New analysis of a bear bone discovered in an Irish cave more than a century ago has resulted in drastic changes to the history of the Emerald Isle, revealing evidence that humans were active in that part of the world some 2,500 years earlier than previously believed.

As researchers at the Institute of Technology Sligo and the National Museum of Ireland reported in Sunday’s issue of the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, radiocarbon dating discovered that the bear’s knee bone was damaged by a human hunter roughly 12,500 years ago, in the year 10,500 BC. Previously, the earliest evidence of humans in Ireland dated back to 8,000 BC.

As Marion Dowd, an archaeologist at the Institute of Technology Sligo who co-led the study, told the AFP news agency, the discovery “adds a new chapter to the human history of Ireland… Archaeologists have been searching for the Irish Paleolithic since the 19th century, and now, finally, the first piece of the jigsaw has been revealed.”

“When a Paleolithic date was returned, it came as quite a shock,” she added. “Here we had evidence of someone butchering a brown bear carcass and cutting through the knee probably to extract the tendons. Yes, we expected a prehistoric date, but the Paleolithic result took us completely by surprise.”

First evidence of Irish humans predating the Mesolithic era

The knee bone is question was one of several thousand recovered from a cave in Country Clare on the west coast of Ireland in 1903, and according to the Irish Independent , it was left sitting in a box at the National Museum without being tested – that is, until Dowd and colleague Ruth Carden, a research associate at the museum, happened across the specimen.

The bone was placed in storage at the museum in the 1920s. Upon finding it in 2010, Carden and Dowd began examining it. They also requested the funding required for radiocarbon dating at Queen’s University Belfast and sent a second sample to Oxford University. Both analyses confirmed the bone was approximately 12,500 years old.

Experts have confirmed that the cut marks on the bear’s bone were made when it was still fresh, confirming that they also were made around 10,500 BC. The findings indicate that humans were active in Ireland during the Stone Age or Paleolithic era, marking the first time that evidence of human presence predating the later Mesolithic period has ever been found in the country.

“From a zoological point of view, this is very exciting, since up to now we have not factored in a possible ‘human-dimension’ when we are studying patterns of colonization and local extinctions of species to Ireland,” Carden told the Irish Independent. She added that the findings “should generate a lot of discussion within the zoological research world and it’s time to start thinking outside the box… or even dismantling it entirely!”

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Image credit: Storylab

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