Fermanagh’s Mossy Pools
31,899 BCE is a modern calendar label, not a year for which Ireland preserves an event, a ruler, a settlement diary or even an annually resolved archaeological sequence. At this depth of time, the responsible language is approximate. Counted from the conventional radiocarbon “present” of AD 1950, the label falls broadly around 33,800–33,900 calendar years before present (cal BP), within the Late Pleistocene and Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS 3), conventionally spanning roughly 57,000–29,000 cal BP. It belongs to the Middle Upper Palaeolithic world of north-west Europe, but there is no basis for assigning a particular Irish human action to this single numbered year.