Cork Cave-Bone Archive – Emerald Archives

Dateline

The label 31,839 BCE cannot denote an event in Ireland in the way that a medieval or modern year can. No written calendar, annual record or securely year-specific archaeological horizon exists for this time. It is a retrospective modern date, roughly 33,800 years before AD 1950, and should be treated only as a point within a much wider prehistoric interval. The responsible frame is Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS 3), a climatically unstable part of the Late Pleistocene, rather than a particular season or year. Evidence from Ireland is sparse, often recovered from caves excavated long ago, and usually dated as ranges of centuries or millennia after calibration.

What can be said is that the island’s southern cave record preserves traces of an Ice Age animal world preceding the Last Glacial Maximum. Around the notional date represented by 31,839 BCE, Ireland was not the settled, wooded island of later prehistory. It was part of a cold North Atlantic region in which climate, ice extent, coastlines and animal distributions changed repeatedly. Its archaeological significance lies less in human history securely documented for that year than in the difficult work of determining what landscapes and creatures existed before later ice sheets reworked or destroyed much of the evidence.

A Date Within MIS 3

MIS 3, broadly between about 57,000 and 29,000 years ago, contained sharp shifts between comparatively milder interstadial episodes and colder stadials. These changes matter greatly for Ireland. Whether a valley, cave entrance or coastal lowland could support plants and grazing animals depended on temperatures, snowfall, permafrost, sea level and the proximity of glaciers. A calendar label such as 31,839 BCE therefore conveys a false exactness. Radiocarbon determinations require calibration against internationally maintained curves, and their probability ranges are not interchangeable with an invented BCE anniversary. Geological and ice-core chronologies provide broad correlation, not a diary of Ireland.

The island’s status was also unlike that of later millennia. During glacial low sea levels, the Irish Sea basin and surrounding shelves were radically different landscapes and seaways. Yet low global sea level did not automatically create a simple, permanent land bridge to Britain or continental Europe. Local crustal depression under ice, changing shorelines and marine incursions complicate any map. Research on raised beaches in southern Ireland indicates that relative sea level was affected by glacial loading and changing ice margins during MIS 4 and MIS 3. The exact configuration at any one point near 31,839 BCE remains uncertain.

What the Caves Preserve

The most informative Irish evidence comes from limestone cave systems, especially in the south and south-east. Castlepook Cave, near Doneraile in north Cork, together with caves at Shandon in County Waterford and Foley Cave in south-east Ireland, has yielded Pleistocene animal remains. These are valuable precisely because bone and sediment can survive in caves when open-air deposits are eroded, dissolved or later overridden by ice. They are not, however, straightforward snapshots. Many were excavated in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, before present-day recording standards. Bones could have been moved by animals, water, sediment collapse or earlier investigators; deposits may mix material of different ages.

Modern reassessment has made the cave collections more useful and more demanding. Re-dating of selected bones with improved pretreatment methods showed that some previous radiocarbon results were too young. At Castlepook, revised dates made parts of the fauna between roughly 5,000 and 12,000 radiocarbon years older than dates obtained in the 1990s. This transformed the interpretation of the assemblage: animals once placed in the final stages of the Ice Age may instead belong to MIS 3. The result is an important warning against using an old date as a fixed historical fact, but it is also strong evidence that southern Ireland hosted a richer pre-Last Glacial Maximum fauna than once supposed.

The Irish Quaternary Fauna Project had already demonstrated the wider point: mammals reached Ireland during the period from at least about 45,000 to 20,000 years ago, though the precise timing varied markedly by species and site. Subsequent re-dating has refined, and in places overturned, parts of that chronology. The relevant conclusion for 31,839 BCE is careful but significant. Ireland was not necessarily empty of large mammals in this broad phase; its caves preserve evidence of repeated animal presence. They cannot establish that every species known from an assemblage was alive in every Irish region in the same year.

An Unsettled Animal Landscape

The pre-Last Glacial Maximum Irish fauna documented or proposed from cave material includes brown bear, reindeer, giant deer, horse, red deer, mountain hare, Arctic fox, lemmings and spotted hyaena. The list should not be imagined as a single harmonious herd beside every river. It combines material from separate sites and periods, and species responded differently to cold, vegetation and access routes. In particular, newer work suggests that spotted hyaena and giant deer may have disappeared locally before the Last Glacial Maximum, perhaps around 40,000 calibrated years ago. If so, they may not have shared the Irish landscape at the notional date of 31,839 BCE. Further direct dating is needed.

Even so, the fauna gives the best available sense of everyday ecology. Reindeer and horse point towards open habitats capable of supporting grazers; hare, lemmings and Arctic fox indicate cold-adapted conditions in at least some phases. Brown bear and hyaena remains show that caves were not merely shelters awaiting people: they were parts of animal territories, dens, hibernation spaces or places where carcasses and bones accumulated. Fossils reveal presence, diet and sometimes age or seasonality; they do not by themselves reveal the exact appearance of the countryside. Descriptions such as ‘tundra’, ‘steppe’ or ‘shrub tundra’ are useful environmental interpretations, not photographs recovered from the ground.

Vegetation would have been shaped by severe cold, wind and short growing seasons, with the balance between grasses, sedges, herbs, low shrubs and bare ground changing through climatic oscillations. There is no basis for picturing extensive closed forest. Nor should Ireland be reduced to an unbroken white wilderness. Ice-free patches, sheltered valleys, wetlands and exposed uplands would have offered sharply different conditions. Such environmental mosaics governed where animals could feed and where sediments could survive long enough to enter the modern archaeological record.

Ice in Motion, Not a Fixed Backdrop

The growth of the British–Irish Ice Sheet is central to the story, but its early development is still debated. Recent syntheses agree that the approach to the Last Glacial Maximum was asynchronous: ice did not expand uniformly across Ireland, Britain and the continental shelf. Modelling experiments for later, early-MIS-2 conditions show small ice caps developing over high ground in north-west Ireland before much more extensive ice-sheet growth. Other research argues, from raised beaches, ice-rafted debris and wider regional evidence, for significant glaciation and retreat–advance behaviour earlier in the last cold stage, including MIS 3. These are reconstructions from different kinds of evidence, not a precise map for 31,839 BCE.

That uncertainty is historically important. Later glaciation profoundly altered the chances of discovery. Moving ice eroded soils, displaced stones and sediments, and buried or removed land surfaces that might once have held camps, footprints, hearths or tools. The scarcity of Irish evidence from this period is therefore not proof that no people ever entered the island; equally, it is not licence to assert an undocumented population. The record has been filtered both by prehistoric processes and by survival.

People: The Necessary Caution

No secure settlement, house, hearth, tool assemblage, burial or artwork can currently be assigned to Ireland around 31,839 BCE. Consequently there is no evidence from which to describe Irish political authority, diplomacy, organised conflict, religion, language, learning, trade or domestic society at this date. There were no known Irish kingdoms, tribes or institutions. Claims about chiefs, hunting parties, ritual caves or exchanges across the Irish Sea would be imaginative reconstruction rather than history.

There is also no reliable year-specific case for humans processing the Castlepook MIS 3 fauna. A reindeer femur from the cave has been discussed because of a possible incision, but the mark’s origin and significance have been contested. It cannot bear the weight of a narrative about a 31,839 BCE hunting episode. Other alleged very early Irish stone artefacts have proved to be glacially transported, geologically derived or otherwise unsuitable evidence for occupation. The clearest published indication of human activity in Ireland is vastly later: cut marks on a brown-bear kneecap from Alice and Gwendoline Cave, County Clare, directly dated to about 12,810–12,590 calibrated years BP. Even that interpretation has prompted debate.

People certainly lived elsewhere in north-west Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic, adapting their technologies and movements to changing game, climates and coastlines. Such neighbouring evidence makes occasional contact with Ireland conceivable, especially where sea crossings were manageable. But ‘conceivable’ is not ‘demonstrated’. The island may have been visited intermittently, may have been bypassed, or may yet yield evidence lost in museum stores or protected cave deposits. For the present, human life in Ireland near this date must remain an unanswered question.

History Before History

Thus the most important development around 31,839 BCE was environmental rather than political: an island-region undergoing pronounced Late Pleistocene change, inhabited at least episodically by Ice Age mammals and approaching the climatic conditions from which the Last Glacial Maximum would emerge. Caves in Cork and neighbouring counties are the principal archive. Their bones, sediments and revised dates reveal both the depth of Ireland’s prehistory and its limits.

The appropriate historical picture is not of an Irish society whose events have been forgotten. It is of landscapes, animals and ice processes whose traces survive unevenly, with human presence unproven. Each new direct radiocarbon date, sediment study and careful re-excavation may change that balance. Until then, 31,839 BCE belongs to a long, cold interval before securely documented settlement: a time illuminated by cave-bone evidence, disciplined by uncertainty, and resistant to the false certainty of a single numbered year.

Primary Sources

Tags: Castlepook Cave, Cork Cave-Bone Archive, Early Holocene, Ireland Year by Year, Irish Ice Shee, Last Glacial Maximum