Cavemen Chose Caves on Five Criteria

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April 9, 2007 — House buyers today usually peruse properties with a checklist of desired features in mind. This aspect of human behavior has apparently not changed much over the millennia, according to a new study that found prehistoric cave dwellers in Britain did exactly the same thing when choosing their homes.

The recently released three-year-long survey of approximately 230 caves in the Yorkshire Dales and 190 caves in the northern England Peak District determined that people there from 4,000 to 2,000 B.C. selected caves based on at least five criteria.

"There was a higher frequency of prehistoric usage of those caves with larger entrances and deeper passages, also of caves that were higher in altitude and caves with entrances that faced towards the east or to the west," co-author Andrew Chamberlain of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Archaeology told Discovery News.

He added that most of the caves linked to human activities tended to have level areas outside of the entrances.

Funded by the English Heritage’s Historic Environment Enabling Program, Chamberlain and his colleagues focused on caves in the two chosen English districts because recreational spelunkers often visit these areas and concern about cave conservation there is high. They excluded artificial caves, mines, tunnels, grottoes and passages revealed by mining, quarrying or hydrologically, as for sink holes.

The archaeologists discovered that the Peak District attracted more prehistoric cave users than the Yorkshire Dales, suggesting that today’s "location, location, location" real estate mantra might have also been true 6,000 years ago.

"The (Peak District) region is a more productive area for agriculture today," said Chamberlain, "and the same may have been true in prehistoric times and thus there may have been more people in the Peak District."

He said it is also a possibility people there simply utilized caves more. Chamberlain explained that caves served a multitude of purposes aside from housing the ancients. Early people also conducted ritual activities and performed burials in them.

Sometimes caves were even like roadside motels, where both human and animal travelers would stop in for a night or two of rest before hitting the road again.

The team believes their compiled data can help other researchers in the future to predict what sorts of caves might contain archaeological artifacts.

Carol Ramsey is a noted anthropologist and cave scientist based in British Columbia, Canada. She described the new cave survey as "an absolutely wonderful project — a great multi-faceted approach and a very useful exercise in terms of managing and conserving an important finite resource."

To Ramsey's knowledge, no comparable survey of caves, especially one directed towards caves with archaeological potential, has ever taken place in British Columbia.

"I’d dearly love to see aspects of it adapted for use in B.C. — especially the landscape archaeology/predictive modeling," she said.

As for Chamberlain and his team, they identified many unexplored caves throughout Britain, particularly in the Yorkshire Dales, during their research. They hope to investigate these caves soon.