly post-glacial, in the sense of being posterior in date to the boulder-clay of the midland counties.
(* Ibid. volume 16 1860 page 491.)
In the same sense the late Edward Forbes declared, in 1846, his conviction that not only the Cervus megaceros, but also the mammoth and other extinct pachyderms and carnivora, had lived in Britain in post-glacial times.*
(* "Memoir of the Geological Survey" pages 394 to 397.)
The Gower caves in general have their floors strewed over with sand, containing marine shells, all of living species; and there are raised beaches on the adjoining coast, and other geological signs of great alteration in the relative level of land and sea, since that country was inhabited by the extinct mammalia, some of which, as we have seen, were certainly coeval with Man.
