Bone proteins from County Kerry have removed evidence of farming’s influence in Ireland before 4000 BCE, reopening questions about when agriculture first reached the island.
For more than 30 years, the Kerry Cow helped shape a story about how farming arrived in Ireland. Excavations along the County Kerry coastline yielded bone pieces that seemed to indicate domestic cattle were already present while local residents still subsisted as hunter-gatherers. A new analysis has revealed that those supposed cattle were actually a bear and a wild boar.
Archaeologists recovered these pieces during digs carried out at Ferriter’s Cove, a small inlet on the Dingle Peninsula, throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Having been attributed to the close of Ireland’s Mesolithic era—a timeframe spanning from 8000 to 4000 BCE—they once stood as the oldest known indicators of livestock farming across either Britain or Ireland.
The items implied that native foragers had formed connections with incoming Neolithic agriculturists from mainland Europe prior to farming becoming established locally.
Researchers led by Dr. Martin Moucheron at University College Dublin returned to the original archaeological material, now stored at University College Cork. The group—featuring Drs.
Benjamin Gearey, Barra Ó Donnabháin, and Margaret McCarthy based at UCC alongside Kate Kanne from UCD—forwarded the specimens to a CNRS facility situated in Lille, France. At the French laboratory, the pieces were evaluated via ZooMS, a method that determines species through the analysis of proteins surviving inside ancient bone collagen.
Instead of the domestic cattle required by past theories, the findings pointed to the presence of a bear and a wild boar.
Published within the most recent issue of PAST, the Prehistoric Society’s newsletter, these conclusions strip away a crucial data point from discussions concerning the timing and mechanism of the transition from foraging to agriculture in Britain and Ireland. At present, no material remains suggest that domesticated cattle—and consequently early agricultural groups—had made contact with or influenced Ireland prior to 4000 BCE.
While the disappearance of this proof fails to set a fresh timeline for the shift, it alters how researchers must piece together that historical development.
“Ferriter’s Cove is an iconic archaeological site, originally excavated by the Late Professor Peter Woodman, Department of Archaeology, UCC; this new collaboration with colleagues at UCD marks an exciting new phase of research and these remarkable results are set to change our understanding of the earliest evidence for agriculture in Ireland,” said Gearey.
Spearheaded by Moucheron under the guidance of Professor Graeme Warren, this investigation forms a component of a postdoctoral study at the UCD School of Archaeology supported by Research Ireland funding. The project is reexamining important Mesolithic archaeological sites using modern scientific techniques.
“These exciting results show the real value in going back to key sites with new analytical techniques – which can change the stories we tell about our past,” Warren added. Martin Moucheron Warren
“For at least four millennia hunting and gathering people lived on the island, and there is a common conception that they left little trace and that we know very little about them – unlike the megaliths of Neolithic farmers, who are portrayed in ways that feel very familiar in Ireland,” said Moucheron.
Further analyses are underway to determine whether the bear remains belonged to brown bears or polar bears. Additional testing is currently underway to ascertain whether these bear remnants originated from polar or brown bears.
