Castlepook’s Bone Chambers
There were no Irish kingdoms, chiefs, borders, treaties or named peoples that can responsibly be assigned to this date. There is no evidence for a permanent population, village, house, burial ground, shrine, tool-making floor, hearth or cultivated field in Ireland in c. 31,838 BCE. Nor can archaeology identify an Irish language, religion, artistic tradition or system of learning at this time. Such absences are historically important. They mean that political affairs, diplomacy, formal conflict, trade and institutions are not merely unknown in detail: they are unsupported categories for this particular Irish horizon.