The bear bone that has pushed back the date of human presence in Ireland by 2,500 years to 10500BC

A fascinating discovery in the darkness of a cave in County Clare has forced archaeologists to rewrite the history of Ireland. A bear bone found in the cave pushes back the date of human presence in Ireland by 2,500 years - to 12,500 years ago.

The cave near Ennis in Co. Clare in which the Paleolithic bear bone was found in 1903.

"This is a hugely significant and exciting discovery," says Dr. Marion Dowd, an archaeologist at IT Sligo, who was co-discoverer with Dr. Ruth Carden of the National Museum of Ireland. "We've effectively pushed back the date of human occupation of the island of Ireland by two and a half thousand years. Until now, we knew that people had been here about 10,000 years ago, but now we've pushed that back into an earlier period - into the Paleolithic."

Dr. Marion Dowd of IT Sligo.

"This journey began in 1903 when a team of scientists, the foremost scientists in Ireland at the time, excavated a small cave, known as Alice and Gwendoline Cave, outside Ennis in County Clare. During those excavations, they recovered archaeological material, and thousands of animal bones."

"The bone that forms the centre of our project was one of those bones, and they commented on this bone in their excavation report. They remarked on the fact that it had these cut marks."

The bone is a patella, or knee bone, and belonged to an adult bear. Dr. Dowd says that the cut marks on the bone indicate someone trying to butcher the bear carcass.

"We're looking at a scenario where you have a bear and it's being butchered. They're cutting through the knee area, probably to pull out the tendons."She said that the "butcher" was likely to have been inexperienced because there were seven or eight cut marks on the bone and they were seemingly having difficulty cutting through the area.

The Paleolithic bear bone with linear cut marks.

A sample was taken from the bone and sent to Queen's University Belfast for carbon dating. The sample returned a date of 12,500 years ago. This puts it in the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age.

"This was very exciting," said Dr. Dowd, adding that it was "completely unexpected". For the purpose of confirmation, a second sample was extracted from the bear bone and sent to Oxford University, whose radiocarbon dating laboratory "sent back exactly the same result".

Now that they knew the age of the bone, they wanted to confirm that the cut marks on the bone were contemporaneous with the bone itself, and not something that was added years, or perhaps centuries, later. Three specialists independently examined the cut marks. All three experts agreed that the marks were made with a "sharp implement" and that they had been made "on fresh bone". The bear bone was butchered soon after death.

The discovery changes the history books, and pushes back the earliest date of known occupation of Ireland to 10500BC. There have been problems with identifying remains from the Paleolithic era - primarily due to the action of glaciers during the Ice Age, which had the effect of scouring a lot of evidence away. The melt waters at the end of the Ice Age would also have washed a lot of material away.

Thousands of animal bones were found in Alice and Gwendoline Cave in County Clare in 1903.

Dr. Dowd said scientists and archaeologists had been looking for evidence of Paleolithic human activity since the 1860s.

Excitingly, there may be the prospect of a return to the cave, where some archaeological digging of the sediments there might reveal further tantalising clues to Ireland's very ancient past.

This one sample of bone rewrites the history of Ireland and adds 2,500 years to its human story.

Watch a YouTube video about this remarkable discovery:

Ceremonial dismemberment and excarnation in prehistoric Ireland - a different way to treat the dead

For a while, I've been wondering about how the small human bone fragments that have been found in some Irish passage-tombs came to be in such a fragmented condition. In terms of the unburnt bone human fragments found during the O'Kelly excavations at Newgrange, "apart from some complete hand and foot bones, all human specimens consisted of small fragments". (O'Kelly, Newgrange: Archaeology, Art & Legend, Thames & Hudson, 1982). 

Replica of basin stone from Knowth's eastern chamber with bone fragments.

There were a total of 750 unidentifiable fragments. The fragmented remains of dozens of individuals were found in the chambers of nearby Knowth. Layers of fragmented remains were found in the passage and chamber of Fourknocks. So how do human bones - those that are not cremated - become so fragmented?

Searching through my extensive archive of research material, I found an interesting article from the Sunday Times from July 2003. Eileen Murphy of Queen's University Belfast had studied Irish neolithic bones and found that our early ancestors had dismembered and defleshed their dead. Murphy had worked on the excavation of graves in Aymyrlyg graves in Siberia, Russia.

There she learnt to look for the tell-tale signs of what is thought to have been an ancient religious practice - short, fine scraping marks on the bone and cuts where tendons and ligaments were joined.
"After studying the dismembered and refleshed Russian remains, I decided to have another look at Irish neolithic bones. It is something that has been overlooked before and will now require a reassessment of our understanding of these ancient burial sites.

The researchers from Queen's made the findings when examining bones from the 4,000-year-old Millin Bay tomb in County Down, and the discoveries mirrored those found by Swedish archaeologists at Carrowmore in Co. Sligo. The Sunday Times article described how body parts, notably skulls, are thought to have been kept on display for religious purposes.

Gabriel Cooney, professor of archaeology at University College Dublin, told the newspaper:

In these tombs you rarely find single skeletons, but rather groups of cremated remains. In this way these neolithic people would seem to have been creating a new identity from their treatment of the dead. You also find different parts of the body treated in different ways, such as unburnt parts of the skull in with cremated remains. This would point to dismembering of the corpses.

Were the Brugh na Bóinne bones defleshed by humans or
by the process of natural outdoor excarnation?

Not all corpses were dismembered by other humans. The process known as excarnation, or defleshing , is well documented. This involves leaving the human corpse out in the open (sometimes known as sky burial), or in a cave, for the elements and wildlife to assist in the process of speedy decomposition and dismemberment. Some "excarnation sites" were outdoors, while others were in caves. It is estimated that a human corpse left out in the open can be reduced to a pile of bones in a matter of weeks or months. However, there seems to have been a deliberate effort made, in some cases, to slow down the process of excarnation by leaving a corpse in a cave.

A chance finding of a bone fragment in a cave at Knocknarea in Sligo led to the discovery of more bone fragments belonging to an adult and a child which may have been evidence of cave excarnation. Radiocarbon dating put the age of the bones at over 5,000 years old. It is thought that the process of excarnation in a cave took much longer - perhaps up to two years - but eventually the deceased's relatives would come back to collect the bones for burial elsewhere. In the case of Knocknarea, this burial might have taken place in one of several monuments on the top of the mountain.

We can imagine, therefore, that Stone Age people in Sligo between 5,000 and 5,500 years ago carried the corpses of their dead up the mountain. After an arduous climb, they then squeezed through the narrow cave entrance, and laid the dead person on the cave floor. (Source)

What's also interesting in Ireland is that osteoarchaeological analysis has revealed an absence of animal scavenging marks, suggesting that the entrance to the excarnation caves was sealed during the process of soft tissue decomposition.

This reveals a conscious decision not to speed up decomposition . . . By creating a protective environment in which excarnation took place undisturbed, people controlled the process, pace and space. The living may have sought to observe the slow and gradual disintegration that was taking place inside a cave. The underground was therefore a place of transformation, which in turn transformed caves as places. It may have been in caves that the journey into the spirit world commenced. (Dowd, Marion, The Archaeology of Caves in Ireland, Oxbow Books, 2015, p. 106)

Flint blades from Newgrange - were these used in the defleshing process?

There are no caves in the vicinity of the great passage-tombs of the Boyne Valley. It would be interesting to postulate on how the fragmented unburnt remains there - and indeed at nearby Fourknocks - came to be in that condition. Of course another question that begs to be asked is how many of the flint scrapers and other flint tools found at Newgrange and other passage-tombs were used in the defleshing of human remains . . .