The discovery of ancient cave art in Ireland suggests that the island's first human inhabitants likely arrived from Wales over a land bridge that existed during the most recent Ice Age, researchers announced.
During this period, much of the British Isles was covered by a vast continental glacier. However, significantly lower sea levels exposed a land bridge connecting modern-day Pembrokeshire in Wales to the southeast coast of Ireland near Rosslare. Dr. George Nash, a rock expert from Liverpool University and coordinator of the Lost Land Bridge Project, believes this pathway would have been an attractive route for hunter-gatherers.
An international team, including Nash, has identified eight cave sites in southwest Ireland featuring rock art. These artworks are estimated to be at least 15,000 years old, predating the previously oldest known evidence of humans in Ireland by approximately 5,000 years.
Nash described the exposed land bridge as a forested and grassland plateau stretching approximately 46 miles (76 km) coast-to-coast. The summer temperatures, ranging from -10°C to -20°C, would have supported a variety of wildlife, including wild horses, mammoth, bison, and reindeer, feeding on the hardy vegetation that grew in the near-frozen soil. Nash stated that based on his career knowledge of human movement during that era, it was improbable that people would not have utilized this land connection.
To investigate this theory, Nash assembled a multidisciplinary team. The group included experts from University College Dublin, the University of Adelaide, and academics from Dubai, Wales, and Portugal. Their work led to the identification of the cave sites and the dating of the rock art found within them.
The discovered rock art includes depictions believed to be of mammoths and deer, along with abstract patterns. One engraving on a limestone wall shows a crude representation of a deer's head, neck, and flank, approximately a meter long. Another piece, resembling concentric semicircles, was found in hardened clay.
