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

Paleoanthropology

Paleoanthropology, which combines the disciplines of paleontology and physical anthropology, is the study of ancient humans as found in fossil hominid evidence such as petrifacted bones and footprints.-19th century:...

 site in the Cockpit Country

Cockpit Country

Cockpit Country is an area in Jamaica which provided a natural defensive area used by Maroons to establish communities outside the control of Spanish or British colonialists....

 of north-western Jamaica

Jamaica

Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length, up to in width and 10,990 square kilometres in area. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harbouring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...

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Description

The site is a small, largely collapsed, limestone

Limestone

Limestone is a sedimentary rock composed largely of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of calcium carbonate . Many limestones are composed from skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral or foraminifera....

 chamber cave that is now a rock shelter

Rock shelter

A rock shelter is a shallow cave-like opening at the base of a bluff or cliff....

 with a depth of 3 m and a length of 6 m. It lies in the Trelawny Parish close to the Coxheath-Windsor Road on privately owned farmland and is an important Quaternary

Quaternary

The Quaternary Period is the most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the ICS. It follows the Neogene Period, spanning 2.588 ± 0.005 million years ago to the present...

 palaeontological site as well as containing a Taino

Taíno people

The Taínos were pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Bahamas, Greater Antilles, and the northern Lesser Antilles. It is thought that the seafaring Taínos are relatives of the Arawak people of South America...

 midden

Midden

A midden, is an old dump for domestic waste which may consist of animal bone, human excrement, botanical material, vermin, shells, sherds, lithics , and other artifacts and ecofacts associated with past human occupation...

. Extinct

Extinction

In biology and ecology, extinction is the end of an organism or of a group of organisms , normally 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 recover may have been lost before this point...

 fossil

Fossil

Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...

 animals discovered at the site include the Jamaican Monkey

Jamaican Monkey

The Jamaican Monkey is an extinct species of monkey first uncovered at Long Mile Cave in Jamaica by Harold Anthony in 1919...

 (Xenothrix mcgregori) and the Jamaican Flightless Ibis

Jamaican Flightless Ibis

The Jamaican Ibis, Jamaican Flightless Ibis or Clubbed-wing Ibis is an extinct bird species of the ibis subfamily uniquely characterized by its club-like wings...

(Xenicibis xympithecus), which were described from material excavated by Harold Anthony in 1919-1920.

Sources