Doneraile’s Faunal Corridor
“31,897 BCE” is a modern calendar label, not a year that can be recovered from Irish evidence. No annals, settlements, graves, tools in secure context or dated human remains allow events in Ireland to be fixed to a particular calendar year this far back. In archaeological terms, the label falls very approximately around 33,800 calibrated years before present (cal BP), within the later Pleistocene and Marine Isotope Stage 3. Such conversion is only a broad orientation: radiocarbon results require calibration, yield ranges rather than single historical dates, and the curve itself is refined as research advances. The responsible history of this moment is therefore a history of environmental phases, surviving animal remains and the limits of what those remains can show.