Earliest evidence of humans in Ireland

A bear bone found in a cave may push back dates for the earliest human settlement of Ireland by 2,500 years.

The bone shows clear signs of cut marks with stone tools, and has been radiocarbon dated to 12,500 years ago.

This places humans in Ireland in the Palaeolithic era; previously, the earliest evidence of people came from the Mesolithic, after 10,000 years ago.

The brown bear bone had been stored in a cardboard box at the National Museum of Ireland for almost a century.

Since the 1970s, the oldest evidence of human occupation in Ireland has been the hunter-gatherer settlement of Mount Sandel on the banks of the River Bann, County Derry, which dates to 8,000 years ago.

Antiquarians and scientists have been searching for an Irish Palaeolithic since the second half of the 19th Century.

Over this 150-year period, occasional Palaeolithic tools have surfaced but in each case have been dismissed as objects originating from Britain that had simply been carried along by ice sheets or other geological processes.

During the Palaeolithic, Ireland was already an island, cut off from the rest of northwest Europe, so nomadic hunter-gatherer groups would have arrived by boat.=read more on bbc link=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35863186