Awbeg’s Hyena Bonehouse – Emerald Archives

Dateline

The label 31,629 BCE cannot identify a day, season, event or generation in Irish history. No written calendar existed, and the evidence does not permit modern year-by-year precision. In archaeological terms it corresponds only approximately to 33,600 calibrated years before 1950, within the later part of the Last Glacial period, conventionally Marine Isotope Stage 3. The responsible task is therefore to examine dated ranges that overlap this point and to ask what they reveal about Ireland’s changing landscapes, animals and possible human visitors.

A Landscape Between Advances

Ireland was not yet the uniformly ice-covered land often imagined under the phrase “Ice Age”. The great British–Irish Ice Sheet was building towards its later maximum, but its growth was uneven across different regions and its margins changed through time. Modern reconstructions indicate major expansion from about 31,000 years ago, with the ice sheet attaining its greatest overall volume much later, around 23,000 years ago. That broad chronology matters: 31,629 BCE belongs to an early and uncertain phase of glacial growth, not automatically to a moment when every Irish valley lay beneath ice.

Evidence from County Fermanagh provides an important corrective to any simple map. At Derryvree, near Maguiresbridge, freshwater silts and organic deposits were sealed beneath later glacial till. A radiocarbon determination from this sequence has been calibrated to a broad range of roughly 36,900–31,700 years before present. The range overlaps the modern label 31,629 BCE. It indicates that, during some part of that interval, freshwater and terrestrial environments existed in north-central Ireland before later ice overrode the site. It does not demonstrate the exact weather, vegetation or human presence in that numbered year.

Greenagho, also in Fermanagh, supplies related but slightly earlier evidence. Organic material from lake deposits beneath till produced a calibrated age range of approximately 37,200–35,700 years before present. Taken together, the Fermanagh sites show that parts of inland Ireland retained ice-free or seasonally ice-free landscapes into the build-up of the last ice sheet. Their survival beneath later deposits is remarkable, but it also makes clear how fragmentary the record is: later glaciers erased or rearranged much of what had existed above ground.

Other records complicate the picture further rather than cancelling it. Marine deposits and reworked shells around Donegal Bay have been used to argue for substantial ice loading in western Ireland over a long span before the Last Glacial Maximum. Such evidence concerns particular coasts, sea levels and ice masses, not a single condition applicable everywhere. Ireland around 33,600 calibrated years ago was a region of contrasts: open ground and freshwater basins may have persisted in some areas while glaciers, ice caps or ice-fed seas affected others. The familiar outline of the modern island is also misleading, since lower sea levels had altered coasts and the connections between Ireland, Britain and the continental shelf.

Cold Open Country

The Derryvree deposits support a picture of a cold freshwater setting surrounded by sparse, open vegetation rather than a wooded Irish countryside. Fine sediments, plant remains and pollen can preserve evidence of water, marshy margins and the plants that grew nearby, yet they offer a local record rather than an island-wide botanical survey. The terrain probably included wet hollows, stream corridors, exposed mineral soils and wind-swept slopes. Trees, if present in sheltered pockets, would not have formed the extensive forests associated with later interglacial Ireland.

This was a dynamic periglacial world. Repeated freezing and thawing disturbed soils; seasonal meltwater shifted sand and silt; and vegetation had to exploit a short growing season. Cold does not mean lifelessness. Low herbs, grasses, sedges, mosses and dwarf shrubs could sustain grazing animals, while wetlands concentrated water and plant food. But productivity was seasonal and patchy. For any creature moving across the landscape, rivers, lake edges and sheltered limestone valleys were likely to have been more useful than the exposed uplands.

At this date, there were no Irish farms, fields, roads, villages or managed woodlands. Nor can historians responsibly identify a named territory, political community or boundary. The terms politics, diplomacy and warfare belong to societies for which people, institutions and enduring social relationships can be observed. Here the material record is far too thin even to establish a resident human population. Competition and predation certainly occurred among animals, but they should not be turned into a prehistoric version of state affairs.

The Cave at Castlepook

The most vivid evidence comes from Castlepook Cave, also called Mammoth Cave or Doneraile Cave, above the Awbeg Valley in north County Cork. Excavations in the early twentieth century produced Ireland’s richest known assemblage of Late Pleistocene vertebrate remains. Among the animals identified from the cave are woolly mammoth, giant deer, reindeer, brown bear and spotted hyena; later cold-stage deposits have also yielded such animals as Arctic fox, wolf and lemmings. The National Museum of Ireland holds important specimens, including a spotted-hyena skull from the cave.

These finds demonstrate that Ireland’s Pleistocene fauna was once much richer than the fauna of the modern island. Reindeer and giant deer imply open grazing country; mammoth points to a still more formidable component of the wider cold-climate fauna; carnivores show that carcasses and herbivore herds supported complex food webs. Yet the cave is not a frozen snapshot of one season. Bones entered it over different episodes and by different processes. Hyenas may have carried prey remains into the chambers, while water movement, excavation methods and later disturbance mixed deposits. A species present at Castlepook cannot automatically be placed alive at the cave mouth in 31,629 BCE.

That caution is especially important for the cave’s reindeer femur. A bone from Castlepook, publicised in 2021, was reported as approximately 33,000 years old and bearing a mark interpreted as damage from a stone tool during butchery. If that interpretation is sustained through detailed taphonomic study, it would be evidence for a human visit to Ireland far earlier than the formerly accepted Late Glacial record. The date is broadly relevant to this article’s period, but it is not a precise calendar date, and the mark is not equivalent to a securely excavated campsite.

No associated hearth, stone-tool assemblage, dwelling floor, burial or repeated occupation horizon has yet established a settled Upper Palaeolithic community in Ireland at this time. A single modified animal bone, even if confirmed, could represent a brief hunting or scavenging episode by people moving through a wider north-west European landscape. Equally, researchers must keep testing whether natural damage, collection history or the cave’s disturbed context affects the conclusion. The distinction between a dated bone and a dated human occupation is fundamental.

Life Beyond the Evidence

If people did reach Ireland during this interval, their immediate economy would have depended on mobility and local resources: animal meat and fat, hides, bone and antler, fuel where it could be found, freshwater and perhaps edible plants in season. Such possibilities are reasonable inferences from Upper Palaeolithic lifeways elsewhere in Europe and from the Irish fauna. They are not direct proof of an Irish hunting camp, food-sharing custom, family group or technology. No proven Irish art, ornament, ritual site or structured burial belongs to this horizon.

There is likewise no evidence for trade in the later sense. Lower sea levels and changing coastlines may have made animal and human movement between Ireland, Britain and the continental shelf more feasible at intervals, but neither an exact land route nor a network of exchange can be reconstructed for this date. The fauna proves that mammals crossed into Ireland during the wider Late Pleistocene; it does not tell us whether humans travelled alongside every migration, nor whether crossings were routine.

Religion, learning and culture must therefore be discussed through absence as well as possibility. Humans of comparable age elsewhere in Europe possessed sophisticated stone technologies, social knowledge and, in some regions, striking artistic traditions. It would be wrong to deny similar capacities to any visitors who reached Ireland. It would be equally wrong to project continental cave art, ceremonial practice or language onto Castlepook without an Irish object or context to support it. In 31,629 BCE Ireland has environmental history, animal history and perhaps a human trace; it does not yet have a recoverable cultural biography.

A Precarious Habitable Margin

The enduring significance of this period lies in its instability. The Irish landscape was neither an empty white expanse nor a permanent homeland known through settlements and monuments. It was a shifting margin where freshwater basins could persist beneath cold skies, large mammals could move through open habitats, hyenas could use limestone caves, and advancing ice was beginning to reshape the possibilities for all of them. In later millennia, the growing ice sheet would cover and scour much of the country, destroying countless traces.

For that reason, the silts at Derryvree and the bones at Castlepook deserve emphasis out of proportion to their small size. They preserve different forms of evidence: one a local environmental sequence, the other a cave assemblage accumulated over time. Together they allow a restrained conclusion. Around the broad chronological horizon represented by 31,629 BCE, parts of Ireland could support cold-adapted ecosystems and substantial mammals. Human presence remains a promising but unconfirmed early possibility, not a basis for invented tribes, leaders or events. The proper history of this date is a history of evidence, uncertainty and a landscape on the threshold of profound glacial change.

Primary Sources

Tags: British-Irish Ice Sheet, Castlepook Cave, County Cork, Ireland Year by Year, Late Pleistocene, Marine Isotope Stage 3