Page 5 - IRISH HISTOEY - CHAPT 1_Neat

A Bare Bones History of Ireland Chap 1

Early Evidence of Rational Mankind

Cave Art (From 40,000 BC)
The greatest innovation in the history of humankind was neither the stone tool nor the
steel sword, but the invention of symbolic expression by the first artists.
In 1940, four teenage boys stumbled across a hole in the ground in France that led to a
cave. This turned out to be the famous Lascaux cave Today, almost a century later, we
know that Lascaux is part of a global phenomenon, originally referred to as “decorated
caves”. They have been found on every continent except Antarctica – at least 350 of
them in Europe alone, thanks to the cave-rich Pyrenees – with the most recent
discoveries in Borneo (2018) and Croatia (April 2019).

Uncannily, given the distances that separate them, all are adorned with similar
decorations: handprints or stencils of human hands, abstract designs containing dots
and crosshatched lines, and large animals, both carnivores and herbivores, most of
them now extinct. Scholars of paleoarcheology infer that the paintings were made by
our distant ancestors, although the caves contain no depictions of humans doing any
kind of painting.
A cave painting discovered in Indonesia on the island of Sulawesi could be the oldest
known artwork in the world, according to new research. The artwork was daubed
on the limestone cave walls 43,900 years ago, say scientists at Australia's Griffith
University in an academic paper published in the journal Nature

Watch: National Geographic https://www.nationalgeographic.org/video/history-
Video on Cave Art
101-cave-art/

Pottery (from 20,000 BC)
Pottery is one of the oldest human inventions, originating before the Neolithic period,
with ceramic objects discovered in the Czech Republic dating back to 29,000–25,000
BC and pottery vessels that were discovered in China, which date back to 18,000 BC.
The oldest pottery found in Ireland dates from about 6,000 BC – when a Neolithic
tomb was discovered in Milltown, Co Kerry, in 2015.
Clay-based pottery can be divided into three main groups: earthenware, stoneware and
porcelain. These require increasingly more specific clay material, and increasingly
higher firing temperatures. All three are made in glazed and unglazed varieties, for
different purposes.
Watch: Video on ancient https://youtu.be/0GJsUfXQWSU
Greek Pottery

The Ice Age in Ireland (- 2.6 Milion to 10,00 BC)

Ireland has not always enjoyed its current mild climate; over the past 2.6 million years it
has gone through extremes of cold ice ages and warm inter-glacials in a period of
geological history that we call the Pleistocene.

During this time, the earth’s climate repeatedly changed between very cold periods,
during which glaciers covered large parts of the world and very warm periods during
which many of the glaciers melted. The cold periods are called glacials (ice covering) and
the warm periods are called interglacials.
For reasons not yet fully understood, our planet goes through cycles of warm and cool
periods. The period that we are now studying occurred about 30,000 years ago and, in
Ireland's neighbourhood, caused the Arctic ice to descend from the North Pole towards
Europe.

5