The First Irish
Around 8000 BC the ice lets go of Europe, and small bands of hunter-gatherers cross to Ireland. They are the first people the record can securely place here. At Mount Sandel on the Bann they build Ireland's oldest known dwellings and live on salmon, eels, hazelnuts and wild pig, under a forest that runs unbroken to the horizon. Four thousand years. The whole island is theirs.
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When was the First Irish in Ireland?
The First Irish spans 8,000 BC to 4,001 BC in this atlas. Around 8000 BC the ice lets go of Europe, and small bands of hunter-gatherers cross to Ireland.
Who ruled Ireland during the First Irish?
Mesolithic hunter-gatherers held the whole island in this atlas's reckoning. Ireland's first people, arriving around 8000 BC across a narrowing sea — small mobile bands living on salmon, hazelnuts, wild pig and the great post-glacial forests.
What is a lesser-known fact about the First Irish?
Ireland was long said to have had no human Ice Age at all. One of the very few countries on Earth with no Palaeolithic. That is no longer safe to say. A bear’s kneecap from a Clare cave, cut with stone tools and dated to 10,860–10,641 BC, was published in 2016 as the first evidence of people here in the Palaeolithic, and archaeologists are still arguing over it. And because the sea rose before the snakes, spiders and moles could follow — St Patrick was 8,000 years too late to banish any serpents.
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