Cave art: Ireland's first humans crossed from Wales — SkimNews
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- Dr George Nash of Liverpool University coordinated the "Lost Land Bridge Project" and identified eight cave sites in south-west Ireland with rock art dating to at least 15,000 years ago, roughly 5,000 years before the previous oldest example of humans in Ireland.
- The team used an AI algorithm trained on cave-dwelling characteristics from south Wales to identify 28 candidate caves in Ireland; eight proved to contain art including ochre and charcoal paintings, wall engravings, and fingertip sketches indented into clay.
- During the last Ice Age, depleted sea levels exposed a forested, grassland plateau roughly 46 miles wide between Pembrokeshire and Rosslare, supporting wild horses, mammoth, bison, and reindeer that would have drawn hunter-gatherers westward.
- South Wales had already been settled 35,000–40,000 years ago by humans from southern England, France, and Spain crossing dried-up land bridges, with Nash estimating around 100 human-inhabited caves on the Gower Peninsula at the period's peak.
- The team is withholding the caves' exact locations to prevent vandalism or looting, and says it is "illogical" to presume early humans bypassed Wexford, Waterford, and Cork — flagging strong potential for earlier, still-undiscovered sites.
Why it matters: The 15,000-year dating pushes back Ireland's human settlement record by 5,000 years and reframes south Wales as a staging ground for westward colonisation, not just a terminal destination. For archaeologists, the AI-assisted method — training algorithms on known cave signatures in one region to locate similar sites across the sea — offers a replicable template for finding prehistoric habitation in other under-explored landscapes.
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