Kent’s Cavern, near Torquay, was one of the first British Palaeolithic sites to be excavated. Between AD 1825 and 1829 Father J. MacEnery discovered flint tools and the remains of now-extinct animals, which were clearly of great age. This was at a time when the biblical version of creation was widely believed and his observations were largely rejected. Later work confirmed that these artefacts did indeed date from the Palaeolithic.

This, together with more recent work, has shown that Kent’s Cavern was intermittently occupied by humans over 500,000 years. The cave consists of a series of galleries and chambers, with different parts containing separate evidence of human occupation. The earliest evidence consists of handaxes, flakes and flake tools which date to at least 500,000 years ago.

Handaxes and scrapers found with the remains of mammoth, reindeer and woolly rhino show that the cave was occupied in the later Middle Palaeolithic, about 50,000 years ago. There were at least four further periods of occupation during the Upper Palaeolithic between 40,000 and 28,000 years ago, and about 12,000 years ago. Artefacts discovered from those periods were all made by modern humans, as shown by the recovery of a human jaw bone, radiocarbon-dated to 30,900 years ago.