The Age of the Kirkdale Cave Palaeofauna

The Kirkdale Cave palaeofauna represents the original and classic 'warm', interglacial mammalian cave deposit in Britain. Although long considered to be ' Ipswichian' in age, no previous attempts to obtain radiometric dates have been recorded. Here we report a uranium-series disequilibrium date of 121,000 ± 4000 yr BP on a flowstone capping that overlay the original bone bed. The precision of the date exceeds that obtained at any other British Interglacial cave site, and permits tentative correlation with the high precision ice core records now available. (Received 16 September 1997; Accepted 5 January 1998) BACKGROUND AND HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION "By the crust o/thy Stalactite floor, The post-Adamite ages I've reckoned, Summed their years, days & hours & more, And lfind it comes right to the second. " Coneybeare, 1822 [see also Figure 3J Kirkdale Cave [British National Grid Reference SE 6783 8562' 1 is an abandoned phreatic resurgence cave, 175m in length, located 58m above sea level, on the northern edge of the Vale of Pickering, north Yorkshire. The cave first came to public attention in June 1821, when it was intersected by a quarrying operation on the east bank of the Hodge Beck. Before that time, the entrance had been completely choked and presented no indications of its existence (Young, 1823; Fig.I). Fortuitously, the local surgeon, John Harrison, noticed teeth and bone in road aggregate and traced the source to the -15-30cm-deep layer of sediment on the cave floor. Over the next four months, a diverse group of local naturalists excavated in the cave, amassing a large collection of mammalian remains of unusual aspect. The existence of hyaena, hippopotamus, 'tiger', and other decidedly atypical Yorkshire fauna marked this discovery as one of some importance, and in November 1821 William Buckland (1784-1856), the first Professor of Geology at Oxford and later Dean of Westminster, was invited to visit the cave. a The national grid reference is reported inaccurately in Boylan, 1981. Figure 1. Kirkdale Cave and the Hodge Beck Quarry as they appeared in late 1821, at the time of Buckland's visit. From Buckland, 1823. Buckland was profoundly influenced by his excavations at Kirkdale, and began a series of cave visits in Britain and Germany that culminated in his Re/iquiae Diluvianae (Buckland, 1823), a volume of seminal importance to scientific speleology, the understanding of late Quaternary extinctions, and the progress of Natural Theology. Buckland's work and philosophy have been documented in some detail by North (1942) and Boylan (1967). The very large number of specimens collected from Kirkdale Cave came to be widely dispersed amongst a dozen museums. Tragically, those in the collections of Royal College of Surgeons and the museums of Bristol and Hull were subsequently destroyed during the hostilities of the Second World War. Boylan (1981) traced some 1,250 remaining specimens and provided a thorough revision of their taxonomic representation. Most 'notably, Boylan resolved the apparently enigmatic concurrence of a 'warm' fauna (eg, Hippopotamus) with 'cold' fauna (such as the woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta) by demonstrating that the latter were erroneous identifications. The Kirkdale fauna is now considered to be a classic example of an 'Ipswichian' warm interglacial mammalian assemblage, many other examples of which are known from epigean sites and are assigned to Pollen Zone IpIIb (Stuart, 1976). These faunas are characterised by the presence of hippopotamus (Hippopotamus), rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus), hyaena (Crocuta), lion (Panthera leo) and straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon), and are often referred to collectively as the 'hippopotamus' fauna, Unfortunately, correlation of either the : ___ "~"1r .... j7\r-:,,'-. .. ,,_,. c. /i r . .I " .'IL.I\; . ! , f' \~ (. \~' ; / £ J::.li -~ , ~ (\ i. \) ' ! " ~ P I( "t )! ~0-__ 1) \~._:'~~_ -'~.-~ .• _ • • .f,-:.. __ ~ _ ':...:. _ ' " j \. . A L. ~" ~~~:~~~;:;';:~_:':' ''' ~: 4f;'d .. 'j( ~tt'" . ., -;"';::I'i.·(<ll·(, .