Ancient Cave Art Suggests Ireland’s First Known Humans Came From Wales

The first known humans to reach Ireland may have walked there from Wales across a vanished Ice Age land bridge, researchers say after discovering ancient cave art in the country’s southwest.

An international team led by rock expert Dr George Nash has identified eight cave sites with rock art dating back at least 15,000 years. That is about 5,000 years earlier than the previous oldest evidence of humans in Ireland.

During the most recent Ice Age, falling sea levels exposed a land route between modern-day Pembrokeshire and the area around Rosslare on Ireland’s southeast coast. Nash said the pathway would have included a forested and grassland plateau stretching about 46 miles, or 76 kilometers, from coast to coast.

The landscape could have supported wild horses, mammoths, bison, reindeer and other large herbivores. They would have fed on sedges, mosses and lichens growing in fertile but almost frozen soil. Summertime temperatures typically ranged from minus 10 to minus 20 degrees Celsius.

Nash said he had long believed hunter-gatherers would have used such an opportunity to move across the region. He assembled the Lost Land Bridge Project with experts from University College Dublin, the University of Adelaide and academic institutions in Dubai, Wales and Portugal.

“

exciting