The seal tooth a Victorian digger got wrong, and what it reveals about Ice Age Britain
For more than a century, a small, perforated seal tooth sat in a museum drawer labelled as something it was not. First catalogued as a badger’s canine, then reclassified as a wolf’s incisor, the object had been misidentified twice over since a Victorian excavator pulled it from a Devon cave in 1867. Neither label was correct, and nobody had thought to look closely enough to notice.
The tooth belongs to a grey seal, and it is roughly 15,000 years old. That identification, made using imaging technology no 19th-century archaeologist could have imagined, has turned an anonymous drawer specimen into Britain’s only known Ice Age seal tooth pendant, and one of just a handful of its kind found anywhere in Europe. The findings, from a team at UCL and the Natural History Museum, London, are published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
The tooth was found on 4 February 1867 by William Pengelly, the naturalist and geologist whose excavations at Kents Cavern in Torquay were among the first systematic scientific digs of their kind in England. Pengelly kept meticulous notes, the kind of record-keeping that has let researchers a century and a half later return to his finds with fresh questions. This particular tooth, though, fell through the gaps. It was uncommon enough as an object type that nobody quite knew what to do with it, and it drifted into obscurity with no full analysis ever carried out.
It resurfaced by accident. Lead author Simon Parfitt, of UCL’s Institute of Archaeology and a Scientific Associate at the Natural History Museum, encountered the tooth while working on the museum’s 2014 exhibition Britain, One Million Years of the Human Story. Looking at it, he could see straightaway that both existing labels were wrong. It was not a badger’s tooth, and it was not a wolf’s either. But he could not resolve what it actually was in time for the exhibition, and it went on public display captioned only as a “carnivore tooth.” Parfitt returned to the problem later, working through the Natural History Museum’s marine mammal skull collection until the shape and wear pattern matched: a premolar from a grey seal, roughly 12 years old at time of death.
Because the tooth is rare and fragile, the team avoided anything destructive. There was no electron microscopy and no sampling for carbon dating. Instead they used high-powered microscopes, a 3D surface scan, and a series of micro-CT scans, non-invasive tools that let them examine the tooth’s construction and wear without touching its surface.
What that imaging revealed was a genuinely worked object. The root had been carefully thinned, likely through scraping and abrasion, a technique uncommon for seal teeth specifically but recorded on similarly shaped and perforated teeth at Magdalenian sites in France and Spain. A hole drilled through the root showed abrasions consistent with careful, patient work, the kind needed to avoid splitting a fragile surface. Wear at the top of that hole indicated the tooth had hung loosely from a cord for an extended period, and its surface had taken on a shiny patina from repeated handling, evidence that whoever owned it wore the pendant often enough to polish it smooth.
“This tooth pendant is a fascinating discovery that had been overlooked for over a century and is only now receiving the attention it deserves,” said Parfitt. “It reveals how items of significance were transported great distances and hints at cultural connections with mainland Europe. However, it also poses a number of questions about its significance to its owner and how it came to travel so far inland.”
That distance is the detail that gives the object its real weight. During the Late Upper Palaeolithic, sea levels were considerably lower than today, and the nearest coastline may have lain as much as 125 kilometres southeast of Kents Cavern. A seal tooth reaching that inland cave meant either trade, a long-distance expedition, or seasonal movement by the Magdalenian people who used the site, hunter-gatherers who lived across caves, rock shelters, and tents throughout southern Britain and Western Europe during this period, and who are best known for their cave art. Similar drilled teeth from other animals have turned up at Magdalenian sites in the Pyrenees, but this is the first seal tooth ornament identified anywhere in the British Isles.
“Although similar seal tooth ornaments have been discovered at Magdalenian sites in France and Spain, this is the first known example from the British Isles,” said Dr Silvia Bello, Merit Researcher at the Natural History Museum and a co-author on the study. “Its discovery adds a new dimension to our understanding of technical abilities, shared cultural traditions and symbolic practices across Ice Age Europe.”
Even with the improved imaging, the team is careful about what remains unknown. “Using modern tools we’ve revealed much about the manufacture and life of this remarkable personal ornament, but there are still questions that persist,” said Dr Claire Lucas, a curator at the British Museum and honorary lecturer at UCL. “We don’t know if the person who carved it was also the one who wore it all the way to Kents Cavern and what story it may have held about their travels or connections.”
It was the same kind of patient, unglamorous reappraisal that led Parfitt’s team, earlier this year, to confirm a 500,000-year-old elephant bone tool from Boxgrove as the oldest of its kind in Europe. Both discoveries share a lesson worth sitting with: the object itself did not change in either case. What changed was the willingness to look again, using tools the original excavators never had, at something already sitting in a drawer.
The tooth remains in the Natural History Museum’s Anthropology collection. Research at the museum was supported by the Calleva Foundation.
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