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| Kirkdale Cave - Hyena Mandible |
I started reading 'Ancestors' by Professor Alice Robert yesterday. The first burial of the seven she describes was 'The Red Lady of Paviland. In actual fact it was a male skeleton they found in the cave on the Gower in Wales. To be more precise half a skeleton with the skull missing. But it wasn't that story that intrigued me. Alice Robert had talked about a similar cave not far from where I used to live. The Kirkdale Cave situated between Pickering and Helmsley. We never visited it but walked very near through a forested area, along a track with old Lucy. Who we always had to keep an eye on or she would slip down into a culvert for the dried out beck there, (she loved dark places and holes) Paul always panicked we might lose her.
"Account of an assemblage of fossil teeth and bones of elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, bear, tiger, and hyaena, and sixteen other animals; discovered in a cave at Kirkdale, Yorkshire, in the year 1821: with a comparative view of five similar caverns in various parts of England, and others on the Continent.", by William Buckland, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol.112 (1822), pp.171-236.
The Kirkdale cave was full of the bones of extinct animals and hyenas as above. And was excavated by a Victorian vicar called Buckland. The whole drama of who or what created our Earth was played out vividly in the Victorian age and Buckland had his views changed from the Bronze Age myths of Noah and the flood, Adam and Eve, not forgetting the seven days when God created the world, to a realisation that the Earth had a very long history of coming into being. The geologists at the time were beginning to understand the stratification of rocks and the Ice Ages. Darwin started to change the thinking.
It is not so long ago of course and we have come on in leaps and bounds trying to understand the world around us. Only yesterday I learnt of an enormous black hole that moves around in space and is enormous compared to our Sun. Scary but it is billions of light years away.
It made me think that area of North Yorkshire, The Pickering Vale has a long history of human settlement, there is also the Mesolithic Star Carr site as well.
Not far from here in Kirkdale proper, though there is no village is the old Anglo/Saxon minister which we visited several times with a history stretching back to the Saxons in its stones. Written about here.
I should have persevered with the Alice Roberts book - but wasn't in the right frame of mind for a heavy(weight!) big book !
ReplyDeleteRead your old post - Now that's what you call an old church, makes those I've visited seem really modern
Annoying things about new paperback books, is that they close up too quickly on their own as well. I was a bit scrappy about Alice Roberts, couldn't think why but it was simply that as an archaeologist she never got her hands dirty.... Her writing is good though Sue.
DeleteArchaeology is endlessly fascinating - it is hard to imagine our countryside with such creatures roaming in it. I imagine that poor Vicar was questioning his faith when he realized the enormity of this find. Yet there are still people in America (not just the Bible Belt either) who are creationists and I used to write to someone who said she knew for a fact that Adam and Eve weren't cavemen!!
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed revisiting your Kirkdale post too. Old churches have such wonderful histories.
It must have a very revealing experience for the 19th century vicars as they broke open the barrows and found all this stuff. I wonder what sort of crisis they went through over their religion, and to think it still persists in some people in this modern age Jennie.
ReplyDeleteI read her book last year. Really enjoyed it once I got past the first chapter which rather went off at a tangent I felt. The free Future Learn course "The mysteries of Star Carr" I found to be really interesting. Arilx
ReplyDeleteI think I skipped a few pages at first Aril, I have a terrible habit of working out beginning/middle/end in fiction and once there that is it. But I found she wrote well and took in all aspects of the history which isn't just about the finding of the bones.
DeleteHow ironic that you should post this. Even when I still believed, my belief in evolution were not at odds with my belief in the Bible. I read this on someone else's blog, quoting C.S. Lewis' Version of the Garden of Eden - For long centuries God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself. He gave it hands whose thumb could be applied to each of the fingers, and jaws and teeth and throat capable of articulation, and a brain sufficiently complex to execute all of the material motions whereby rational thought is incarnated.....then in the fullness of time God caused to descend upon this organism both on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say "I and Me" and which could look upon itself as an object, which knew God, which could make judgements of truth, beauty and goodness..and could perceive time flowing past"
ReplyDeleteHi Debby, I always loved Aslan but storytelling is what we do for each other to make sense of the world. C.S.Lewis is exploring his faith. Funnily enough both Lewis and Tolkien were Catholic and friends and must have discussed faith in the pub they frequented. I am not a believer, though educated at a convent ;) But the truth spiralled down at about age 7 years, when, at Sunday school, I looked down at my little book of prayers and saw a picture of many faces all WASP's and questioned so where is everyone else? Love the quote, in a sense it is what we are all aiming for - a new kind of consciousness - often expressed today in love of nature.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I have found, since the fall of Afghanistan, that my faith and my belief has vanished. The following church service, I was reading, and psalm was something to do with 'if I call on you I will be saved', and I thought of all the millions of prayers that went up around the world which went unanswered. It popped into my head that this psalm was holy hyperbole and I could not shake that thought. I tried. When I discussed my feelings, I discovered that some Christians feel that they were not saved because they were not praying properly. I found myself increasingly angry with people of that mindset and also with the idea of a God that would condone a mindset like that. I have to tell you that Ukraine has done nothing but reinforce that cessation of belief. I do not want to be this way, but I am. I no longer believe in God, but I do believe in good, and I believe we all have a responsibility to be part of that.
DeleteI hadn't realised that you had a belief Debby, well up to a certain time ago. Faith is a delicate subject to discuss, often you will find a scornful attitude in this country to such things. Other faiths become politicised for various reasons. Archaeology takes you away from belief in a God/gods. Humans are very symbolic in their nature therefore we have to hold onto something else to make sense. the worst thing we have to face is of course inevitable death, therefore we ritualise it. The church itself was built on fear, you will see it in any medieval painting on a church wall. Good is the balance against bad, I actually believe in yin and yang, two forces gently buffeting against each in our natures and outside forces. Ukraine is about ambition and power (in a man who seems to be going mad!)
DeleteI like Alice Roberts, both on screen and her writing. I have read a few of her books, not her latest but it does sound interesting. It must have been such a challenging time, when they started to find fossilised bones, to make sense of them and to fit them into the doctrine of the time. I have friends who have a strong faith but I have never discussed with them how ancient history fits into that for them. Like you say storytelling is how we make sense of the world and have done since time immemorial, no doubt.
ReplyDeleteWell as always telling stories was there before writing. It is a difficult subject, religion. So many belief systems that we fear to tread on because of people's sensitivity. Archaeology stands like all the sciences as a truth but unfortunately there are so many missing clues it is difficult to join the pieces.
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