Castlepook Hyaena Toothmarks
Archived: 21 September 2026
About 30,930 BCE, Ireland’s history is reconstructed from uncertain environmental and faunal evidence rather than dated events. Derryvree, County Fermanagh, preserves freshwater sediments indicating treeless, tundra-like wetlands during a cold pre-maximum glacial interval, although conditions elsewhere remain uncertain. Castlepook Cave, County Cork, contains time-mixed remains of mammoth, reindeer, giant deer and carnivores, demonstrating intermittent cold-stage animal communities. A reindeer femur bearing a possible stone-tool cut mark may indicate brief Upper Palaeolithic butchery, but cannot prove settlement. Subsequent ice expansion destroyed or obscured much evidence, leaving a fragmentary, revisable record of changing Late Pleistocene Ireland across the island over millennia thereafter.