Ancient cave art discovery suggests first known humans in Ireland walked over from Wales — SkimNews
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- Dr George Nash and his international team located eight cave sites in south-west Ireland with rock art dating at least 15,000 years, pushing back the earliest known human presence in Ireland by roughly 5,000 years.
- The Lost Land Bridge Project traced the likely migration route via a now-submerged Ice Age land bridge between Pembrokeshire (Wales) and Rosslare — a forested and grassland plateau of about 46 miles (76 km) coast-to-coast.
- The team used AI-driven computer modeling, fed with known cave characteristics from south Wales, to identify 28 candidate caves in Ireland; eight of those yielded rock art on field investigation.
- The rock art spans engravings on cave walls, paintings in ochre and charcoal, and line sketches indented into clay and earth by fingertips — what Nash calls a progression from figurative traditions developed in Welsh caves over 20,000 years.
- South Wales was settled 35,000 to 40,000 years ago by humans from southern England, France and Spain crossing dried-up land bridges, with around 100 inhabited caves recorded on the Gower Peninsula during the Ice Age.
- The team is withholding the caves' locations to prevent vandalism or looting and says "more, and even earlier" sites likely await discovery in Wexford, Waterford, and Cork.
Why it matters: Eight confirmed caves of at least 15,000-year-old rock art put humans in Ireland roughly 5,000 years before the prior oldest evidence — the project team is withholding exact sites to shield them from looters while planning follow-up surveys of Wexford, Waterford, and Cork that could yield even older finds.
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