The Castlepook Faunal Puzzle
A simple conversion places 31,304 BCE roughly 33,250 years before the conventional radiocarbon ‘present’ of 1950. That arithmetic should not be confused with a calibrated archaeological date. A radiocarbon age of about 33,000 years BP is not identical to 33,000 calendar years before 1950, because the concentration of atmospheric radiocarbon has varied over time. For periods this remote, calibration intervals can be broad, and laboratories express results with statistical uncertainty. The sensible historical frame is thus not ‘Ireland in the precise year 31,304 BCE’, but Ireland sometime around the later part of MIS 3, approximately 45,000–30,000 years ago in the wider chronology used by Irish Quaternary research.