Red Lady of Paviland

The so-called Red Lady of Paviland is an Upper Paleolithic-period human male skeleton, discovered in 1823 in one of the Paviland caves in the Gower Peninsula of South Wales by Dr William Buckland. It's relatively intact, and gets its name from the fact that it was initially misjudged as being female by Dr Buckland, combined with the fact that it was discovered dyed in red ochre.

The Red Lady has since been identified as a man, of around 21 years old at time of death. The remains date to around 29,000 BP (Buckland, a creationist, believed no human could be older than the Biblical Great Flood, and therefore wildly underestimated the skeleton's age). They are the oldest anatomically modern human remains ever found in the UK, and the oldest example of a ceremonial burial in Western Europe. The man may have been the chief of a semi-nomadic tribe that scouted the area living off mammoth, wooly rhinoceros and reindeer.

Since their discovery, the Red Lady's remains have been housed at Oxford University, where Buckland worked. They were exhibited in Wales for the first time in 2007, when they were loaned to the National Museum Cardiff for one year, but they have since returned to storage in Oxford. There have been calls, by heritage experts such as archaeologist and early Welsh historian Dr Ray Howell, for the remains to be exhibited long-term or permanently in Wales.