Читать книгу Walking on the Gower. 30 walks exploring the AONB peninsula in South Wales онлайн

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History

The first humans to appear in Gower were small groups of nomadic hunters and gatherers who left behind little evidence of their visits as they moved through the landscape during the Palaeolithic era. Clues to their presence come from stone tools or waste from their manufacture. The chance find of a flint axe on Rhossili beach has pointed to human activity in this area as early as 125,000 years ago; then there is nothing until 100,000 years later, when further evidence for human presence is found, mainly from cave sites such as Cathole.

Excavations in the limestone caves have revealed evidence for Palaeolithic and Mesolithic activity, with the most famous of these being the ‘Red Lady of Paviland’. This was in fact the burial of a Cro-Magnon man, the earliest known modern human, just before the final advance of the ice sheets 28,000 years ago in the Upper Palaeolithic. For around 15,000 years afterwards the climate was too cold for human occupation but, as the temperature warmed from around 13,000 years ago, people returned and the cave sites were again occupied by hunter-gatherer groups pursuing prey. There were probably no more than 50 people in the whole of Wales at this time, consisting of one or two extended families.