John MacEnery

Father John MacEnery (1796-1841) was a Catholic priest and early archaeologist who investigated the prehistoric remains at Kent's Cavern in Devon.

MacEnery concluded that the palaeolithic flint tools he found in the same contexts as the bones of extinct prehistoric mammals meant that early humans and the creatures such as mammoths co-existed.

He had great difficulty in reconciling his religious background with what he was finding and was ignored by his contemporaries who still subscribed to a pre-Darwinian, creationist view of the earth's history. MacEnery never published and it was left to William Pengelly to publicise and explore his findings after he died.