Name Index

To

The Literature of the Oreston Caves near Plymouth

Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 1872 , Vol. V, pp. 249-316.

by

W. Pengelly, FRS, FGS

Prepared by Michael Steer

Plymouth has had a remarkable and unique history of bone-cave discoveries since the very beginning of the 19th Century, when the working of the Admiralty Breakwater Quarries at Oreston first breached caves filled with fossil bones. The climax of these occasional encounters with the City's buried fossil heritage came with the breaching of a fissure at Cattedown in Autumn 1886, wherein were eventually discovered the remains of at least fifteen hominins, which were subsequently excavated and researched by a local naturalist, R.N. Worth and others. Owing to both the geographical location of the discoveries, in a European context, and to the quantitative and qualitative nature and physical disposition of the human remains, this is one of the most important discoveries ever documented about the history of "anatomically-modern humans" or Homo sapiens sapiens in Europe. The article, from a copy of a rare and much sought-after journal can be downloaded from the Internet Archive. Google has sponsored the digitisation of books from several libraries. These books, on which copyright has expired, are available for free educational and research use, both as individual books and as full collections to aid researchers.