Hyaena Hall’s Open Country
MIS 3 was not a uniformly frozen world. Across north-west Europe it was marked by abrupt climatic oscillations, sometimes over centuries or millennia: comparatively milder intervals alternated with colder, drier phases. Ireland lay at the Atlantic edge of that unstable climatic system. Its eventual coverage by the last British–Irish Ice Sheet is beyond doubt, but the extent, timing and thickness of ice varied substantially between regions and through time. The best recent ice-sheet reconstruction begins at 31,000 years ago—later than the nominal year considered here—and shows ice building rapidly over Ireland and Britain thereafter. It cannot responsibly be used to draw a hard ice margin for 31,903 BCE.