Kents Cavern: Inside the Cave of Stone-Age Secrets - Test 1

C2 Proficiency · Multiple Matching · Proficiency Testbuilder, 4th Edition, Mark Harrison, Macmillan

You are going to read an extract from an article about archaeological discoveries in a cave in the south of Britain. For questions 1–10, choose from the sections (A–F). The sections may be chosen more than once.

The entrance to the cave was narrow and no more than 1.5 metres high. Only one person at a time could enter, head stooped, a flickering light held in one hand, pickaxe in the other. They were a group of 12 explorers on that summer's day in 1825, including local coastguards, a man determined to discover an ancient Roman temple, and a young Roman Catholic priest with an interest in fossils. Father John MacEnery had recently arrived from Limerick as private chaplain to the Cary family at nearby Torre Abbey. He was the last to enter this strange world of darkness – of vast chambers, narrow fissures and magical stalactites that formed crystalline chandeliers and pillars, glinting in the lantern light.

Breaking off from the rest of the party, who were vainly trying to break through the calcified floor, Father MacEnery investigated areas of the cave where the ground had already been disturbed. Beneath the stalagmites, in reddish brown earth, the priest saw something gleam. His candle reflected off the enamel of fossil teeth. He wrote later: 'As I laid my hand on these relics of distant races… I shrank back involuntarily… I am not ashamed to own that, in the presence of these remains, I felt more awe than joy.' The priest continued his search in silence, keeping 'my good fortune a secret, fearing that amidst the press and avidity of the party to possess some fossil memorial of the day, my discoveries would be damaged.'

If he had known what he had stumbled upon, he might have held his finds even closer. For the teeth and other remains found in the cave are rewriting human prehistory. It is now known that this cave, called Kents Cavern, outside Torquay in Devon, had been home to prehistoric hominids and animals extinct for half a million years. In 2011, Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum announced that a human jaw found in the cave in 1927 is 7,000 years older than was thought and, at 42,000 years, this makes it the oldest Homo sapiens in northwest Europe. This is yet more evidence that modern humans must have lived side-by-side with Neanderthals, an extinct cousin species, for tens of thousands of years.

But back in the 1820s, science knew nothing of humanity's origins – or of what Britain was like millennia ago. Between 1825 and 1829, Father MacEnery made more astonishing discoveries. He unearthed the bones of extinct and exotic creatures, among them elephants, rhinos, sabre-tooth tigers, cave lions, bears and hyenas, from beneath the stalagmite cave floor. For the early 19th century, this was momentous. It was just four years since the professor of the new science of geology at Oxford, William Buckland, had discovered similar fauna in a cave in Yorkshire. Science – and society as a whole – were barely coming to grips with the idea that animals which now existed only in tropical countries could once have tramped over the Dales in northern England. Now it seemed they had also lived in the south of the country.

But Father MacEnery found something even more astonishing. As he dug, he discovered, on a bed of dirty red colour, 'the singular phenomenon of flint instruments intermingled with fossil bones!' They were the unmistakable tools of Stone Age humans. 'This,' he wrote – his intellectual shock palpable – 'electrified me'. Father MacEnery was enthused by his momentous discovery and his realisation that it implied the co-existence of man and extinct beasts.

The 19th century was a frenzy of the new. Rapid developments in transport, industry and technology were paralleled by radical new philosophies and a revolution in the understanding of the age and nature of the Earth. The belief that our planet was just 6,000 years old was fatally undermined by the geologists who were revealing the great antiquity of our world. Now it is acknowledged that Kents Cavern is one of the most important archaeological and palaeontological sites in Britain. Furthermore, although now a splendid show cave, it is still producing wonders. With the advance of new dating techniques, this vast warren that has already revealed astonishing fossils and artefacts may again revolutionise our understanding of our origins.

Kents Cavern: Inside the Cave of Stone-Age Secrets

surprise about the location of some findings

the present and possible future significance of the cave

the danger of drawing attention to certain contents of the cave

subjects that people previously had no information on

a reaction to what the presence of something in the cave indicated

a revised assessment of something found in the cave

the different aims of people investigating the cave

the disproving of a theory by a body of evidence

a sign of previous activity in the cave

the physical appearance of the cave

In which section are the following mentioned?

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