Dorothea Minola Alice Bate FGS (8 November 1878 – 13 January 1951), also known as Dorothy Bate, was a Welsh palaeontologist and pioneer of archaeozoology. Her life's work was to find fossils of recently extinct mammals with a view to understanding how and why giant and dwarf forms evolved.
Early and family life
Born at Napier House, Carmarthen, Carmarthenshire, Bate was the daughter of Police Superintendent Henry Reginald Bate (born in Co. Wexford, Ireland) and his wife Elizabeth Fraser Whitehill. She had an older sister and a younger brother. She had little formal education and once commented that her education "was only briefly interrupted by school". When she was 34 her brother broke his leg and she spent around 18 months looking after her parents. She was later disinherited by her parents in order to provide a dowry for her brother to marry a wealthy woman.
Career
In 1898, at the age of nineteen, Bate got a job at the Natural History Museum in London, sorting bird skins in the Department of Zoology's Bird Room and later preparing fossils. She was probably the first woman to be employed as a scientist by the museum. There she remained for fifty years and studied ornithology, palaeontology, geology and anatomy. She was a piece-worker, paid by the number of fossils she prepared.
In 1901 Bate published her first scientific paper, "A short account of a bone cave in the Carboniferous limestone of the Wye valley", which appeared in the Geological Magazine, about bones of small Pleistocene mammals.
The same year, she visited Cyprus, staying for 18 months at her own expense, to search for bones there, finding twelve new deposits in ossiferous caves, among them bones of the species Hippopotamus minor. In 1902, with the benefit of a hard-won grant from the Royal Society, she discovered in a cave in the Kyrenia hills a new species of dwarf elephant, which she named Elephas cypriotes, later described in a paper for the Royal Society. While in Cyprus she also observed—and trapped, shot and skinned—living mammals and birds and prepared a number of other papers, including descriptions of the Cyprus Spiny Mouse (Acomys nesiotes) and a subspecies of the Eurasian Wren (Troglodytes troglodytes cypriotes).
She later undertook expeditions to many other Mediterranean islands, including Crete, Corsica, Sardinia, Malta, and the Balearic Islands, publishing work on their prehistoric fauna. In the Balearics in 1909, she discovered Myotragus balearicus, a previously unknown species of the subfamily Caprinae. On the plateau of Kat, in eastern Crete, she found remains of the Cretan dwarf hippopotamus. In Crete, she got to know the archaeologists then excavating Knossos and other sites on the island, who were throwing light on the Minoan civilisation, such as Arthur Evans.
Finding herself sexually harassed by the British Vice-Consul in Majorca, Bate commented: "I do hate old men who try to make love to one and ought not to in their official positions."
According to The Daily Telegraph –
In the late 1920s Bate travelled to the British ruled Palestine. She was in her late 40s and well respected. Bates had been invited by Dorothy Garrod, who later became Cambridge University's first female professor and who had been put in charge of an excavation in Haifa by the British military governor. In Bethlehem Bates and Elinor Wight Gardner discovered an extinct elephant species, an early horse and a prehistoric giant tortoise. They also discovered evidence that animals had been hunted by Bethlehem's first human inhabitants. In the 1930s Bate studied the animal bones Garrod had excavated in the Mount Carmel caves, which contained a succession of Upper Pleistocene levels. Instead of just inferring climatic conditions from the presence or absence of cold- or -warm loving animals, she was an early pioneer of the approach to take large samples of fauna of a succession of archaeological strata. These provided a series of plots. Bate worked on the basis that alterations in the frequency of species of animal hunted by early man reflected naturally occurring changes. This work made her an early pioneer of archaeozoology, especially in the field of climatic interpretation.