Presumed Ice Age Cave Art Rewrites Ireland's History

Ireland's earliest known residents may have walked in from Wales, researchers say, citing evidence written on cave walls. An international team has identified eight caves in southwest Ireland bearing engravings, ochre and charcoal paintings, and finger-drawn lines that they date to at least 15,000 years ago—about 5,000 years older than the previous evidence of humans on the island, reports the BBC. Lead researcher George Nash of Liverpool University ties the art to a now-vanished land corridor that once linked Pembrokeshire to southeast Ireland when Ice Age glaciers locked up seawater and lowered sea levels.

The team used an AI model trained on known cave sites in south Wales to pinpoint 28 promising Irish locations, then found art—including what are believed to be depictions of a deer and mammoth—in eight of them, per ZME Science. The researchers, who are keeping the precise cave locations secret to deter vandalism, argue hunter-gatherers moving west and north from mainland Europe filled up Welsh caves, then pushed across the 46-mile exposed plateau, following mammoth, bison, and reindeer. Nash notes that the art in the Irish caves represents a "progression" from the Welsh cave art, which began thousands of years earlier. Researchers now expect more early sites to surface along Ireland's southern coast.