Humans in Ireland 2,500 years earlier than thought

Humans lived in Ireland 2,500 years earlier than was previously thought.

In one of the most significant archaeological discoveries here in decades, radiocarbon dating of a butchered brown bear’s knee bone found in a cave in Clare over a century ago has pushed the date of the first human occupation of Ireland back to the Palaeolithic period some 12,500 years ago.

The remarkable discovery by Marion Dowd, an archaeologist at IT Sligo and a specialist in Irish cave archaeology, and Ruth Carden, a research associate with the National Museum of Ireland, is set to rewrite Irish pre-history and the story of human colonisation of the island. Since the 1970s, the oldest evidence of human occupation here has been the hunter-gatherer settlement of Mount Sandel on the banks of the River Bann in Derry, dated to 8,000BC in the Mesolithic period.