Hyaena Hall’s Open Country – Emerald Archives

Dateline

The label 31,903 BCE is a modern chronological convenience, not a year that can be isolated in Ireland’s archaeological record. It corresponds very roughly to 33,850 years before AD 1950, but that conversion must not be mistaken for a precisely dated event. Radiocarbon ages require calibration against changing atmospheric carbon levels, and results are normally expressed as probability ranges rather than exact calendar years. For Ireland at this depth of time, the responsible unit of history is therefore a broad phase within the Late Pleistocene—Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS 3), conventionally c. 57,000–29,000 years ago—rather than a single calendar year.

A Date Within an Unstable Ice Age

MIS 3 was not a uniformly frozen world. Across north-west Europe it was marked by abrupt climatic oscillations, sometimes over centuries or millennia: comparatively milder intervals alternated with colder, drier phases. Ireland lay at the Atlantic edge of that unstable climatic system. Its eventual coverage by the last British–Irish Ice Sheet is beyond doubt, but the extent, timing and thickness of ice varied substantially between regions and through time. The best recent ice-sheet reconstruction begins at 31,000 years ago—later than the nominal year considered here—and shows ice building rapidly over Ireland and Britain thereafter. It cannot responsibly be used to draw a hard ice margin for 31,903 BCE.

The central fact is uncertainty with limits. The island was not yet the familiar temperate, wooded Ireland of the Holocene, and it was not necessarily a single, continuous white expanse at every moment. During less severe phases, portions of the landmass, especially in the south, could sustain cold-adapted animals. During colder advances, expanding glaciers and ice sheets reshaped or destroyed earlier landscapes and deposits. That later glacial erosion is one reason the Irish record for this period is so sparse: absence of excavated evidence is not proof that nothing ever happened, but neither is it evidence for people, settlements or political communities.

Castlepook Cave’s Long Record

The most important Irish evidence relevant to this era comes from Castlepook Cave near Doneraile in north County Cork. Its evocatively named passages—including Hyaena Hall and Elephant Hall—were investigated mainly in the early twentieth century. The cave produced a remarkable assemblage of more than 2,000 surviving animal bones, although far more were reportedly removed in the original excavations. It is Ireland’s richest known vertebrate archive for the period leading towards the Last Glacial Maximum. Yet it is an archive, not a snapshot: bones were accumulated in different parts of the cave over a long interval, and the early excavations did not record stratigraphy to modern standards.

Older measurements once seemed to associate a Castlepook mammoth bone with an age of 33,500 ± 1,200 radiocarbon years before present, close enough to make this nominal date seem unusually tangible. Subsequent work has changed the picture. Improved collagen pretreatment and redating have shown that several legacy dates from southern Irish caves can be substantially too young; at Castlepook, revised results were between about 5,000 and 12,000 radiocarbon years older in particular cases. The current interpretation is that key fauna, including giant deer and spotted hyaena, may have disappeared locally before about 40,000 calibrated years BP. Thus neither the mammoth date nor the cave’s species list can securely be assigned to 31,903 BCE.

This matters because careful prehistory separates evidence from illustration. Castlepook establishes that Ice Age mammals inhabited Ireland during parts of MIS 3. It does not establish that mammoths, hyaenas, reindeer and people all met outside the cave in one specified year. A cave bone may date an animal’s death; its position may reflect scavenging, carnivore transport, sediment movement or nineteenth- and twentieth-century disturbance. The animal remains are powerful testimony to a vanished Irish ecology, but their mixture is also a warning against turning a long, complicated depositional history into a single dramatic scene.

Animals on the Irish Margin

The faunal record nevertheless allows a restrained reconstruction of the kind of open country that could develop during favourable MIS 3 intervals. Castlepook has yielded woolly mammoth, reindeer, giant deer (Megaloceros giganteus), brown bear, wolf, red fox, Arctic fox, mountain hare, collared lemming, Norwegian lemming and spotted hyaena. These are not all necessarily contemporaneous. Together, however, they point to landscapes very different from modern woodland and pasture: largely open, cold environments with grasses, sedges, herbs, low shrubs and patches of more sheltered vegetation, capable of feeding large grazers and browsers.

Spotted hyaena is especially revealing. Modern assumptions that hyaenas belong only to warm African savannahs are misleading: Late Pleistocene spotted hyaenas ranged through parts of Europe and were well adapted to seasonal cold. At Castlepook, chewed bones and the composition of the assemblage support the interpretation that carnivores, particularly hyaenas, helped gather remains in the cave. They were hunters and scavengers, competitors with wolves and formidable processors of carcasses. The presence of mammoth and giant deer need not mean that every animal was killed at the cave entrance; it means that large herbivore carcasses, or pieces of them, lay within reach of the cave’s accumulating processes.

‘Irish elk’ is a familiar but misleading popular name for giant deer: the animal was neither uniquely Irish nor an elk in the modern North American sense. Ireland later became famous for its huge antlered remains, but the species ranged widely across Eurasia. Its appearance in the Castlepook record shows that the island, when accessible and ecologically suitable, formed part of a wider north-west European animal world. Lower sea levels exposed extensive continental shelves and reduced sea crossings, though Ireland’s exact connections to Britain and the continent changed with ice, sea level and local topography. Animal movement was possible in some phases; the routes, seasons and population sizes remain uncertain.

The Human Question

There is no securely excavated settlement, hearth, house, tool-making floor, burial, artwork or named individual from Ireland that can be dated to this point. Accordingly, there can be no responsible account of Irish government, diplomacy, organised warfare, religion, literacy, formal learning, farming or trade in 31,903 BCE. There were no states, kingdoms, churches, ports or markets in the later historical sense. If people reached Ireland in MIS 3, they would have been small, mobile Upper Palaeolithic foraging groups whose social relations, belief and seasonal movements are archaeologically invisible here.

A possible exception gives this date its special interest, but it must remain explicitly provisional. A reindeer femur from the Castlepook collection has been reported as bearing marks consistent with cutting by a sharp stone tool and as dating to about 33,000 years ago. If the marks are confirmed as anthropogenic and securely associated with the bone’s age, the find would indicate a brief human encounter with a reindeer carcass far earlier than Ireland’s formerly accepted archaeological record. It would demonstrate neither a permanent colony nor a village: at most, a fleeting episode of carcass processing. Recent accounts of Irish Palaeolithic archaeology rightly describe the claim as requiring further in-situ evidence and refined dating.

That caution is reinforced by an important contrast. The better-known evidence for Late Upper Palaeolithic human activity in Ireland comes from Alice and Gwendoline Cave in County Clare, where a cut-marked brown-bear bone has calibrated dates of c. 12,810–12,590 cal BP. New work has improved understanding of that cave’s complicated deposits but does not push its evidence back into MIS 3. It confirms that direct dating, sediment study and taphonomic analysis are essential before a marked bone becomes a human history.

No Society to Describe—Yet

For this nominal year, the most accurate treatment of society and economy is therefore negative but meaningful. No settled population can be demonstrated; no cultivation, domestic animals, pottery, metalworking, monument building or exchange network has been identified. There is no evidence from which to infer Irish languages, ethnic identities or connections with later peoples. The first firm evidence of sustained human settlement belongs vastly later, after ice-sheet retreat and major environmental transformation. Even the earliest currently accepted Upper Palaeolithic evidence is separated from this MIS 3 horizon by more than twenty millennia.

What can be said is that Ireland was part of an ecological frontier. Its caves preserve rare traces of animals that crossed, occupied or repeatedly returned to changing landscapes at Europe’s north-western margin. Predators and prey, open habitats and advancing ice, exposed shelves and shifting sea barriers shaped the possibilities for any human visitor. The important development around 31,903 BCE was not a recorded Irish event but the creation—and frequent destruction—of the environmental conditions under which life might persist on the island.

Hyaena Hall’s bone deposits convey that story more eloquently than any invented chronicle could. They reveal a Pleistocene Ireland intermittently inhabited by large mammals, but they also reveal the limits of the record. At this date, Ireland’s history is not yet one of rulers or peoples known by name. It is a history of climate pulses, animal movement, cave taphonomy and scientific revision: a country whose deepest past survives in fragments, demanding imagination tempered by restraint.

Primary Sources

Tags: County Cork, Hall’s Open Country, Hyaena Hall, Hyaena Hall’s Open Country, Ireland Year by Year, Irish Ice Shee