The brown bear patella, or knee cap, marked by seven cuts by a long blade, was found in 1903 by a team of early scientists in a County Clare cave. Amazingly, it was stored in a cardboard box at the National Museum of Ireland where it remained for close to a century.
The bear bone was just one of thousands of bones found in the cave on the island’s west coast, says Newser. It did stir a bit of interest by archaeologists at the time, but radiocarbon dating was still decades away. But in 2010 and 2011, Dr. Marion Dowd and Dr. Ruth Carden looked through the old cardboard box and rediscovered the bear bone.
Discovering the age of the bear patella
Carden is a research associate at the National Museum of Ireland, and Dowd is a lecturer in Prehistoric Archaeology at the School of science at the Institute of Technology, Sligo. After reexamining the bone, they applied for funding to get it carbon dated. Imagine their surprise when radiocarbon dating showed the bear’s knee bone had been butchered by a human in about 10,500 BC.
This was astounding news, reports the Independent. It has long been believed that the earliest evidence of humans dated to 8,000 years ago during the Mesolithic era. But the bone places humans in Ireland in the Palaeolithic era, 2,500 years earlier than what had been believed.
“When a Palaeolithic date was returned, it came as quite a shock,” said Dr. Dowd. “Here we had evidence of someone butchering a brown bear carcass and cutting through the knee probably to extract the tendons.”
Mount Sandel Mesolithic site
Since the 1970s, it has been believed that the oldest evidence of humans in Ireland was the hunter-gatherer settlement of Mount Sandel on the banks of the River Bann, in Coleraine, County Londonderry. The site was excavated by Peter Woodman of University College Cork.
Another interesting theory that came out of the 1970 discovery of the Mount Sandel settlement was the supposition that the largest terrestrial mammal available for exploitation during Ireland’s Mesolithic era may have been the wild pig. At that time, it was declared that Ireland had no Palaeolithic era (at least none has yet been discovered).
The search for earlier humans in Ireland
The BBC reports that scientists have been searching since the second half of the 19th century for evidence of human occupation in Ireland that dated to before the Mesolithic era. Over the years, a few Palaeolithic tools surfaced, but they were assumed to have originated in Britain and were carried along by ice sheets.
However, during the Palaeolithic, Ireland was already an island and cut off from the rest of northwestern Europe. Hunter-gatherers would have had to come over by boat. The bear bone dates to the end of the Ice Age when the climate was cooler, and in addition to bears, there would have been giant deer, red deer, reindeer, hares and wolves.
The two doctors hope to carry out additional investigations of the cardboard box in the hopes of finding out more about Ireland’s past history. Dr. Dowd says, “Finally, the first piece of the jigsaw has been revealed. This adds a new chapter to the human history of Ireland.”
The results of this study, “First evidence of a Late Upper Palaeolithic human presence in Ireland,” were published in the online journal Quaternary Science Reviews March 21, 2016.
