The Castlepook Femur
Archived: 9 September 2026
Around 33,900 years ago, Ireland was a cold, changing Late Pleistocene landscape, with lower sea levels, open vegetation and advancing ice sheets. Castlepook Cave, County Cork, preserves Ireland’s richest assemblage of vertebrate remains from this period, including mammoth, giant deer, reindeer, bear and hyaena. Its deposits accumulated over millennia and cannot reconstruct a single ecosystem or event. A reindeer femur reportedly bearing a stone-tool cut mark suggests possible human butchery around 31,000 BC. However, no associated tools, hearths, dwellings or human remains confirm settlement. Ireland’s earliest possible human activity therefore remains fragmentary, while later glaciation erased or buried much evidence.