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“31,934 BCE” is a modern way of naming a point far beyond the reach of any Irish calendar, written record or year-by-year archaeological sequence. It must not be treated as the date of a known event. In the conventional archaeological system of years before present, where “present” means 1950, it corresponds broadly to about 33,884 years ago. That places Ireland in the Late Pleistocene, within Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS 3), a climatically unstable interval of the last Ice Age.
The closest evidence comes from Castlepook Cave near Doneraile in north County Cork. Excavations there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries recovered a large assemblage of Ice Age animal remains, now principally in the National Museum of Ireland’s collections. Subsequent re-examination has shown why old museum collections remain important: bones once given broad or unreliable dates can be identified anew, sampled with improved methods and studied microscopically for traces of animal or human action.
