Long Mile Cave, sometimes known locally as Pick'ny Mama Cave or Hell's Gate Cave, is a

palaeontological Paleontology (), also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (geology), epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes t ...

and palaeoanthropological site in the

Cockpit Country Cockpit Country is an area in Trelawny and Saint Elizabeth, Saint James, Saint Ann, Manchester and the northern tip of Clarendon parishes in Jamaica. The land is marked by steep-sided hollows, as much as deep in places, which are separated ...

of north-western

Jamaica Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of His ...

Description

The site is a small, largely collapsed,

limestone Limestone ( calcium carbonate ) is a type of carbonate sedimentary rock which is the main source of the material lime. It is composed mostly of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of . Limestone forms whe ...

chamber cave that is now a

rock shelter A rock shelter (also rockhouse, crepuscular cave, bluff shelter, or abri) is a shallow cave-like opening at the base of a bluff or cliff. In contrast to solutional caves (karst), which are often many miles long, rock shelters are almost alway ...

with a depth of 3 m and a length of 6 m. It lies in the

Trelawny Parish Trelawny (Jamaican Patois: ''Trilaani'' or ''Chrilaani'') is a parish in the county of Cornwall in northwest Jamaica. Its capital is Falmouth. It is bordered by the parishes of Saint Ann in the east, Saint James in the west, and Saint Eliza ...

close to the Coxheath-Windsor Road on privately owned farmland and is an important

Quaternary The Quaternary ( ) is the current and most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). It follows the Neogene Period and spans from 2.58 million years ...

palaeontological site as well as containing a Taino

midden A midden (also kitchen midden or shell heap) is an old dump for domestic waste which may consist of animal bone, human excrement, botanical material, mollusc shells, potsherds, lithics (especially debitage), and other artifacts and ecofact ...

Extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

fossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

animals discovered at the site include the

Jamaican monkey The Jamaican monkey (''Xenothrix mcgregori'') is an extinct species of New World monkey that was endemic to Jamaica. It was first uncovered at Long Mile Cave by Harold Anthony in 1920. Discovery Harold Anthony is responsible for many species ...

(''Xenothrix mcgregori'') and the Jamaican flightless ibis (''Xenicibis xympithecus''), which were described from material excavated by Harold Anthony in 1919–1920.Olson & Steadman (1977).

References

Notes

Sources

* * Geography of Trelawny Parish Caves of Jamaica Paleontological sites of the Caribbean Paleoanthropological sites Rock shelters Caves of the Caribbean {{Jamaica-geo-stub