Welsh Journals

Plate 1. Bacon Hole from the air. P. Richens Evidence of Climatic Change and Human Occupation During the Last Interglacial at Bacon Hole Cave, Gower by CHRISTOPHER STRINGER Recently THERE HAS BEEN much debate amongst geologists and palaeont- olgists on the detailed sequence of climatic events during the last inter- glacial (the period from about 128,000-75,000 years ago) known in Britain as the "Ipswichian". Some workers (e.g. Sutcliffe 1976) have argued that the last interglacial was a more complex event than the simple interglacial cycle of cool-warm-cool climates proposed by many workers (e.g. see Mitchell et al. 1973). In the most complete survey of Ipswichian mammal faunas so far published Stuart (1976) proposed that pollen and faunal sequences supported the "simple" last interglacial scheme. How- ever, new data is now available from deep-sea cores, where long sequences of sediments containing marine micro-organisms and chemical data have been used to reconstruct past temperature changes and these suggest that the last interglacial consisted of three warm periods with the first (and