Ice Before History
About 31,975 BCE, Ireland was a cold, unstable Late Pleistocene landscape during Marine Isotope Stage 3, before maximum glaciation. Expanding ice, changing seas and open tundra-steppe created varied environments rather than a uniformly frozen island. Cave evidence, especially from Castlepook, County Cork, records reindeer, mammoth, giant deer, bears, wolves, hyaenas and other fauna. A reindeer bone bearing a possible stone-tool cut mark, dated broadly near 31,000 BCE, offers potentially Ireland’s earliest human trace. It suggests brief Upper Palaeolithic visits, not permanent settlement. No associated tools, hearths, dwellings, communities or practices are known. Ice and rising seas may have destroyed evidence.