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Marine Isotope Stage 3, broadly c. 57,000–29,000 years ago, was not one unchanging freeze. Greenland ice cores record abrupt alternations between colder stadials and relatively milder interstadials, while the North Atlantic margin experienced shifts in sea ice, iceberg discharge, wind, rainfall and vegetation. Such records give a broad climatic framework for Ireland, but they do not mean that a specific Irish valley can be assigned the exact temperature, season or vegetation of 31,506 BCE. Ireland’s fragmentary terrestrial record has been repeatedly altered by later ice advances, erosion and rising seas.
Ireland was not yet the island familiar today. Sea level was far lower than now because immense quantities of water were held in northern ice sheets. The coastlines lay well beyond their modern positions, exposing parts of the continental shelf and altering routes between Ireland, Britain and mainland Europe. Yet a lower sea did not necessarily mean a simple, continuous land bridge available at every moment. Glaciers, rivers, marshes, sea channels and shifting shorelines made the geography of movement complicated. Any people or animals reaching Ireland did so within a north-west European world whose physical connections changed repeatedly.
