Ireland Ice Age Cave Art May Rewrite the Island’s First Human Story
Researchers with the Lost Land Bridge Project say they have identified prehistoric rock art in eight caves in south-west Ireland that may date to at least about 15,000 years ago — roughly 5,000 years earlier than the previous oldest widely cited evidence for humans on the island, around 10,500 years ago. That timeline is provisional until the art is scientifically dated.
Coverage of the work appeared in recent days via the BBC and The Debrief.
The project is coordinated by Dr George Nash of the University of Liverpool, working with Genevieve von Petzinger and Barbara Oosterwijk and a multi-disciplinary team that includes colleagues linked to University College Dublin and the University of Adelaide, with caving specialist Shane Diffily and digital mapping consultant Darren Lee.
The team’s working model is an Ice Age “lost land bridge” between modern Pembrokeshire in Wales and the south-east tip of Ireland near Rosslare — about 46 miles (76 km) coast to coast when sea levels were lower. Nash argues hunter-gatherers following herds on that plateau would have been hard-pressed to ignore the route. He and colleagues note that south Wales caves were inhabited tens of thousands of years earlier, and that Ireland’s sparse early record may reflect where archaeologists looked, not where people never went.
Using characteristics of known cave dwellings in south Wales, the team fed a computer model that returned about 28 candidate caves in south-west Ireland. Investigations found rock art in eight of them: engravings, ochre and charcoal markings, and finger flutings in soft clay or earth. Reported imagery includes the front quarters of a cervid (deer) and what appears to be a mammoth. Exact cave locations remain unpublished to reduce vandalism and looting risk.
Nash and colleagues stress that reliable dating is the next step. If the ages hold, the finds would push back Ireland’s earliest known human presence by several millennia and strengthen the case for Ice Age movement from Wales across a landscape now under the Irish Sea. The team also expects more sites along likely routes through counties such as Wexford, Waterford and Cork.
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