Reindeer, Sedges and BIRM-166
Archived: 17 September 2026
Approximately 31,502 BCE, Ireland lay within the unstable Late Pleistocene MIS 3, not a precisely recoverable historical year. Derryvree sediments in County Fermanagh, dated by BIRM-166, show an ice-free, open tundra wetland with sedges, grasses, mosses and cold-adapted plants. Castlepook Cave in County Cork preserves a mixed, long-lived fauna including mammoth, reindeer, giant deer, hyena and Arctic fox, rather than one contemporary community. A cut-marked reindeer femur may indicate brief Upper Palaeolithic butchery, but cannot prove settlement or permanent occupation. Climatic oscillations preceded major ice-sheet expansion, whose erosion and deposits later obscured much earlier landscape and human evidence in Ireland.