Reindeer bone found in Cork shows that humans lived in Ireland 33,000 years ago
Signs of early human activity in Ireland dating back to a stunning 33,000 years have been found on a bone fragment which was unearthed in cave over 100 years ago. This paradigm-changing discovery instantly negates everything archaeologists though they knew about humans in ancient Ireland, and across the entirety of western Europe during the Upper Paleolithic. Between 1904 and 1912 the naturalist Richard Ussher named the site “Mammoth Cave” after he dug up a high volume of woolly mammoth remains. The fragment of reindeer femur that has sparked a total reassessment of Irish history radiocarbon dated to 33,000 years old, and under microscopes a series of tiny chop marks were identified that that are consistent with butchery using flint or stone tools.
Up until this new revelation, the earliest evidence of human activity in Ireland was 12,500 years old, found on a butchered bear bone found in a Co Clare cave. The new evidence that establishes human activity in Ireland 33,000 years ago was discovered in 1972 at Castlepook Cave near Doneraile in north Cork, and it comes in the form of a bone fragment from the hind leg reindeer femur. This finding resets the clock on currently maintained population models of western Europe by more than 20,000 years.
How and why did hunters get to ancient Ireland 33,000 years ago from the animal rich hunting planes of what is today central Europe? Dr. Ruth Carden, a leading consultant zooarchaeologist and adjunct research fellow with the School of Archaeology, UCD explained that it was likely that “the hunter-gatherers would have followed and lived off the migrating reindeer herds to Ireland across wide expanses of lands and water bodies which are now under the sea , in the North-West European region.” Now it is known that humans came into Ireland 33,000 years ago, not only does this demand a reshaping of early population models in ancient Ireland, but the discovery “changes everything” archaeologists think about “north Western Europe as a whole during the Upper Palaeolithic period.”
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/ancient-ireland-0015219
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