The Cut-Marked Reindeer
Archived: 9 September 2026
31,919 BCE is a modern label for a Late Pleistocene period, not a recoverable Irish historical year. Before the Last Glacial Maximum, deposits in Fermanagh indicate that some Irish landscapes were intermittently ice-free, although conditions varied regionally. Castlepook Cave in County Cork preserves a chronologically mixed fauna including reindeer, mammoth, giant deer, hyaena and other cold-stage animals, demonstrating habitable environments. A cut-marked reindeer femur may indicate human butchery around 33,000 BCE, but disturbed deposits, alternative explanations and absent artefacts prevent confirmation. Later glaciation created a vast gap; securely dated human activity appears only over twenty millennia later in County Clare.
