Long Misidentified, This Seal Tooth Pendant Was Carefully Crafted by a Prehistoric Human Roughly 15,000 Years Ago

Discovered in 1867, the artifact raises new theories about the Magdalenian people who inhabited southwest England during the Late Upper Paleolithic period

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

April 14, 2026

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In 1867, British geologist and naturalist William Pengelly found an unusual artifact in a cave in southwest England. It appeared to be an animal tooth of some kind, possibly one from a wolf or a badger, that someone had drilled a small hole into and rubbed smooth.

Now, nearly 160 years later, archaeologists have more accurately identified Pengelly’s find as a seal tooth pendant. They believe that roughly 15,000 years ago, someone painstakingly crafted the premolar into an ornament, then wore it as a beloved necklace or bracelet, according to a new paper published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

At that time, during the Late Upper Paleolithic period, the nearest shoreline would have been about 78 miles away, so the findings raise new questions about the prehistoric humans, known as Magdalenians, who lived there at the time. Perhaps they engaged in trade, made long-distance expeditions to the coast or migrated seasonally, the researchers theorize.

Pengelly discovered the tooth in Kents Cavern, a cave system in Torquay, Devon, England, during his second significant excavation of the site. The British Association had tasked Pengelly and his colleague Edward Vivian with finding “unquestionable proof of early human habitation” of the cave, wrote archivist Jon Bushell for the Royal Society in 2021. The duo spent years methodically investigating every nook and cranny of the cavern, turning up flint tools, fossilized animal remains and other artifacts—including the perforated tooth.

At the time of his death in 1894, Pengelly was heralded as a researcher who “belongs to the heroic age of geology—to that group of men who found British geology almost a terra incognita, and left it so completely explored that there is little left for their successors but to correct mistakes and fill in minute details,” fellow British geologist William Boyd Dawkins wrote in Pengelly’s obituary.

However, Pengelly did not always interpret his discoveries accurately. The Natural History Museum in London, using Pengelly's notes, had identified the find as a badger tooth. Later, it was referred to as a wolf incisor.

The artifact was overlooked and ignored for more than a century until University College London archaeologist Simon Parfitt stumbled upon the tooth while putting together the museum’s 2014 exhibition titled “Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story.”

Parfitt knew right away the tooth did not belong to a badger or a wolf, but he couldn’t immediately identify it, so he exhibited the artifact as a “carnivore tooth.”

More recently, Parfitt and his colleagues gave the specimen another look. The tooth didn’t seem to match any other land-dwelling animals that lived in the region, so they broadened their search and compared it to remains housed in the museum’s marine mammal collection. There, they found a match. Their work suggests it once belonged to a 12-year-old male grey seal.

To study the artifact even further, the researchers turned to nondestructive, noninvasive techniques. They looked at it under microscopes, performed micro-CT scans and created a 3D model to get a closer look.

Based on their investigations, they came up with a theory for how it was made. First, someone must have encountered a seal—either one that had died of natural causes, or one that had been intentionally killed. Then, they probably used a heavy object to break open the animal’s jaw bone and extract the premolar, which would have been held firmly in place by a large root.

Next, the creator scraped or ground down the root to thin it out, then repeatedly turned a pointy piece of flint to bore a small hole through it. Crafting the pendant likely required a great deal of patience and skill, as any wrong move might have caused the fragile root to split.

The top of the hole shows evidence of wear, likely because it was hung from a piece of cord. The entire surface appears to have been rubbed smooth, likely because someone wore it regularly for many years. That theory is bolstered by the fact that the hole appears to have become more oval-shaped over time, as the cord gradually eroded one side of the circle.

Researchers believe it was probably a prized possession that the owner accidentally dropped and lost inside the cave.

“This seal tooth pendant might have had some formal purpose—perhaps to show the social identity of the pendant’s owner,” says study co-author Silvia Bello, an archaeologist and anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, in a statement. “It could be an indication that the person, or group they were part of, was familiar with the sea and maybe used to live near the coast.”

Researchers have unearthed similar perforated seal tooth ornaments at archaeological sites in the Pyrenees of France and Spain. Those artifacts are also believed to have been made by the Magdalenian people, a culture known for its cave art and cannibalistic practices. But this is the first known example discovered in the British Isles.

In the future, researchers hope to conduct isotope analyses and ancient DNA studies on the tooth, which might reveal where it came from.

“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,” says study co-author Claire Lucas, a curator specializing in the European Upper Paleolithic period at the British Museum, in a statement.

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.