Shandon Cave’s Bear Horizon
At this point Ireland lay within Marine Isotope Stage 3, a long and climatically unstable interval of the last Ice Age. It was colder than the present, but it was not yet the moment when the last British–Irish Ice Sheet reached its fullest known extent. Major reconstructions place that maximum principally around 27,000–25,000 years before present in north-western sectors and about 25,000–23,000 years before present in the Irish Sea and Celtic Sea regions. Thus 31,884 BCE belongs to the preceding build-up: an age of pronounced cold shifts, expanding ice and exposed continental shelves, but not one in which a simple map can safely label all Ireland as either wholly frozen or wholly ice-free.