Maguirebridge’s Tundra Lake
Ireland at roughly 33.8 thousand calibrated years ago is known through a thin and difficult archive: fossil bones from caves, plant and insect remains preserved in sediments, layers of glacial debris, and mineral growth in caves. These are not historical records. They cannot reveal a ruler, community name, battle, treaty, shrine, market or spoken language. Indeed, they do not securely demonstrate a settled human population. They instead allow a more fundamental question: what kinds of landscapes and animal communities could exist in Ireland as the last great ice-sheet expansion approached?