Elephant Hall’s Open Steppe
Archaeological dates of this antiquity must be handled with particular care. Radiocarbon results are not calendar years: they measure residual carbon-14 and must be calibrated against records of past atmospheric variation. The resulting dates are probability ranges, often broad at thirty millennia ago. A BCE label is useful for organising a year-by-year series, but it should not suggest that a particular Irish community experienced a recorded “year 30,778 BCE”.