Qualla: Kents Cavern

Kents Cavern: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1927, an excavator working through the upper sediment of a Devon limestone cave lifted out a fragment of an upper jawbone. It was clearly human. It was not clearly anything else. Catalogued as Kents Cavern 4, it sat at the Torquay Museum for decades as a curious old find. Then, in 2011, a team radiocarbon-dated the layers around it and concluded that the jaw was between 41,500 and 44,200 years old. If correct, the fragment was the oldest anatomically modern human fossil yet discovered in Britain and northwestern Europe. A small piece of bone, picked up from a poorly-recorded nineteenth-century dig, suddenly held the deepest English claim to the moment when our species first walked into this corner of the continent. Above it in the same cave, layer upon layer, were the bones of cave bears, the teeth of an extinct sabertooth, the tools of Neanderthals, and a slow accumulation of human visits that has not really stopped for half a million years.

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kents Cavern: How a Cave Becomes a Library

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. Kents Cavern formed in Devonian limestone, eroded by water rising through the rock during the Early Pleistocene, and then slowly filling, over the next two million years, with everything that fell or wandered in. The lowest layer, the Red Sands, was probably laid down by an ancie...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kents Cavern: Cave Bears and a Sabertooth's Tooth

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. During MIS 11, around 400,000 years ago, cave bears used Kents Cavern as a hibernation den. They died in their sleep, or in fights, or of age, and their bones accumulated in the Breccia. Excavations found remains of the transitional bear species between archaic Ursus deningeri an...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kents Cavern: Neanderthals, Modern Humans, and Pengelly's Notes

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. The cave was occupied, on and off, by Neanderthals during the late Middle Palaeolithic, around 60,000 to 40,000 years ago. Their Mousterian tools, mostly lost in the nineteenth-century digs, included bifaces, scrapers, and two Levallois flakes. The traces are not a record of long...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kents Cavern: The Carpenter Who Bought a Cave

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthew Hartley, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1903 the cave passed out of Lord Haldon's estate and into the hands of Francis Powe, a Torquay carpenter who needed somewhere to build beach huts. He used the cavern as a workshop. The Powe family still owns it. On 23 August 2003 they celebrated a century of ownership with an ...

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Image: Matthew Hartley | CC BY-SA 2.0